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  She’d do anything, as long as she had a chance to work.

  * * * *

  When Dolce returned to the apartment she shared with Sarah and two other women later that afternoon, she still didn’t have a new job, although a foreman at the Carlkilney brewery took down her name and said he’d short-list her for any new positions based on her mechanical skills.

  Sarah, Colleen, and Desiree weren’t home, which meant she could have the shower all to herself and use as much hot water as she wanted without worrying about someone else needing to get into the bathroom.

  Sad when an uninterrupted shower’s the only pleasure I have to look forward to.

  The four of them living in the tiny two-bedroom, one-bath apartment made for close quarters sometimes. But since they were all too busy working to worry about entertaining, it wasn’t like they were lacking for space or privacy.

  Dolce had served in the military with Sarah, who’d gotten out three months before Dolce had fourteen months earlier. Colleen and Desiree were women Sarah had met while working at CaliTeleSatCom. When Sarah had offered to let Dolce room with them after her enlistment ended, it wasn’t a difficult choice for Dolce to make. Dolce had no close family. She’d grown up in a state foster facility in Ohio after her parents died in a flu pandemic when she was thirteen. None of her scattered aunts or uncles or cousins on either side of the family could afford the extra financial burden of another child.

  I might be able to convince Sarah to leave the city with me.

  In the military, Sarah had been an electronics specialist with their fleet repair unit. Right now, Sarah, Colleen, and Desiree were fighting a losing battle in their jobs at CaliTeleSatCom to keep LA’s telecommunications and sat-link infrastructure up and running. With the riots doing more damage to the systems every day, the three women had been working double shifts, along with their other coworkers, trying to stay ahead of the electronic carnage.

  Maybe Colleen and Desiree would come with us, too. The other two women hadn’t served in the military, going straight to a tech school after high school to enter the work force with a job that paid marginally better than minimum wage. They didn’t have any survival training to make a life in the wilderness, but if they wanted to learn, she and Sarah could teach them.

  When Dolce finished her shower, she took stock of their grocery situation. They’d been living on bean and lentil soups with vegetables, and the occasional meat they could afford, for the past several months.

  With the four of them pooling their money, they could keep the electricity on, pay the rent—which fortunately included water—and keep food in the pantry.

  Colleen and Desiree shared car expenses, and Sarah paid them gas money.

  Still, that left them all very little at the end of the month.

  Dolce knew if she moved out, the women could likely find another roommate to fill the void. But Dolce’s personal opinion of the future status of LA was that it was doomed.

  She put together a pot of beans to simmer on the stove. She knew the other women, who were supposed to have tomorrow off, had planned to try to hit a couple of grocery stores that night on their way home to see if they could find any good sales on chicken.

  Dolce couldn’t remember the last time she had beef or pork.

  Of course, if I move out somewhere in the woods, I could hunt as well as fish. Have meat whenever I wanted.

  That being predicated on Dolce finally making up her mind to abandon the city for good, with or without her friends in tow.

  And she really hoped they’d all three be in tow. She couldn’t imagine Colleen and Desiree surviving on their own once the city finally devolved into complete anarchy, and that wasn’t an if, but a when. Sarah had a chance of survival if she stayed in the city, considering her marksman skills. Hell, she could have gone for sniper certification if she’d wanted to stay for another tour.

  The other two women, to the best of Dolce’s knowledge, had never even fired a gun before, much less weren’t proficient in any other kinds of self-defense tactics other than basic urban survival from growing up just outside of Los Angeles. Neither had any close family in the city they could move in with, either. Another reason the four women had become close friends, in addition to roommates.

  They were basically adopted family to each other now. The only thing close to “relatives” that any of them had. Dolce didn’t want to abandon them if she could avoid it, but she refused to stay in Los Angeles and become target or a victim.

  She’d take her chances alone in the wild, if she had to.

  * * * *

  The other three women still hadn’t arrived home by six. That wasn’t exactly cause for worry, especially when Dolce knew they’d planned to try to shop for groceries.

  But seven o’clock rolled around.

  And then eight.

  As the minutes ticked by, Dolce’s worry grew. None of them had burner phones, much less regular cell phones. They couldn’t afford a landline in the apartment.

  Dolce didn’t even know where to start looking for them. When they’d left that morning, they’d mentioned they were being sent to Glendale to work on circuits in a large connection facility there. She knew they drove to a central work yard outside of Downey to pick up a work truck, or join another work detail there, but she wasn’t very familiar with that area and didn’t want to get herself stranded with no way of getting home again other than walking.

  With the unsettling quiet in the apartment too much for her to stomach, Dolce turned the radio on in the living room and found that the music station they usually listened to was broadcasting news.

