Survive By The Team (Team Fear Book 3)

by Cindy Skaggs

  “The infamous Janet, I presume.”

  The woman smiled, lighting her whole face and making her look nearly as young as the women outside. “I see my reputation precedes me.”

  “Rose told me you run this place. He seemed in awe of you.”

  “They’re afraid of me, which I enjoy.” She wrapped an arm through Mandi’s and propelled her deeper into the building past a large open room centered around a fireplace. The way Janet pulled her in was so kind, so welcoming, it threw Mandi for a moment.

  “Your daughter is an absolute delight.”

  “Niece,” Mandi automatically responded.

  “Correct me if you like, but you’re the only mother figure she’s ever known.”

  “True.” Tiredness made Mandi weepy, but she kept it inside. When you dealt with people’s grief on a daily basis, you learned to hide your own feelings so they weren’t on display, but Janet’s words hurt her. Or, more accurately, reality hurt. Despite everything Danny had done to raise and protect Ellie, after everything he’d sacrificed, he still hadn’t been Ellie’s caretaker. Mandi was a mother in everything but name.

  The weight of it had changed her life even before Danny died. Mandi hadn’t had a chance to sew her wild oats. Maybe that’s what the interlude with Dean was about. Maybe. She was tired and confused and not real happy with the way the meds made her feel. “Where is Ellie now?”

  Janet patted her hand. “She was beside herself when they arrived, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with me. She latched onto Craft like he was the keeper of the toys and games. He doesn’t strike me as kid-friendly. To be honest, none of them do, but Craft took her up to the command post and got her hooked on some computer game. She fell asleep in her chair.”

  “Sounds... normal.”

  “As normal as it gets around here.” Janet led her through to an industrial kitchen. “I was getting ready to cook breakfast. We take turns around here—yours will come. It’s Jake and Camy’s turn today, but I thought with all the excitement I’d break from the routine and cook. If anything, I’m better at it than they are. Sausage and biscuits?”

  Mandi’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten since SpaghettiOs, but the timber of Dean’s voice behind them—combined with that of Rose’s sister—was enough to sour her appetite. “If you’d just take me to Ellie—”

  “Sound asleep in my room. Let’s not wake her.”

  Tears stung Mandi’s eyes. Ellie was her shield. She’d used Ellie and her surgeries and doctor’s appointments to protect against the world around her. Now was definitely not the time to face... The sound of Dean’s voice so cheerful behind her made her want to vomit. “A bed then.” A room. Heck, at this point, a closet to hide in.

  “You look like you’re in pain.”

  “You have no idea.” But it wasn’t physical pain, or not just physical pain.

  Janet gave her one of those looks—the kind Mandi used on Ellie—before nodding to a thought in her own head. “Car accident?”

  “Plus a psycho who wanted to choke me to death.” She pointed to where she thought the finger-sized bruises appeared.

  “Good enough. For now.” Janet led her up a set of narrow, windy stairs. “We eat together. Train together, but I can see that you need some time to adjust.”

  Mandi wanted to cry in thanksgiving, but instead, she followed Janet up the stairs and down a hall that gave her the heebie jeebies. It was long and dark. Smelled old. There was a window at the end, but it didn’t let in much light. The creepy covered fixtures that lit the wall every few feet were old and dim. The tiled floors were buffed and polished but still creaked as they walked. “What is this place?”

  “A survivalist training camp.”

  The doors were evenly spaced down the long dim hall. “As in?”

  “Wacko conspiracy theorists, of course.”

  “You’re awful cheerful about that.”

  “Oh, I don’t care who trains here, as long as it helps us stay afloat. Jake’s the security guy. He checks to make sure we’re not letting anyone dangerous inside.”

  “Jake?”

  “You probably know him as Fowler.”

  The big, quiet guy who helped dispose of the body. “He’s your son.”

  “That he is.” Janet opened a door to a tiled room the size of a college dorm. “I’ll move Ellie into the adjoining room tomorrow.”

