“No way, darlin’. Get up.” An insistent hand clamped under my armpit, pulling painfully.
I struggled feebly against it. “Jus’ rest f’r a minnit…”
“KELLY! ON YOUR FEET! MOVE IT!”
Hellhound’s full-throated bellow and yank on my arm squeezed out a tiny trickle of adrenaline. I stumbled to my feet.
“Wha’?” I moaned. “Was jus’ res’n’…”
“Can’t rest yet, darlin’. Get in the Hummer. Just a few more steps. Come on.”
“…’Kay.” I plodded forward to the driver’s door. Pulling open the door took the last of my strength, and I made it into the driver’s seat only with the aid of a vigorous boost from Hellhound’s knee. He closed the door behind me, and a moment later a flurry of snowflakes and a slam indicated that he was safely in the back seat.
I went limp, every exhausted muscle giving up simultaneously.
“Kelly?”
I ignored Reggie’s questioning voice.
Rest.
Sleep…
“Kelly! Hey! Talk to me!” Somebody shook my shoulder. Reggie again. Why wouldn’t he just piss off?
“She’s hypothermic.” Hellhound’s disembodied voice floated from the back seat. “Get that wet gear off her an’ give her a hot drink.”
“We don’t have anything hot.”
“There’re MREs in that black duffel she’s holdin’. Grab the FRH outta one of ’em.”
More acronyms. My mind ground to a halt.
The duffel bag jerked, accompanied by Reggie’s close-range cursing. “Can’t get it… Useless fucking hand…”
“Let me,” Murray’s voice chimed in.
After considerable jostling and a period of time I didn’t register, the fog began to clear from my mind.
“Keep drinking,” Reggie urged.
I obediently took another swallow, hot liquid burning my tongue. Violent shivers seized me.
“Good, she’s finally shivering,” Reggie said.
“About time,” Hellhound agreed with satisfaction.
“Y-you d-don’t n-need to s-sound s-so g-goddamn h-h-happy about it!” I snapped. “I’m f-freezing m-my f-fucking ass off h-here!”
“Yeah, Kelly, we do get to sound goddamn happy about it,” Reggie countered. “That means you’re warming up. You were too damn cold to shiver before.”
As if my brain had finally thawed enough to work again, I grasped their meaning at last. “Oh. R-right. H-hypothermia.” I gulped some more hot liquid, a repulsive too-sweet fruity thing. “G-God, wh-what is this sh-shit?”
“Just another treat from your MRE,” Hellhound said cheerfully. “Drink up, darlin’.”
“G-good Lord, it’s d-disgusting.” I shuddered in between my shivers, but kept swigging.
At last my trembling eased to a constant fine vibration. I gulped the last of the hot drink and fell back in the seat. “Damn, that was close. Thanks for keeping me going, Arnie.”
“No problem. Glad you’re back with us, darlin’.”
“And thanks for making me answer Nichele’s call. It never would have occurred to me to get Dave to come and rescue us.”
Hellhound grunted. “Hell, I never thought of it, either. I just knew ya needed to keep talkin’ if ya were gonna make it, an’ if anybody can keep ya talkin’, it’s Nichele.”
I laughed. “You’ve got that right…” I jerked upright. “Headlights!”
A glow brightened the whiteness, slowly widening and separating into twin points of approaching light.
“Reggie,” I snapped. “Get ready to fire just in case. The rest of you, stay low. That should be our ride, but I’m going to go and check it out.”
“Not by yourself, ya ain’t,” Hellhound growled.
“Okay, let’s go.” I threw my hood up and muffled my face in my wet scarf again.
The headlights had halted by the time we stepped out of the Hummer into the biting wind. Shivers seized me instantly, long hard paroxysms that twisted my stomach and rattled my bones.
The headlights were surrounded by dozens of yellow lights that outlined the shape of a highway tractor, and a muffled figure swung down from the cab and stumped toward us with Dave’s familiar stiff gait.
I drew a breath of relief and eased my grip on my Glock. “Dave! You found us!”
“’Course.” He gave me a quick hug, patting my back, then pulled away. “You’re shivering. You should get in where it’s warm.”
“Yeah, that’s what I keep tellin’ her,” Hellhound agreed. “Go on an’ sit in the Hummer, darlin’. Dave an’ I’ll do this.”
I was shivering so hard that my revolting fruit drink was threatening to reappear in a spectacular fashion, so I nodded and hurried back to the Hummer.
Reggie lowered the P90 as I slipped into the driver’s seat.
“All good?” he inquired.
“Y-yep.”
“Do I need to hide this?” He hefted the weapon.
“D-Dave w-won’t ask questions. B-better k-keep it handy until we’re b-back on the road. J-just in case.”
He nodded and laid the gun in his lap before reaching into Hellhound’s duffel with his good hand. “Here, have another hot drink.” He passed me another foil pouch and envelope and scowled, the prosthetic half of his face disturbingly serene beside the angry expression on his right. “I’d do it for you, but this fucking hand is even more fucking useless than what I’ve got under it.” He made a disgusted gesture with his cosmetically-enhanced left hand.
“C-can’t you m-move it at all?” I asked cautiously as I tore open the heat pack.
“I can move it a bit, but it’s no damn good for anything.” He demonstrated, moving the forefinger and thumb together and then apart. The other fingers remained immobile. “I can’t grip worth shit. I might as well not have a hand at all when I’m wearing this fucking thing.”
“Th-that sucks…” I hesitated.
Should I change the subject? He’d be furious if he thought I was trying to pussyfoot around him, but if I said the wrong thing he’d bite my head off.
I chickened out. Maybe I could throw somebody else under the bus.
“S-so whose idea was the d-disguise?” I asked.
