When he straightened, his eyes fixed on Melissa. His heartfelt gratitude was evident beneath twin streaks of tears. Kim instantly fell in love with his open appreciation, his pride, and his humble attitude.
“You didn’t have to say all that.” the captain rose from her husband’s lap, voice cracking hoarse. She rested her hand on Moe’s shoulder. “I told you it was an honor, always.”
Bryant stood and spread his arms wide. “Any friend of Melissa’s is a friend of mine.”
The two men embraced and patted each other on the back with meaty thuds.
Kim’s eyes grew wide and watery. She hadn’t realized how much had been happening halfway across the country. Others were giving their lives, sacrificing themselves, and dying every day. Hundreds of Navajo people were infected with spores, and they needed saving.
It made their efforts at Redpine that much more important. She had to secure those vials and send Moe home with a solution.
Kim wiped the tears from her eyes and cleared her throat. “So, how can we prepare for what’s coming? What’s the plan?”
Chapter 29
Randy, Redpine Facility, Little Rock, Arkansas
The hip-hop groove jumped through the gym speakers, the bass vibrating the gym floor. Red, purple, and blue lights spun across the room. Girls in their prom dresses shook their hips and mouthed the rap-based rhymes along with the singer.
The young men joined in, most dancing poorly but trying to make a good impression on the ladies. Their bow ties hung loose, jackets thrown off, shirt sleeves rolled up.
Rap songs weren’t for Randy, and he hated fast dancing. He spent most of his time at social events quietly watching people, more interested in relaxing than showing off.
He walked past the punch bowl and thought about getting a glass for him and his date, but he turned and scanned the room instead.
“Where are you, Trish?” he whispered.
The fast song was just winding down, the music fading into something slow and languid. His sister, Jenny, whisked by wearing a beautiful green dress, her red hair pinned up on her head. She dragged a tall boy across the dance floor by his hand. When they reached the center, she spun and fell against him with her cheek pressed to his chest.
Randy circled the dance floor. Had she found another partner for the song? It happened sometimes. Friends danced with friends, but he wanted Tricia for himself. This was their song.
Dismissing a pang of jealousy, he moved back in the other direction, feeling anxious as the song broke into its chorus. He nearly gave up and sat down when someone poked him on the shoulder.
“Wanna dance, soldier?”
He spun the see Tricia standing there in a blue dress with straps that hung off her shoulders. Her light hair lay in silky tresses down her back, exposing her pale neck. Her hazel eyes seemed brown in the dimness.
She held out her hand. Grinning, Randy took it and allowed her to lead him onto the dance floor not far from Jenny and her partner. She turned slowly, pressing herself against his chest with slow surety. They had all the time in the world, and life was for the taking. He put his hands on her hips and held her lightly, closing his eyes as they swayed.
“I want it to stay this way forever,” she whispered, locking her hands behind him. “I don’t want it to change. I love the dances and dates. And I love fighting the Colony. Surviving. It’s everything I ever dreamed of.”
“I could do without the fighting,” he said, wincing and shifting in her embrace. His back pain had been there the whole time, but he’d ignored it trying to find her. Her squeezing caused his lower back to ache all the way to his right hip bone.
“But you’re so good at it,” Tricia countered. “I am, too. We make a great team.”
“What about getting married? What about kids?” Randy winced and twisted his torso to the side, trying to take some pressure off.
“We’re still super young.” Tricia squeezed again, nearly ripping a howl from his mouth. He clamped his lips shut, not wanting to seem like a wimp. “We’ve got plenty of time to make a family,” she added.
“Yeah, but the hits are adding up.” He ticked off their injuries. “You’ve been shot once, and I’ve been hit four times. Hell, Trish, we almost died a lot.”
He winced and tried to wiggle around, but her arms were like a vice grip, squeezing him harder, pulling the pain from his muscles and up through his spine like he was on a torture rack.
“Ease up a little,” he grimaced. “You’re killing me.”
“Ease up?” She turned her face up to him, batting her eyelashes mockingly. “I just found you, Randy Tucker. And I’m not going to let you go, no matter what. You’re mine.”
Tricia’s face twisted up with a colossal effort, and she gripped him harder.
Pain lanced through him, muscles spasming in protest. The bullet entry points pulsed like rupturing volcanoes, his hot blood overflowing in lava surges. It soaked his shirt and oozed down his legs.
“Trish stop.” He pushed the words through clenched teeth as the pain radiated around his ribs, gripping his chest tight. “I’m serious. