The R.E.M. Project: A Thriller (The Ocula Series, Book 2) Read online

  “We do, reverend!”

  “Don’t you want your cup to runneth over?”

  “Bless us, reverend!”

  “Are you ready to sow your way into God’s favor?”

  “We are!”

  “Hallelujah!” the pastor yelled with a confirmatory jump and a clap; a motion reserved solely for collection time. Perch’s assistant recognized the signal. He hit the music again, then walked to the front and stood next to Perch, a purple felt bag held tightly in his hands.

  The congregation rose to their feet. Men rustled deep in their pockets, pulling out handfuls of neatly folded cash. Purse latches clicked open in concert as women searched for their checkbooks. Parents handed their children money, then ushered them up front to make a donation. Everyone was ready to tithe, save one: the sour man in the overalls. He stood and watched the spectacle, shook his head, then spit a shot of tobacco juice on the floor. Only a few folks nearby noticed, but didn’t dare call him out. The man was rough, grizzled, and for a moment it looked like he might have had something to say, but he opted to stay quiet. Instead (and to the great relief of many), he turned to walk out the door.

  The rest of the congregation formed a line to the front. One by one, hands dropped cash and checks into the purple felt bag. Perch kept a close eye on every donation, counting the increase while playing the part of a man who didn’t care how much or how little each person tithed. He graciously nodded to each person who passed, pairing the gesture with a soft-spoken “Bless you, child.” Then it was back to counting.

  The reverend’s excitement grew in harmony with the swelling purple felt bag. There’s Evelyn’s $200, and Catherine’s $250 makes $3,700. Perch checked the line. The bag was almost full, with two-thirds of the congregation still waiting to hand over money. Jesus Christ, he thought. This’ll be the best week yet.

  Soon, Robert Dixon walked up, family in tow. The money folds in their hands were bigger than the smiles on their faces. Even little Katie Dixon carried a wad of cash, dollar bills bursting from her tiny hands. The assistant knelt down to accommodate the young sower, and Katie dropped in the cash.

  Perch couldn’t contain his excitement any longer. He picked up Katie and twirled her around, planting a big kiss on the little girl’s forehead. The congregation whooped and cheered and cried tears of joy.

  “God bless the little children!” Perch hollered. God bless them, indeed.

  ***

  Jonas Perch sat on the edge of the bed and glanced over his shoulder at the empty space on the other side. It was nights like this he wished he had someone to talk to, someone to celebrate the prosperous service that had taken place earlier that day with.

  He had thought once about getting married, and for a while, the outlook was promising. Her name was Bethany, a blonde, twenty-five-year-old presenter working alongside Perch during the Power Hour of Prayer nightly broadcast. Perch led the majority of the service, preaching his version of the gospel well into the wee hours of the morning. Once he was finished, it was Bethany’s job to follow up with a call to action, urging viewers to give their way out of debt before reciting the telephone number enough times to drive a parrot mad.

  A thirty-something preacher and a choir leader would have made a formidable power couple in the faith community. Unfortunately for Perch, fate intervened in the form of a scathing investigation followed by a fall from grace. When the coffers dried up, Bethany disappeared. It wasn’t long before Jonas followed her into the archives of long-forgotten memories.

  Still, things were looking up for Perch. He slipped on his house shoes and shuffled to the bathroom, following the narrow path of moonlight that shone through the windows. He flipped the bathroom light and walked to the sink, reminiscing on the earlier church service. He couldn’t help but laugh to himself; just four months earlier, he had been wondering how he was going to pay the light bill. Now he was depositing five figures a week into the bank account of an ironically-labeled nonprofit organization.

  Perch stared blankly into the mirror of the medicine cabinet above the sink and wondered where his good fortune had come from. For decades, he had been publicly humiliated; bouncing from one low-income job to another; forced to quit and move on to another gig as soon as someone recognized him from his scandalous past.

  That was before Jonas Perch bagged Robert Dixon’s groceries. The meeting was uncanny. Perch remembered how Robert pulled him to the side while the clerk rang everything up; whispered to Perch that the Lord wanted him to preach again; promised that if Perch would take a leap of faith and find a place to hold a service, that people would come.

