38 hours
Fallon had been watching the other woman’s eyes as they spoke. She’d seen their slight narrowing when she’d offered to exchange what she knew for what the other woman knew. So she was already lunging for her own gun when the Latina fired. Fallon felt the bullet whizz by her ear. She tried not to think about the fact that if she’d moved any slower, her brain would be too fragmented for even an Infected to find useful.
Fallon snatched the gun up, but she was neither an athlete nor an action hero, and as she tried to straighten awkwardly, she saw the Latina pointing the gun at her again, her smile feral. She knew in that moment that she was going to die.
I’m so sorry, Jason.
And then the door burst open and Warga rushed in, guns blazing.
Or at least that’s what it seemed like to Fallon, half-crouched, still fumbling with her own weapon. She watched as the rapist fired two shots into the Latina’s head before the other woman could turn and get a shot off herself.
As the curvaceous femme fatale collapsed on the floor, her head coming to rest in a pool of crimson blood and raven hair, Warga clucked his tongue.
“Damned waste,” he said, shaking his head. “She was hot.” He took a longer look. “Still is.”
Straightening, Fallon looked at the other psycho, freshly stitched up and bandaged. Some of his color was coming back, but that might also have been from arousal at the sight of a female corpse.
“What the hell are you doing up here?” she demanded. “And where are the others?”
“I might ask you the same thing, Doc. And I think you know what I’m doing up here, and it’s not something we need the others for.”
Fallon scoffed, though inwardly she felt a flutter of fear.
You have a gun, dummy.
She pointed it at Warga.
“Even getting shot isn’t enough to stifle your urges?”
Warga laughed, ignoring her gun as he moved closer, his own weapon held loosely in his hand.
“You’ve read my jacket, Doc. Hell, you wrote most of it. ‘Hypersexualized, equates sex with violence,’ the whole nine yards. All this shooting and blood is getting me hard, and I intend to do something about it.”
Fallon’s finger tightened on the trigger. Not enough to engage the firing mechanism, but enough that Warga could see she wasn’t joking.
“You’re going to have to keep it in your pants, Randy. Maybe after we bring the meteor back, we can set you up with a hooker or two, but—
“Or four?”
“Okay,” Fallon said, as surprised by the interruption as she was by his amused look. “Or four. But for now, we’ve got a job to do, with no time for extracurricular activities.”
“What about your activities? What the hell was going on here?”
She ignored the question.
“I saved your life. You’re telling me that doesn’t warrant a little thanks?”
Fallon shrugged. “Thanks.”
Warga looked at her for a moment, then laughed again. He lowered his own weapon and moved past her toward the dead woman. Fallon kept her gun trained on him.
“That doesn’t mean you can go all necrophiliac on me, either.”
He ignored her, knelt, and grabbed the woman’s wrist.
“See these tats? And the ones on her neck? She’s cartel.”
“What?”
Warga stood, putting his gun back in his pants as he walked over to the bed where the woman’s purse was. He dumped it on the bedspread, and thick rolls of cash tumbled out, as well as a .22.
“With this much cash, a case full of toys, and no bodyguards? Probably a hit woman. So what are you doing playing cops and robbers with the cartel, Doc?”
“You said it yourself. She’s hot.”
Warga’s eyebrows tried to climb onto the top of his head.
“Wow, Doc, I had no idea you swung that way.”
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Randy,” Fallon replied quietly, but Warga wasn’t listening.
“Gotta say, I’m impressed. And you’ve got good taste in women—brunette, busty, and dangerous.”
Fallon had had enough. She fired a shot past Warga’s head—one that came far closer to taking off his ear than she’d intended.
“Hey!” Warga yelped. “What the hell didya do that for?”
“It’s time to go, Randy.”
“Sheesh. You could have just said something.” He pocketed a couple of the smaller rolls. At Fallon’s look, he shrugged. “Might come in handy at some point. Not everyone in the zone is Infected, and people everywhere want the same basic things, especially at a time like this: sex, food, and security.”
