Rampage Read online

  ALSO BY JOHN SANDFORD

  LUCAS DAVENPORT NOVELS

  Rules of Prey

  Shadow Prey

  Eyes of Prey

  Silent Prey

  Winter Prey

  Night Prey

  Mind Prey

  Sudden Prey

  Secret Prey

  Certain Prey

  Easy Prey

  Chosen Prey

  Mortal Prey

  Naked Prey

  Hidden Prey

  Broken Prey

  Invisible Prey

  Phantom Prey

  Wicked Prey

  Storm Prey

  Buried Prey

  Stolen Prey

  Silken Prey

  Field of Prey

  Gathering Prey

  VIRGIL FLOWERS NOVELS

  Dark of the Moon

  Heat Lightning

  Rough Country

  Bad Blood

  Shock Wave

  Mad River

  Storm Front

  Deadline

  KIDD NOVELS

  The Fool’s Run

  The Empress File

  The Devil’s Code

  The Hanged Man’s Song

  OTHER NOVELS

  The Night Crew

  Dead Watch

  Saturn Run

  BY JOHN SANDFORD & MICHELE COOK

  THE SINGULAR MENACE

  Uncaged

  Outrage

  Rampage

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 by John Sandford and Michele Cook

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Excerpt from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from the book The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1923, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1951 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouseteens.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9780385753135 (trade) — ebook ISBN 9780385753166

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Other Titles

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Trapped . . .

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  About the Authors

  No way out.

  The smell of oil and rust and wet rot was all the sharper for the total darkness. They were trapped in the bow of the ship, heavily armed hunters above them on deck. Shay’s pistol was cocked and cold in her right hand, and she held X’s collar in her left.

  Someone not far away was moving back toward the stern. The wolflike dog twitched against her grip, ready to fight.

  Harmon, the ex-soldier, invisible in the dark, touched Shay’s sleeve and whispered, “We need to go up. Get between the support beams and the deck.”

  “What about X?”

  “He’s gotta climb with us….”

  Combat boots rang on the metal stairs, and then a voice, unintelligible, and the faint glow of a flashlight, still a hundred feet away, behind a stack of shipping containers. The rumble of the engines was muted this far forward, but the vibration caused the old freighter to creak and moan. Shay and Harmon were wearing soft running shoes, and the freighter’s metallic complaints would cover the sounds of their movement.

  A man’s baritone voice, hard with a hunter’s intensity: “Hey—there’s one! Rick, he’s heading aft, he’s heading aft. Get him! Get him!”

  Shay and Harmon had released a group of prisoners—human experimental subjects—from the ship’s holds. Now the security men were chasing them down.

  The echoing voices seemed to move away…but there was another soft, unnatural rattle from nearby.

  “Still there,” Harmon whispered. “Too big for a rat.”

  Shay: “Look at X. He can see them.”

  The dog was straining into the darkness, his one cybernetic eye glittering like a firefly.

  Harmon: “Don’t shoot unless you have to—I’m gonna hit them with the light.”

  Harmon had an LED flashlight, small but powerful. Two seconds after he’d warned her, the light beam lanced into the dark…and found a pack of zombies: four of the recently freed human experiments.

  —

  The Asian men, round faces slack beneath shaved heads, blinked into the light, BB-sized bronze knobs on their scalps, which were striped with red surgical scars. They were dressed in loose green cotton shirts and pants, like hospital scrubs, and plastic slippers.

  The three in back retreated, each holding on to the waistband of the man in front of him, shuffling backward into the darkness again. They made hoarse, growling sounds as they went, “Owwwww…owwww…awwww…”

  Shay blurted, “Oh my God…”

  The fourth put up his hands in the universal sign of surrender and asked in fragmented English, “You are help us?”

  At Shay’s nod, the man turned and called softly to the others in another language.

  “Korean,” Harmon said. “I don’t understand it, but I know the sound.”

  Shay thought the man might have been calling the others back, but the three faded into the dark.

  Another man’s voice, far away: “Check the bow. Harvey, Stan, check the bow. There must be some of them up there….”

  —

  “We gotta go now,” Harmon said. He shined the flashlight up at the underside of the deck. The interior of the hull, as it came to the bow, was braced with rusty steel crosspieces spaced a foot or so apart, like shelves in a bookcase. The crosspieces were a foot deep, and the hull rose at an angle, rather than straight up. Almost a stairway.

