Apocalyptic Visions Super Boxset (113 page)

“Thirty yards north, Sarah. Move!”

Sarah pushed herself off the back side of the wall, her right foot dragging behind her when she wasn’t using it to steady her pace on the grinding run. She weaved in and out of the huts, using them for cover as much as she could. Bullets zipped past her. She fired back, carefully, making sure each shot was close enough to cause the soldiers to slow down but leaving enough space to ensure she didn’t misfire and hit one of them.

The thump of the helicopter blades grew louder and kicked up sand in her face. She squinted her eyes as the grainy beads of earth whipped against her skin and clothes, stinging the bullet wounds on her body. Cover fire from the chopper blasted through the air. Through the thick gusts of sand, she saw a hand extended; she reached for it and felt the strong arm pull her onto the chopper’s deck. The gunshots faded, and she felt the chopper quickly lift into the air. The wind swirled what bits of sand remained on Sarah. She lay there on the deck, her eyes flitting open and closed.

“Sarah? Hey, stay with me.”

Sarah recognized the voice and felt a tug on her shoulder and arm. She kept her eyes open long enough to see that Vince was patching up her knee. “They sent you? I might as well have been saved by the local police. I was wondering what was taking so long.”

Vince cracked a smile. He ripped the fabric from her shoulder, exposing the bullet wound, and began to clean it. “Yeah, well, they were busy responding to the reports of a crazy woman shooting up some local villages. She even crashed into some of the houses.”

“Women drivers,” Sarah said, shaking her head. A flood of pain hit her as Vince dug the metal pliers into her shoulder and pulled the bullet out. “In all fairness, I didn’t try to hit the buildings.”

“You don’t try to do a lot of things, Sarah,” Vince said. “Yet here we are.”

Sarah faded in and out of consciousness. Images of her brother and her parents flashed in her mind. She couldn’t think of why until Vince hit a nerve ending in her shoulder that shot a rush of pain-laced adrenaline through her body. She propped herself up with her elbows. “I need to get home.”

“You need to get to surgery if you want to be able to walk again,” Vince said.

Sarah wrenched his shirt collar. “The funeral. It’s tomorrow. I need to be there.”

Vince placed his hand over hers and gently removed the strong claw that had the speed and tenacity to kill him without even trying. “I have orders to get you patched up.”

Sarah fell back to the deck of the chopper and remained motionless, her body only responding to the spasms of pain from Vince’s prep work for surgery. All she could think about was her brother, sitting there in the church, alone, carrying the burden of burying their parents without her.

***

White light crept into Sarah’s pupils, momentarily blinding her as she opened her eyelids. Her mind felt groggy, her body uncoordinated. She lifted her head with a strained effort and saw her left shoulder and arm in a sling and her knee wrapped in a soft cast. She gave her quad a bend and was rewarded with a sharp pain that stole the breath from her body. A large curtain surrounded her, and it was suddenly ripped back, and a group of nurses surrounded her.

“How are you feeling, Ms. Francis?” the nurse asked.

It took Sarah a moment to process the information. Mary Francis was one of the aliases she used in her international travel. “I’m fine. What’s today’s date?”

“It’s Friday,” the nurse answered.

“Shit!” The word was loud, harsh, and triggered the jaws of the nurses around her to drop, while the occupants of the beds next to her sniggered. “I need to make a call. Where’s my phone?” Before the dumbfounded nurse could answer, Vince entered, her phone in his hand.

“Darling, you’re awake!” Vince said.

All effort to conceal her emotions had vanished and was replaced by the irritable expression usually reserved for Bryce’s tech babbling. Vince pushed the nurses aside and leaned in to kiss her lips. Sarah immediately stopped his face mid-push with her good right hand and denied his advances. He smiled, waving it off playfully.

“You did always like to play hard to get,” Vince said.

“And you do love it when it’s your turn with the dildo,” Sarah replied, giving a sweetly innocent smile, which the nurses around her found neither sweet nor innocent.

“Will you ladies give us a moment?” Vince asked. “My wife and I have a lot of catching up to do.”

The nurses nodded, their eyebrows raised in a mixture of polite professionalism and shock. Vince drew the curtain back, giving them some privacy.

