by Julie Rowe
“You can’t show him.”
Max shook his head. “It doesn’t matter if I show him or not. He’s already got the virus.”
“If he had control of it, he wouldn’t need to know how to grow more of it. You can’t show him.”
“He’ll kill you, those kids, our men, everyone.”
“No, he won’t. He needs enough people alive who have the virus or carry the virus, so he can spread it faster.”
“He will kill someone.” Max stared at her, his gaze heavy. “He’ll kill you.”
“It’s a risk, but it’s one I’m willing to take. You can’t show him.”
“Can’t show me what?”
Akbar walked into the room with two more armed men. He grabbed her by the neck again and pulled her away from Max. “Continue with the vaccine.”
Max injected the eggs with virus and set the timer. “In about forty-eight hours the virus will have multiplied and can be extracted by syringe.”
“What is the next step?”
“Mix it with the stabilizing agent.”
“Excellent.” Akbar told one of his men to take the inoculated eggs. “Thank you. I don’t need you anymore. Any of you.” His smile was grotesque in its anticipation. He dropped Ali and walked up to Max until there were just inches separating them. “You are...disposable.”
He began giving orders in Arabic, telling his men to destroy everything in the building and kill everyone. He wanted Max to watch while his men raped Ali and gelded Max. Then they were to kill everyone else in front of Max, killing him last.
“It’s very satisfying to know you’re dead,” Akbar said to Max. He nodded at his men and left.
Two of the men grabbed Ali by her arms and dragged her across the room from Max, their intentions clear from the eager expressions on their faces.
Anger swept through her, a firestorm that cleared her head of conspiracies and petty worries and dumped rocket fuel into her bloodstream.
Max bellowed, then launched himself off the floor. He’d covered more than half the distance between him and the men holding her when a gunshot reverberated through the room. Max fell to the floor, blood turning his left pant leg dark and wet.
That’s it, you’re done.
Her mind shut down everything but the warrior she was at her core.
The two men who thought they were about to have some fun had her by her arms, one on each side. They’d slung their rifles onto their backs when they took her.
Big mistake.
She threw her weight up and twisted, hitting one man in the chin with her leg while grabbing the other man by his shirt and yanking his head down so she could knee his temple.
Their grips loosened and she twisted again, thrusting out with open palms. She was free.
But not safe.
She struck the closest one with a punch to the temple and he went down. The other man was bringing around his rifle as he staggered to his feet. She moved in close, kneed him in the kidney, stepped around grabbed his head and twisted hard.
The snap of his neck seemed louder than a gunshot.
The other man yelled as his hands scrabbled for his weapon, leaving him open to a throat strike. She hit his Adam’s apple with a sickening crunch and he abandoned his rifle to clutch at his throat.
She took the weapon and turned, slamming the butt of the weapon down on the back of the neck of one of the men now trying to hold down Max.
He collapsed, freeing one of Max’s arms.
Max punched the other man in the face, just like she’d taught him, with the heel of his hand in an upward strike against the other man’s nose.
The militant fell backward, his eyes wide and sightless.
Max stared up at her, his gaze wild. “Ali?”
“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She looked at his leg. “But you’re not.”
His hands grasped at her shoulders. “They didn’t... Didn’t...”
“All they did was die,” she said. “Just like these two.”
Max jerked to look at the man he killed and the one she’d taken out. “I...killed him.” His hands were shaking.
“Yes, and I killed three of them, so don’t freak out on me.” She knelt next to him and tried to find the bullet wound. “Where did you get hit?”
“What?” He glanced down at his leg, a frown on his face, and blinked. “Oh.”
“Not feeling it yet?”
He shook his head, his frown deepening.
“Adrenaline will do that sometimes. Don’t worry about it—it’ll start hurting soon.”
“How reassuring.”
Now that was her Max.
She grabbed a rifle and put it in his hands. “Watch the door while I bandage you up.”
He didn’t say anything—he didn’t have to—his hands putting the rifle into position as competently as hers would have done.
Hot damn that was sexy.
She found wound pads and bandages in the pile of supplies Akbar wanted to destroy. “Now, where are you?” she muttered as she found the hole in his pants and tore open the fabric.
The wound was in his thigh and was bleeding freely, but not so fast as to make her suspect an artery had been hit. She slapped the pads on the entry and exit wounds, then wound the bandage around them to keep them in place and add pressure to stop the bleeding.
He was okay. He’d been shot, but he was focused and ready to go. There was no reason to panic, yet all she wanted to do was hold him.
Max grunted once, but didn’t take his attention off the doorway.
When she was done, she picked up one of the other rifles, inhaled a calming breath and asked Max, “Got a plan?”
“Wait for the next bunch of militants to show up with people they’re going to shoot?” It sounded sarcastic, but she gave it serious thought.