  The room had a big pine bed with a quilt cover, an attached bath, and a lock on the door. It smelled of pine cleaner and a hint of potpourri, although Mandi didn’t see any in the room. The Spartan room appealed to her. The locked door definitely made her feel secure. At the moment, Mandi couldn’t ask for more.

  “It was a sanitarium before,” Janet said after she’d shown Mandi around the room. “You know, a loony bin.”

  Mandi choked out a laugh that bordered on hysteria. After a hellish few days, she was now smack dab in the middle of a nut house. “Are you sure it isn’t still?”

  “Quite certain.” Janet stepped into the hall. “But we do have our share of ghosts, given the way this place started, so don’t go wondering the basement level until you know your way around.” She gave Mandi a once-over. “And you should probably avoid the attic all together.”

  “Ghosts don’t bother me.” At Janet’s quizzical look, Mandi explained. “I’m a mortician, from a family of them, actually. I stopped worrying about ghosts before I saw my first scary movie.”

  “Good.” Janet nodded. “You’re going to be okay here.”

  She left with a wink; leaving Mandi to wonder how much of the ghost story was atmosphere and how much was truth. Given the day she’d had, she opted on the side of safety. She locked the door before collapsing on the bed. “I don’t have time for ghosts,” she said to no one in particular. She fell asleep waiting for an answer.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Stills had just endured the longest fucking drive of his life. At the cabin, Rose had carried Mandi out to the car and prevented Stills from following. He didn’t want to ride with her, but damn, it burned to be banned from the woman. Hell, even he didn’t know what they were. They’d slept together. Sleeping with women was his hobby and had been since he’d cut Shelley loose.

  And if that didn’t screw his day enough, now Ryder was demanding to debrief before everyone bunked down. This was the fucking reason he’d gone off on his own in the first place. Death by briefing. Adding PowerPoint slides would cap his fucking day.

  He walked the underground tunnel by himself. Camy had kept him after they finished breakfast. She’d been lonely, he guessed, with the men gone, and worried about her brother. She was a scary smart computer nerd with the kind of mad skills her brother did not want to know about, but she didn’t really belong in their mess. She’d stumbled into it, and being exiled to the farthest reaches of U.S. soil wasn’t her idea of a good time. All of which explained why she’d jumped him. She was exuberant and bored and didn’t see any harm in her actions.

  But they had caused harm.

  The look on Mandi’s face—shock and pain—caused a truckload of guilt to land squarely on his shoulders, but by the time he’d set Camy aside, Mandi had disappeared.

  The way she’d fallen apart back at the cabin had shredded his resolve. He didn’t figure it was the team’s fucking business who he slept with, but the way she’d cut him off when everyone arrived didn’t sit right. They’d shared... shit, it wasn’t just sex, although it should have been. He cared about what she was doing and how she was feeling. He wanted to fucking talk to her, but Janet wouldn’t tell him which room she’d put her in, saying only that Mandi was tired and sore and needed a break from all the testosterone in the building.

  Which made him grumpier than normal when he walked into the command post. It was a long, rectangular room lined with computers and screens. Behind it was the meeting room they’d turned into Echo central, with pictures of Team Echo on one wall, and a whole whiteboard full of questions about their fucked-up circumstances.


  Craft stopped him before he stepped into the hot seat. “Where are my computer parts?”

  “At the computer store.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “It’s a little funny.” But maybe because he was sleep deprived. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The second he walked into the meeting room, Ryder smacked him upside the head. “You want to survive, dumbass, then you stick with the team.”

  Stills rubbed the ache at the back of his skull. “When did you become such a mother hen?” Silence, as if the Universe waited.

  Finally, Ryder nailed him with a glare. “Do you think we’d be any less fucked in the head if we lost you than we were when we lost Madigan and Gault? Do you think that event would fly under the radar?” Stills started to answer, but Ryder silenced him. “We’re not losing another brother.” For the first time, Stills saw the strain weighing Ryder down. The tense shoulders, the lines on his forehead, and the shadows under his eyes.

