Getaway Island

Copyright 2021 by Kat Thomas

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Canva Kat Thomas

Book design by Kat Thomas

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

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

Due to many thefts of online work This copyright notice will be there on every online posting from now on. I will also say I will take action on any person or company who posts my work without permission.

The laser-like sun rays were blistering as they reflected the white sands color and made her head hurt as she drove across the bridge that connected the area. She knew that the water on either side of her was an emerald green or the lightest of blues as they mixed together in the brackish creeks that fed the Gulf of Mexico. The day despite being bright was unseasonably cold as she turned the heat up in her small jeep. She knew she would be the last one arriving. She for once she really didn’t care. She wasn’t sure what exactly was going on only that one of the local multi-agency companies needed her help. That could only mean one thing, and she knew that though she would rather not think too hard on that as she tried to clear her mind of any thoughts that would limit her abilities.

“Kid you have worked with all of them before. It is no big deal.”, her boss had said. She scoffed at the idea but not because she didn’t like the people in that unit. She did. Sometimes and one, in particular, she liked them too much. It was a catch twenty-two that she was a single woman who was surrounded constantly by good looking and almost perfect men, but they were all married to their work just like she was. Now the unit of the best looking men and one who had always got under her skin needed her help. This was probably the cause of the headache she had, but she would continue to blame the sun because she would have to admit her feelings for this man if she didn’t.

She was good at hiding her feelings. She had to be to do this job. She would deal with it later if she really was need with whatever they thought she was needed for. She continued not to think about the whole thing as she continued on her forty-minute drive from her nice quiet office to the hustle of the one of the largest military bases in the country. She knew it well. It had been where she had spent two years honing her studies and the first she could think of as her home base. Since then she had been moved and then privatized so she could freely work with every agency in a time of need. She always hoped she would never be needed.

The base at its core was an air force base with two smaller air force bases within twenty miles. The navy base was forty miles away, and there was an army one within an hours drive as well. It was a hub of activity and always was. It was one of the main training facilities on the east coast though it wasn’t in the strictest terms an east coast base. They had both military and civilians working there full time as researchers and developers for all sorts of new tech that could and would be helpful for both worlds. She had worked in both worlds as well. It was the nature of her job.

She was getting close to the base as she started to wonder what this was about, though she wanted to keep the ideas out of her head she hadn’t heard any chatter about anything happening and she always heard the chatter enough in the first place to know she would be called to some unknown and undisclosed location, but not this time. There was nothing that she knew about besides a few outbreaks happing in Africa at the moment. She had watching those close enough to know they would spark a widespread outbreak if the three actually touched close enough together, but as for now, there was nothing close to that. She thought of the outbreaks in the country, and she knew there were a few going on which was normal to a point. She had received her daily reports on those as well. Nothing was in her particular purvue or in her scope. She was the heavy hitter and not who handled the smaller outbreaks. She was only called in when things hit the fan, and everyone was up shit’s creek. She had known that after she had given her report a few years prior when she was told, “Not to worry her pretty little head” about what turned out to be the largest outbreak in recent history. She had seen it coming and had said how to prevent it from spreading like wildfire. She had even volunteered to go and oversee it. When she was told that she started to question her place. It had hit her on a quiet Sunday night as she was reading a report that had stated no one had seen this coming. The report was written by the person she had gone to months prior and told him that exact thing. The report had been written only three days before.

She was a decoy. She had never felt so used in her life. She had gone into the medical field and worked her way up the food chain in a short amount of time. She had been test and tried to be where she was, but they still thought of her as a novelty. She was angry and hurt. She was the pretty face they sent in to be the “hope” to solve the problem when in fact she had tried her hardest to prevent the problem in the first place. Her boss took her inside his office and shut the door and locked it. He then explained how things really worked. She had been appalled that she had signed her life away to be nothing more than a cog in the machine. She had wanted to stay away from them all after that. She stayed in her office, read her daily or weekly reports, she went to the meetings but never spoke anymore, she never threw out ideas anymore. She couldn’t do her job unless it was a full blown outbreak or attack. She almost stopped trying.

These side missions had been a distraction over the years from the daily grind of reading reports. She liked working with the different people but never got to close. She had her walls, and so did they. That was fine with her as well. A welcome distraction. Except for him. He was not a welcome distraction in the least. He was just a distraction. She would have a brain freeze every time he was near to the point she assumed people didn’t believe she was a genius on any level. If he wasn’t there though she worked completely fine and could focus. She wondered if he would be there today and if he was if she could at least ask he be moved.