“Stemp’s, who else? Fucking asshat. When he showed up with this fucking… face…” Reggie spat the word with disgust as he gestured at his head. “…right after I hired on, I told him if he had such a problem looking at my fucking deformity, I’d quit right then and save him the trauma.” He bared his teeth. “He handed me some bullshit line about how he thought I might want to avoid attention sometimes. Yeah, right. Stemp, the fucking Sensitive Guy. As if.”
My heart squeezed at the thought of Stemp labouring over his tools and molds to get Reggie’s face just right, only to have his efforts angrily rejected.
“He p-probably meant well,” I ventured. “I c-can see where you’d b-be mad if you thought h-he was implying your own f-face wasn’t good enough, b-but…”
“Meant well, my baked ass,” Reggie spat. “You know what he’s like. You’re the one that’s always getting reprimanded for calling him a dickhead. And didn’t I hear a rumour about you jamming a gun under his chin and threatening to blow his head off?”
I winced. Neither Kane nor Stemp would have disclosed that. Holt must have let it slip, dammit. What else had he blabbed about me?
“Well, yeah, b-but there were extenuating c-circumstances,” I explained. “I don’t h-hate Stemp. He’s just… s-sometimes he’s not so g-good with human interaction. I d-doubt if he m-meant to insult you.”
“Sure he did. He insults people all the time just to rattle their cages. To see if he can find some leverage to manipulate them.”
“T-true,” I agreed reluctantly. “It’s his j-job to be a d-dickhead sometimes, b-but I don’t th-think he enjoys that p-part of it. He’s b-basically a good g-guy.”
“Bullshit.” Reggie slouched back, crossing his arms. “He makes me wear this getup to conferences ‘so nobody will recognize me’, he says. More like he thinks that if I don’t wear it people will be so creeped out by my freak-face that they won’t be able to concentrate on my presentation. Asshole.”
I pressed my lips together to keep from pointing out that it sounded more like Reggie’s attitude problem than Stemp’s, and busied myself ripping open the pouch of hot liquid. An involuntary shudder shook me as I swallowed the first mouthful of sickly sweetness. “G-God.” I shuddered again. “It’ll be a m-miracle if I c-can keep this down.”
“Just shut up and swallow.”
I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Said the typical man.”
He snickered, and I relaxed at the return of his usual sardonic humour.
The driver’s door opened and Hellhound poked his masked-and-hooded head in along with a blast of icy air. “We’re hooked up, an’ Dave’s gonna start pullin’. Roll your window down so I can give ya steerin’ directions.”
I complied, and a few minutes later the Hummer was on the highway again, windows closed and heat blasting.
“Well, that was anticlimactic,” Melinda remarked, and I could hear the smile in her voice.
“It felt pretty climactic to me,” Murray murmured, just loudly enough to be audible.
“Ignore them,” Reggie advised me. “Don’t even look back there unless you want to know what they’ve been doing under that blanket all this time.”
“Don’t want to know,” I agreed.
A tap at my window provided a welcome distraction, and I powered it down to greet Hellhound again.
“We’re gonna go get the Forester now,” he said. “I’ll take the duffels back with me. If we can’t get my truck out, I’ll bring everythin’ back an’ we can all go together, but I’d rather go with the original plan if we can.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed. “Good luck.”
Forty minutes later Hellhound’s Forester was back on the road. After another check-in call to Stemp, we moved off. Dave’s highway tractor pushed through the drifts ahead of us while I hugged his taillights, unable to see anything else in the whiteout. Behind me, Hellhound’s headlights were barely visible even though I knew he was only a couple of car-lengths back. The wind shrieked and tore at the Hummer, and my arms ached with the effort of holding it on the road despite its power steering.
Reggie glanced at his wristwatch. “At least we missed the fucking meet-and-greet.”
“Maybe not,” Murray spoke up hopefully. “I’m sure it’ll go on for a few hours. The Brits will be getting their second wind because of the seven-hour time difference, and the Aussies and Kiwis will party no matter how jet-lagged they are.”
I groaned. “Can’t we just skip it?”
“No chance,” Reggie said sourly. “We have to drop off the weapons at the secured facility, so we’ll be walking right through their stupid party.”
“Well, I’m looking forward to it,” Melinda said. “It’ll be nice to interact with our colleagues in a less formal setting.”
Murray murmured agreement.
“It’s a fucking waste of our time,” Reggie snarled. “This isn’t a fucking social club, it’s a top-level national security meeting. Damn Nora Taylor. Good old Howie Coleman would’ve bitten his own tongue off before he’d make small talk. But no, put a woman in charge and all of a sudden we’re having tea and making pinky-friends.”
Prying a hand momentarily off the steering wheel, I gave him a backhanded smack on the shoulder. “Nice attitude, asshole. And you were whining about Stemp being a dick?”
He rubbed his shoulder, the good side of his mouth curling into a smirk. “You know I’m only rattling your chain.”
“Coleman was a curmudgeonly old fossil, and you’re his younger evil clone,” Melinda said without heat. “It’s no wonder you liked him, but nobody else did. Nora Taylor is a much-needed change, and I’m looking forward to meeting her. And the meet-and-greet wasn’t entirely her idea, anyway. I heard that Brad Wilson was all over it, too.”
“I don’t trust that fake-tanned asshole any farther than I can throw him,” Reggie groused. “He’s a fucking politician, not a scientist. Doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together. I can’t believe the U.S. made him their fucking Director of Weapons Research. Idiots.” He shot me a look. “And it can’t be a coincidence that the research directors of both the U.K. and the U.S. want a meet-and-greet for the first time ever, and that they both asked for you to be there.”
I had thought I’d used up my worry quota for the day, but apparently not. Anxiety clutched at my throat. “This meet-and-greet isn’t business as usual?”
“No. They’ve got some agenda, I guarantee it. Better watch your back.”