  Rose crossed his arms and frowned.

  Fowler shrugged.

  Craft took a seat next to Fowler, distracted by a handheld device.

  Stills cleared his throat. “If you can stop climbing up my ass for a minute, I have some answers.”

  “What’s the question?” Craft asked, still pushing buttons and not looking up.

  “Why didn’t Echo go after the kid? Like you said, soft target.”

  Ryder sat down and crossed his ankles. A thin layer of dust coated his black boots. That more than anything spoke to his high level of distraction. “Go ahead. Impress me.”

  Challenge accepted. Stills paced the short end of the room, putting his thoughts together. He’d had plenty of time to think. No one on the team would talk to him during the drive home. He was in the deep doghouse with only one way out. Wow them. “Gault wasn’t a random target.”

  “We’re aware,” Rose said with a slight sneer.

  “What crawled up your ass and died?” Stills replied.

  “Quit playing the macho Lone Ranger shit,” Rose answered. “You walked away from the team. That is never acceptable, but you didn’t just do it a few nights ago, did you? No, you’ve been doing that from the day they cut us loose.”

  “Because the military doesn’t own me anymore. I don’t owe you fuckers anything.”

  “Then walk away.”

  “I can’t.” The admission popped out without conscious thought. There were times he truly wished he could walk away because after Gault, Stills wasn’t watching another teammate die. He swallowed, his throat flexing around a knot of emotions he had no intention of unpacking. “Do you want to know why Gault was targeted or not?”

  “Because he was one of us.” Fowler stood and moved to the kill wall, the one with pictures of Echo. He grabbed the picture of the guy they had captured at the cabin and crumbled it into a ball. Threw it in the nearest trashcan.

  “True, but he had something we didn’t,” Stills replied.

  “The laptop. We know,” Craft said, looking up from a schematic on his screen.

  “The laptop was the tip of the iceberg.”

  Ryder straightened in his seat. “How so?”

  “The day outside of Kandahar, Gault knew the shit was about to hit the fan.”

  “Didn’t we all?” Rose asked.

  Grumbles of agreement. Stills looked at each of them. One by one, meeting each gaze and holding it. “Gault did something about it. When Ryder passed around the bag for the meds, Gault took three from his pill bottle.”

  Ryder’s eyebrows lifted. He rested an elbow on the briefing table, but only a fool would consider him relaxed. “What good would three pills do him?”

  “Not a damn thing, but imagine if we had those pills now,” Stills said.

  “They’d be proof,” Rose admitted. “Against the company.”

  Craft nodded agreement. “They’d give your girlfriend a chance to reverse engineer our meds to see what the fuck they gave us.”

  “This is all theoretical.”

  Stills grinned. He may have gone off the reservation, but he’d come back with the goods. “No. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Gault was targeted because his pill bottle was short three pills. They knew he had proof against the program. And they needed to stop him.”

  “Which they did, in Technicolor.” Ryder twisted his neck to the side until the joints popped. “Are you saying they didn’t get the proof when they killed Gault?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Did anyone bring Gault’s rucksack up here?”

  Fowler pointed out the puke green duffle in the corner.

  Stills dug through the bag until he found Gault’s combat boots. He popped the heel to reveal three little white pills. Millions of dollars in research. Proof that the company was playing God.

  The rest of the team leaned forward. Actually leaned in to get that glimpse at redemption.

  Craft whistled loudly. “Holy shit, brother, you hit the jackpot.”

  Stills let that sink in for a moment. “They let the kid go because she wasn’t the target.”

  “Although they’d gladly kill one or all of us in the process,” Ryder added.

  “Right. Killing Gault’s sister—or causing an accident—was supposed to get our attention and take us to the evidence, which they hoped to confiscate.”

  Craft finally set his electronics away. “I’ll be damned. They switched tactics. This wasn’t their crazy end-run where they try to pull us into a trap.”