It sounded wrong to even wonder that, but he had a way of making her feel like she was dumb. She had never really ever felt that way in years, not since people looked at her closely as how she could take and score perfectly on the placement test for one of the ivy league schools when she was ten. The public school system had labeled her as being unable to read, but she did the placement test within a half hour, and she had scored one of the highest in the schools history. People started to question her then. It was easily found out that she did have a reading problem, but it wasn’t because she couldn’t it was more she didn’t want to. The school had labeled her, and that was that. She was to be passed along and forgotten about. That was until she made a bold move and proved everyone wrong just because she could. She hated that feeling, and he brought it back without any effort on his part. He was the only person who could do this to her now.

They had all gathered in the briefing hall. They were waiting for the last two or three people to show up. No one had been told why they were calling this group in but they all looked around and knew it must be something big. Something one agency couldn’t handle alone. The people in this room were quoted as being the best of the best, and with that, they all knew who one of the missing people was. She wasn’t here yet.

The young doctor who had been on the collective groups radar for years now had taking the job in stride for a while. She blew away every one In this rooms minds when tasked with something they either thought she couldn’t do or couldn’t handle. She was unbelievable. She was beautiful. She was intelligent.

As he looked around the room, he knew that they all were waiting for her. She must have some part in this because otherwise, they would have started and then someone else would have filled the late comers in. everyone knew of her preference to be there at the beginning of the briefings, and they would hold the start until she got there. He had sat down in the back of the hall watching as he always did. The different agencies all worked together almost on a daily basis now. His own department worked with the others providing information daily or weekly it seemed. He knew everything about each one of the people in the room. He didn’t know nearly enough about the tiny doctor who would rare speak around him. That bothered him. He didn’t know why either and that bothered him even more.

She was always rather blank when he was around that he almost didn’t think the first few times they had worked together that she was the person she was said to be. She always had the deer in headlights look. However, when he wasn’t directly involved, and he was on the sidelines, he watched her work. She had been ruthless at getting what she had wanted from the other members of the team but not in a hurtful way. She was just herself. She brought the team to victory more than once in her striving goal to make the world a safer place. When he was on the sidelines watching she had been someone other than who she was when he was around. He wondered at why the change in her but he also knew he had a reaction to her as well. Instead of wanting to stay to the shadows and do what he did best he wanted to be near her, he wanted to be there to feed her what she needed, he felt the need to impress her as well, none of those things was like him or his personality, and it had been noted by the others as well.

His counterpart in another department had told him that it was painfully obvious to anyone who knew him why he was like that. He didn’t understand it though. He was friends or at least friendly with the people in the room, but with her, she reacted as if he was one of her deadly viruses. It had stung when she would react that way, but he would continue than digging into her with barbs and somewhat sharp retorts.

“Are you going to behave today?”, a voice came from in back of him. He turned and looked up.

“Possibly.”, he replied. “What are we waiting for the briefing was supposed to start fifteen minutes ago?”

“You know very well why we are waiting.”, his supervising agent replied.

“If the good doctor can’t be here on time then why should we wait for her?”, he asked.

“Because from what I gathered so far she plays an intricate role in the mission.”, his boss stated.

“How do you know what the mission is and I don’t?”, he asked.

“I don’t know anything about the mission. It was what I gathered for certain people.”, his boss said as he walked away. The doors to the back opened, and two people walked in. she had a pair of sunglasses on that hid her light eyes, but instead of removing them she kept them on and moved off to the side to settle in the back of the hall.

“That isn’t like her.”, he said to himself. He knew from all the past experiences that she was normally front and center for everything. It was in her to be tucked away in the back of the hall. He wondered at the sunglasses as well. He shrugged it off that maybe she had too much to drink the night prior as it was a hazard in all their personal fields to fall victim to that vice. He looked again, and she was looking around as she pulled the sunglasses down just enough to see clearly when the lights were turned on even more brightly she winced and placed then back on and tried to settle into her seat again. He knew then she must be suffering through a rather bad migraine and this whole briefing would be torture for her. He almost smiled with that knowledge. He turned back to the podium to the main speaker who stood and looked over the crowd.

“Welcome and thank you for coming. We have a big problem, and we need all of your help…..”