Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  The bullet wounds would take longer to heal fully. The new skin under his T-shirt was still pale and soft-looking.

  Checking his healing injuries reminded him how hungry he was; he was still eating enough for three people as his body repaired itself. He went down the stairs and into the kitchen. No one was up yet, but the coffee pot with last night's dregs was sitting on the counter with the canister of coffee conveniently next to it. He washed the pot and started it perking. A quick sandwich slapped together from the remaining bits of roast and the heel end of a loaf of bread should take the edge off his hunger until breakfast. Try not to eat these people out of house and home, Noah.

  Maybe he could make breakfast, pay them back a little for giving him and Peri a place to lie low.

  He'd just opened the refrigerator when Ramona came into the kitchen in a bathrobe, the fussing baby cradled against her shoulder. "Good morning," she told him with a tired smile.

  "Morning, ma'am. I was just going to ... uh ..." He held up one of the egg cartons. "Can I make breakfast for your family?"

  Her weary, polite smile turned into something bright, genuine, and unexpectedly beautiful. "That would be wonderful. Oh, and you made coffee! Remind me to tell Peri she has excellent taste in boyfriends."

  She took a cup of coffee to the kitchen table, where she sat in a chair with an afghan draped over the back and unselfconsciously began to breast-feed the baby, flipping a corner of the afghan across her chest to provide a modicum of privacy from her houseguest. "There's homemade sausage in the freezer. It's already shaped into patties, so you can just get that out and run a little hot water over it. And I put bread on to rise last night. I'll get it kneaded for its second rise when I'm up."

  "I could do it," Noah offered. "You'll just need to tell me what to do." He couldn't see anything around that obviously looked like bread, though it was hard to tell in the clutter. The kitchen wasn't messy in an unsanitary kind of way, but nearly every surface was crowded with half-empty cereal boxes, cookbooks, dish towels, kitchen appliances of various types, jars containing spices and sugar and dried beans. Drying bundles of herbs dangled from the ceiling, some of which had been hanging long enough to collect dust.

  "Sorry for the mess," Ramona said as if reading his thoughts. "It's hard to keep up with housework and the new baby too."

  Somehow it didn't surprise Noah that Peri's father wasn't the sort of guy who helped out around the house. As far as he could tell, none of the guys in the compound did.

  He sensed more than physical exhaustion in Ramona's air of resigned weariness. Hers was a worn-down kind of tired; it wouldn't have surprised Noah to find out that she suffered from untreated depression or something similar.

  "It doesn't bother me," he said, which was not precisely true—he'd grown up in a house kept spotless by the family's housekeeper—but after the Morelands had taken him in and let him bleed all over their furniture, he couldn't imagine being a lousy enough houseguest to complain about a little bit of clutter. "Why don't you tell me what to do with the bread, and you can enjoy your coffee and have a nice relaxing morning?"

  She flashed him another of those incongruously pretty smiles. "I'd love that. The sponge is in the big bowl there, under the towel."

  The bowl was big enough to do dishes in. What kind of sponge needed a bowl that big? "What's the sponge for?" Noah asked, reaching for the towel, and pulled it back to discover that the bowl was full of pale, yeasty-smelling bread dough.

  "Sorry. Baker talk. The sponge is the rising bread."

  Under Ramona's direction, he cleared off a space on the counter to wipe down and dust with flour, then pinched off sticky pieces of dough with floury hands and squeezed and pressed them. He'd seen people do this, but had never done it himself, and he was surprised at how satisfying the dough felt in his hands. It was soft, almost silky. His fingers sank pleasantly into its yielding mass. Something deep inside him seemed to be purring.

  Following Ramona's directions, he filled a half dozen flour-sprinkled loaf pans with the kneaded loaves of bread and put them aside to rise with a dish towel over the top. This left a large chunk of bread dough that Ramona said she intended for rolls later, which Noah kneaded and put back in the big bowl.

  "That's fun," he said, and Ramona smiled at his tone of surprise.

  "It can also be very satisfying when you've had a hard day to take out your frustrations on the bread. You can punch it as much as you want and it only makes a better loaf."