“I don’t think we have that kind of time,” she said after considering it. “We need to get our guys out of jail and armed if we hope to stop that bag of dicks.”
“Suggestions?”
“Walk up like we’re in charge and kill the bad guys.”
“How refreshingly direct.”
“Got a better idea?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go. I’ll take point.”
“If I argue you’re going to complain, right?”
“No, I’m just not going to follow that order.”
He looked like he was going to argue anyway, so she added, “By the way, I loved how you kicked ass just now.”
“You...approve?”
“Approve? You delivered a textbook punch that killed your assailant. Boom. I’m so proud it’s disgusting.”
Max shook his head. “I don’t understand you, not even a little.”
“That’s okay, you don’t have to.” She loved him, but it was obvious he was having trouble with her rationalizing the lives they’d taken.
So, she tucked away the sadness of that realization, smiled and asked, “Ready?”
“What exactly are we going to do?”
“We’re going to fake it ’til we make it.”
“Oh. That.”
She grinned. She didn’t like his sarcasm, she loved it.
They left the room and walked the short distance to the room where the children had been sleeping. It was empty.
“They took the children?”
Max’s voice was rough when he said, “They’re going to use them as carriers of the flu, send them to populated areas. We have to get to them first.”
Chapter Thirty
Max stared at Ali, hoping she had a plan that would end with them alive and free and Akbar dead.
“Let’s get to it.”
Not the answer he was looking for. �
�With what, pretend bullets?”
She was insufferably calm. “No, Hunt stashed a couple of weapons.” She pulled a pile of debris aside in one corner and handed him a rifle. “We’re going to distract and disarm.”
“I thought you preferred a more permanent solution.”
“We need to know where Akbar is going to send, or has sent, the infected.”
“He has a lot of men. We need a big distraction.”
“We could blow the place up,” Ali suggested. “Isn’t that what Dr. Perry did?”
“She wasn’t trying to distract anyone. She was trying to deny Akbar access to her work.” Max grimaced. “We’d probably kill ourselves.”
She shrugged. “At least we’ll go big.”
“If the entrance is abandoned we’ll make contact with the general and get the whole area quarantined. If there’s someone guarding it...” Max looked at her. “What if you pretend you’re sick, dying, and I bring you out, make a lot of noise, get you close enough to do some damage?”
“Okay, let’s go take a look.”
They worked their way quietly toward the front of the building and discovered several armed men talking in a group. Just past them, outside, the Special Forces soldiers still knelt on the ground with their hands behind their heads.
Ali let loose some colorful language. “How do you want to do this?”
He considered her for a moment, then said, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”
She raised a brow and stepped toward him, her arms reaching for him. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
He picked her up, one arm under her knees, the other behind her back. “Cough a little, would you?”
She wilted and her coughing became hoarse and wet sounding, like she really couldn’t draw in a good breath.
He purposefully allowed his own breathing to speed up, like he was barely managing to carry her weight, but she wasn’t heavy at all.
How could such a tiny, curvy woman wreak the havoc that she did? Holding her like this made her seem fragile, breakable. She was nothing of the sort. She was a tornado touching ground.
It went against his every instinct to carry her into the fight like a husband carries his bride over the threshold, but she’d have his hide if he didn’t respect her skills and use her like the weapon she was.
He was in love, not an idiot.
His stride faltered as the word registered.
The situation was even worse than he’d thought.
No time to change anything, he’d been spotted by an armed man, so he staggered into the dirtiest reception area on the planet, huffing and puffing.
“She’s got the flu,” he moaned in Arabic. “She’s dying.” Max made sure to cough deep in his chest where it would sound like he was sick too. “Where’s Akbar?”
The men pointed their weapons at them and took at least one step backward.
“I need the medicine he took. She’ll die without it.”
There were six. Four of them stared at him with growing horror, but two glanced at each other.
So, not all of them knew Akbar’s plans. He took a step forward.
One of the men said in Arabic, “Stay back. Take her away.”
“She needs medicine,” he moaned again.
“Take her away or we’ll shoot you both,” the same man said again. He was a little bigger than the rest, but not one of the two who’d reacted to his mention of medicine.
One of those two stepped forward and whispered something in the self-appointed leader’s ear.
He froze for a moment, then his expression changed to one of practiced indifference. “Go. Take her back there.” He pointed into the hospital.
Max turned slightly, as if complying with the order, then let the arm under Ali’s knees drop as he pretended to stumble on some unseen thing on the floor.
Ali slipped out of his hold and lunged at the leader.
She had him down in the next three seconds and was working on taking down two more when Max joined her. He didn’t try to make it fancy or even fair. They would kill his Ali if they could, so he wouldn’t let them.
