The Vault (A Farm Novel) (11 page)

CARTER

We rolled into Albuquerque after an uneventful three-or-so-hour drive. One good thing about the Tick-pocalypse? No traffic and even fewer cops. If you’ve ever wanted to punch a Toyota sedan up to a hundred, the highways in New Mexico were the place to do it. We had stopped to siphon gas once in the town of Roswell. There, I’d loaded up a duffel bag of supplies and stashed it in a safe place. When we made it out of Sabrina’s with the cure, I wanted to have some resources waiting for me.

Mel hadn’t been able to tell me a lot about Sabrina’s lair. She hadn’t even known where it was located, but she had seen the Smart Com logo on all the buildings. And it just made sense. A lot of the vampires were aligned with major corporations. I’d remembered Smart Com was headquartered in Albuquerque, but once we got there, we had to stop and look for more info. We found a library on the east side of town and I had Dawn and Darren wait in the car while I went in to look for a phone book or something.

Libraries—along with churches and universities—were the kind of places Ticks usually avoided. They didn’t like those obvious reminders of what they’d once been. Still, there was no way I was going to send Dawn or Darren into a building I hadn’t scouted first. I came back out after only a few minutes and slid into the backseat.

“Did you find the address?”

“Even better. I found maps and some brochures about the company.” I held them out to Dawn. While Darren drove, Dawn started reading aloud as I unfolded the map to pinpoint where we were.

“It says here that Smart Com’s headquarters are located in a state-of-the-art, seven-building campus sitting on two hundred and forty-seven acres in the suburbs north of Albuquerque. They have an on-site health clinic, a day care, and a cafeteria capable of feeding all twenty-five hundred employees.”

“You gonna send them your résumé or not?” Darren asked.

“Shut up. I’m doing research,” Dawn grumbled.

“You think you could sound a little less impressed?”

“Probably not. They even have their own greenhouses.”

“What?” I asked.

“They grow their own vegetables for the cafeteria. And—looks like we have a winner.” She waved the pamphlet around. “They also claim to have an underground disaster shelter.”

“Wow,” Darren said from the front seat. “An underground disaster shelter? In New Mexico? It’s not exactly tornado alley. Or hurricane central.”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Sounds like Smart Com was prepared for something a little outside Mother Nature’s pay grade.”

“Someone was prepping for the apocalypse long before prepping for the apocalypse was cool,” Dawn added.

“Exactly.”

Dawn gave me a pointed look. “This is obviously it, right? We found Sabrina. Shouldn’t you be excited or something?”

“Yeah. Or something.” Sabrina not only had all these resources, but she was ballsy enough to advertise it in a friggin’ brochure. I had the feeling that Smart Com was going to make El Corazon look like child’s play.

Suddenly I was feeling very unprepared. You know that nightmare where you find out you’re late for a final for a class you didn’t even know you were taking? Like that. Except the final is a battle to the death and the lives of everyone you know are at stake.

For Christ’s sake, I didn’t even know what Sabrina looked like.

I thrust the map up to the front seat. “Switch with me.”

Dawn handed back the brochure and I started flipping through it. On the second-to-last page, I found a picture of Smart Com’s upper management, smiling and standing arm in arm in front of one of the buildings. Beneath was a blurb about how the company was founded.

The picture must have been old, because the company’s former CEO, Paul Workman, was standing there, front and center. Paul Workman was
the
tech guru of his generation. People practically worshiped him. When he’d been diagnosed with some rare cancer about six months before the fall, Smart Com’s stock price had plummeted. But in the picture, he looked hip and healthy as he smiled serenely for the camera.

Beside him was a beautiful woman with long dark hair. The photo was captioned with job titles, not names, but I figured that had to be Sabrina. She was the only person smiling with her mouth closed. Which, I’m guessing, you’d make the habit of doing if you had incisors the size of hypodermic needles.

“How much farther?” I asked, leaning forward in my seat to get a better view out of the windshield as we inched through town.

“Hang on,” Dawn muttered, squinting out the windows, trying to catch the names on dusty street signs as she glanced back and forth between the map on her lap and the worn signs.

Darren slowed to a stop at an intersection. “We’re at Baker and Parkland.”

