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  It wasn’t necessary to warn him. He’d already spotted the headlights winding along the road toward their driveway. There were cars that drove by that way, simply passing through to other destinations. But not usually at that time of night.

  By the time the car slowed at their driveway, Roscoe had made his way down to Yankee from the rear of the house.

  “What’s up?” Roscoe asked in his thick Brooklyn accent.

  Yankee pointed at the road. The car continued on, still slower than the posted speed limit. When it reached a pullout at the next curve, it left the road and parked on the shoulder, the lights going dark.

  “Damn,” Roscoe muttered before bolting back into the darkness.

  Somewhere to Yankee’s left, Oscar let out two short, sharp whistles, just loud enough Yankee could hear him.

  The car’s dome light flashed on as the door opened. A lone figure exited the car, and the light extinguished when the door closed again. It was just after new moon. The only other lights were the blanket of stars above them. But to Yankee’s trained eyes, it was enough to spot the person start walking back up the road toward the driveway leading to their safe house.

  A moment later, Papa melted out of the night next to him. “What do we have?” he whispered.

  “One out of the car and heading this way.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Not that I can see. Doesn’t mean he didn’t drop someone else off before he came into view, or there’s not someone else hiding in the car.”

  “Roger roger. Maintain your positions.” Papa disappeared again. Yankee knew their leader would get everyone quietly and quickly roused and ready to greet their visitor, as well as have several of them prepared to usher Q and Pandora out the back of the house and to safety, if necessary.

  Five minutes later, he was aware of three of their guys heading down the driveway to intercept their visitor. Followed approximately two minutes later by a long, rolling whistle.

  Their all-clear signal.

  Whoever it was, they were friendly.

  Yankee relaxed and waited, knowing Oscar, Roscoe, and Niner were doing the same at their posts around the property. Papa called out to him and Oscar to follow them into the house. Upon reaching the front door, where light now spilled out into the yard, Yankee recognized Alpha’s spook buddy.

  His grim expression didn’t bode well.

  “Inside,” Papa ordered. “Everyone needs to hear this.”

  With Niner and Roscoe also corralled, they all gathered in the living room to hear the man out. Nothing else happened while everyone watched Doc do a stick test on the guy to make sure he didn’t have Kite. It might have been overkill, but no one took any chances.

  He tested clear.

  Only then did the spook reveal why he’d come. “I didn’t want to risk waiting to contact you,” he told them. Yankee didn’t know the guy’s name. Maybe Papa did, but around everyone else, Alpha had only referred to him as “the spook.”

  “I’ve done some research into the problem facing you,” he continued, “and I can confirm there’s definitely a leak in the food chain. I don’t have a reliably secure way to contact Arliss for you without possibly alerting the leak as to why. But I did toss some chum out and pulled in a bite.” He hesitated, deferring to Papa before continuing.

  Papa looked grim as he nodded, correctly interpreting the spook’s hesitation. “They can hear it. We’re all in the same boat at this point.”

  “I used a friend of a friend to alert a frenemy to put it out there that there was a SOTIF unit on the ground in Oz, looking for a way out for them and their special-care perishable package, via any means possible. Within twelve hours, I heard back from the echo chamber that another SOTIF unit, one that doesn’t report to Arliss, was pulled from their current assignment in Europe and sent guess where.”

  “Sonofabitch,” Alpha muttered.

  Papa blew out a breath. “How fresh is the intel?”

  “I immediately headed over here as soon as I found out. Looks like it was SOTIF7 that got sent out, from what I could read off the grapevine.”

  “Any idea about orders?”

  “What was reported back said that the scrambled SOTIF team was to locate, assist, and extract the entire team, and their perishable package, as quickly as possible. Arliss was notified of the intel and okayed the mission and extraction.”

  Papa slowly nodded. “That’s good. That means we’re still off their radar.”

  Pandora’s brow furrowed in confusion. “I thought we were off the grid? Or whatever it’s called.”

  All the men chuckled.

  Her face turned red. “Listen up, assholes. You agreed I was part of the team. Don’t treat me like a kid sister.”

  Yankee loved it when she got riled. She was a breath of fresh air.

  And, to be fair, it was her friend watching their six in terms of intelligence. They’d be farked if it wasn’t for his help.

  Doc got her calmed down. “We are off the grid. Off the radar means that they still think we’re on the leash.” When she glared at him, he quickly continued. “They think we’re still reporting to Arliss. The mole doesn’t realize Arliss warned us.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Thank you. I swear, sometimes I think you monkeys make shit up just to see me react.”

  “That’s the good ole government for you,” Papa said. “Especially the military. Acronyms out their assholes.”

  “Okay,” Pandora said. “Explain to me then why if we’re off their radar, why can’t we be obvious and ask for help?”

  “Because then the mole will know where we are,” Papa said. “And it’ll raise suspicions as to how we got here in the first place when they just received intel that we’re still in Oz. Better they waste time looking for us in Oz for a few days. Gives us time to get the hell out of Hawaii.”

