Flood Rising (A Jenna Flood Thriller) (32 page)

“I can’t do it alone!” he shouted.

“We could both die,” she suggested.

He stared at her, no doubt weighing her sincerity. “Without you, they don’t stand a chance.”

He was manipulating her. She knew it. He knew it. But he was also right. To stop the other clones and a third world war, she had to survive this mess, and that meant working with Jarrod...so that they could try killing each other again once they reached the ground.

“Tell me what to do,” she said.

He pointed his hands down, toward the dish. “Just focus on the dish. See it slowing. There’s no way we can stop it completely. It’s too heavy. But we can slow it down.” He closed his eyes and ground his teeth. The structure shuddered, mashed against an unseen force, but it continued to fall.

Jenna closed her eyes and did as instructed. She immediately felt the dish’s weight pulling against her. It was agonizing, like muscles in her mind were being stretched and snapped.

She screamed.

And the dish slowed.

We’re doing it
, she thought, and she opened her eyes.

That was when she saw the third missile and shouted.

Jarrod’s eyes snapped open. He saw the missile,too. “No!” He reached out a hand, deflecting the missile to detonate in the desert, but he lost control of the dish in the process. The strain became to much for Jenna to bear alone, and she lost her psychokinetic grip.

With a groan of rending metal, the dish plummeted. Jarrod fell from view. Jenna clung to the support beam as long as she could, but momentum pulled her free and flung her away. The world became a blurry spiral, and then, in a snap, became nothing.

63

6:32 p.m.

“Jenna?”

The voice called to her out of the blackness.

“A few more minutes,” she murmured.

That’s all I need. I’ll sleep for a few more minutes. Then I’ll get up
.

But unconsciousness had already released her back into the world of the living. Her eyelids fluttered open just in time to see a familiar shape kneel beside her.

“Jenna.” Noah sounded very concerned, and as she pondered possible reasons for this, the memory of the collapsing dish replayed in her head, but the final impact however was a blank spot in her memory.

She opened her eyes and couldn’t make sense of what she saw. Destruction lay all around her and above her, but a ten foot circle around her remained unscathed. It was as though the dish had slammed into a spherical force field, wrapping its hundred ton metal form around it.
What happened?

She hurt, all over, but she decided that was a good sign. Serious injuries would have left her numb with shock. She tried to sit up.

“Lie still,” Noah told her, his voice soothing but still somehow ominous.

How bad is it?
She wondered, and she decided that, sensible or not, she was going to get up. Noah didn’t try to stop her, and that, she decided, was probably a good sign, too.

As soon as she was partially upright, the world spun. There were two Noahs kneeling in front of her, and behind them, the flat desert landscape appeared strangely broken, like two transparent pictures imperfectly arranged on a desktop. Other than that, things looked pretty normal. After a few moments, the two images came together and she could see clearly again.

That was when she saw him at the edge of the untouched sphere of land.

A dark wave of grief crashed over Jenna, threatening to drag her back into unconsciousness. Jarrod—a
part
of Jarrod—lay a few feet away. When the edge of the dish had impacted the ground, it had sliced through his torso like a guillotine. He lay there, staring up, his too-familiar face frozen in a rictus of horror. The rest of him was buried in the rubble.

He tried to kill me
, she thought.
I should be glad he’s dead
. But instead, it felt like a piece of her had been torn away.

Noah’s arms enfolded her. “It’s okay, Jenna. It’s over. You’re safe.”

Over?
She shook her head, making no effort to hold back the tears. “No. I failed. I couldn’t stop him in time.”

“Shhh. Don’t worry about that now. You did what you could. You did more than anyone had the right to ask you to do. And I’m proud of you.”

Jenna was surprised by how much that mattered to her. Yet, she didn’t deserve his pride. When the chance to act had come, she had balked, torn between doing what she knew to be right—what Noah had raised her to believe in—and a preprogrammed sense of loyalty to a family she didn’t know.

If the world destroyed itself in the next few weeks, would it be her fault for not doing more? And if it destroyed itself gradually over the next fifty years, would that be her fault, too?

Soter appeared behind Noah, hobbling toward them as fast as he could manage. Jenna saw the look of relief mixed with wonderment in the old man’s eyes turn to hurt as he glimpsed Jarrod’s body and the state of the dish around her. Then he, too, was kneeling beside her.

Cort, on his crutches, was just a few seconds behind. “Did you do it? Did you stop him?” His eyes flicked back and forth between Jenna and the destroyed dish.

“Damn it, Cort,” Noah rasped. “Give her a minute.”

Jenna shrugged away from Noah, stood and got in Cort’s face. “You didn’t need to send in an airstrike! The signal was already sent! It was too late, you son of a bitch.”

Cort squinted at her. “Did you get there before or after the signal was sent?”

Noah stepped between them. “You almost killed her. She has a right to be pissed. Back off. Now.”

Jenna was angry, but she hadn’t forgotten the stakes. “I took his computer before he could e-mail the others.”

“Where is it?” Cort asked.

“It’s in the—” She trailed off when she realized that the truck and everything in it had been pulverized beneath the collapsing antenna. She turned toward the mass of destruction. “You destroyed it.”

Cort sagged against his crutches. “Well, there’s going to be hell to pay, but at least we can scratch that one off the list.” He jerked a thumb in Jarrod’s direction. “Hopefully this will mean the end of the cyber-terror attacks.”

Despite his coarse manner, Jenna found his statement strangely comforting. Something good had come out of it after all. Jarrod, and Sophia too, might have been only small parts in a grand design, but without them, the whole would be that much less effective.

Jarrod had warned her that the plan would go ahead, even if he was unable to contact the others, but maybe that wouldn’t happen right away. Maybe there was still time to stop the others—her brothers and sisters—from throwing the world into chaos.

