Tiger in the Hot Zone (Shifter Agents Book 4)

by Lauren Esker

  They'd now been in Arizona for three days. Within the next day or two, the initial group of people they'd met in Tucson would start showing symptoms if they were going to. Peri felt cold down to her bones.

  "Is it possible to test us to see whether we've got it?" she asked.

  "You don't," Lafitte said, sticking a label on the vial of blood before moving on to Delgado. "From what I'm told, it's not contagious to humans at all, which means you and I and the other exposed human, Dawn Mendez, are all the in the clear. In spite of that, I'm still insisting on the masks as a safety protocol."

  "From what you're told—?" Peri broke off, realizing that one of the masked and gowned techs was Dr. Bassi. She hadn't recognized her under the protective covering. "You again!"

  "She's been very cooperative," Lafitte said wryly.

  "It was made clear to me that I don't have a choice," Bassi muttered, edging around to put the patients' beds between herself and Peri.

  Lafitte laid her blood draw supplies on the bedside tray next to Delgado, who offered up her arm with a resigned air. "In answer to your question," Lafitte said as she swabbed the crook of Delgado's elbow with an alcohol wipe, "we can't reliably detect the virus before it has replicated enough to provoke an immune response. The bloodwork from last night shows that Trish and Noah already had a heightened white blood cell count and other signs of infection when you returned from Flagstaff, somewhat more advanced in Noah than in Trish. Earlier blood samples taken from both of you at the Seattle office came back clear. Therefore we assume that once the immune response shows up, symptoms will appear within about twelve hours."

  "Which you already know," Bassi said tetchily, "because I told you. That's consistent with our tests as well."

  "As a scientist, I prefer independent confirmation. Trust but verify." Lafitte's voice was polite, but there was a tightness around her eyes. Most of the people Lafitte cared about back in Seattle would be in danger, Peri thought—Lafitte's wife, her friends—and all because of this woman they were working with.

  But Lafitte remained calm. She placed the newly drawn vials of blood into Bassi's hand and nodded to one of the other agents in the room. "Julio, take her to Lab 4."

  "Yes, ma'am." Some of what Peri had taken for medical staff turned out to be guards for Bassi; two of them escorted her out of the room.

  "How can you stand working with that—that murderer?" Peri asked.

  "I hate her," Lafitte said simply, and Noah's eyes opened. "But she's the best chance we have to come up with a cure and a decent vaccine before this spreads."

  Noah raised his head slightly. "I don't think I've ever heard you say something like that about anyone before. You're not even in danger from this, not personally."

  "So?" Lafitte inquired. "Pam is. My friends are. And anyway, you shouldn't have to be the victim of attempted genocide to find it reprehensible." She smiled slightly as she checked Trish's IV. "I'm black and I'm queer and I'm fifty-one years old. I've been around the block a few times, let's say. Bassi doesn't have any problem with me personally. Actually, when we were working together in the lab earlier, she was telling me about how hard the Valeria fought against the Axis in the second world war, risking and losing their lives in a guerrilla war against the German and Italian armies in the Alps. Her grandfather was a resistance leader. I think she thought it would make me like her better. But I've met people like her before. I've had people like her spit on me before. She might be just fine with me being gay and black, and she might hate Nazis as much as the rest of us do, but that doesn't mean she has nothing in common with them."

  ***

  By early afternoon, Mavis's scientists were confident enough that humans couldn't catch the disease that Peri and Dawn were allowed to roam the facility freely, as long as they didn't leave the premises and observed safety protocols when entering or leaving the room where the patients were. Dawn was visibly more cheerful after being able to speak to her daughter. Of course, the news that we're not likely to die a horrible death probably helps too ...

  But the shifters didn't have the same guarantee. Delgado came and went, checking on Trish and otherwise spending most of her time in the quarantine room. Peri hadn't seen Caine lately. No one had told her how Patient Zero was doing; it seemed they were keeping him elsewhere in the building.