  And come they did.

  Now, after thirty years in purgatory, the formerly disgraced pastor had risen from the ashes, amassing a flock of faithful parishioners who were more than willing to fork over every spare penny they could muster. With each passing Sunday, more people filled the folding metal chairs, more people singing Perch’s praises, and more people tithing.

  Every Sunday there were more.

  The pastor shook his head, laughing, and opened the medicine cabinet, telling himself it was no use worrying about why things were looking up, so long as they stayed that way. He reached for the top shelf and took down a bottle, reading the side.

  PERCH, JONAS

  OCULA 10 MG

  MFR: ASTERIA PHA.

  TAKE ONE BY MOUTH IMMEDIATELY BEFORE BEDTIME.

  QUANTITY: 30

  EXPIRES: 07/15/2022

  Perch shook out a pill. It was the last one left. Already time for a refill.

  Cool tap water sloshed in the glass as Perch carried the nightcap to his nightstand. He kicked off his house shoes and tucked himself in, then leaned over to take the pill, washing it down with a big swig.

  There was just enough time for a thought or two before the medicine kicked in. He closed his eyes and took pleasure in his growing bank account. If things continued along the current path, it wouldn’t be long before everything he had lost was returned in full. A big house. A fancy car. A beautiful woman to fill the empty space in the bed next to him.

  His eyes grew heavy as he marveled at his newfound freedom from that wicked sin of lack. The late 90s and early 2000s had been tough. He had spent the entire twenty-first century struggling to make ends meet. Now he was back. He drifted off to sleep, content with his second chance and eager to see what tomorrow would bring.

  It was 2021, and Jonas Perch lacked for nothing.

  Chapter 1:

  Pill Run

  The glass door hit the bell hanging above it, sending it swinging and ringing as a customer walked into the campground store. The hipster-on-staff emerged from the back to see a grizzled-looking twenty-something making a beeline to the medicine aisle, thumbing through the hanging packets before walking empty-handed toward the coolers. The man didn’t speak, but the clerk would have recognized his trademark plaid shirt and worn denim jeans anywhere.

  “Ronny, my man. How ya doing today?”

  “Good,” he mumbled from the back. He grabbed a Coke out of the cooler and brought it to the front, setting it on the counter with a grimace and a thud.

  “You’re not looking too good, Ronny,” the clerk said. “No offense.”

  “None taken. Hey, you wouldn’t have any ibuprofen behind the counter, would you?” The man nodded toward the medicine aisle. “Looks like you’re out back there.”

  The clerk bent down and fumbled in some boxes under the counter, but came up short.

  “Sorry, Ronny. Nothing here, either. Everything all right?”

  “Just a headache is all.”

  “Ah, man. That sucks.”

  “Eh, it happens.”

  “Everything else going well over on eleven?” The clerk asked as he rang up the Coke.

  “Yessir. Campsite’s just fine. Could use a little AC, but other than that it’s just fine.”

  The clerk laughed. “Yeah, I hear you. Well, look at it this way, it’ll be fall before you know it.” He tilted his head, t
hen asked, “Think you’ll be sticking around much longer?”

  The man shrugged. “Who knows. Kind of playing it by ear.”

  “Well, I know you don’t like paying more than a week out, but you’d sure save a lot of money by renting a site by the month.”

  “I appreciate that. I really do. But like I said before, I’d prefer to just pay a week at a time.”

  The clerk pressed his lips and nodded. “All right, man. You’re the boss. Just trying to save you a little bit of money, is all.”

  The exchange was beginning to try the man’s patience. His head was throbbing and his right eye was dangerously close to swelling shut. Every sound was amplified. The cha-ching of the cash register. The hum of the beer coolers. The chatty hipster. He pretended the pain was little more than a nuisance, but even the slightest of sounds splintered the man’s mind, the migraine becoming more intolerable with each passing second. A sinister part of him wanted to tell off the know-it-all hipster for consistently nosing in on his business, but he knew better. This was the longest he had stayed in one place in a while, and he didn’t want to ruin it. He mustered a smile, told the clerk thanks, took his Coke, and left.