And if she could accomplish that, maybe there would be time to save the world from itself.

Noah stood and held her. She savored Noah’s embrace a moment, then turned and faced Cort again.

“I got a look at his contact list. It’s not much, but it’s a place to start. We can find the others. Stop them.” Her eyes were drawn to Jarrod’s corpse. “Maybe even save them from themselves.”

Cort regarded her with an almost predatory curiosity. “We? There is no ‘we.’”

Noah stepped between them again, hands on hips in a fatherly posture. “Jenna, your part in this is done.”

She shook her head. “I know them. I know how they think, and I know why they’re doing it. I’m the only one who can stop them.”

Cort laughed. “How are
you
going to stop them?”

Jenna looked up at the bent dish above them. She could do more than even she knew. It filled her with confidence. “Try to stop me.”

Cort was more than willing. He reached for his pistol, drew it and pointed it toward Jenna. But instead of shooting the weapon, he tossed it—or at least, that’s what it looked like. Jenna caught the weapon and turned it around on Cort. “I promised that I would give myself up when this was finished. I’ve changed my mind. So we can either do this together—on my terms—or we can do it at odds. The choice is yours.”

Cort rocked back and forth on his crutches for a moment. He was doing a decent job of hiding his surprise, and his fear. “What are these terms of yours...exactly?”

“First, back off. This is going to be a partnership. I’m working
with
you, not
for
you. Get that straight.”

Cort shrugged, refusing to agree, but Jenna kept going.

“Second, I want Mercy released, right now. Make a call, put her on a plane back to Key West or wherever she wants to go.”

This request got a response from Cort. His brows furrowed. “Who is Mercy?”

“What?” Jenna looked around for the woman, but she was nowhere to be seen. She turned to Noah, who looked as confused as Cort. The world, and the events that had brought her to the Very Large Array had changed. Not only was Mercy not present, but she was also not a part of her life, or Noah’s. It felt like a death. It stung. But she hid it. “She’s a clone. Like me. One of the first. We need to find her. She’ll help.”

Cort shrugged again, indifferent, but not opposed.

Jenna turned to Soter. “We’re going to need your help, too.”

Soter’s face creased in alarm. “They’re my children. You can’t make me hunt them down.”

“Yes, they are your children, and you’re responsible for what they’re doing. If you really care about them, you’ll help stop them before they do something terrible.”

He leaned against his cane, as unwilling to make a commitment as Cort.

“There’s something else,” she continued. “The transmission didn’t come from extraterrestrials.”

That got Soter’s attention. “No? Then who?”

“From us.
Today
. The Wow! Signal was sent by Jarrod.”

“Impossible,” Soter said. “The signal came from deep space.”

“Which is exactly where he sent it,” Jenna said, motioning to the skyward pointing array dishes. “But we don’t know who created it, or why.” She left out the refining nature of the signal, deciding to tell her father once she was sure he was the same man who had raised her. “But we need you to help figure out who created the signal...and our genome.”

Soter’s eyes brightened a little at the prospect of an unsolved mystery. He nodded slowly.

“Anything else?” Cort asked, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

Jenna matched his tone, looking over the barrel of the man’s gun. “I’m sure I’ll think of something. Now do we have a deal or should I put a bullet in the other leg and be on my way?”

Cort winced. At least that part of the story hadn’t changed. He shook his head. “You have no idea what you’re in for, kid.”

“I think I’ve got a pretty good idea.” She turned back to Noah. “Still proud of me?”

Noah blinked as if trying to hold back tears and smiled. “You are still going to finish high school, and go to college…and get the job of your dreams.”

“After we stop World War III,” she said.

He chuckled. “Looks that way.”

She grinned back. “Deal.”

He hugged her again. “Yes. I’m proud of you. More than you can imagine.”

“Nurture wins over nature, right? You raised me well.”

“Yes. I did.”

Noah led her away, arm around her. As they walked, she leaned her head on his shoulder, and he leaned in close, but not to comfort her. In a serious, but quiet voice, he said, “How do you know about Mercy?”

A NOTE FROM JEREMY ROBINSON

Dear Reader,

I wanted to take a moment to thank you for reading FLOOD RISING. I hope you have enjoyed this brand new thriller. If you did enjoy the book, please show your support by posting a review at your online retailer. E-book websites work on algorithms, meaning the more people review my books, the more the e-book retailers will recommend them to other readers. And the more people buy my books, the more I get to write them, which is a good thing for both of us (assuming you enjoyed the book). If we can get FLOOD RISING moving off the virtual shelves, there will be many more adventures with Jenna Flood to come.

Thank you!

—
Jeremy Robinson

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Jeremy Robinson
is the bestselling author of more than forty novels and novellas including
Uprising
,
Island 731
,
SecondWorld
, the Jack Sigler thriller series, and
Project Nemesis
, the highest selling original (non-licensed) kaiju novel of all time. He’s known for mixing elements of science, history and mythology, which has earned him the #1 spot in Science Fiction and Action-Adventure, and secured him as the top creature feature author.

Robinson is also known as the bestselling horror writer, Jeremy Bishop, author of
The Sentinel
and the controversial novel,
Torment
. His novels have been translated into twelve languages. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and three children.

Visit him online at
www.jeremyrobinsononline.com
.

Sean Ellis
is the author of several thriller and adventure novels. He is a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom, and he has a Bachelor of Science degree in Natural Resources Policy from Oregon State University. Sean is also a member of the International Thriller Writers organization. He currently resides in Arizona, where he divides his time between writing, adventure sports and trying to figure out how to save the world.

Visit him on the web at:
seanellisthrillers.webs.com