been helping the government mass-produce and disseminate it as quickly and widely as possible. Given the strained state of the country—and the world—the progress we’ve made has been remarkable, even for a cynic like yours truly.
But I hear the president’s concern loud and clear. A quarter of the country has yet to be inoculated.
That’s eighty million new potential feral humans. A staggering thought.
Clearly we have our work cut out for us.
The meeting of the newly re-formed and renamed Animal & Human Crisis Task Force ends, and Chloe and I start to leave. We find ourselves exiting alongside Freitas, who’s pushing himself along in his wheelchair. The plane crash left his face badly scarred, and he’s still too weak to walk—but he’s alive, miraculously.
“Chloe, Oz, I meant to ask you both,” he says. “How are you finding the accommodations?”
“This isn’t the first time we’ve lived in seclusion with the leader of the free world,” I say. Just a few weeks ago, the White House was evacuated for the second time in eight months. The threat of feral human attacks was just too great. “It ain’t the Ritz,” I continue. “But living underground sure beats living in the Arctic.”
Chloe and I walk down one of the mountain compound’s long, dim central hallways toward the daycare center. Eli now spends most of his waking hours there, learning and playing with kids his own age—instead of being alone with his frazzled parents or running away from animal attacks or witnessing his mother turn feral. We’ve only been at Raven Rock a few weeks, but already the kid is thriving. Which warms my heart. And gives me hope.
But as we near the daycare center, I can tell that there’s something on Chloe’s mind. I stop walking and take her hand. I stare deep into her gorgeous eyes.
“What is it, Chloe?” I ask tenderly.
She avoids my gaze and gently runs a finger along one of the deep scars on the side of my neck—a mark from when, just a few months ago inside that Jeep in Vegas, she tried to kill me. She’s still upset about the whole episode, even though I’ve tried to convince her it wasn’t her fault. And that I still love her more than anything.
“I don’t know,” she answers softly. “I am just…afraid. HPR is under control. All three of us are together again. We’re living in the safest place on Earth. And yet…I don’t know how to describe it. It’s just a feeling. An uneasy one.”
I pull my sweet, beautiful wife into a warm embrace. “I know,” I say. “I’m afraid, too. But there’s nothing to be…”
I stop talking—because I hear something.
A faint, distant scratching sound. Almost a burrowing. But it’s not coming from one particular spot. It’s emanating, almost echoing, all around us.
Chloe and I share a look. We both hear it. We’re both concerned.
And then, we’re both shocked—as a swarm of cockroaches emerges from the cinder-block walls all around us, pushing through every nook and cranny, thousands of them, black and shiny, squirming and wiggling…
And coming right at us.
The Pretender
James Patterson
With Andrew Bourelle
Prologue
I speed through the desert along a dirt road, my Jeep leaving a cloud of dust in its wake. The setting sun gives the desert landscape a reddish hue. The only thing visible in any direction, besides sagebrush and cacti, is a run-down shack up ahead. Marco’s car is already parked outside.
I have the feeling I’m walking into a trap.
On my passenger seat sits a black satin sack about the size of a sandwich bag, containing a few million dollars’ worth of diamonds. Other than that, I have only a gas station cup half full of soda. I have no gun. No knife. I bet Marco has one or the other.
Or both.
I’d been telling Marco for weeks that I was going to quit after this heist—what we’d called “the job to end all jobs”—and Marco had not been happy about it. He’d even joked that he wasn’t going to let me leave. I didn’t think much of it, but then Marco insisted that we rendezvous here, in the middle of nowhere. We had always met in public places before.
I stop the Jeep about a hundred yards from the shack and let it sit, idling in neutral. I take a drink from my soda. I think about shifting the Jeep into gear and taking off. Then I get an idea.
I wedge the Styrofoam cup between my legs and pull off the lid. I pick up the satin bag