by Cindy Dees
The last door in the back of the upper floor revealed the only fully furnished bedroom. Refrigerator-esque cold skittered across his skin in the dim space. A double bed took up one wall, and a low cot covered with a lavender comforter sat in the far corner underneath what must be an industrial strength air-conditioner. Even now, the thing was humming away, blasting the room with chilly air. Good luck against the inferno to come. All across the top of the unit, small blue bottles stood in a neat row. He picked one up to have a look. The label was written in some Arabesque language he did not read. He snapped a quick photo of it on his cell phone before tossing it aside.
He threw open the closet door and peered in just long enough to rule it out as Piper’s hiding place. Unfamiliar and altogether unpleasant, panic started to claw at his gut.
He tore back downstairs. The ceiling of the living room was on fire now, along with the curtains and exterior wall. Heat roared toward him, and the fire was getting loud.
He bolted past it one more time to the back of the house. He’d have seen her go out the back door from his vantage point, and she definitely hadn’t gone out the front door. She had to be in here, somewhere.
Where. Was. She?
He skidded to a frustrated stop in the kitchen. The first door he threw open was a pantry. The second door revealed a staircase, however. Basement. Casting a worried glance over his shoulder at the fire now consuming the front of the house, he raced down the steps into the dark.
He narrowly avoided hitting his head and was forced to slow down. “Piper! Are you down here?”
“Mike? What the hell are you doing here?”
“Saving your—” He rounded the corner and skidded to a halt in the middle of a high-tech lab set-up that looked as if it belonged at a major pharmaceutical firm. “What’s this?” he blurted.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she muttered over her shoulder as she fooled with a display on some sort of bulky machine.
“Are you aware that the house is on fire?”
That made her look up. “What?”
“Burning merrily overhead as we speak. We have to get out of here, now.”
“I can’t go yet. I’ve got to collect samples. Bag and tag them so we can figure out what was going on in here.”
“Piper. The house is on fire.”
As if to emphasize his point, a burning ember fell from the ceiling at the far end of the long lab, right about underneath where the bonfire ought to be.
“I’m sorry, Mike, but I can’t leave until I get samples. This is too important.”
“You won’t get any samples out if you don’t leave with me now.”
“Shut up and find me a plastic bag or something like that.”
He stared at her in disbelief. Was she shitting him? The house was burning down around their ears and she wanted to play forensic investigator? He searched for a heavy object to conk her over the head with. He would knock her out and carry her from the burning building—
—He spied a cardboard box of plastic sandwich bags. Momentarily derailed from his plan, he spat, “Here are the damned bags.”
“Put those dead mice in the bags. One mouse per bag. And whatever you do, don’t touch the mice. And you might want to hold your breath when you’re in proximity to them. No telling what diseases they incubated.”
He stared in disgust at the pile of little corpses she must have retrieved from the trash can next to her. Incubated? Diseases? Jesus. What was this place? He glanced around and spied another row of those little blue bottles on a high shelf along with other bottles of chemical supplies.
A forearm-sized piece of wood tumbled to the floor with a loud clatter behind them. He jumped. “Gotta go,” he urged in a singsong voice of impatience.
“I think I’ve found it…one more sec…ah hah!”
He couldn’t help glancing at the computer screen she was watching intently. Numbers and long scientific words scrolled across the readout. “Just take the whole damned hard drive with you and let’s go.”
“Can’t. Hard drive is in that tower over there.” She pointed at a man-sized server array in the corner. Jesus. What was going on here that required so much computing power?
She plugged a thumb drive into the side of the computer terminal on the desk and grinned up at him triumphantly. “Take a quick look around while I download this data. As soon as it’s done, we can get out of here.”
“Assuming the kitchen’s not an inferno,” he replied grimly.
He took a few steps toward the far end of the lab and spied something that made him suck in a sharp breath.
“What?” Piper asked quickly.
“Don’t look,” he bit out. “Finish up over there.” He whipped out his high-intensity flashlight and pointed it into the shadows.
“Ohmigod,” Piper gasped from behind him. Of course, she’d looked. Dammit.
He stared in raw horror at the pile of dead human bodies encased in clear plastic body bags. They weren’t neatly laid out like a morgue. Some of them were curled into fetal balls, some had arms or knees sticking up inside their transparent plastic sarcophagi. Some lay in dark pools of dried blood inside their individual body bags. The flashlight caught a pair of eyes staring back at him out of a black-skinned face. What should have been the whites of the young woman’s eyes were blood red.
The satanic death stare chilled Mike to the bone. He’d seen some messed up shit in his day, but this took the cake.
Piper bumped into him from behind. “Are they all dead?” she asked in horror.
He bit out grimly, “If living people get put into body bags they suffocate soon enough. Those bags are meant to keep in bodily fluids and smell of decay. They’re water and air-tight.”
“How did they die?” She started to move forward toward the pile of corpses.
The ceiling over the dead bodies was sagging noticeably and the smoke that had started gathering near the ceiling was seeping upward into cracks in the sagging spot at an increasing rate.
“No time to investigate. The ceiling’s about to collapse, and we’ll burn to death if we stay here!”