  ***

  The drive to the nearest drugstore should have taken fifteen minutes, but rubberneckers along the northern California two-lane slowed the pace down to half an hour. But there were worse places to be with a migraine, the man figured. He could have been sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in downtown Atlanta, where the only scenery consisted of towering pillars of concrete and glass, enough billboards to block out the sun, and a sea of taillights amongst a nerve-wracking symphony of honking horns and squealing brakes.

  Instead, he was following a pack of slow-moving tourists through the Six Rivers National Forest, where the only skyscrapers in sight were the endless scores of evergreens overshadowing the winding asphalt road. He was a few miles from redwood country, but the scenery was still remarkable. Short stretches led through dark tunnels of Douglas firs, blocking the sun from both sides of the road, the drooping limbs coming dangerously close to cars passing underneath.

  When the road did open up, there was always a notable landmark responsible for it. A Roosevelt-era bridge crossing a whitewater stream, an aging span of concrete boasting a precarious view of spring waters below on a southbound rush. A mountainside carved out and graded to make room for a road, scraggly pines clinging to what little soil they could find between a wall of crumbling gray boulders hanging on one side of the road. A rural outpost marked by a shoddy country store, with a few dated homes scattered across the distant hills.

  The drive was peaceful, almost otherworldly. A line of cars would dip into the safety of the thousand-year-old woods, going back to a time when the only footprints humans left were the ones beneath their feet. Then they would emerge again, back into a world of tourism and progress and human encroachment. The man appreciated the idea behind conservation, and was thankful big-city developers had spared this particular stretch of country so far, but he knew the backwoods had its drawbacks. He was, after all, in dire need of pain relief from the headache bearing down between his ears, and a store closer to his camp would have been a godsend.

  At least he would get his meds soon. After what seemed like an hours-long drive, relief was in sight. He watched ahead as every car in front of him hit its blinker to turn into the Hardscrabble Creek Scenic Area. That was the thing about tourists: they could never pass up a sightseeing opportunity, even if it was a featureless dried-up stream (an unfortunate reality of longer summer droughts).

  The last car turned and the driver floored it. Five minutes to the drugstore in Hiouchi, he thought. Can’t get there fast enough. He hugged the turns and feathered the pedals, sticking to the outer white line and blowing past the slow-crawling cars moving in the opposite direction.

  Soon he was out of the curves and on the last straightaway leading into Hiouchi. A mile-long stretch of clear highway lay before him. He pressed the pedal to the floor, reveling in the sounds of roaring tires, ascending RPMs, and the high-speed wind blasting the campground’s hitchhiking gravel dust off the windshield.

  The young man rarely got out these days, and for a split second, the impromptu joyride caused him to forget all about his headache. The momentary escape, however, was short-lived when another sound joined the speedway chorus: the whirling blare of police sirens.

  His eyes immediately cut up to a rearview mirror filled with flashes of blue and red. “You’ve got to be kidding me,” he mumbled. For a split second, he considered running. If he could somehow double back into the forest, he might be able to lose the officer in the curves. Then he could ditch the car and make a clean getaway.

  All hopes of escape were lost when the officer’s voice blared over the loudspeaker, ordering him to pull over. He hit the brakes, then his blinker, and pulled off on the shoulder.

  The man rolled down his window. In his rearview, he watched the cop walk up, quickly filling the space in the reflective square on the driver side. Soon the officer was looming overhead, his silhouette blocking out the sunlight.

  “License and registration, please,” the officer said.

  The driver nodded and reached for his wallet, pulling out his credentials and handing them over.

  The officer tilted the license away from the glare and read, “Freeman. Paul.” He looked at the driver, then again at the license. “So, Mr. Freeman, any idea why I pulled you over?”

  Paul knew. The officer walked back to his car to run his license, and Paul cursed under his breath. How could I have been so stupid? Speeding through a tourist town? He would have kicked himself if he weren’t sitting in the driver’s seat. He watched as the cop parked behind him, sat in his cruiser, and kept his head down. It was the focused look of an officer writing a traffic ticket.