  “They needed us to find the evidence because they failed to get it before they caused Gault’s death. Mandi thinks they let her live that night, but I think the dust storm kept Echo from finishing the deed.” Thank God. Stills didn’t want to consider the possibility that they could’ve killed Mandi before he’d had a chance to...

  Rose made a few notes in his ever-present notebook. “So rather than kill you outside the hospital—”

  “Echo put up a good fight and let me loose.”

  “After fitting you for a tracker,” Fowler added. “They followed you straight to the evidence.”

  “But none of us realized it,” Stills said.

  Ryder leaned forward, pressing his hands into the table. “What’s Captain Johnson’s involvement in all this?”

  “He tagged me,” Stills said. It hurt his pride that he hadn’t even checked for a tracker after getting into it with Echo.

  “No,” Ryder insisted. “I think he was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Care to make it interesting?”

  “A bet?” Ryder shrugged. It wasn’t like this was the first time they’d bet on one of the macabre details of their program. “Sure. Ten bucks says Johnson is innocent bystander.”

  “We don’t have Camy around to put it down in the betting book.”

  “Allow me.” Rose grabbed a marker and made notes on the whiteboard. Each man placed their vote before they moved on.

  “I’ve got one more question about the good captain.” Stills settled into a chair, but his insides were wired for sound. His gut twisted. Nerves twitched like live wires on his skin. He’d had some time to think about Johnson after the car conversation with Mandi and she asked what happened on Gault’s last deployment. “Why did he take us to the scene that day? Shit hit the fan after that, so that little detour on the Chinook got lost in the shuffle, but why would he risk taking us to see something we weren’t supposed to see?”

  “‘We were never here.’ That’s what he said.” Ryder jumped up and paced the small space between the briefing table and the far wall. “You’re right. If Johnson was a company man, why give us any indication? Why let us know what had happened?”

  “That’s right,” Rose agreed. “Would have been simpler to pull us in. Take us to Germany. Detox and kick our asses out. Instead, he gives us an up close and personal at the scene of the crime.”

  “By doing so, he gave us fair warning. We knew what the other team had done. We knew why we got the boot.” Ryder rubbed a hand over h
is eyes, circling at the temples as if he were rubbing out a headache. “The day after Madigan, Johnson showed up at the jail. Warned me to keep my head down because the company was watching.”

  “Doesn’t sound like a company man,” Fowler said. “Move my bet to the other side.”

  Craft was having none of it. “A bets a bet. You can’t change mid-game.”

  “Fine. Put me down for the same amount on the other side.”

  “Win-win?” Ryder asked while Rose marked another bet on the board.

  Fowler shook his head. “Ain’t none of this shit a win.”

  “Truth.” Craft gave Fowler a fist-bump. “Layer upon layer of mind fuck. Johnson is a company man or he wouldn’t know what they were doing.”

  Stills didn’t disagree, but he’d had a long drive to think about this while Mandi slept. “He’s working an angle. When I asked which side he was on, he said ‘mine.’ What the hell kind of answer is that? Sounds like a man with serious issues.”

  “Who are we to judge? Not a one of us has our heads screwed on right,” Rose said.

  “For now, approach with caution,” Ryder said. “Next on the agenda, what do we do about the pills? The company will assume we have the evidence.”

  “They’ve killed for less,” Fowler added.

  Stills threw Fowler a glare. “All the more reason to use it. We have a chemist who can reverse engineer the ingredients. Debi knows what went into the original formula. Having her evaluate it should go a long way toward answering our questions: What did they give us, what are the side effects, how long are we affected?”

  Rose was shaking his head as Stills spoke. “No can do. She can only do so much here, which is why you went to the lab last time. We need their equipment.”

  “Which Echo blew up,” Craft said.

  “And even if we had the chemical breakdown, what good does it do?” Fowler wasn’t letting it go. “We need to know who is involved. Doesn’t matter if we tell the world if we don’t know who is responsible. Without evidence, names, and dates, we’re a crazy bunch of conspiracy theorists.”

  “I might have a line on that.” Craft looked up from his handheld. “I know you were against letting Debi’s friend Allyson go.”