  “So when are we doing that?” she asked.

  Papa glanced at his wristwatch. “I want everyone ready to bug out in less than two hours.”

  “So much for my beauty sleep,” she joked.

  Chapter Three

  India Pelletier leaned over the sink and splashed water onto her face and the back of her neck. Sweat plastered her short brown hair to her scalp. If late April was already this hot, the rest of the summer would be miserable at this rate.

  Fark it.

  She leaned in and stuck her head as far under the faucet as she could, ladling water over her scalp with her hand. It wasn’t like any of her patients at the small charity clinic just outside of Colima would care what she looked like.

  All they cared was that she could stitch them up, or give them a pill or a shot to fix their problem, or do whatever it was she needed to do to alleviate their condition, soothe their pain, or prevent their kids from getting sick and dying from diseases easily preventable with vaccines.

  When India had gone to school to become a licensed nurse practitioner, she never imagined she’d find herself basically working as a doctor at a small Mexican charity clinic.

  Then again, Colima beat the hell out of the circus her hometown just northwest of the St. Louis city limits had become since Reverend Hannibal Silo and his church of the unholy carnival act had come to town and apparently settled in for the duration.

  She tried not to think about that. It made her sick to her stomach to think about her parents basically giving all their money, money they couldn’t afford to part with, money that should have been their retirement funds, to the con artist.

  Now, the entire St. Louis area should be called St. Silo.

  She hated it.

  She’d rather be doing something good, something worthwhile with her life. It had meant accepting a scholarship from Compassion Médicale Internationale, an international medical charity, for her college and nursing school tuition in return for her spending four years of her life wherever they said, but she was okay with that.

  CMI had treated her well and paid her a decent wage, in addition to covering her living expenses. She ha
d no complaints.

  Except for a lack of air-conditioning in the clinic with the Mexican summer rapidly approaching. At least all the rooms had ceiling fans, and she had a box fan she put in her window at night that helped.

  She shut off the water and stood, staring into the mirror. The small window to her right slanted afternoon sunlight across her face, painting and hiding the dark circles under her brown eyes with shadows.

  Okay, and it would be nice for once to have a full-time doctor here that spent longer than his or her mandatory four-month stint.

  CMI had been prompt in paying her and providing needed funding and supplies for the clinic. She never had a complaint about that. But ever since the Kite outbreak, getting a response from the American headquarters in Dallas for anything other than her routine expense submissions to accounting took weeks, months, even. She’d asked again last week if they had a time frame on a replacement doctor, and still no reply from them. Her own nursing stint was due to expire in just a couple of weeks. She hadn’t let them know one way or another about continuing her tenure yet.

  Mostly because she couldn’t make up her mind. One day she wanted to settle here for the rest of her life, and the next she was curious to see what other clinic positions might be available elsewhere in South America. She’d even considered returning to the States and getting a “real” job there somewhere.

  Well, anywhere except St. Louis.

  Or any other place that bozo has a church.

  In their last e-mail to her several weeks ago, her parents had told her how they’d both taken on second jobs, and asked how soon was she going to move back home to help them out with their finances.

  Uh, that would be never.

  She’d begged them not to send all that money to the church, and they’d ignored her. They were adults. They’d have to deal with the consequences of their actions.

  Her decision currently didn’t matter either way, she supposed. She couldn’t leave the clinic until they’d at least assigned another nurse. Or a doctor.

  She wouldn’t leave the clinic empty and the locals without any medical assistance.

  Running her hands through her wet hair to brush out the water, she grabbed a hand towel and rubbed it across her scalp.

  Hell, I might decide not to leave here when my time’s up next month.

  CMI had no problems hiring on staff for full time positions once their initial commitment ended.

  And, in a way, the residents of Colima had become a sort of adopted extended family. India had delivered a lot of babies in her time there. Outlasted eight doctors, who usually only did four-month stints. Dr. Paul Karsonnes, who’d been there when she first arrived, was apparently the first doctor in a long string of them to work more than a year at the clinic. He’d been there three years when she arrived, and left a year later. A rarity. It was easier for CMI to find nurses willing to sign on for longer work exchange tenures than doctors. Only one other doctor besides Karsonnes stayed longer than their minimum stint, a whole eight months, during India’s tenure.

  India had even trained a couple of local midwives. Taught CPR and first aid to residents. Pregnancy nutrition. Instituted vaccination programs.

  She’d done a lot of good for these people.

  More importantly, she felt good about what she’d done, how she’d contributed. Worked with the local padre to introduce a birth control program that had in the span of two years drastically reduced teen and unintended pregnancy rates to single-digits.

  She’d learned some other specialty skills by necessity, including anesthesiology, radiology, and even meatball surgery techniques that had saved lives which would have otherwise been lost.

  She’d also quit stumbling through her Spanish and frequently found herself thinking in the language now.

  A light rap on the door caught her attention. The clinic’s receptionist, notifying her the next round of appointments was ready to commence.

