Her eyes kept flickering up to his face, but I thought it was his gun that had started moving ever so slightly as he tapped his upper arm with his free hand as if he were counting down the seconds. I only saw them both in profile so I couldn’t be sure, but she seemed ready to break out into a sweat any moment now.
Looking around, I tried to read anything off the faces of the others, but my compatriot hostages all looked incredibly relieved that they weren’t out there on the hot seat, and Nate’s people were more concerned with looking that bored kind of alert that made me think of robots on stand-by. One or two of them were checking their weapons; the Ice Queen was sharpening a knife, the sound of metal on whetstone just barely audible through the glass but setting me on edge nevertheless; and two of the former security guards were busy screwing around with the one infernal coffee machine that had miraculously survived the cave-in of the entrance but was still more intent on eating quarters rather than spewing out brown slush. Giving up, they instead got some chocolate bars from the vending machine next to it, the shattered glass front making their work easy pickings.
“Let’s talk about your research,” Nate suggested—as much as being asked at almost gunpoint could be considered a “suggestion”—leaning back against one of the tables that held the array of monitors.
“My research?” Thecla asked, sounding surprisingly guarded.
“All of it. Not just the part in the official documentation.”
His words set me on edge, and I wasn’t even the one on the hot seat right now. Was that the reason why they had been tearing the labs apart? Looking for something that simply wasn’t there?
Thecla licked her lips, betraying nerves, but then that could have been just from the situation. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Nate kept looking at her, unblinking.
“Now that is something I cannot believe. You killed, what was it? Fourteen people in cold blood? No, fifteen, right?” He added a brief pause there, but Thecla didn’t react. At his ludicrous accusation, she seemed to have turned to stone. “I know that you stored the data somewhere, and you’re going to tell me all about it now. A woman as meticulous as you wouldn’t just let her findings go to waste.”
I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, but even from several feet away, I could see that a shudder ran through her body. I was still waiting for her to vehemently protest—I would have, at the very least—but all she did was look at somewhere between the floor and Nate’s knees. Tearing my eyes away from her, I looked at my fellow inmates and was met with a lot more indifference than I expected. That everyone was still hunkering down was one thing; but Greene seemed to be the only one listening to the conversation, tension making the lines of his jaw stand out stronger.
Could there be anything to this accusation?
There was one possibility out there that made sense, if only just a little. Thecla had been involved in vaccine research, so maybe there had been complications in a clinical trial? But that sounded far-fetched at best; Green Fields Biotech did the preliminary research, yes, but not the actual human trials. It was someone else’s responsibility—like the FDA’s—to make sure that no one could come to harm. Granted, there were always nutjobs out there who’d want to blame scientists for sheer bad luck of patients, but Nate had never struck me as that irrational. Then again, what did I know? Not even in my wildest dreams had I ever figured that he’d be the kind to take hostages and detonate bombs.
“Giving no answer is an answer, too,” he remarked just then, pulling me back out of my musing. He looked more relaxed than his words made him sound—a fact that was underlined when he put his gun down next to him and briefly switched his attention to the techie still seated beside him. “Have you looked through her files yet?”
He got a curt nod from her, and a moment later her fingers were flying over the keyboard again.
“Lots of spreadsheets, saved papers, everything you would expect. I’ve randomly checked the files, but nothing looks suspicious. She must have stored the interesting stuff somewhere else.”
Was that a hint of satisfaction that I saw flitting across Thecla’s face? But that couldn’t be, right?
Nate seemed to have seen something, too, because he narrowed his eyes, then picked up something from a box resting on the table. It took me a moment to recognize the egg-shaped object as a hand grenade. My pulse picked up and I felt something in my chest seize, unease quickly making room for outright fear. Thecla swallowed convulsively, her gaze fixed on the grenade, but she remained silent.
“Know what this is?” he asked, holding the grenade out to her, making her tense even more. “Course you do. Makes me wonder. You handle deadly viruses in your lab on a daily basis, but you’re afraid of this?”
Silence stretched again, leaving me too much opportunity to consider why they kept a box of ordnance just lying around in the open like that. It was broken not by Thecla’s reply, or Nate’s next question, but by a weirdly menacing moan coming from the direction of the vending machines across the atrium. My nerves already felt laid bare by what was going on right in front of me, but while it didn’t actually sound like much, there was a subliminal quality to it that made something inside of me run cold—a brain-stem, instinct-driven reaction.
Through the gloom outside of the floodlights, it was hard to make out details, but one of the two guys who had been busy decimating the contents of the vending machines had gone still. I couldn’t see the look in his eyes, but his features were strangely vacant. Bored, likely, as most of Nate’s people seemed to be that I could see guarding us or the atrium, but there was something completely unnerving about it.
That was, until his face suddenly turned into a grimace, his eyes widening with rage, and he launched himself at his buddy who had been standing right next to him the entire time. The attack was all mindless brutality and direct violence, the rifle strapped to his body completely forgotten as he grabbed the other guy’s head, and went straight for his jugular. With his bare teeth. Howling with range and triumph.
