Omega Days (An Omega Days Novel) Read Online Free PDF

and Crystal made a raspy sound deep in her throat. Then she lunged, teeth snapping, just missing Skye’s face.
    Skye screamed and shoved her away, scrambling backward like a crab as her little sister struggled to crawl after her. The brown eyes that had looked up to her as a hero were now dark and malignant, all traces of warmth replaced with a predatory need. Skye backed over the tracksuit woman, her own voice coming out in a long wail, and she found her feet.
    Crystal let out an enraged howl as Skye reached the outer door, snapped the dead bolt back, and yanked it open. A moment later she was running. Dozens of maimed figures lurched among the trees and emerged from dorms, and they turned toward her with a rising, collective moan. It made her run faster.
    A parking lot was ahead, and beyond the first row of parked cars stood a tan, camouflaged vehicle, a Humvee with a long antenna and a man poking out of the top next to a big machine gun. Others in uniform moved around it.
    “Help!” She raced toward the vehicle. “Help me!”
    One soldier, a young man close to her age carrying a rifle with a scope, spun at the sound of her voice, seeing her running at him.
    “Help me!”
    The soldier snapped the rifle to his shoulder, aimed at Skye, and fired.

THREE
    Oakland International Airport
    Peter Dunleavy was thirty-seven, a hundred million short of being a
billionaire
, and was about to go to federal prison for forty years. So his lawyers told him, a pack of overpaid parasites—supposedly the best legal minds money could buy—who couldn’t seem to manage something as simple as fraud and tax evasion. Worthless.
    He sipped an iced tea and sank further into the wide leather seat, looking out the oval-shaped window beside him. The parasites assured him the jury would find him guilty either today or tomorrow, despite their best efforts. They were confident of a reversal on appeal. Dunleavy did not share their enthusiasm and had no intention of waiting around for appeals. Or even convictions, for that matter.
    The only successful thing the parasites had accomplished was to arrange for his release during the trial. A frustrated federal prosecutor had made passionate but unsuccessful pleas to the judge, pointing out that Dunleavy had plenty of reasons, and more than sufficient financial means, to be a flight risk.
    “Goddamn right,” he murmured, swirling the ice in the glass, the luxuriant main cabin of his G6 surrounding him. Next stop, his mountain villa in Venezuela. It was a country politically at odds with the United States and uncooperative with extradition. Sizable payoffs to top government officials ensured it would remain that way, at least with regard to Peter Dunleavy.
    Now, however, the viability of that exit plan was in doubt. The G6, and according to the pilots
all
air traffic, had been grounded. Dunleavy’s first thought was that his plan had been discovered, and he spent the first hour staring out the window of his plane, expecting to see vans of U.S. Marshals racing toward him across the tarmac. When that didn’t happen, Peter’s fright turned to annoyance. The pilots said that no further details had come from the tower, only the instruction to hold position.
    On the table in front of his seat rested a Bible, a pair of tablet computers that had been shut off, and a hardcover copy of his latest best seller. On the dust jacket was Dunleavy, smiling with perfectly white teeth and wearing an expensive Italian suit, arms raised as the sun rose majestically behind him.
Finding Your Inner Savior
stood out in big silver letters at the top, and at the bottom, also in silver, was
Reverend Peter J. Dunleavy
. Like the five that had gone before it, the book was a major hit.
    Now they wanted to take it all away from him: the estates, the yachts and private jets, the portfolios and bank accounts (the ones they knew about, anyway), the Dunleavy Bible College in Missouri, the Sunday TV show and televised fund-raisers, the