  She spent a couple of hours with Noah, who was battling a high fever and drifting in and out, sometimes fully conscious (if weak), other times dazed and only vaguely aware of his surroundings. When he fell asleep for the fourth or fifth time, Lafitte urged her to go get something to eat and take a break. She wandered up to the cafeteria, got a sandwich and a Coke, and ate by the window. From here she had a good view of the gate and the unusually heavy guard on it, compared to earlier; there were four agents armed not with hip-holstered handguns, but with rifles.

  The whole facility had developed an alarming martial-law sort of feeling. Peri wondered what would happen if she did try to leave. She was sure she'd be stopped, but she wondered how far they would go to stop her. Would they shoot her?

  Not that I really want to leave anyway, with Noah here. But I wish I knew if I had the option.

  Lafitte appeared from the direction of the elevators, now in regular clothes rather than scrubs. She stopped by the sandwich machines before coming Peri's way with a smile. "Mind if I sit here? I've been ordered to take a dose of my own medicine and get out of the lab for an hour or two."

  Peri nodded and gestured to the chair across from her.

  "Everyone else's bloodwork is still coming back clean, by the way," Lafitte said as she sat down. "I felt you'd want to know that."

  "That's good. Is it possible no one here has caught it?"

  "Even a highly contagious illness isn't transmitted to every person who comes in contact with it. Trish and Noah were both recently injured, which leaves shifters in a slightly immunocompromised state for a day or two while they heal."

  Peri's attention was drawn to the gate, where an RV trailed by a small sedan was being waved through. "Who's that?"

  "Probably one of the local agents' families," Lafitte said after a glance out the window. "Right now everyone who can be spared is working on identifying shifters who might have been exposed and moving them to the facility before they can infect others. They're mapping out Noah and Trish's movements since they've been here, finding people who came in contact with them, and then identifying anyone who's had close contact with them."

  "Good Lord, that sounds like a lot of work." Peri imagined an ever-spreading fractal tree of people meeting other people, and those people meeting people—

  Her alarm must have showed, because Lafitte said quickly, "Since neither Noah nor Trish became ill until late yesterday, and all their contacts here at the SCB were cursory, it's likely that no one is actually at risk. Right now we're working on the 'better safe than sorry' principle until we understand a little more of the disease's epidemiology, and keeping anyone who might have been exposed from coming into contact with other shifters until the disease's incubation period has run its course."

  "But what about their jobs and stuff like that?"

  "We're not making ourselves popular in the local shifter community right now," Lafitte said dryly. "Luckily that's Costa's area, not mine. I have to worry about the medical end. He gets to tell shifter families that they're being treated to an involuntary week of summer vacation behind barbed wire. Fortunately the man has the hide of a rhino."

  And this was coming from someone who was married to Stiers. "Does he really blame Noah and me for Thiessen being killed?" Peri asked. "I feel terrible about it, you know. I never wanted anyone to get hurt."

  "I don't think he blames you, as such. You definitely don't have any legal culpability—"

  She broke off as a worried-looking woman hurried into the cafeteria, looked around, and made a beeline for their table. "Janet," Lafitte greeted her. "What's wrong?"

  "I need you to come with me right now, ma'am."

 
"So much for a quiet lunch," Lafitte sighed, putting down her half-eaten sandwich.

  "Is it Noah?" Peri asked anxiously. "Is it the patients? Please, is it Noah?" When Lafitte got up from the table, Peri did too, with every intention of chasing them all the way back to the labs if they wouldn't talk to her.

  "You can tell her that much," Lafitte said.

  Janet looked stricken. "It's the first patient, Sandro Felici. He—" She paused with a quick look at Dr. Lafitte. "He coded. Dr. Begay called it a few minutes ago."

  Peri's heart lurched into her throat and choked her. "He's dead?"

  She didn't hear the answer. She turned and fled the cafeteria, a blind flight to the labs, knowing only that she had to see Noah, had to make sure he was okay.

  Lafitte caught her halfway across the skybridge. "Don't break quarantine." Her voice was harder than Peri had heard it before.