  "I can see how that would be useful," Noah said, noncommittally tiptoeing around the implication that Ramona Moreland had a lot to be frustrated about. "You said the bread needed to rise again. Should I wait to make breakfast until it's done?"

  "I wouldn't say so. It'll need at least an hour, and then perhaps another hour to bake and cool. We can look forward to fresh bread and butter for a midmorning snack. But you look like you're hungry now."

  "Not so hungry I couldn't wait." His stomach picked that moment to rumble.

  "I'd rather not wait, so let's get that sausage on. Skillets are there." Ramona pointed with her chin, as both hands were busy with the baby.

  The skillets were all heavy cast iron ones, hanging in a row on hooks on the wall. Noah selected a large one. He didn't know how to bake, but he could cook a decent breakfast. Although there was one issue ... "I'm used to cooking for myself. How much should I make?"

  "It'll be the three of us—you, me, and Peri if she's up. Maybe half of the sausage in the freezer."

  Noah tactfully didn't ask where Peri's dad was. "She said she planned to sleep until noon."

  "The smell of breakfast may get her up. We'll see."

  Ramona was right. As the tantalizing scent of frying sausage and eggs filled the house, he heard the shower running upstairs. A few minutes later, a sleepy-looking Peri wandered into the kitchen, her hair wet, scratching her side through the fabric of an oversized T-shirt with a gas station logo on the front.

  "Noah, are you cooking?"

  "I'm a man of hidden talents." When she came to snuggle up to him at the stove, he put an arm around her, but—conscious of her stepmom watching them—planted a chaste kiss on top of her damp head. "No, actually, I'm a man whose talents are mostly limited to the ones you know about, but I can cook a decent breakfast."

  "And now you can knead bread," Ramona said from the table. "Pretty handy at it, too."

  "Oh, don't give him chores!" Peri protested.

  "I volunteered. I wanted to do something to help." Noah shooed her to the table. "Go on, sit down and let me serve you breakfast. How do you want your eggs?"

  Her smile was bright. "Sunny-side-up, if you're taking orders."

  "Raw yolks?" Noah complained, cracking eggs into the skillet.

  "Excuse you, Mister Giardia-doesn't-bother-me—" Peri broke off, glanced quickly at Ramona, and said in a more subdued tone, "I thought you'd be a guy who liked his food rare."

  "Only in some cases." He delivered her breakfast and Ramona's with a flourish on plates decorated with cherry blossoms, then scrambled himself a half-dozen eggs. "I'm not using up all the eggs, right? There's more where these came from?"

  "Lots more." Ramona pointed with her fork to the refrigerator. "It's not our day to collect eggs until Monday, but today was the Albertsons' turn, so I expect it's only half done, if at all. After you two finish eating, you could go out and refill those cartons."

  Noah hadn't realized at first that she was pointing to the door of the fridge rather than its contents. A sheet of printer paper, held in place with a pair of banana-shaped magnets, contained a computer-printed grid that had names down one side, days of the week across the top, and tasks written into the spaces: Feed chickens/collect eggs. Feed/milk cow (morning). Feed/milk cow (evening). Weed garden.

  "Chore roster?"

  Ramona nodded, her mouth full. Peri, going for another bite of her eggs, looked up long enough to say, "It was that way when I was a kid, too. The farm is run commune-style. Families take tur
ns doing the chores and collecting what they need. Or at least, that's how it's supposed to work. Someone always ends up doing most of the work anyway."

  "I was thinking you two could collect eggs after breakfast," Ramona said mildly, refusing to rise to the bait. "It would give you a chance to spend some time together."

  After they'd eaten, Noah scraped the plates into a bucket that Ramona said was for chicken scraps. He volunteered to wash the dishes, but Ramona said she'd do it, with the polite implication that she knew the two of them wanted some couple alone-time.

  "I don't mean to pick fights with Ramona," Peri moaned as they walked through the grass toward the chicken coop, Noah with the scrap bucket and Peri carrying a small plastic pail for eggs. "She doesn't deserve it. It's just that she's such a doormat. I know she's miserable out here, but she won't do anything about it."