“Hmm . . . okay . . . that’s . . .”

Darren gave his sister a playful punch in the arm. “Hurry it up. We don’t have all day.”

“We’ve got time,” I said. Actually, we did have most of the day. We’d gotten here early enough to find Sabrina’s compound, do a little recon, and hopefully approach the front gate well before dark.

“That doesn’t mean she’s not being a slowpoke,” Darren grumbled.

Without looking up from the map, Dawn reached over and thumped Darren on the forehead. “Shut up. I’m doing the best I can.”

Darren snorted. “Yeah, right.”

“Okay, when was the last time you read a map? Dad got the GPS for both the cars when you were ten. So it’s not like you know what you’re doing.” Before he could say anything else, she held up a hand. “Wait. I found it. I mean, I found us. We’re right here.” She pointed to a crinkle in the map. “I think we’re about three miles away. Here’s where I think Smart Com’s headquarters are.” She pointed to a pale pink splotch that took up a sizable swath of the map. Then she shrugged. “But that’s just based on the street address.”

“And we have no way of knowing how far out Sabrina’s territory extends. Pull in here,” I ordered Darren.

He guided the car into the parking lot I’d indicated and I had him park behind the strip mall next to an abandoned Corolla covered with a layer of dust thick enough to choke on.

“Great!” Darren said. “Who ordered a pizza?”

“What?” I frowned, looking around and trying to hide the way my stomach grumbled at the thought of pizza.

“He’s just being an idiot,” Dawn said, pointing to the sign over one of the doors. “Domino’s Pizza.” She turned and scowled at Darren. “Dork.”

He shrugged, smiling. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t fight a honey badger for a slice of pizza.”

Dawn and I both ignored him.

I turned to Dawn. “You two, wait here. I’m going to do some recon.”

“This far away?” Dawn asked. “We’re still a couple miles from Smart Com.”

“Maybe,” I muttered. “But I don’t like the looks of this. It’s too . . . clean.”

“Too clean?” Darren leaned forward between the two front seats. “What do you mean? Looks like the typical alleyway. Back behind the typical strip mall.”

“Yeah,” I said grimly. “Exactly.” Dawn and Darren exchanged a look, so I expanded. “This place doesn’t seem any different from any other city in the Before.”

“So?”

“So, this isn’t the Before anymore. There isn’t anywhere in the U.S. that looks like this now. At least not anywhere I’ve been.”

“Elderton looks like this,” Darren said stubbornly.

“Sure. Elderton. That’s like never-never land. But out here . . .” I couldn’t repress a snort of disgust. “Out here, things are a lot worse than they are in Elderton.” It was easy to forget sometimes how sheltered Dawn and Darren had been.

When it came to the big cities, here’s the way I saw it: shit went bad in Texas fast. I mean, fast. From life as we knew it to fire-bombing Houston in a couple of weeks. The wreckage from that—the sheer number of bodies—was bad enough in the smaller towns I’d been sticking to. I’d seen mass graves with what looked like hundreds of bodies, dug by backhoes—graves that hadn’t even been covered up. As if, midburial, Ticks had swarmed through and ripped the guy operating the backhoe right out of the driver’s seat. In the big cities? I couldn’t even imagine. The Dallas metroplex had eight million people. If I was optimistic and guessed that only half of those were dead . . . still, what did you do with four million Tick-ravaged bodies?

Nothing. You did nothing with that many bodies.

There weren’t enough living people to bury the dead.

My guess was, the big cities, like Dallas, were literally filled with rotting corpses.

So, yeah, I avoided them.

Until now.

“This place,” I summed up, “looks too normal. Someone’s been doing regular patrols. Keeping the Ticks away. Probably keeping away looters, too.” I twisted in my seat. “I’m going to get out and scout. Try to get the lay of the land. See if I can figure out how regular the patrols are.”

“Why does it matter if there are patrols?” Dawn asked. “I mean, don’t we want them to find us anyway? We’re not planning on sneaking in. I thought we were planning on just driving up and turning ourselves over.”

“Eventually, yes. But I’m kind of hoping we can also get back out. I’m not planning on being Sabrina’s pet
abductura
for the rest of my life. I don’t want to go in there until I have some ideas about how to escape.”

