Eden Rising

1

A light crunch of gravel.

Footsteps, slow and steady, as if uncertain they should be there.

No surprise in their arrival, though. Matt Hamilton had been expecting to hear them since the moment he’d sneaked out of the Bunker and hiked to the ridge overlooking the Lodge. Time alone was not something he experienced much anymore.

He folded the piece of paper he was holding and slipped it into his jacket pocket.

“Matt?” Chloe’s voice.

Again, not a surprise.

He waited until she was only a few feet behind him, and said, “It was always too big.”

In the open meadow below was a pile of burnt rubble that had once been the Lodge. The massive building had not only been the Resistance’s headquarters but also home to most of its members.

His home.

“I don’t know,” Chloe said, stopping next to him. “Seemed the right size to me. I liked that I could always find someplace to hide.”

“It was good for that, wasn’t it?”

Together they stared silently at the wreckage for a few seconds before Chloe turned to him. “I thought you’d like to know the others will be leaving soon.”

“Is it time already?”

She nodded.

When Project Eden had attacked the Ranch on Implementation Day, less than a week earlier, the members of the Resistance had retreated into the Bunker deep below the Lodge, where they had ridden out the fight, and where they’d continued to live in the days since. But Matt knew the threat of another strike grew exponentially each additional day they remained there, and the next time they might not be as lucky. When he saw the weather projections showing a series of storms heading their way in the coming week, storms that would likely fill their valley with snow and trap them there for months, he knew he had no other choice but to order the evacuation to Ward Mountain, their base in Nevada. It wasn’t as sophisticated as the Bunker, but it would be safer.

He hoped, at least.

Leaving the Ranch, though, was a complicated process. They may have lost the battle of keeping the Sage Flu outbreak from ever happening, but they were still in the fight to keep alive those who had survived. To that end, there could be no break in communications with those involved in the worldwide rescue operation the Resistance had initiated. If there were, it very likely would mean the additional deaths of survivors and the Resistance’s field team members trying to help them.

An additional day was lost while trailers on the back of three semi trucks were converted into mobile communication hubs that could be manned throughout the trip. While this was going on, the other vehicles were packed with all the supplies and weapons they could carry.

But continuous communications wasn’t the only problem with leaving.

There was Captain Ash, too.

The captain had been severely injured in an explosion during the early part of the outbreak. And while Dr. Gardiner was encouraged by Ash’s recovery, he insisted the captain should not travel for at least several more days. It had finally been decided that a small group would stay behind until Dr. Gardiner gave his okay, or, more likely, until the weather forced their hand. Chloe had volunteered, of course, and Brandon and Josie — the captain’s children — refused to go anywhere without their father, so they had stayed, too. Matt had assigned an additional dozen trained men and women to act as escorts in case this second group ran into any problems.

He had always planned on staying with them, something his sister Rachel was not happy about. He kind of felt it was like being the captain of a ship, and thought it only proper to be the last one to leave. But when he received the message that was now tucked in his pocket, his reason for staying changed completely.

“Are you coming?” Chloe asked.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he said. “I promise.”

“All right,” Chloe said. “I’m going to go see if they need any more help.”

Once the sound of her steps faded into the woods, he double-checked to make sure she was really gone, and then retrieved the piece of paper from his pocket.

At the top was the message as it had originally been received — a string of letters and numbers and symbols that were unreadable unless you had the key to the code, which Matt did. Below this, scrawled in his own handwriting, was the translation. The only thing consistent between the coded and decoded message was the first line:

It was indeed an opportunity. One that could mean everything.

Matt had already sent a reply.

I will come to you.