The whole incident only took seconds and was so bizarre that my mind didn’t quite catch on to it until he wrenched his head back, blood spraying everywhere. His victim let out a scream that cut off immediately when he was attacked again, his fingers going limp on the pistol he’d barely managed to draw, making the weapon clatter uselessly to the floor. All around the atrium, heads turned, but I wasn’t the only one simply perplexed by what was going on.
Nate didn’t seem to have the same problem.
Staring at what was going on over there, I’d missed what had happened to the grenade in his hand, but he was halfway across the floor, his gun out, by the time I noticed him. Every line of his body sang with tension, but the look on his face was closed off, concentration taking over.
“Jones?” he called, loud enough that it even drowned out the sickeningly wet sounds coming from where the guy—Jones presumably—was now savaging his victim on the floor, tearing junks off his neck and face like there was no tomorrow. He didn’t react, and that seemed to be all that Nate needed. In quick succession, he pulled the trigger twice, first hitting Jones in the shoulder—which didn’t even make him jerk around—and then in the head, spraying blood, bone, and brain matter everywhere. That finally did the trick and made the now lifeless body topple onto the other, but as he drew close enough, Nate sent another bullet into what was left of his head, and two more into the victim’s.
After the deafening blast of gunfire, silence fell, but only for a second. My eyes were still glued to the gruesome bloodbath over there when a high, keening sound made me look back to where Thecla stood—a grenade clutched to her chest. Her eyes were impossibly wide, her entire body shaking with dread, but it wasn’t Nate or his gun that she was staring at, but what had started leaking blood all over the floor at his feet.
“I’m… I’m so sorry but I can’t do this anymore! It’s out there! That’s not a world I can live in anymore!” she screamed, her
words barely intelligible.
Nate whipped around, his eyes briefly latching on to the grenade, but he ignored it over focusing on the frightened woman’s face instead. My breath caught, fear so visceral that it was clogging my throat gripping me.
“Easy there—“ he started, but cut off when she pulled the safety pin, her fingers grabbing the now armed detonation device even harder. For one insane moment I almost expected her to lob it at Nate and the others, but instead she sagged down onto her knees, folding her body around the grenade.
“You know what’s out there, I know you do!” she shouted at Nate, her eyes impossibly wide. “And I know it, too.” Then her gaze zoomed to me, and for a second, she looked almost calm. “I’m sorry—“ she repeated.
The grenade went off.
Chapter 10
Every breath I took hurt in my chest. Not in the way your lungs start to burn from exertion or the first stages of suffocation. No, it was a stronger, more deep-set kind of pain.
Tears had been burning in my eyes for over an hour now, but I refused to let them fall. Not because I was afraid that it would make me look vulnerable—right then it was hard to care about anything else than what my mind had latched on to. That sound, more felt than heard and somehow… wet. That spray of blood where a familiar face, hands, and torso had been. The mangled remains, barely human above where the grenade had carved a cavity into her chest to expose the spine and what little was left of the rib cage.
Those tears were born of frustration rather than sadness. My mind felt like it was stuffed with cotton, repeating the same sequence over and over and over—making me wonder whether I'd slipped into a state of shock.
There was only a single thing my thoughts kept revolving around—the conviction that I was going to make it out of here alive. Whatever the cost, whatever it took, whatever I would have to do—I was going to survive this.
Considering how the last couple of hours had gone down, it wouldn't be easy, and I wasn't sure if I wouldn't hate myself coming out of this. I could dwell on that later, maybe spend the rest of my life in therapy, but I wasn't going to let anyone get the better of me.
While I'd been hiding in the air ducts, I'd been convinced that there was no worse state to be in but sitting here, locked in yet on display with absolutely nothing to occupy my mind with; I realized that I actually preferred the former. Inactivity seemed to make my predicament ten times as bad. Before, I had limited control over my life.
Now, I had a bucket looming in the corner, and the acrid smell of burning flesh in my nostrils.
Of those locked in the glass cubicle, Greene and I seemed to have been the only ones observing Thecla’s interrogation—brief as it had been—and how it ended. Instinct had made me throw myself away from the wall closest to her just as the grenade had gone off, making me end up half sprawled across Greene at the other end of our prison. The look he had given me was just as frantic and confused as I’d felt, and the fact that he hadn’t even groped me, just shoved me off him, spoke of how shaken up Thecla’s suicide had left him. His shock had worn off much quicker than mine, but back in my corner—all on my own now—it was easy to ignore the occasional smirk he aimed at me.
The explosion had torn the terrorists out of their momentary stupor; the Ice Queen had stepped in quickly and organized that someone sloshed some kind of flammable liquid over the three bodies and set fire to them before they had even fully bled out. The resulting stench made me want to retch even an hour after they had doused the remains with fire extinguishers. All that was left were two uniform, gray sludge heaps that drew my eye whenever I looked out into the atrium, but I tried very hard not to. Which was impossible, of course, as such things go.