  Peri shook off her hand. "I wasn't going to. I just need to see Noah."

  "I'm not going to stop you. Just keep your head."

  Whether because she didn't trust Peri not to charge into the quarantine area without stopping to suit up, or because she wanted to check on her two living patients, Lafitte accompanied Peri back to the medical wing. Noah and Trish were still sleeping, their vitals comfortingly steady on the attached monitors. Noah's temperature was still high, his heart rate slightly elevated, but there was nothing alarming. Peri took his hand and closed her eyes in relief, fighting back tears.

  A sudden sharp gasp from the other bed made her open her eyes again. Trish was awake and looked like she was in pain.

  "What's wrong?" Lafitte asked, turning from replacing Noah's bag of IV fluids.

  "My hand," Trish groaned. "My hand hurts."

  "What kind of pain?" Lafitte asked, picking up her hand.

  "Don't know. Sharp. Twingy." She grimaced. "Ow. Like that."

  Craning over from Noah's bedside, Peri saw Trish's hand spasm, the fingers twisting inward and the bones flexing visibly under the skin.

  Lafitte's soothing voice faded to a distant murmur through the roaring in Peri's ears. She dragged her gaze away from Trish's hand—relaxed now, the fingers spread—and down to Noah's sleeping, beloved face.

  She'd known him for such a short time, but the idea of losing him cored out her center, leaving her empty and cold.

  And it wasn't just Noah. She'd only just discovered this secret, magical world of people who turned into tigers and antelope and boars, and now she might have arrived in time to watch its destruction. How many shifters were there, anyway? Based on what she'd seen so far, there must be thousands in the U.S.—tens or hundreds of thousands, even—and millions worldwide.

  Millions of people, dying, dead.

  Genocide.

  Peri laid down Noah's hand very carefully. She got up and stumbled to the door. In the changing room outside, she peeled off her scrubs with shaking hands.

  "Don't do anything rash," Lafitte told her, following her out. "I'll put a guard on you if I have to."

  "I don't need a guard. I'm not going far."

  ***

  She found Dr. Bassi outside, smoking in the shade of the building while two armed agents guarded her. The looks they were giving Bassi weren't fond ones, and they made no attempt to stop Peri from storming over to her.

  "Why?" she demanded. It burst out of her in a near-scream.

  "Why what?" Bassi asked, taking a draw on her cigarette.

  "Why would you do this? Why do you hate them so much? They didn't do anything to you. Had you even met one of them before? How can you hate someone so much you want to kill them without even meeting them?"

  Bassi smoked in silence for a minute. She tapped ash off the cigarette onto the rocks underfoot. "For the sake of humankind," she said at last. "They look like people, so I understand how you could be fooled. I have to keep reminding myself not to fall for it. They're inhuman and evil, and they want us dead. It's us or them. I'm choosing us."

  She said it calmly and with such conviction that Peri just gaped at her. "You really believe that."

  "It's not a matter of belief. It's a matter of simple fact."

  Peri had always held, as an article of faith, that people were basically reasonable and decent. She had always believed that if people were confronted with evidence that their ideas were wrong, they'd be able to change.

  But her distress and fear simply rolled off the stone wall of Bassi's conviction.

  "Children and old people and—and—You met Noah and Cho. And all those people you've been working with in there—how can you talk to them and still believe that kind of bullshit?"

  "Because, if I allow myself to weaken, we'll lose."

  "If by 'lose' you mean 'not kill everybody,' that's actually a good thing!"

  Bassi took a long drag on her cigarette, looked away, and didn't answer.

  Peri gulped air, fought down the urge to scream, and tried a new, calmer direction. "It's not just them, though. Did you know Felici's dead, from the disease you helped create?" This scored; she saw a flicker cross Bassi's face. "What you've unleashed kills Valeria too. You're all at risk, every last one of you."

  "It's not dangerous to humans," Bassi said, but for the first time she sounded unsure.

  "You saw one of your own people suffer in screaming agony until he died."

