Flood Rising (Jenna Flood #1)

Noah?

The thought stung. Just when she had been ready to believe his declaration of love, his promise to help, the jaws of the trap had snapped shut. Looking to Noah for help was worse than letting the shooters run them down.

“We have to go where they won’t think to look for us,” she told Mercy. “Follow me.”

Staying low, she skirted the parking area toward the corner of the transmitter building. After verifying that the coast was clear, she darted into the lee shadow of the structure. From this new vantage, she saw the bundled cables overhead, snaking from the nearest tower to the suspended antenna assembly far out over the dish.

She considered climbing onto the cable and making her way out to the array. It was definitely the last place anyone would think to look, but it was also a dead end. Even if they could make the precarious journey unnoticed, they would be trapped four hundred feet above the ground.

But the dish was another story. From the control room, it had looked like an enormous empty swimming pool excavated from the surrounding landscape, but Soter had revealed that it was actually made up of aluminum panels, built above the ground. The edge of the dish was only a hundred yards away. If they could make it under the reflector panels, they’d have far more options.

She told Mercy her plan, leaving no room for argument. There was none. Mercy just nodded, looking a little shell-shocked. When Jenna started forward, creeping along the perimeter of the building, Mercy stayed right behind her. They stopped again at the next corner. The dish was visible below, a massive spherical bowl. A narrow tree-lined road ran down to its edge. The slope and slick pavement would make keeping their footing a little tricky, but Jenna estimated that a sprint of no more than thirty seconds would bring them to their goal. She checked the surrounding area for any sign of hostile forces, and then gripped Mercy’s hand again.

“Ready?”

“Not really,” Mercy admitted. “But let’s do this.”

Jenna nodded, and then because she could not think of a better way to coordinate their mad dash, gave the classic track and field prompt: “Ready, set, go!”

As they ran, Jenna expected to hear gunshots or feel the impact of a bullet, but what happened was much worse. Two-thirds of the way to her goal a shout reached her, an all too familiar voice, rolling down the slope, echoing from the surrounding limestone formations.

Noah’s voice.

“Jenna!”





51



10:42 a.m.



She looked back, even though she knew it was a mistake to do so, and she stumbled.

The fall seemed to take forever, yet no matter how she flailed her arms, she could not recover her balance. Instead, she pitched and twisted, past the horizontal plane, and went skidding face first on the wet asphalt. The abrasive surface tore at her skin and clothes like sandpaper. There was no immediate pain, just a jolt of impact that knocked the wind from her sails.

Mercy skidded to a stop beside her, one hand extended, but before Jenna could take it, something struck the pavement near her outflung arm, showering her with hot grit. She didn’t need to hear the report to know that someone was shooting at them.

Noah’s voice came again, shouting, but the words were incomprehensible. Seething with anger—at Noah for yet another betrayal, at herself for having been foolish enough to react—all she could hear was the roar of blood in her ears. In that instant, the weight of all that she had endured—the exhausting flight from the killers, the ordeal in the Everglades, too many gut-wrenching revelations to count—descended upon her like an extinction-level-sized asteroid. She had learned unimaginable truths about herself, been put through the wringer, and it was all for nothing. She was going to die.

No! No, I’m not! Her defiance felt hollow.

“Just run!” she shouted, ignoring Mercy’s offer of assistance. “Go!”

Jenna rolled toward the edge of the path and sprang to her feet. She took off, a millisecond ahead of a shower of bullets that tore into the hillside behind her.

Twenty more yards.

Ten.

The reflector was ringed by a protective barrier that looked like a partially tipped over chain-link fence. It loomed overhead, but the road continued into the space beneath the aluminum panels, past another caution sign, this one a red and black diamond with the words “Warning Radio Frequency Radiation Hazard.” Probably don’t have to worry about that anymore, she thought. The road turned across the face of the concave slope, spiraling around it toward the center, more than five hundred feet away.

Made it.

“We made it!” As she plunged beneath the suspended dish, she glanced back to make sure Mercy was still with her.

Mercy was not with her. Mercy was nowhere to be seen.

No!