Day 14—Chronos Corporation Headquarters, Stromville, West Virginia
“My team found something, ma’am.”
Irritated at the interruption, Katherine Henley Harper lifted her head from perusing the day’s paper, blinking. Another school killing, which only confirmed what she knew to be true—the world needed cleansing. Not a bomb, because Mother Earth didn’t deserve that. More like antibodies attacking a disease. A good, clean surgical intervention.
And like any good surgeon, she’d identified the problem. Or problems. A segment of the population needed eradication. It was as simple as that.
Pull the weeds and a garden would flourish. Leave them to grow and the precious plants would be choked out. The plants needed water—which was exactly how she planned to deliver her blow. Over the past few years, Chronos had formed partnerships with water companies throughout the nation, becoming an essential part of the country’s very infrastructure. Water treatment and purification.
Population purification.
Exactlylike pulling weeds. Those given the vaccine would flourish, and the others would simply…wilt away to nothing. Good would prevail. The earth would prevail.
Her eyes closed as she pictured her father’s garden, where she’d spent her most formative years. Every flower had its place, with—
“Ma’am.”
She blinked a few times before narrowing her eyes at the middle-aged woman standing in her door. Bonnie? No. Brenda. Brenda Lassiter. A good find. Not groveling like that Tenny shithead or frightening like the military men the senator sent her way. Women, she found, were generally better employees than men. Smarter, less ego, more willing to work together. Unfortunately, they often had a strong, though skewed, sense of right and wrong. Which was why she was forced to work with people like Tenny. Men whose moral compass had broken somewhere along the way.
She eyed Brenda. Though short and a little fat at the hips, the woman had a steel core. Unflinching.
“Yes?”
“We located them.”
Katherine racked her sluggish brain. “Them?” She hated how wobbly her voice had gotten with old age. Weak.
“I had my people do a grid search of the area between Burke-Ruhe and Volkov—and there’s someone out there.”
The fog she spent most of her time in cleared and everything came back—those fools losing the precious virus samples and heading back to the station, where they’d found nothing. Days—no, weeks—of searching had produced nothing.
She would have to let the entire security team go once this was over. They’d failed on all levels. Spectacularly. And then there was Clive Tenny to contend with—a holdout from her father’s era. He’d stuck with the company, but goodness, the man was irritating.
“Could they be ours?”
“I confirmed that ours returned to the Harper Research Facility. I believe the people we have located are on foot.”
Her eyes widened in surprise. “On foot!”
She put a hand on the arm of the settee and pushed, keeping her face blank, though the pain was excruciating. Worse every day. Which made this delay even more of an aggravation. She had to be here to see everything come to fruition. She turned to the photo on her desk—her two smiling babies, whose lives had been snuffed out so quickly, so unfairly.
For them.She would see this through for them.
“Show me.” Despite the pain, she was proud to note her breathing was even. If it weren’t for the cane, there’d be no outward sign of her own physical frailness.
Slowly, with the help of the damned stick, she followed Brenda out the door, down the short, bright hall, past what she thought of as the Widow’s Window, overlooking the formal front garden, with its fountains and centuries-old boxwood allée, and through what appeared to be a simple paneled wooden door. Only it wasn’t, of course.
Katherine watched Brenda enter her personal code, swipe, and press her hand to the scanner before swinging open the heavy steel panel to reveal the New Wing. A misnomer if ever she’d heard one. There was nothing winglike about this great glass, metal, and concrete structure, dug deep into the mountain and rising to soar above it. If anything, the original house was the anomaly now. A wart more than a wing, regrettably, but the company’s stature had required an update.
And there were certain things Katherine wouldn’t—or couldn’t—do, since she’d lost her babies. Such as leave her home to go to the office. Therefore, the office had come to her. Naturally.
After her home’s warm woods, glowing lamps, and antique florals, the New Wing’s bright modern glass and hard stone sheen put a slight hitch in her gait. She pushed through it, of course, lest her employee think she was anything but the strong, steadfast leader she’d always been.
They made their way down the hall, Brenda slowing to match Katherine’s pace, which annoyed her to no end. They stopped at the elevator, again delivering handprints, retinal scans, and pass codes—necessary modern annoyances in this line of work—and descended to Floor -4, where this type of operation was handled.
In the bowels of her company’s building, they entered to find the logistics team hard at work. Silent, staring, concentrated, most of them with those tiny plastic listening devices stuffed into their ears, there was nothing but the clicking of keys to prove that they were, in fact, in the realm of the living. Modern zombies.
He’dworn one of those ridiculous contraptions, the murderer who’d taken the lives of her grandchildren. His bullets had torn through their perfect little bodies, along with those of other children, their teachers, some parents—including her own daughter—all while piping music directly into his ears.