  "Felici was a Witchfinder." She started to raise the cigarette to her lips before noticing she'd smoked it down to the butt. Dropping it, she planted her heel on it and ground it into the gravel of the path. "Perhaps the rumors are right and they aren't like the rest of us."

  "Do you really think you're so different?" Peri took a step forward and had the satisfaction of making Bassi move back. "If some of you are shifters—and I know they are, because I saw Julius shift—"

  "You what?" This was the first thing so far that managed to split a crack right down the middle of Bassi's cool facade. "No, you didn't. That's a lie."

  "Yes, I did, I saw him do it twice, and if he's a shifter, then maybe you all have a drop or two of shifter blood in you. Maybe you all have enough to die from the plague you made."

  Maybe we all do, came close on the heels of that thought. Blended human-shifter families couldn't be that rare, since no one seemed to mind her relationship with Noah. Maybe the difference between human and shifter was really only a matter of degree, after all.

  Bassi was staring at Peri in disbelieving horror, but then her face changed, the lines of disgust smoothing out into a blank, stunned look. "I suppose I knew you were going to show up sooner or later," she said in a voice that was striving for normalcy but didn't quite make it.

  She was looking over Peri's shoulder.

  As Peri spun around, there was a sound, a soft sigh, a scuffling on the path. By the time she'd completed her turn, Julius was standing behind her and the two guards lay dead at his feet. The knife in his hand dripped blood.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  "Are you here to kill me?" Bassi asked, her voice wound tight as a spring about to snap.

  "Breaking you out." He stood casually, as if holding a bloody knife with two victims at his feet in a rapidly-expanding red pool was just another day for him. He was flushed and sweaty, wearing dun-colored clothing that blended with the desert rocks and a floppy-brimmed hat, a hunting rifle slung over his shoulder, another gun and a second enormous knife strapped to his belt.

  "Why, to take me back to them?"

  Julius shook his head. "No. I'm done taking their orders."

  He turned toward Peri, the blood on the knife glinting in the sun, and her chest seized up like a fist had closed around her lungs. She'd thought she had known terror before, but it was nothing like this. Even Julius chasing her in the store hadn't been like this. The conviction that she was going to die, here and now, seized her in its teeth. She tried to scream, but all that emerged was a breathy, mouselike squeak.

  "Stop!" Bassi said sharply. "Don't kill her."

  Julius paused with the tip of the knife brushing P
eri's chest. "Why?"

  "She's a human who works with the SCB." Bassi's words tumbled out in a flood. "She'll know things. She'll be useful. We can trade her to the Valeria, use her for a hostage—I don't know, but why squander an asset? And—Julius—" Her breath caught in her throat. "Let's not kill anyone else if we can help it, okay? Not a person."

  As if the shifters lying dead at Julius's feet meant nothing. As if Noah and all the other shifters who were going to die from the disease she'd helped design meant nothing.

  That thought finally managed to unlock Peri's paralysis. The whistle. She got it to her lips and blew one sharp, piercing blast before Julius delivered a sharp smack to her face, knocking it out of her hands.

  He clamped his big hand over her mouth and nose. Suddenly she couldn't breathe at all. She struggled as he picked her up effortlessly and tucked her under his arm, with his opposite hand still sealing off her ability to breathe. He was so shockingly strong; she felt like a recalcitrant toddler for all the good her kicking and punching did.

  Dark spots began to bloom in front of her eyes. She tried to scream without opening her mouth, but with her mouth and nose covered, all she could manage was a helpless groaning. She was dimly aware of being shaken as Julius broke into a jog, carrying her as if she weighed nothing. Blood pounded in her ears; her sight started graying out.

  Then she hit the ground with a jarring impact. She wheezed frantically for air, sucking it into her lungs until her head swam from hyperventilation.

  Dizzily she looked up. She was lying at Julius's feet. All she could see was sky and rocks, the top of a radio tower—and Julius, standing over her with his rifle in his hands. He must have dropped her so he could use it.