  "She's a different person than your mother, you know," Noah said. It was a wild stab in the dark, but Peri's grimace let him know that his guess about what was bothering her was correct.

  "Yeah, we'll see. Mom got up the nerve to leave Dad when I was four. Ramona's kid is less than a year old. Still plenty of time to change her mind."

  Four? That was terribly young. He couldn't imagine being away from his mother at such a young age. "Where did your mother go?"

  "Idaho. I didn't see her much when I was little. Dad didn't even let people mention her name. Later, I—" She broke off. "I thought we were talking about Ramona, not me. Getting back to that topic, this isn't a very psychologically healthy place to live for anyone. And Dad tends to collect people who want to be told what to do and then takes advantage of it."

  "My earlier point stands, though," Noah said. "Ramona isn't your mother. She doesn't seem very happy, but I don't know if it's being here that's making her unhappy, necessarily. I think no matter where she is, she'd benefit from a good therapist and some Prozac."

  "Good luck talking her into it," Peri said glumly. "They all think psychiatric drugs are government mind-control tools. And Ramona and I had a, er, very interesting conversation yesterday about vaccines. Let's just say I hope the compound's kids don't come in contact with measles anytime soon."

  Noah turned to look over the mismatched buildings of the compound, bathed in the slanting morning light. "Is your dad actually brainwashing the people here? In a dangerous way, I mean."

  Peri sighed and went around back of the chicken coop, where a row of little trap doors baffled Noah until she opened the first one and reached into the straw to retrieve an egg: they were back doors to chicken nests so the eggs could be removed without bothering the hens. "Not really. Most of them were like this before they met him. He just tends to collect crazies and encourage them."

  "Have you thought about corresponding with Ramona after you leave? You could send her information that she can't get from the people around here. Reliable scientific information on vaccines and that kind of thing."

  "I guess I could do that." She straightened up with a bucket half full of eggs. "You know, that was what Tell Me More! was originally supposed to be, a debunking site for correcting dangerous, misleading beliefs. I don't know how it turned into what it turned into—or, hell, I do know. There's no money in telling people the truth. The truth is boring. What's interesting and exciting and gets advertiser dollars is spreading rumors about Bigfoot and UFO landings."

  She looked and sounded so dejected that it made him ache on her behalf. Even her perky puff of hair, drying slowly without its usual applications of styling gel, was almost flat, which made Noah realize that her hair was normally straight and rather thin. He'd only ever seen the teased-up version.

  "Hey." He took her in his arms and kissed her lightly. "You were right about the SCB, and that's a story nobody believed in except you. The truth isn't always boring. Sometimes the werewolves are real and the government conspiracies are actually happening."

  "Don't tell me that!" Her voice was almost a wail. "I spent my whole childhood feeling like I was the weird one for not believing in that kind of thing."

  He kissed her again, longer this time, until her soft, pliant lips melted against his. "You're a good person, Peri," he told her gently when the kiss broke apart, brushing strands of mermaid-colored hair back from her cheek. "I think when we get back to civilization, you can make your blog into a site for helping and educating people like Ramona, if you want to. You've got a lot of readers—as the SCB knows all too well," he added with a rueful grin. "If you start giving them useful, factual information instead of puff pieces on ghosts, some of them are going to stomp off in a huff, but some will actually listen, people who might not if they didn't already know you and trust you. And you can always sprinkle in a UFO sighting or two to keep things interesting."

  Peri huffed a tiny laugh. When she looked up at him, the familiar light of mischief was back in her eyes. "Speaking of UFOs, there's something I need to show you. It's not far. We can leave the eggs here."

  They left the egg pail and the empty scrap bucket sitting on a woodpile beside the chicken coop. Behind the coop, a wooden fence marched along the curve of the hillside, with goats and cows grazing on the other side. Peri swung a leg over the bottom fence bar and ducked under the top one in a well-practiced fence-crossing maneuver. She looked back, and Noah sighed and followed her. He reminded himself that if he really had to, he could outrun a charging bull as a tiger.