The observation was surprisingly astute, and Fallon realized she might need to revise her assessment of Warga. It wasn’t a comforting thought.
He walked over to the case on the desk and started pulling weapons out of it—a Glock like the one Fallon had, a couple of other pistols she didn’t recognize, several knives, and another pair of pliers. He started putting them in whatever pocket or through whatever loop they would fit in. As he did, he tossed the Glock to Fallon, who surprised herself by catching it one-handed. Following his lead, she placed the sleek weapon in a pocket on her left hip and replaced the other in the pocket on her right. When she was done, she looked back up at Warga, who was decked out like Rambo and grinning like an idiot.
“Locked and loaded, Doc. Let’s go. The sooner we find that damned meteor, the sooner I get my hookers. And maybe a new light bulb,” he added. And then laughed uproariously at Fallon’s perplexed look.
Fallon sent Warga down ahead of her since she didn’t want to deal with whatever the others might think about where they’d been, or worse, speculating about why they’d been there together.
Once he was in the elevator, Fallon stepped back into the room and went over to the bed. She ignored the cash Warga had left behind, instead looking inside the purse. As she expected, credit cards and a driver’s license nestled in little slots in the leather lining. She pulled out the license.
The dead woman stared back at her from a blue square in the lower right-hand corner of a miniature Grand Canyon. Not Jessica Conejo, but Carmen Gamez of Scottsdale, though Fallon suspected the woman’s true address was probably quite a bit south of that.
She blinked to turn the camera and two-way radio back on.
“Book, you there?”
There were a few moments of silence, then Book came online.
“I’m here, Fallon. Sorry, I was trying to finish a mouthful of pizza.”
At his mention of food, Fallon’s stomach grumbled in complaint. She ignored it.
“I need you to find out who this woman is and what connection she has to Elliott Jameson.” She held up the license so Book could get a clear view of it through her camera implant, deliberately looking toward the door and away from the dead woman.
“Your partner at the lab? Why?” She would have to answer carefully. She had turned her camera and radio off—or at least had signaled that she wanted them off—but Book would want to know what she was up to, not just why she wanted to track Elliott’s cartel connection down.
The fact that someone could almost always keep track of her was simultaneously comforting and worrying. She didn’t really like the idea of Big Brother Book seeing and hearing everything she did and said in real time. But knowing that she could check in with Book or someone else at almost any moment had made her feel safer, less like the psychos were out here on their own. Even though, for all intents and purposes, they were.
“Yes. Just find out, okay, Book? I’ve got to go.”
She was starting to blink the command to terminate the connection—to keep him from asking more questions—when Book stopped her.
“Wait! Fallon!”
“What is it? I really need to rejoin the others.” Preferably before Warga started regaling them with tales of her eagerly yielding to his sexual prowess.
“It’s Briggs.”
Fallon put two and two together—Book’s serious tone and the specialist’s circumstances when last she’d seen him, in quarantine with three other soldiers, waiting to see who’d been infected by Crazy 8s.
“Is he . . . one of them now?” She couldn’t quite bring herself to say the word when she was talking about someone she knew. Someone she considered a friend—or at least friendly, which was rare enough itself these days.
“No. That’s the problem.”
“How could it be a problem?” Fallon asked before the answer dawned on her. “Oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. The other soldiers became infected and started attacking him. He killed one before anyone could get in there and take out the other two. But he knows, Fallon. Knows he’s immune, and knows what it means.” Book paused for a minute, Fallon thought perhaps to swallow down his empathetic grief. She found herself hoping the young analyst was never exposed to the virus because he’d succumb in a matter of minutes. “He’s having trouble processing it all, and he wants to talk to you.”
“I’m a neuroscientist, not a psychiatrist,” she protested.
“A neuroscientist who’s immune to the virus for the same reason he is. But you knew sooner and had more time to come to terms with it.” Another pause. “Please, Fallon. He needs you.”
She relented, mostly because Book was one of the only other people on that side of the microphone that she considered a friend.
“Okay, I will, but not now. I’ll call you back when I have time.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he replied. “We both will.”