He crashed through them like a linebacker, using his body to knock them off their feet. Shots went off, but he didn’t feel anything hit him, so he elbowed and kneed his way out of the tangle of limbs.
A rifle muzzle was pointed at him. Before it could go off, he grabbed the barrel, pulled it hard past his ear, then shoved the butt into the face of the man holding it. That stunned the militant long enough for Max to twist the weapon out of his enemy’s hands and into his own.
The boom of another shot rang hard on the other side of his head. Instinct had him ducking away, just in time for another one. Who was doing the shooting? He couldn’t tell who’d taken the shots.
A woman screamed and everything inside Max came to an abrupt halt.
Ali?
Where was she? He searched, stumbling over the legs of a man who lay unmoving on the floor, but she wasn’t anywhere he looked.
More shots rang through the room, each one seeming to come from farther and farther away. There was a confusing mass of bodies, limbs and weapons filling his vision, but he couldn’t see Alicia anywhere.
More men suddenly piled into the room through the windows. They looked familiar, but hazy, as if someone had put a pane of warped glass between him and the rest of the world.
He couldn’t get that scream out of his head.
A surge of gunfire rocketed through the room and seemed to echo inside his head for minutes, hours.
His sight narrowed and went dark, and for a moment, all he knew was the sound of his own breathing, then...nothing at all.
* * *
The world came back in a hazy gray. At first Max thought he was dreaming, but his head and body hurt so bad it couldn’t be a dream.
Things came into better focus after a few seconds, but what he saw made no sense.
Bodies, several of them. Adult men covered in blood were piled around him. Local people, from their dress. Smoke curled around the room. A room with windows empty of glass.
A crash from deeper inside the building fractured the eerie silence, then more smoke billowed out in a dark wave and threatened to suck everything in.
Memory returned in bursts.
Ali, the children, a confusing fight.
Up, he needed to get up.
Max put his hand down on the dirty floor to push into a sitting position and looked down at himself. He was covered in blood. His left side hurt and he had a horrible headache.
He wiped his face with one hand and it came away smeared with blood. His injuries would have to wait. The smoke was becoming denser with every second.
He struggled to his feet, but was immediately driven back to his knees by an intense wave of dizziness. He’d suffered some kind of head wound, and between that and the smoke, walking was out. He crawled toward the door leading outside.
When he crossed the threshold, he found more bodies. He recognized three of them as Special Forces soldiers. The rest were part of the group of men Akbar brought with him.
The madman’s name triggered a rush of memory. Akbar holding Alicia’s arm and pointing a gun at her head. Akbar demanding information on the flu virus. Akbar ordering Ali to be raped and Max gelded.
Where was Akbar now?
Where was Alicia?
He turned and scanned the bodies inside the building, but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t one of the bodies in front of the building either.
He attempted to get to his feet again, but was forced down by extreme dizziness. He wasn’t going to find her crawling on the ground. He needed to get up.
Movement at the corner of his vision grabbed his attention and he lifted his head to see the two little boys Alicia had saved running towar
d him.
They reached him and their small hands tugged on his clothing.
“Hurry, hurry,” they said in Arabic. “We must run!”
He glanced at the building behind him. Flames had burned a hole in the roof and were dancing in the empty windows.
All his equipment...gone.
His people...gone.
“Where is Ali?” he asked the boys, holding on to them like they were his lifelines.
“The bad man took her and the others away. We snuck out.” Coban put his hand on Max’s head. It came away bloody. “You’re bleeding.”
Max looked at the bodies on the ground. He shuffled over to grab a rifle from one and a scarf from another.
“I need a mirror,” Max told the boys. “Help me find one in one of these houses.”
Coban stayed with Max, helping him to stand, while Berez ran ahead to the nearest house and went inside.
Max’s head hurt so much he had to breathe through his mouth to keep from vomiting. He had acquired a concussion at some point he couldn’t remember.
As he reached the house, the younger boy came out and waved at them to go in. There was a mirror hung on the wall a few feet inside the door.
His reflection wasn’t reassuring.
His head, face and neck were coated in blood, though it was concentrated on the left side. He turned to get a better look at that side and realized there was a furrow carved out of the skin down the side of his skull.
That explained the blood on his head and his dizziness.
One of the boys tugged at his hand and held out a cup of water.
“Thank you,” Max said to him then took the cup, dipped one corner of the scarf in it and began to clean some of the blood off his face. Then he used the scarf as a bandage and wrapped it around his head, tying it into place to keep fresh blood from obscuring his vision.
He checked his side next and found a hole in his clothing. Another bullet had hit him just below his hip, but it had gone through clean, leaving an exit wound that was only bleeding sluggishly.
“Can you get me another one of these?” Max asked Coban, pointing at the scarf around his head.
The boy nodded and dashed out the door.