  “Gotta go,” he repeated.

  The fourth zombie stood staring at them, gold pins winking from his scalp. Shay said, “You have to hide. You understand me?”

  “I go with you.”

  “Can you climb?”

  “I go….”

  —

  Harmon and Shay were both climbers, and scaling the rusty crosspieces would not normally have been a ch
allenge for them. But with a dog and a zombie and guns in their hands…

  Harmon said to Shay, “Lead the way. Get X up there. I’ll help this guy.”

  “Come on, boy,” said Shay, and the dog went with his girl as he always did, up toward the underside of the deck in the faint, hand-cupped illumination of Harmon’s flash. X was moving at Shay’s hip until a front paw missed the fifth brace and his body pitched forward into the gap. Shay caught him around the belly and pulled him back with a snapping motion like a cobra’s. The dog gasped but regained his footing.

  The Asian man, an awkward climber, came next, steadied by an occasional touch from Harmon. As they came up under the deck, Shay felt a draft of cooler air that stank of the muddy river. She leaned into Harmon and whispered, “Feel the air? Where’s it coming from?”

  “Dunno…but let’s go that way.”

  They edged along the supports and, ten feet back toward the stern, found a service ladder and a hatch. The hatch was not entirely tight: the rubber seals had either ripped or worn away, allowing a thin stream of night air into the hull. A wheel hung from the center of the hatch. Harmon let a bit more light seep through his fingers and muttered, “Looks like it hasn’t been opened for a while. Take the flash. Don’t drop it.”

  He turned the light off and handed it to Shay, who cupped her fingers over the lens and turned it back on.

  Harmon was a large man, and strong. He stood on the ladder, got a grip on the wheel, and tried to turn it. It moved a half inch, then stopped with a nearly inaudible clank. “Get the light closer….”

  A latch that fit into the wheel mechanism was preventing the wheel from turning. Harmon tried to pull the latch free, failed, then began hitting it with the heel of his hand. After a few blows, it began to move, and he managed to push it the rest of the way over. With the latch open, the wheel turned reluctantly but steadily, and a minute later, Harmon pushed the hatch up enough to peek out at the deck.

  “We’re right where we came aboard,” he said. “And…we’re moving backward.”

  “What?”

  “Shhh!”

  Down below, more footsteps, and this time, a brilliant beam probed the interior of the hull, where the prisoners had just been. Then a man’s gruff voice: “We’re clear here.”

  The footsteps started away, then another man shouted: “There! There they are! Stan, go left, three of them going left!”

  The Asian man whispered, “They catch my friends.”

  —

  X’s throat vibrated—it would have been a growl, but Shay had her arm around his chest and squeezed. The dog understood the warning and went silent. The footsteps and the light from the flash began to move away.

  “Now what?” Shay whispered.

  “We’ve got a way out now—we could be over the side in two seconds,” Harmon said. “Maybe we hang here, see where they’re going.”

  “What if they turn around and go out to the ocean…like, all the way to North Korea?”

  “Probably want to get off before then,” Harmon said.

  “Funny,” she said.

  —

  Shay Remby was a slender sixteen-year-old, a rock climber with serious muscles in her shoulders and arms, currently with brutally cropped black hair. A few weeks earlier, her hair had been long and a striking fiery red—but a few weeks earlier, she’d never fired a gun, never handled a firebomb, never left a man standing on a toilet with a noose around his neck…and only a few days earlier, she’d been a sworn enemy of the man who now stood with her in the dark rusting freighter.

  The trouble had begun when she ran up against the Singular Corporation of San Francisco. Singular was experimenting on human beings—on human brains. If the company succeeded in its research efforts, the consciousness of one person could be transferred into the living brain of another. If the transfer was made from an old body to a young one, life could be prolonged almost indefinitely. There was no limit to the number of bodies that could be used. The minds of the donor bodies would be wiped in the process—a deadly science in which one life was sacrificed for another. Nobody expected there to be volunteer donors.

  The cost of the program was astronomical. The beneficiaries were necessarily the richest and most powerful people in the world. And the program was necessarily top-secret.

  That is, until Shay’s brother, Odin, without really knowing what he was getting into, stole information from a lab that revealed the existence of the Singular research program. Singular was frantic to eliminate the leak. Shay and her friends were doing anything, everything, to turn the leak into a flood and expose Singular’s crimes—preferably before Singular eliminated them….