“Pictures. We need proof.”
“Jesus Christ!” At this point it was more efficient to do what she said than to argue with her. Frustrated and frantic, he whipped out his cell phone and stabbed at it to bring up the camera function. He snapped a half-dozen pictures fast. “Can we go now?”
“Yeah. Sure. Cool your jets—”
The rest of her words were drowned out as the ceiling gave way in slow motion, blackened beams cracking and falling like a flaming mass of pick-up sticks. He shoved her violently behind him, then swore and threw up his arm to ward off a burning brand from above. He batted at his hair to quell any burning embers. Inferno heat poured over him. This place was going to be a no-shit oven in a few seconds.
“Up the stairs!” he shouted over the roar of the bonfire as the entire pile of flaming mattresses and bed frames collapsed through the hole.
Searing heat made the air too hot to breathe. Sleeve thrown over his mouth, he turned and ran for his life. Piper scrambled ahead of him as a rush of unbelievably hot air followed them up the makeshift chimney that the stairwell had just become.
Smoke, black and blindingly thick, billowed around them. He found the handrail and clung to it for all he was worth as he raced upward in a blackness blacker than night.
He burst into the kitchen and fell to his hands and knees, beneath the pall of smoke filling the room fast. Piper became visible a foot ahead of him. She was looking back over her shoulder in panic toward him.
“Where to?” she screamed over the unbelievable noise, hands outstretched and obviously disoriented. He saw her eyes were screwed shut. Must have gotten smoke in them and temporarily blinded herself.
He crawled past her fast, heading for the back door he’d seen the Palestinian use earlier. On the way by, he grabbed her hand and wrapped it around his belt. She hung on for dear life as he scooted for the door as
fast as his hands and knees would carry him. The ceiling was on fire and burning crap rained down all around him, burning his face and back where it burned through his shirt.
The top of his head banged into something hard. He felt a door panel and groped frantically for a doorknob. His fingers screamed in pain as he touched scorching hot metal. Quickly, he yanked his cuff down over his hand and opened the door.
He started to stand up to make better time, and was slammed flat by Piper throwing herself on top of him just as a violent wave of fire rushed through the doorway barely above them.
“Backdraft!” she shouted as she rolled off him.
Jesus. She’d just saved his life.
He scrambled on his belly across the porch and down the steps. Shit was falling off the sides of the burning building and he pushed to his feet and sprinted a hundred feet or so away from the house until the worst of the blistering heat on his back subsided.
He fell to one knee, coughing like a chain smoker. Piper hacked and coughed beside him. Her face was soot-smudged and blistered and tears streamed down her cheeks, striping the mess, yet she still managed to be just about the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen. He’d found her in time. And he’d pried her away from her damned investigation in the nick of time. They’d made it. They were alive.
“Well, that was fun,” she gasped.
He sucked in a lungful of cool, fresh air just as a half-dozen popping noises exploded behind them. “Get down!” he ordered her urgently.
“What’s happening?” Piper asked from above him. “Is the house exploding or something?”
He grabbed her arm and yanked her off her feet violently.
“Hey!” she protested as she hit the dirt beside him.
“Gunfire,” he bit out, pulling out his sidearm. “Someone’s shooting at us.”
“Who the hell’s firing at us?” she exclaimed.
He took a general position fix on the direction of the gunfire and realized it would ultimately drive them back into the burning building. Sonofabitch. “Someone wants us to go back into that fire.”
“We can’t go back in there. We’ll die!”
No shit, Sherlock.
“Cover,” she bit out. “We need cover.”
He looked around desperately. Off to their left. A cluster of bushes with a small boulder nestled in the middle of them. “On my mark,” he bit out in her ear, “Run for that rock.”
As soon as she nodded, he ordered, “Now.”
They jumped up and ran like bats out of hell for the scant cover of the boulder. He noted that she knew to zigzag and make herself a harder target to hit, at any rate. He dived behind the rock just as another volley of gunfire exploded behind them. From the direction of the driveway.
“Gotta be the white guys who went into the house after the Palestinian left,” he muttered tightly.
A distressed look crossed Piper’s face. Under her breath, she muttered, “They had better not be shooting at me.” Louder, pitched for him to hear, she suggested, “Maybe it’s locals who don’t appreciate foreigners poking around.”
Doubtful. Despite being on the wrong side of a violently disputed border, this place was out in the middle of nowhere.
She asked low, “How much ammo have you got?”
“Not enough for a gunfight. You?”
She pulled a pistol out of a holster in the small of her back. “Two partial clips. Call it twenty rounds.”
“How are you at stealth evasion?”
“I guess we’re about to find out,” she replied wryly.
Good point. They couldn’t sit here and get picked off like sitting ducks. He held up his fist and gave her the signal to move out.
Eight
Thank God Mike had stopped creeping around in the bush for a second. Breathing heavily, Piper tried to have a heart attack quietly but feared she was failing. Why had the PHP guys Mike had spotted—for surely he’d seen the same two men she’d already spotted—set the house on fire? And furthermore, why had they stuck around to shoot at her and Mike? Had they gotten orders to make sure nobody put out the fire?