Both Dawn and Darren nodded. They were smart kids even if they’d been sheltered. And, yes, I knew it was stupid to think of Dawn as a kid when she was three years older than I was.

“You guys wait here,” I said as I reached for the door handle. “I should be back in twenty minutes or less. If I’m not, you take the car and head back to San Angelo.”

I climbed out of the car and crept to the edge of the buildings, looking in either direction for some sign that Sabrina’s people might be out there. The strip mall was L-shaped and we’d parked at the very back. I crept around the corner and behind the other side of the building. I stopped at the edge of the wall and considered my options. I had a decent view of the street in one direction, but not the other. There was a freestanding ATM about twenty feet away. I’d have a better view from there—in both directions—and I’d still have decent cover. I made the dash to the ATM and then looked around again, keeping my back to the wall.

Albuquerque might as well have been a ghost town. Across the road was another strip mall, equally unexciting. A half block down was a school. There were a few cars on the road, but they were all parked. Like they’d been left there deliberately.

Not like Ticks had swarmed through and ripped the drivers out of the cars while they were still running. I shuddered, giving my head a little shake. There was no point in creeping myself out any more than I needed to.

I studied the street in either direction. Though the sun was nearly at its zenith, the full moon was low on the horizon, so pale against the milky blue sky it was almost transparent, like a water spot on a glass. The air was cool on my heated skin, but I knew that wasn’t the only reason for my jitters.

There was something not quite right. Something other than the fact that I was deep inside the territory of some badass vampire and I was about to hand myself over to her like a lamb to the friggin’ slaughter.

Then I heard it, a car door closing. Not softly, either.

I briefly closed my eyes, shaking my head.

For once, would it have been too much to ask to have someone—anyone—just follow my directions?

With all the things that sucked about leading the rebellion, you’d think the one perk—being the guy in charge—would occasionally pay off. But no.

I heard Darren and Dawn trying to sneak up behind me. You’d expect someone who’s as good a shot as Darren to have a little—I don’t know—coordination or something. But I swear the guy stepped on every twig and piece of trash in the alley. Jesus, was he
trying
to make noise?

Yeah, I knew I was being paranoid. There probably wasn’t anyone nearby to hear but me.

I turned around and was surprised to see Dawn step out of the alleyway first. I’d pegged her as a follow-the-rules kind of girl.

“Got bored waiting in the car?” I asked. There was no point in staying quiet when anyone in the vicinity would have already heard us.

“You know, it’s really annoying when you just leave and expect other people to follow your directions,” she said.

“Yeah. I’ve been told that.”

She bit down on her lip and shot me an apologetic look. Then she stepped away from the building. Stumbled, really.

She caught herself, and straightened. Taking a big step out into the open, revealing the guy behind her holding a semiautomatic shotgun right at her back.

A second later, Darren stepped out, too, another guy with another gun right behind him.

The second guard studied me for a second and then must have decided I was the bigger threat, because he shifted to point his gun at me.

Collabs always had a problem looking cocky but being lazy. They were always a little too comfortable with their rifles because they’d never had enough training to really respect what their weapons could do.

These guys didn’t look like that. Both guys looked very much like the hitters that Roberto had hired. They were big, muscled-up guys. Guys who knew their shit. They’d been well trained, either by the military or by some private organization, like the Elite Military Academy that I’d gone to, only a lot more hard-core. Sabrina had obviously hired the best. Or she’d trained them herself.

“We need you to come with us,” Muscles Number One said. He gave me another expressionless, steely-eyed glare before glancing at his companion and nodding in my direction. “He’s not going to give us any trouble. Are you?”

Muscles Number Two read between the lines and shifted his gun back to Darren. Which was a smart move. They were still maybe twenty feet away from me. Close enough that he certainly might have hit me—if he was as good and as well trained as he looked—but far enough that I might have tried to charge him. Maybe he’d take me out, maybe he wouldn’t. As long as I had surprise on my side, I would have a shot. But, at point-blank range, there was no way either Dawn or Darren would walk away from a firefight. Obviously Muscles Number One had figured out that I wasn’t about to do anything to endanger them.