  What a disaster. The traffic stop would mean the Freemans would be moving again. Aaron was oblivious to their new nomadic lifestyle, but Michelle had already declared the last move the last time she’d had to pick up in the middle of the night to flee one campground for another. He remembered the conversation distinctly: No more campgrounds. No more hiding. This is no way to raise a child. Sooner or later, Michelle had said, they had to return to the world.

  Unfortunately, settling back into society hadn’t been that simple. The destruction of Asteria’s secret research facility in Costa Rica had been the break of the century for the pharmaceutical company—and downright devastating for those who had sought to expose the company’s misdeeds. After counting on Claire Connor’s connections to Costa Rican aristocracy, the cooperation of Atlanta PD’s Dawa Graham, and the testimonies of a dozen former employees of the facility to bring down one of the largest drug companies in the world, it had all come down to evidence of wrongdoing. Unfortunately, a volcanic eruption large enough to capture the attention of the international press corps during spring sweeps left the outliers with little to go on. Tanner and Doyle’s jungle playground had ceased to exist, the truth behind their actions forever hidden under a thick blanket of volcanic ash.

  With no evidence, few witnesses, and a claim that would easily top a list of The Greatest Conspiracy Theories of All Time, Paul had decided to put his initial plan of disappearing into action. Of course, that had been easier said than done. Fake IDs. Social security numbers. Auto registration. Employment records. Starting anew in a manner akin to witness protection would have cost at least $30,000—and that was per person. No family discounts, no refunds, and completely out of the question.

  It also hadn’t helped that Paul had been the only breadwinner in the family since Michelle had taken her extended leave of absence to watch after Aaron, or that Paul’s income was tied to the very drug company that now wanted him either dead or strapped to an observation chair (which, according to his friend Claire, was worse than calling it lights out for good). Their savings account wasn’t bad for a couple of twenty-somethings, but without a steady income, it would go quickly. It was clear the escape pl
an would have to be on a shoestring budget.

  Thus, the westward migration had begun. Over the last six months, the Freemans had traveled from the East Coast to the Pacific Northwest, staying at whatever cheap motel or campground was willing to accept cash in advance without asking too many questions along the way. Going into hiding was never meant to be a permanent solution, but Paul hoped a few months off the grid would give him enough time to hunt down the other Ocula outliers while keeping his family safe in the process. Problem was, they were short on money, they didn’t have a single lead, and time was running out.

  This situation was dire, but at least the Freemans had their lives. Paul empathized with Michelle’s grievances, and he was tired of life on the run, too. But he also knew it would make a lot more sense to emerge from the shadows with a few aces up their sleeves, as opposed to waddling out of the woods like sitting ducks, ripe for an Asteria culling.

  A car door slammed shut, and Paul snapped out of his trance to see the officer returning to the driver’s side window. Soon he was greeted with a yellow citation and a stern warning. Hiouchi Police had little tolerance for that kind of driving, he was told. Don’t let it happen again. Then the officer left.

  Paul read the notice. $200 for 14 over. He rubbed his temples and cursed the bastard. Soon the officer pulled back onto the highway, waving as he rolled past the speeder parked on the shoulder. Paul returned the gesture and cussed him through his teeth while donning the fakest of smiles.

  He started once more to the drugstore, already going over the ways he could break the news to Michelle that they would be leaving again. Nothing sounded good, because nothing was good. Michelle was right: they couldn’t keep running forever.

  But for now, they had to. Asteria had powerful CIA connections that were undeniably monitoring any and everything connected to the Freemans. From the moment the officer ran Paul’s license, the clock had started ticking. It was risky enough for Paul to waste time going on to the drugstore before doubling back, but he couldn’t ignore his migraine. If he was going to be of any use to his family, the pain had to be taken care of first. Then, it would be back to the campground to pack up and head somewhere else. Somewhere far away from the traffic stop. Oregon. Maybe Washington.