  The cows seemed friendly, or at least benign. Peri patted the nearest one and began to climb the hill. "Watch your step," she said, and Noah hastily stepped around the cowpat he'd been about to plant his foot in.

  They climbed through short-cropped grass, past increasingly dense stands of trees. At the top of the hill was a tall chain-link fence, which seemed designed to keep humans out as much as livestock; however, the gate stood open, and a couple of goats were grazing inside a large grassy square, bounded on all sides by the chain-link fence. Tall poles topped with halogen lights stood at each corner, and there was a wooden structure at one side that looked a little like a fire watch tower. A log scaffolding supported a platform some thirty feet off the ground with a ladder leading up to it.

  This was definitely the place he'd seen from below lit up like a soccer field, but even up close he couldn't tell what it was. The only thing inside the chain-link fence was the fire-watch structure and a field of short-cut grass.

  A head topped with a floppy-brimmed hat appeared over the railing at the top of the tower. "What are you doing up here?" Peri's dad called down gruffly.

  "Hi," Peri called, waving. "We'll take over for a little while. Go get breakfast."

  "Huh." The head vanished; a moment later, Peri's father clambered nimbly down the ladder with a rifle slung over his back. "You shouldn't be bringing strangers up here," he told her as he jumped off the bottom rung.

  "I'll stay with him at all times. I promise."

  Peri's father grunted and handed her a walkie-talkie and, to her obvious discomfort, the rifle, huge compared to her slender frame. He kissed her forehead and started down the hill with the loose, long stride of someone who did a lot of walking. Noah turned to watch him go and found that they'd climbed higher than he'd realized. Below them, the entire compound was visible. The residential buildings spread out in a rough horseshoe, with the outbuildings for the animals and the pasture on the side away from the road, and the garden in the middle.

  "C'mon," Peri said. She leaned the rifle against the base of the tower and stuffed the walkie-talkie in her pocket, then gripped the ladder and began to climb.

  "That does not look safe," Noah protested.

  "C'mon, I've been up here hundreds of times." All he could see of her from this angle was a pair of climbing buttocks—not a bad view, all things considered. She planted her artificial foot on the ladder with more care than the left one but didn't otherwise seem to be having trouble with the climb. "Though I guess that was ten years ago. Hopefully the beetles haven't gotten into the wood ..." And with that ominous caveat, she vanishe
d from the top of the ladder.

  Noah took hold of the ladder and tested his weight on the bottom rung. He could feel the whole structure swaying slightly under his weight and Peri's, but not to an extent that seemed likely to bring it all down, and the ladder was rock solid.

  At the top he found a small, wooden viewing platform, about eight feet square. There was nothing up here except for a folding chair and a couple of coffee cans, one half full of sand and cigarette butts, the other with a lid on it. Peri was hanging fearlessly over the railing.

  "Watch out for loose boards," she remarked. "Dad needs to do some maintenance up here. But come see the view; it's great."

  She was right: while not quite as breathtaking as the view from the ridge she'd taken him to yesterday, it was still worth the climb. Beyond the compound, the gravel road curved away down the valley. Noah picked out the tiny gate on the driveway and the parking lot with toy-sized vehicles, including the red splash of his Camaro. People the size of model figures in a toy train set moved around between the buildings. It was too far to make out details, but with a pair of binoculars, he could have seen everything that went on down there and everyone who came in from the road. The phrase line of sight entered his mind.

  "Guard tower, huh?"

  "Yeah, but not just that." Peri turned around to look down at the enclosed field below them. "What do you think that is?"

  Even from above, it still reminded him of a ballfield. It was about the right size, with those pole-mounted lights at the corners—big floodlights, angled upward. In full darkness, especially on a foggy night when the reflected glare would light up the sky, these lights must be visible for miles.

  His gaze was drawn to a blazed cut slashing through the unevenly animal-cropped grass at the approximate center of the fenced area. It looked like someone had mowed out a stripe twenty feet long and about the width of a riding lawn mower. No, two stripes that crossed at the middle.

  An X.