  “…We repeat, authorities are asking citizens to stay away from the areas of Culver City, Inglewood, and Hawthorne. New Los Angeles International Airport has enacted a temporary ground stoppage due to poor visibility from smoke from fires caused by the nearby riots. If you are in the area, authorities are asking you to remain inside your home, keep all windows and doors locked, and the curtains drawn. Do not leave your home. California Governor Martin has issued an official state of emergency decree, and martial law has been declared in the greater Los Angeles area. Unless you are going to or from work, or have a health emergency, there is a curfew for all residents from 9:00 p.m. tonight until 5:00 a.m. tomorrow morning…”

  Feeling sick to her stomach, Dolce turned off the radio. They lived on the fourth floor of a six-story apartment building. If she looked out her window, she could see the distant glow and smoke from the fires to the northwest.

  She went to the bedroom she shared with Sarah and pulled her locked storage box from under the bed. Inside lay two nine-millimeter handguns, six spare clips that were also full, and four hundred rounds of ammunition. Technically she shouldn’t have them in California without a permit, but since she was former military, if she was ever caught with them, she could show her marksman certification endorsement on her official military ID and would be let go with a slap on the wrist and an admonishment to get a license for them.

  She preferred not to do that. She’d heard too many stories of people in LA getting their licenses, and then getting robbed soon after, their guns stolen from them. Dolce didn’t know what it was like in other parts of the country, but someone locally was obviously using that information to their advantage.

  She double-checked one of the guns, tucked it into a holster, and clipped it to the inside of her jeans, her T-shirt pulled down over it. With one of the extra clips stuck in her back pocket, she double-checked the locks on the door, turned off the lights in the apartment, and sat in front of the window looking west to watch the distant fires.

  And she tried, unsuccessfully, not to worry about her friends.

  Chapter Four

  Dr. Riley Perkins sat on a bench just outside the library in La Habra, her fingers flying over her laptop’s keyboard. It was precariously balanced on her lap as she frequently glanced around at her surroundings. She hated being out in the open, but she worried if she went inside the library that her
image might get captured on security video.

  No way could she allow that to happen. She didn’t know what kind of facial recognition software they might be running, and even with a surgical mask covering the lower half of her face, it wasn’t worth the risk.

  She’d seen a message on their secret shared server, supposedly from Quong and McInnis, that they were hiding in the Los Angeles area.

  She wasn’t sure she could trust it.

  Frankly, she didn’t trust anyone anymore.

  She couldn’t afford to.

  The only reason she was there today was something on the news had caught her attention. A local clinic of some sort, apparently run by a large church, had been burned down by gangs a couple of days earlier. Eclipsed by the violence and destruction from the riots, it had quickly fallen off the top news feeds.

  If she wasn’t mistaken, from what little she’d sleuthed out online in a couple of medical forums, it seemed based upon the personnel who’d been solicited to work there that they might have been trying to develop a Kite vaccine.

  Now all she had to do was find someone in that church to contact. If they really were working on a vaccine, maybe they’d give her anonymous sanctuary in exchange for her helping them out. It could be the break she and her fellows on The List needed to stay safe from the governments who wanted to apprehend them. Wasn’t there some sort of sanctuary provision in many religions?

  She wasn’t sure, because religion was definitely not her forte.

  Finding a vaccine to stop Kite’s march across the globe was her only goal. Fixing the fuckup she’d helped create in the first place.

  Dammit, I was an idiot.

  She’d fallen for North Korea’s scheme to get her there hook, line, and sinker. By the time she’d landed in Pyongyang, she couldn’t back out of the project without risking her life.

  Then again, North Korea would have carried out their project regardless of whether or not she’d participated. At least now she had a chance to help turn the tide. All of them did.

  Before it was too late for the human race to recover.

  The Church of the Rising Sunset had a larger satellite church facility down in Mission Viejo, but that was nowhere near where she was. And that particular facility didn’t have anything in the way of available contact information other than a phone number on the main church website.

  She damn sure didn’t want to place a phone call to them. That would put her at too much risk of discovery.

  What she wanted was a way to e-mail the church, to find someone in administration to talk with anonymously until she could verify her suspicions were correct in the first place. It looked like they were creating a dozen or so “Celebration Stations” around the country, as the church called them in their online descriptions. To Riley, on satellite pics they looked like nothing more than fortified compounds in which to ride out the growing waves of violence and the oncoming advance of Kite into the continental US.

  Whatever.

  She didn’t care what they were doing, or why, or what the hell they called them, as long as they were working toward a Kite vaccine, too. All she cared about was securing a lab for herself and bringing in her fellows, if possible.

  Then again, the church had a pretty vast TV network.

  Maybe that’s the answer.

  Maybe she needed to contact one of the church network’s “reporters” and try to get the information out that way. If she could spread the word about how Kite the virus and the drug came to be, and that there were people who had a shot at creating a vaccine for the virus, maybe she and the others on The List wouldn’t just disappear to never be heard from again.

  She didn’t dare respond to Quong and McInnis yet. Not until she could verify they’d actually been the ones who’d sent the message in the first place, and she wasn’t sure how to do that. If it was a fake, and the government was onto her being in the LA area, she didn’t dare reveal to them where she was.