  “Gracias, Mama,” she called out in response to the knock.

  They all called the seventy-two-year-old woman Mama. She was like a mother to most of them in many ways.

  One of the perks of working at the clinic was the sat-link connection, supplied by CMI, so she could access medical databases and remote physicians for video conference consultations on her laptop. She’d checked several sites again just that morning, medical sites she’d monitored ever since the Kite virus had been identified.

  While they didn’t have any active cases in the state of Colima yet, there were ten new confirmed cases in Mexico City as of yesterday, arrivals on a flight from Bogota. Apparently, they were family and “business associates” of a drug lord who’d bought their way past airport security in Colombia. Police had called in the military to help quell the mini-riot started by families of the other passengers when the entire plane, including crew, was held in quarantine.

  What a farking joke.

  It was only a matter of time before someone slipped past quarantine and testing procedures and infected others in the densely populated urban area. Then the Kite virus would explode in Mexico City before spreading to the rest of the country the way it had in countries on the other side of the globe.

  The videos she’d seen coming out of other countries, especially in Asia, scared the crap out of her. Bands of infected Kiters toward the end-stage of the disease, running amok through streets and attacking people as if nothing more than packs of rabid dogs.

  Even more unsettling, CMI had lost contact with all of their clinics in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, and Cambodia. Three of seven clinics were out of contact as of yesterday in Vietnam. A clinic in Somalia had reported four confirmed cases on a freighter that had arrived from India. Eight other clinics on the African continent had reported a total of twenty confirmed cases.

  Their official conclusion on the private CMI website was that staff had likely been killed, either by Kite or Kiters, in the clinics they’d lost contact with. The clinics were all equipped with emergency backup gennys, in addition to solar and wind power, and in some cases were attached to the local power grid. They also had sat-phones and emergency hand-crank chargers for them.

  If the staff of those clinics were completely out of contact, it meant the proverbial excrement had impacted with the ventilation device.

  The charity had also passed along reports from official government and military agencies in the region, which unanimously stated that it didn’t appear there were any civilian doctors, nurses, or other medical workers remaining in the country of India. That likely they had all either died, or fled in the face of the uncontrollably spreading virus.

  Even Kite patients who didn’t develop the violent stage, and not all of them did, still posed a high risk to their family and friends. Anyone who was a caregiver, who was exposed to bodily fluids, ran the risk of contracting the nearly always fatal disease.

  So far, the infinitesimal few who had survived Kite would have been better off dying, reduced to barely conscious shells of human beings who could no longer independently care for themselves.

  There were even unconfirmed reports that many survivors were being humanely euthanized with potassium chloride, just because there weren’t adequate facilities or personnel to care for them any longer. They would have painfully lingered before dying of thirst, starvation, or attack by Kiters.

  CMI had not yet issued an official ruling on that subject. For her part, India was definitely glad about that. However, just after New Year’s, they’d shipped her three cases of pre-loaded po-clo bolus syringes, each one containing more than enough of the solution to kill a very large human, fifteen hundred doses total.

  When she’d e-mailed headquarters, asking for clarification and instructions on what the heck she was expected to do with them, the reply she’d received chilled her to the bone.

  Use at your discretion, if the need arises, to contain the spread of Kite and relieve suffering in your region.

  The cases still sat, unopened, on a top shelf in a
far corner of the main storeroom, buried behind several other boxes of items she wouldn’t need to access on a regular basis.

  She hadn’t explained to Mama what they were for, preferring the woman didn’t know. India told her they were for flushing out IVs and had been sent by mistake, and that they were never to be used unless she’d personally authorized it.

  India had actually been able to get surgical masks into the hands of local residents via help from the padre, who handed them out at masses, as well as sent them home with students from the church-run school he presided over.

  Trying to get the people to use them, however, was a different matter. While they would put them on if someone was sick, they couldn’t be bothered otherwise. Most of them spent long days out in the sun working in fields and tending to crops or livestock.

  Wearing another hot, essentially useless article of clothing didn’t interest them.

  Even in Mexico City, the last time she was there a couple of weeks earlier for a supply run, it was rare to see anyone besides public employees, medical professionals, and rich people wearing them.

  Most of the population either couldn’t afford them, or couldn’t be bothered with them.

  Colima had once been a bustling center of trade and commerce, until earthquakes and fires, followed by flu epidemics, along with intermittent economic implosions, destroyed first the infrastructure, then the population by attrition and migration to other areas in Mexico. For the past fifty years or so the city, now only a little town, existed as a shadow of its former self. Less than five thousand people lived in rural areas outside what had once been the city proper. The last regional hospital had closed six years before India’s arrival, the structure damaged beyond repair by earthquakes and fires. There weren’t enough people in the region to warrant building a new one, so the Mexican government had started paying CMI a monthly stipend to expand and operate their existing charity clinic, which served not just Colima, but surrounding towns as well. People frequently came from over fifty miles away to her clinic.