“You need to explain yourself,” Sarah said. “Right now.”

“Honey, you’re distraught,” Vince said, brushing back her hair.

Sarah snatched his hand in mid-swipe, squeezing the pressure point on his palm, and twisted it hard right, triggering a yelp. “What the hell happened?”

Vince rubbed his wrist, keeping his voice low. “The nearest GSF medical facility was too far out for the surgery you needed. You could have lost your leg if it wasn’t operated on soon, not to mention the amount of blood you lost, so I brought you here.” He squeezed his palm into a fist a few times and rotated it around on his wrist, checking its mobility. “Usually this is when people say, ‘oh, thank you!’”

Sarah rested her head back on the pillow. She closed her eyes. “I missed it.” She felt something land on her stomach, and when she opened her eyes, she saw her phone.

“I know,” Vince said, his voice void of the playful newlywed act. “Your brother kept calling. I didn’t answer. I figured you would want to come up with your own story.”

Sarah scrolled through the twenty missed calls and just as many voicemails and text messages.

“You have a checkup tomorrow, and then we’ll be moving you back to Chicago,” Vince said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I’ll give you a few minutes. If you need anything, let me know.”

Sarah nodded, and Vince disappeared behind the curtain. She lay there, phone in her hand, her thumb over the play button for the voicemail messages. She didn’t want to listen to them but forced herself to press play and brought the receiver to her ear.

“Hey, Sarah, didn’t know if you wanted to ride together to the church. Let me know, and we can either pick you up or you can meet us at the house. Love you.”

“Sarah, we’re at the church now. Let me know when you get here.”

“Hey, are you all right? The procession is about to start. Please call or text me.”

“Okay, you’re starting to scare me. Please, call me.”

The longer Sarah listened, the more desperate and angrier the messages became. Once they were finished, she pressed the return call button. The monitor measuring her heart rate and vitals beeped in faster intervals. She tried to swallow, but her mouth went dry, and the lump in her throat refused to go down. Her body broke out in a sweat as the phone went to its third ring, then fourth. She found herself hoping that it would go to voicemail, but just before the sixth ring, she heard a click and the raspy sound of her brother’s voice.

“Hello?” Ben asked.

A silence followed as Sarah searched for her words. Ben repeated himself again, and Sarah finally spoke up. “Hey, Ben.” Silence. Sarah waited for him to say something, anything, but he wouldn’t give her a response. “Look, I, um, I don’t know where to even star—”

“Are you okay?” Ben asked.

Sarah’s throat caught again, and she felt her heart crack along the same fault line that had opened when Ben told her about their parents’ car accident. “Yeah, I, um, just, was doing some overtime at the factory, and there was an accident. I got banged up a little bit. Actually, I got banged up a lot, but I’m fine. Yeah, I’m fine.”

“Matt and Ella kept asking about you. They’ll be glad to know you’re all right,” Ben said.

A tear formed in the corner of her eye and rolled down her cheek alongside her nose until she could taste the salty mixture on her lips. “Ben, I’m so sorry I missed the funeral.”

“You’ve been sorry about a lot of things over the past few weeks, Sarah,” Ben said, his voice exasperated. “You’ve been sorry about not coming to the hospital with me to identify the bodies. You’ve been sorry about all the appointments and meetings we were supposed to do together to get everything in order. You’ve been sorry about going days without getting back to me. I guess I’m done with your being sorry.”

“Ben—”

“Look, I have to go,” Ben said. “I’m at work, and I’ve already had to take off a lot of time because of the funeral, so I need to get back to it.”

“Right, yeah,” Sarah said, forcing back the quivering in her throat. “I’ll talk to you later.” The call ended without any goodbyes, and the phone slid from her face to the pillow. A numbness washed over her, engulfing her in waves of apathy until she couldn’t think or move. One by one, she was losing her family, and what made it all worse was the knowledge that she could have saved the relationship with her brother.

Present Day

The news feeds all said slightly different versions of the same thing: Tuck Investments had been responsible for the financial terrorism and played a major role in the power outages that lasted for more than a week across the entire globe. And if the reporters weren’t commenting on the search for the Tuck Investment board of trustees said to be the masterminds behind the attacks, they were busy talking about fallout from both Russia’s and China’s aggressions during the blackout.