If so, who gave the order? And why would the Americans follow orders from anyone associated with that nightmare lab in the basement?
For all the PHP guys knew, she and Mike had been innocent passersby who’d only gone into the burning house to make sure no one was trapped inside. Right. Because anyone innocent would happen to be strolling past a hidden lab in the middle of freaking nowhere. If one of the most dangerous countries on earth could properly be classed ‘nowhere’.
She could not wait to get her thumb drive and those dead mice back to a lab and figure out what had been going on in that secret lab. Memory of bloodshot, dead eyes staring accusingly at her, nearly made her wretch. Fatima said El Noor was shipping girls with hemorrhagic fevers south. To die horribly and end up in body bags? Why?
The lab equipment in the basement gave credence to the idea that someone was researching hemorrhagic diseases. To what end? And why would the Patrick Henry Patriots give a damn? The only possible leaps of logic she could think of frankly made her stomach want to heave.
She flashed a hand signal at Mike asking if they could talk aloud. He shook his head in the negative. Paranoid, much? Not that she was in any position to cast stones at him for that just now. He’d saved her life, for crying out loud. She wouldn’t have had any idea the house was on fire until the ceiling fell in. And knowing her luck, she would have been elbow deep in those body bags when the roof caved in. An involuntary shudder rippled through her. Sheesh. That had been way too close a call.
Something slithered away into the weeds no more than three feet from her nose and she lurched hard against Mike. He wrapped an arm around her shoulders and gave her a reassuring squeeze. She was never, ever, crawling around on her belly in the African bush again. She’d seen more gigantic, creepy bugs—and snakes—and lizards—nose-to-nose today than she ever cared to again. Knowing Africa, most of them were wickedly venomous, too.
Her throat was parched and the back of her neck must look like boiled lobster. She stifled a cough against the inside of her elbow for the hundredth time—she was still hocking up phlegm after inhaling all that smoke. The bottoms of Mike’s boots disappeared around yet another clump of the local sawgrass that had already sliced her cheeks a half-dozen times this afternoon. She followed grimly, hesitating to imagine how it was possible to be any more miserable than this, lest she jinx herself into finding out.
Mike rose to a crouch in front of her and a sharp knife of hope stabbed through her. Please God, let this be the end of their ankle-high safari. He scanned all around through his infrared goggles and gestured her up beside him. Praise the Lord and pass the potatoes.
He put his mouth on her ear to whisper, “My Jeep’s just ahead. I think our shooters have left the area.”
Grateful nearly to tears, she followed him behind a big clump of scrub and climbed into the passenger seat of his Jeep. She had no idea where her motorcycle was at this point. She wished it and whoever found it god speed. Mike started the engine, but more importantly, he turned the air conditioner up to full blast.
She groaned in pleasure as marginally cool air blew in her face. A little civilization went a long way after a day like today. She might run around here trying to act like one of the boys, but she liked her creature comforts every bit as much as the next girl. He eased the vehicle forward very slowly.
“You think they may still be out there?” she asked.
“Not likely. I’m just trying not to lay down a big trail of dust and announce our presence to everyone within a mile of our position. Even if your guys have left, that doesn’t mean this area is by any means safe for us.”
“They’re not my guys,” she snapped a little peevishly.
“They’re your targets, right?” he asked evenly.
Too evenly. She might not know him all that well, but she knew him well enough to know that he was not a happy man at the moment. What w
asn’t he telling her about the dangers out here? “What’s wrong, Mike?”
“Care to explain why your guys hooked up with my target all of a sudden and burned down his lab for him when he was done with it?”
“The logical assumption is that they work together,” she replied reluctantly. Please, God, let that not be true.
Silence fell between them as Mike steered the Jeep onto a paved road and picked up speed. And it wasn’t one of those contemplating the countryside together in companionable quiet silences. This one simmered and stewed, twisting angrily throughout the vehicle, wrapping itself around Mike and lashing out at her every minute or two.
What was his trauma? She’d already asked him once what was wrong. She’d be damned if she asked him again.
After maybe a half-hour of driving northward, he spoke, this voice vibrating with tightly controlled anger. “The first two times your investigation put you across my path, I thought it was chance that our respective investigations brought us together. K-Town’s not that big a place at the end of the day. But now I’m starting to think you and I may be investigating the same problem.”
“I’m following a group of American, back-to-pre-industrial-revolution separatists. How do they have anything to do with a Palestinian scientist/terrorist?”
“Answer that, and we may figure out what both of our targets are up to.”
Reluctantly, she had to agree with him. Three times, now, tracking her targets had led her straight to Mike. Either he and she were following the same terrorist trail or the gods of fate were playing a grand joke on the two of them. And she didn’t happen to believe in fate.
“Any brilliant ideas on how we should proceed?” she asked, leaning her head back against the headrest and closing her eyes.
“That’s a hell of a question, given that I had to let my target go so I could run into that house and save your neck. Again.” He thumped both hands on the steering wheel in anger. “I had him, dammit. I had visual on the bastard. I’ve been tracking him for months!”