About half an hour after Thecla had ended her life, I'd succumbed and grabbed some bottled water in an attempt to wash the taste of blood and bile out of my mouth. I kept telling myself that dehydration was my worst enemy right now—if I ignored the gun-toting psychopaths, that was. Sam always reprimanded me that I wasn't drinking enough on a good day, and today was definitely not one of those.
I hadn't yet finished drinking when I felt that all-too-familiar twinge start that told me that, very soon, I'd have to throw any staples of normalcy overboard and use that bucket. Honestly, the idea of public urination had lost a lot of its horror after seeing my former colleague reduce herself to so much bloody gore.
Trying to postpone the inevitable seemed like a stupid thing considering that I didn't expect anything to change until morning, and there would be more than one trip to the bucket in store for me by then, but I still remained in my corner until discomfort turned to light pain. When I got up, I felt my cheeks flame up but tried to ignore it. I hadn't been the first to succumb to that basest of urges, so it shouldn't have made that much of a difference.
Stepping up to the bucket, I fixed the dark corner in front of me with my gaze, and tried to go through the motions as mechanically as possible. The guards outside where a short distance away but none of them even glanced in my direction. Any normal human being should have had the urge to lend someone in my position some privacy, and, just to be sure, I'd waited until Nate had left the atrium. Not that I thought that watching me pee would be of any interest to him, but anything I considered decent or intimate was definitely something I'd exclude him from.
Sadly, I'd overestimated the group-building strength of the exercise of being locked in with thirteen other people. I was just about to crouch down, strangely happy about still wearing my lab coat to glean even a shred more privacy, when I heard Greene's voice sneer off to my right.
“Finally some entertainment! Too bad that you're not more of a looker, or this could have become actually interesting.”
Screwing my eyes shut, I did my best not to react. The quicker I was done, the quicker he'd be out of material to taunt me with. Why anyone in a situation like ours would act like he did was beyond me.
“Does that work for you, cowering there like a baby getting potty-trained?” he went on.
Embarrassment turned to anger, but I forced myself to take it out on myself by sinking my fingers into my thighs, rather than letting him see that he got under my skin. I vaguely remembered reading somewhere that people dealt differently with grief and loss—in his case, it seemed to one-up his usual asshattery.
I knew that I should have stood above this. Why did I let him have so much power over me? Why—
“Something I've always wondered about. Is it sexually gratifying for women to urinate? When you fuck a woman just right she's going to piss herself, too, so is pissing reminding you of getting fucked?”
My back went ramrod straight, and before I could put a muzzle on my temper, I'd already fixed him with a glare, and words were coming out of my mouth. “Want to know what I've been wondering about? Are you one of the guys who needs to watch porn where girls puke into each others' mouths to get off?”
His eyes narrowed, but he was still sporting a lazy smile where he kept lounging against the glass wall as if it was the sofa in his living room. “Why, is that something you engage in on a regular basis? I think I'd want to watch that, yeah.”
Pressing my lips together tightly, I turned as much of a cold shoulder on him as I could, looking around for something to clean myself with.
“No toilet paper provided, but if you ask me nicely, I'll consider licking you clean. Just like home, eh?” came his next jibe.
I hated how a twinge of defensiveness crept in with the intertwined anger and mortification, but it helped me to take a mental step back. This exchange was bordering on surreal, and it was about time I learned my lesson and shut my mouth.
Thankfully, they hadn't taken away the pack of tissues I carried around in my lab coat, so I put one of those to good use. I briefly wondered if I should have held on to them longer; a more charitable person than me might have offered some to the others, but then none of them was even looking up, let alone coming to my defense, so they didn't deserve unsoiled underpants. Dropping the us
ed tissue into the bucket, I returned to my bottle, using that water to rinse my unbandaged hand. With what was going on, caring about germs seemed like a silly thing to do, but years of practice were hard to overcome.
As I settled back into my corner, I caught Greene still leering at me and did my best to ignore him. Not that I'd done such a stellar job so far, but the night was still young.
Then my gaze was drawn back to where Thecla's charred remains still lay where she'd sunk to the floor, and I realized that it really was about time for me to get my priorities straight.
Chapter 11
Time continued to crawl by at a snail's pace.
I'd been awake for more than eighteen hours, had a hellish three hours of both physically and mentally exhausting game of cat and mouse behind me—I should have been ready to keel over any second now.
It wasn't like I wasn't weary to the bone. I simply couldn't relax enough for my mind to shut down. And time to think was the last thing I needed right now.
A short while ago, Nate had returned to the atrium. He had been gone for over an hour, although from the productivity level of his men, that wasn't easy to tell. Everyone seemed to know what they were doing, and besides short intervals of downtime where they stood around and chatted in low tones, all of them were busy. The only static people were the guards at the cube door and the foyer barricade, and even they switched in a team rotation schedule of forty-five minutes. I'd never considered myself a hyperactive person, but not being able to do anything while everyone else was occupied was slowly driving me nuts. I could see several of them looking over to the larger sludge pile that had been two of their fellow mercenaries. What had that been about, anyway?
Then again, the moment Nate walked into the cube and fixed me with that intent stare of his, I wished I'd never whined that I was dying of boredom here.
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