“The G7, along with the UN, are wrapping up their treaty negotiations with the Russians and Chinese,” the anchor reported. “It’s expected that the negotiations will continue for some time, as tensions are still high. While both Russian and Chinese authorities have ordered all their men to stand down, there are still pockets of Chinese and Russian soldiers fighting along their countries’ borders.” The reporter cleared his throat and turned to another monitor. “The search continues for Rick Demps, CEO and president of Tuck Investments, who authorities say was the orchestrator of the largest coordinated terrorist attack in history. More on where officials believe he and his accomplices are hiding when we come back.”

Sarah turned the television off and tossed the remote onto the couch. She took a step in front of the mirror to get a final look at herself before she left. The black dress fit snug against her body, and she fidgeted awkwardly in the high heels, her ankles on the verge of snapping. She scrubbed off as much of the dirt and grime as she could and tried doing her hair but in the end just pulled it back in a ponytail to get it out of the way. With her brain burning resources on what the hell she was going to do at the funeral, her bangs were the least of her concerns.

The flips and knots in her stomach had been present for the past seventy-two hours, but it felt much longer. The tired lines on her face accentuated her age by a decade. But despite the fatigue that both her body and mind had gone through, she was still wired with grief and rage.

A knock at the door caused Sarah’s hand to instinctively reach for the pistol that would have been found in her shoulder holster but stopped when her fingertips grazed the fabric of her dress, confused at the material they found. When she checked the peephole on the front door, she gave a brief sigh of relief. She opened the door, and standing in front of her with his best attempt at grooming and dressing himself was Bryce.

“Hey, wow, you look great,” Bryce said, his lower jaw still sagging after the words left him. “I mean, well, you look nice.” He cleared his throat and glanced down at his shoes awkwardly.

“What are you doing here?” Sarah asked.

Bryce kept his head down as he spoke. “Well, I know the funeral is today, and I thought you could use some company.”

The painful fault line that had cracked itself open in her heart, cutting its path deeper and making it seemingly impossible to ever heal, felt like it closed a fraction of an inch at the sound of Bryce’s words. She gave a light smile, which he still couldn’t see because his face was glued to his shoes, then embraced him in a hug. “Thank you.”

Bryce smiled, waiving it off. “Hey, that’s what I’m here for, right? Support. It’s literally my job.”

“You really know how to make a girl feel special,” Sarah answered, the sarcastic tone ringing in the air between them. “Let’s go.”

The two descended the steps to where Bryce had a car waiting. The black sedan was definitely from GSF’s stash of vehicles. Before Sarah could reach for the handle, Bryce offered a feeble attempt at chivalry by opening the door, which Sarah smacked away. “I’m grieving, not crippled.”

The car ride was quiet; neither Bryce nor Sarah spoke. Only the driver offered the occasional word, making sure the two were comfortable and asking if they needed anything.

“Did you speak with her yet?” Bryce asked.

“I tried calling, but she wouldn’t pick up. And she hasn’t returned any of my calls.” The last interaction she’d had with Becca wasn’t exactly a family gem. She reached her hand up and touched the side of her cheek, where the burn of Becca’s palm still felt fresh on her skin. “I only found out about where the funeral was going to be held through the announcement in the paper.”

“She’s hurting,” Bryce said, his hand covering her own. “It’ll take some time.” He gave a light squeeze, and Sarah offered a smile that was more sad than happy.

The truth was Sarah wasn’t sure if she wanted Becca to forgive her. It seemed like justice for her to be shunned from the family she had always seemed to ignore. Her job didn’t allow for long-lasting emotional connections. The past six years had seen her seat at family dinners and holidays lie empty more often than filled. All of the excuses she gave were lies, but in her conscience, she’d given them weight, knowing that she was out trying to keep safe the very people she was leaving behind. Her family had always chalked it up to her being independent, but she was afraid that her absence was just a cover that lay under the façade of lies. A truth that she may have loved her job more than her family. And today those lies could finally break through the surface.