Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (25 page)

51

10:42 a.m.

She looked back, even though she knew it was a mistake to do so, and she stumbled.

The fall seemed to take forever, yet no matter how she flailed her arms, she could not recover her balance. Instead, she pitched and twisted, past the horizontal plane, and went skidding face first on the wet asphalt. The abrasive surface tore at her skin and clothes like sandpaper. There was no immediate pain, just a jolt of impact that knocked the wind from her sails.

Mercy skidded to a stop beside her, one hand extended, but before Jenna could take it, something struck the pavement near her outflung arm, showering her with hot grit. She didn’t need to hear the report to know that someone was shooting at them.

Noah’s voice came again, shouting, but the words were incomprehensible. Seething with anger—at Noah for yet another betrayal, at herself for having been foolish enough to react—all she could hear was the roar of blood in her ears. In that instant, the weight of all that she had endured—the exhausting flight from the killers, the ordeal in the Everglades, too many gut-wrenching revelations to count—descended upon her like an extinction-level-sized asteroid. She had learned unimaginable truths about herself, been put through the wringer, and it was all for nothing. She was going to die.

No! No, I’m not!
Her defiance felt hollow.

“Just run!” she shouted, ignoring Mercy’s offer of assistance. “Go!”

Jenna rolled toward the edge of the path and sprang to her feet. She took off, a millisecond ahead of a shower of bullets that tore into the hillside behind her.

Twenty more yards.

Ten.

The reflector was ringed by a protective barrier that looked like a partially tipped over chain-link fence. It loomed overhead, but the road continued into the space
beneath
the aluminum panels, past another caution sign, this one a red and black diamond with the words “Warning Radio Frequency Radiation Hazard.”
Probably don’t have to worry about that anymore
, she thought. The road turned across the face of the concave slope, spiraling around it toward the center, more than five hundred feet away.

Made it
.

“We made it!” As she plunged beneath the suspended dish, she glanced back to make sure Mercy was still with her.

Mercy was not with her. Mercy was nowhere to be seen.

No!

Jenna wheeled around, almost stumbling again, and charged back up to the edge of bowl, shouting Mercy’s name as she went. Had Mercy been hit? Had she sought cover in the woods? Jenna had to know.

No, you don’t. You can’t help her now
.

Jenna ignored the cautionary inner voice, but when she reached the top and caught sight of two gunmen coming down the road toward her, she knew there was nothing more she could do for Mercy. As she ducked back down, a barrage of gunfire rattled into the underside of the reflector.

She turned off the road, but the ground was not as open as it had first appeared. Cables stretched like spider webs from the bottom of the dish to concrete footings that dotted the slope like the stumps of hewn trees, creating an obstacle course. The thin layer of soil underfoot was saturated, held together by nothing more than roots and inertia. With every step, the hill slid away beneath her. She pushed on, ducking under cables, slipping and sliding her way to the bottom of the depression.

Up close, the panels did not appear solid. Perforated with millions of holes like a sieve, they were about as opaque as a window screen. The raindrops that struck the panels did not stay there long, but collected together into streams of water that poured down onto the dense carpet of ferns that lay spread out beneath the reflector. As she descended deeper into the bowl, the runoff became a veritable waterfall, feeding small rivers that swept toward the center of the hollow.

Movement drew her eyes. A car sped along the corkscrew road more than a hundred yards away. It seemed too far off to worry about, and the road would take it even further away, but it would eventually, inevitably, come back toward her.

A small structure lay directly ahead—a shed or platform of some kind. It offered the best chance at cover and concealment. It was the obvious choice. The
too
obvious choice. But Jenna saw that it reached up almost to the underside of the dish. In a flash of intuition, she realized that this was by design. The platform was elevated so that workmen could conduct routine maintenance on the dish.

If I can climb up there…

She let the thought go. It seemed like the only option, and she didn’t want to think about all the ways it might go awry. Behind her, the two gunmen on foot blundered down the hill, blocking any possibility of retreat. She angled toward the platform, even as the distant vehicle reached the apex of its orbit and began swinging around toward her.

I’m not going to make it
.

The burden of her failures sapped the last of her will. Her leaden legs stumbled a few steps further, then she fell again, sprawling and sliding down the muddy slope.

I give up.

You have to live.

I can’t. Can’t run anymore.

You have work to do.

“What?”

Not quite knowing why, she struggled once more to her feet. The two gunmen were so close that she could see the exertion in their determined faces.

You have to live
, the inner voice repeated.
You have to escape
.

Escape was impossible. She was being driven deeper into the funnel…

Funnel
. That was exactly what it was. The limestone bowl caught all the rainwater that poured into it, and in the tropical environment, rain was a constant. The underside of the dish should have filled up like a lake.

Where does all that water go?

The streams carving across the slope supplied the answer. She lurched into motion once more, letting gravity draw her closer to the center.

She solved the mystery of the disappearing water a moment later. There was a gaping hole, like the entrance to a tunnel, or more precisely, a drain. It was enormous. To channel away the volume of water that accumulated in the basin, it had to be. Torrents of water from all around the bowl converged at the center and simply disappeared.

The car reached the end of the road near the platform, no more than fifty yards away. Even before it stopped, a door flew open and someone burst out like a jack-in-the-box: Noah, running toward her, shouting and waving. Another familiar figure emerged, close on his heels. It was Cort, limping on a wounded leg. The memory of shooting him in the safe-house gave Jenna a small glimmer of satisfaction, which she poured into a final burst of speed.