  For the first time in her life, she was glad she was alone. No family to worry about, either because of Kite or because of governments using them to try to get to her. Ironically, she missed her little adopted family of people from The List. Despite their heinous purpose, they’d grown close as they banded together for survival and to attempt to derail the project without their handlers discovering their plans.

  She didn’t miss what they’d all done in terms of creating Kite the virus, but that was why it was vital they reunite and fix this. They’d been so close to a reliable vaccine and mutating Kite to a nonlethal form, but with Kite now randomly mutating in the wild, they’d need to study all available samples to find the common connection.

  She knew they could do this.

  They didn’t have a choice.

  Now it was a matter of figuring out how to touch base with the church.

  Maybe I should learn a little about praying.

  She searched the church’s main website and finally hit upon looking on their discussion forum for parishioners. That allowed her to track down one Jerald Arbeid, a forum moderator. When she ran a search on his name, she discovered he was the assistant to one Reverend Hannibal Silo, head of the Church of the Rising Sunset.

  Bingo.

  She hoped he kept his e-mail info up to date on the forum. Pulling up an anonymous e-mail account, she fired off a quick message to him, choosing to use a direct and ballsy approach.

  I know what secrets you were hiding here at your Los Angeles facility. At least, I suspect what you were doing based on what I’ve dug up. You’re looking for a Kite vaccine.

  I can help you, but I need a favour in return. You put me in a lab with your virologists and promise to give me the church’s protection, and I’ll help you. And I might be able to get hold of some of my colleagues from The List as well.

  But we need a guaranteed safe harbour in return. We were used by the North Korean government, forced to create Kite. And we need to make sure the whole story gets out there to the world so people don’t think we were willingly doing what we did. In our defence, we tried to stop them, but we were interrupted. You promise to tell our story over your network, we’ll help you develop the vaccine.

  If you require proof, I can tell you exactly how and where Dr. Phe Quong got himself and his family out of South Korea, and where they went. You can verify it through customs records. Respond ASAP.

  She didn’t sign her name. Either he would reply, or write her off as a crackpot. She felt badly about offering to give up Quong’s last known location, but if Quong really was in Los Angeles now, hopefully he’d moved his family from Australia, too.

  Before she could get her computer shut down, she noticed an alert that she’d received an e-mail in an account she never used anymore.

  Curious, she took a peek.

  The headers were a jumbled mess she suspected she wouldn’t be able to trace. The subject simply read Greetings.

  Dr. Perkins, I’m a friend of Doctors Q and Mac. They are in the area and said to remind you about the mac and cheese. You can reply to this e-mail address. It is secure.

  Bubba.

  She stared at the message before finally gathering her wits and shutting down the computer. Now nervous, her heart raced as she looked around and shoved the laptop into her backpack. She shouldered it, hurrying away from the library in the opposite direction of the rooming house where she was staying. She didn’t want to risk anyone following her back there.

  The mac and cheese comment was something only someone on the team would know. A joke she’d made early on when they were complaining to each other about the lousy food in Pyongyang.

  She’d said she would have killed for mac and cheese.

  The normally serious and stern Quong had uncharacteristically made a joke the next time Riley walked into the lab with McInnis. “There are Mac and Cheese now.”

  It had become a silly tension-breaker they’d used the rest of their forced tenure together.

  So either they really had sent the message on the serv
er, or someone had forced that little tidbit out of them, or out of one of the others, to lull her into a false sense of security.

  Either way, she wouldn’t make a decision right that minute. Right now, she needed to plan where she’d go from here.

  Chapter Five

  Jerald had struggled not to run all the way to Reverend Silo’s office. He had to wait until the reverend had finished his meeting with a Congressman from Georgia, who was there to deliver his monthly payment.

  Silo had incriminating videos of the married father-of-three church deacon picking up a transvestite prostitute on five different occasions in Atlanta. The same prostitute. Someone who, each time, had filmed the session for Silo.

  The Congressman was also on a few important committees.

  Needless to say, he was also firmly in Silo’s pocket.

  When the Congressman left, Jerald entered, closing the door behind him. He almost didn’t catch the thick envelope of cash that Silo tossed to him.

  Silo frowned. “What’s got you so riled up?” A grin blossomed across his features. “Did our volunteers and their special payloads finally show up?”

  “No, sir. Even better.” He didn’t bother with euphemisms. He detailed his e-mail exchange with someone he suspected might be either Dr. Riley Perkins or Dr. Peter McInnis, based on the language and structure of the e-mail. “They were the only two native English speakers on the list. My gut instincts are it’s Dr. Perkins.”

  Since starting this venture, Jerald had practically memorized every single person on The List, their vitals, their history, their education, their entire lives, any writings or personal correspondence he could get his hands on. If it was out there to be known about them, he knew it.