  —

  The Asian man clung to the crosspieces, a foot below Shay and X, and asked in his rough English, “You are who take Fenfang?”

  Shay, surprised, nodded, then realized he couldn’t see her. “Fenfang, yes! How do you know her?”

  “I was at prison when you take her….I see you then. Your hair is not same. Is Fenfang okay now?”

  Shay said, “We can talk when we get out of here….”

  She didn’t want to tell him there had been a firefight a half hour earlier, off the boat, and Fenfang had been shot. Shay didn’t hold out much hope.

  They could hear boots on the deck overhead coming closer to the hatch, then passing by and receding.

  After a moment, Harmon whispered, “Security check.”

  The Asian man asked, “Are we in the ocean?”

  “No. We’re going inland,” Harmon said. “We have to get off the boat and bring the cops down on them before they get rid of those prisoners.”

  “Let me get up on the deck,” Shay said. “Check the possibilities.”

  Harmon pushed the hatch lid up, and Shay climbed past him onto the deck. The cloudy night sky was a smooth, creamy color to the west, over San Francisco, but here, straight up, there was nothing but deep, starless darkness. Ahead of the ship, she could see the lights of a bridge high over the water and could hear the righteous thump of a decent rock band.

  Shay took a fast look around, listened, then stepped to the edge of a bank of steel shipping containers and peeked around. A hundred yards ahead, on the near shore, bright lights had been strung over a concrete pier that jutted out over the water. Thirty or forty people were dancing on the pier, and more moved back and forth between a bar and the dance floor. Another bunch of people sat on folding chairs, watching the dancers, chatting.

  She moved back to the hatch and dropped down the ladder.

  “I know how we can get the cops on the boat. Lots of cops. In ten minutes.”

  —

  A moment later, Shay cracked the hatch again and stood on the ladder with her head poking out. Harmon muttered, “If you hear anyone, pull back.”

  Shay got on the phone. Twist answered on the first ring: “Where are you?”

  “We’re still on the ship. We’re going inland, away from San Francisco. Where are you?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “How’s our friend?” She was staying away from names, in case they were being monitored.

  “She didn’t make it.”

  “Oh no…Oh God.” Shay turned to look down at Harmon. “Fenfang…” She shook her head.

  “Ah, Jesus.”

  From below, the Asian man asked, “What is trouble?”

  At the same time, Twist said, “Tell me where you are.”

  “We can’t have gone far.” She looked up the river and said, “We’re going to create an emergency.”

  Twist heard her out and said, “That plan has so many problems I can’t even begin to list them all. But…it could work.”

  “Look for us after the fireworks,” Shay said, and closed the hatch.

  The ship was a dark shadow moving up the river, traveling slowly but steadily away from the scene of Fenfang’s murder.

  Shay’s group was tracking it: her older brother, Odin, a computer hacker who’d precipitated the fight with Singular; Tw
ist, the rich, thirtyish artist who ran a hotel for street kids and runaways and had helped Shay escape a pair of pimps on her second night in Hollywood; Cruz Perez, one of the teens at Twist’s hotel; and Danny Dill, a former hotel resident and now a marijuana grower from California’s north coast. Cade Holt, another teen living at the Twist Hotel, guided them through the night from a hideout in Northern California. Still aching from a beating delivered by Singular security people, he was talking to them through throwaway cell phones as he looked at satellite photos on Google Earth.

  Twist was driving the Jeep, Odin in the passenger seat beside him, when Shay called in her plan. He had begun to point out all the crazy flaws when Shay hung up. Cursing, Twist filled in Cade, who relayed the news to Cruz, who was following in a Toyota truck, and Danny Dill, trailing him in a Volvo. Cade said, “If it’s an old freighter, it can’t be moving fast. It’s only been gone a few minutes. One or two miles an hour…it won’t be to the Antioch Bridge yet.”

  “What’s the Antioch Bridge?” Twist asked.

  “It’s a bridge across the channel—they’ll be heading right toward it,” Cade said. “Let me look it up….Ah, Wiki says it’s got a hundred and thirty-five feet of clearance, so they’ll be able to go under it. That looks like the best place for the pickup, if they really pull this off. A road goes right down to the river.”

  “Get us there,” Twist said.

  Cade guided them back through town. The tight convoy moved at the speed limit: they couldn’t afford to be stopped by the police. For one thing, the backseat of the Jeep was still wet with Fenfang’s blood. They’d rushed her to the hospital…too late.