The drain loomed before her, a dark maw waiting to swallow her, bear her down to the bowels of the Earth, yet she knew that whatever uncertain outcome awaited below could be no worse than her fate if she remained.

When she was just ten feet away, she threw herself flat, into a channel of runoff that rushed by like white-water rapids. The water and her momentum carried her the rest of the way. As she slid over the edge, she felt no fear—only relief.

One way or another, it was finally over.

52

10:45 a.m.

It wasn’t over. Not by a long shot. In the torturous moments that followed, Jenna wondered why she had imagined this to be a better alternative than the swift release of a bullet to the head.

She was simultaneously falling and drowning, hammered by the enormous volume of water and driven onto the anvil of an unseen slope. As she caromed from one jagged surface to the next, tumbling and spinning, she lost all sense of direction. Her lungs begged her to take a breath—water or air, it hardly mattered—but the pounding impacts left her unable to even gasp.

Something clipped the side of her head, just a glancing blow, but enough to drive a spike of pain through her skull. She wrapped her arms over her face, curling up into a protective ball, and braced herself for the next collision. She spun and bounced, slammed and scraped, blind and all but deafened by the roar of water. Yet through it all she remained conscious, and that eerily calm inner voice kept her company.

You have work to do
.

She thought she knew what that meant. Her cloned siblings—men and women who had each followed different paths in life, and yet shared memories of something that had never actually happened—were preparing to trigger a chain reaction of destruction on the world.

Wipe the slate clean
.

Jenna was not the only person who was aware of this, but she did know something that no one else knew—not Cort or Noah or any of the government assassins hunting the clones. She knew
why
they were doing it. She also knew that what had happened thus far—the SARS outbreak, the Internet attacks, and perhaps countless other acts of aggression and terror over the last two decades—were merely a prelude to what was about to occur. The attacks were merely preparatory moves, setting the stage for something that would trigger a global holocaust. But before the final act, the message had to be sent.

The message was the linchpin. Stop the message, and the planned destruction would be averted, or at the very least, postponed. Jenna knew from where and when the message would be sent, and only she was in a position to stop it.

Stop it? Why?

Tumbling through limestone tunnels like a spider in a downspout, the question of
why
—to say nothing of
how
—seemed unimportant. Yet, she was still alive, and as the miserable seconds stretched out into minutes, the impacts became less frequent. She could feel the rush of cool air on her face. She could
breathe
again! She was no longer falling, but being swept along in a subterranean river.

And sinking.

The chilly fresh water did not buoy her up the way salt water did, and as the crazy whitewater run slowed down, she was forced to uncurl her arms and legs and paddle to stay above the water line. After a few minutes, or perhaps only a few seconds, she felt herself moving faster again. The bottom rose up under her, scraping against her feet. Then without warning, she was falling again, vomited out of the cave and into daylight once more. The light was painfully bright after too much time in the darkness.

She tumbled down the face of a waterfall, splashed down into a pool beneath it, and was driven to the bottom by the force of the cascading water. Hydraulic eddies pinned her there, but she fought against them as she had everything and everyone else that had tried to kill her. After a brief struggle, she wrestled free of their grip and clawed her way to the surface.

The current, swift with the volume of rainwater feeding the river, caught hold of her. The water snaked between towering walls of limestone, slick with wet moss, impossible to climb. Jenna could do little more than tread water, dog paddling to stay in the middle of the river where she was less likely to be smashed against the rocks.

Despite the tropical climate, Jenna felt her body heat leaching away, and with it, the strength and will to keep going. Fatigue—physical and mental—stole over her, and without realizing it, she stopped paddling. The air in her lungs kept her buoyant, but when she exhaled, her head dipped closer to the surface. She knew she had to keep her face out of the water, but her consciousness was a dim light, unable to penetrate the dark clouds of exhaustion and hypothermia, fading with each passing second.

Fading…

Suddenly, she felt very heavy. The current pushed hard against her, but she wasn’t moving. The river, it seemed, had chosen to cast her up on a rocky shoal.

Safe in the knowledge that she probably wouldn’t drown, she was content to simply lay there, the tepid water continued to leach away her body heat. She needed to get out of the river and find shelter from the rain, but even the contemplation of movement was a daunting task.

Just get out of the river
, she told herself.
Do that much, and then you can rest
.

With a groan, she rolled over and started crawling. The slippery rocks shifted beneath her, dropping her to the bottom, bruising her knees and scraping her palms. She endured the river’s final attack and dragged herself onto the shore.

Now get up. Find some shelter
.

She shook her head.
No. Rest now. That was the deal
.

Her internal retort was half-hearted. She knew that she had to keep moving.
Just a few more seconds
…

Something rustled in the woods beyond where she lay. She turned toward the sound, just as a man stepped into the open.

“No,” she groaned, but her plea was as futile as everything else she had tried.

She didn’t recognize the man, but there was no mistaking the pistol in his hand or his intent when he aimed it at her heart. He did not fire, however. Instead, he held something close to his mouth—a cell phone or walkie-talkie—and spoke. “This is Trace. I found her.”

There was a brief pause, and then a disembodied voice—Cort’s voice—issued from the handset. “You know what to do.”