The woman shifted her gaze between the two of them.
“My…my friends are there,” she said. “We were supposed to meet there. I…I…”
Gabriel’s chest tightened. “When did they go there?”
“New Year’s Eve.”
A week before.
Gabriel wanted to say something comforting, but he thought the woman’s friends were likely dead.
She stared at the ground, and when she looked up again, her eyes were hard and determined. “Can you show me?”
“That’s probably not a good idea.”
“You want me to believe you? Show me.”
Nyla considered the request. “Gabriel can take you.”
“Thank you.”
“If it saves your life, we’re happy to do it.” Nyla held out her hand. “I’m Nyla.”
The woman shook it. “Martina.”
Martina Gable didn’t know what to think. Were Nyla and Gabriel telling her the truth? Was it possible the UN message had been a fake? That its purpose had been to take even more lives? Only a few short weeks ago, that would have sounded like conspiracy-theory bullshit. But a few short weeks ago, there hadn’t been survival stations and the release of a virus that had killed who knew how much of the human race.
And then there was the video from that Tamara Costello. Martina had seen the reports the woman did during the spring outbreak. The news said the woman had died during the mini-epidemic, but clearly she had not. Her words, more than anything else, were what kept Martina from marching up to the front door of Dodger Stadium right then.
Until she had more proof, she’d keep her guard up, something she’d stopped doing the last few days.
When she had finally caught up to the woman driving Ben’s Jeep, and been told Ben was dead, Martina had slipped into a state of despair. She still couldn’t remember where she had gone or what she had done in the forty-eight hours that followed. Her family, most of the people she knew, and then Ben. It was too much.
After she finally began to pull out of her funk the day before, she’d found herself near the ocean in Santa Monica. She had wandered out onto the pier, passed the arcade games and amusement-park rides, to the very end, where she leaned against the railing and stared out at the vast, empty sea.
She knew she had a choice: she could either give up or take control again and live. In the face of all the loss caused by the pandemic, could giving up be considered a weak decision? She vacillated on the answer for a while, but as more of the fog lifted from her brain, she saw the truth. Giving up would be weak. She had to live. If not for herself then for those she knew who had died. Besides, she still had friends who were alive. Friends, she realized, who were not far from where she was at that very moment.
Her first thought, of course, had been of Noreen and Riley and Craig, but she didn’t know where they were. What she did know, though, was where they would eventually go, if they hadn’t already — the survival station at Dodger Stadium.
She figured the stadium couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen miles away at most, so that afternoon she had walked off the pier and headed east, deciding to go on foot and use the time to fully clear her mind. She grew tired not long after sunset, so she found an apartment free of the smell of death and collapsed onto a couch in the living room.
It was as dark when she woke as it had been when she’d lain down. She checked her watch and saw it was about ten minutes to one in the morning. There was no question of going back to sleep, though. The anticipation of seeing her friends again would not allow it.
She hit the road and walked alone through the darkened streets. Alone, that was, until she’d heard Gabriel behind her.
Now here she was walking beside him into a hilly neighborhood north of Sunset Boulevard.
“I thought I was closer to the stadium than this,” she said after they’d been hiking for a while.
“You were, well, are. It’s over there.” He pointed to the right. “We’re going around to the backside. Same place we shot the video. Best view.”
The sun began to rise as they headed up a ridge road. The left side was lined with homes, and the right with a narrow valley filled mostly with trees and grass.
They continued until the valley began to close.
“Going off road now, so watch your step,” Gabriel said.
He led her down the slope, staying under the trees to avoid the open grass areas. At the bottom, they came to a four-lane street.
Gabriel paused under the trees and scanned the road before whispering, “Quick across.”
In a sprint, he led her to the other side and up the eastern slope. At the top, they crossed a smaller road and moved rapidly through a cluster of buildings. A sign identified the area as the Los Angeles Police Academy. Unlike most of the other places Martina had seen, the parking lot was jam-packed with cars gathering dust. She guessed they belonged to recruits and active officers who had been called to a duty they never completed.
She and Gabriel moved down the edge of a clearing, then along a trail that paralleled the main road, and passed another building complex before finally stopping.
“We’ll cross here and go up that hill,” he whispered, pointing at the land on the other side of the road. “Follow exactly where I go, and if I motion for you to get down, don’t hesitate.”
“I won’t.”
He checked the road in both directions, and then sprinted across. Martina followed right behind, matching Gabriel step for step. Once more under the cover of trees, they climbed the small slope and headed south until the hill began to descend again. Through the branches, she could see glimpses of the large parking area and the stadium, but her view was too obstructed for her to make out many details.
Gabriel knelt and removed his pack. From inside, he pulled out a pair of binoculars and motioned for Martina to follow him. Staying in a crouch, they worked their way to the right until most of the foliage in front of them cleared away, and then stretched out on the ground.
There it was. Dodger Stadium, the banks of seats brightly lit by the morning sun.
Gabriel looked through the binoculars, adjusted the magnification, and handed them to Martina.
She raised the glasses to her eyes.
“Concentrate on the center,” he instructed. “Over that black barrier separating the two outfield bleachers. Like I said before, the angle isn’t perfect, but…well, just look.”
The eye line he suggested allowed her to see a portion of the outfield area and all of the infield, or at least where they used to be. Now, like she’d seen on the video, there were fences cutting across the grass and dirt, with posts hammered into the field.
“They look empty,” she said, taking in the two larger areas.
“What do?”
“The…detention areas? Is that what you called them?”
“The first few days they were pretty full, but after Tamara’s video knocked that phony UN message off the air, the number of new arrivals decreased considerably. Out of those who still came, we’ve been able to get to most of them first.” He paused. “Now look around the grandstands. Lower deck, top end, right before it disappears.”
Martina focused in on the seats and slowly began to pan across the stadium. “What am I looking—” She froze.
“You see them?”
“Yeah.”
Dead center in her binoculars, facing the playing field, was a soldier with a rifle. She searched some more and found others, all facing the field. It was all exactly as Nyla and Gabriel had said. Granted, none of it proved this wasn’t a UN operation, but her doubt was beginning to fade.
She refocused back on the field and noticed something she’d missed before. “There’s another fenced-in area in the outfield.”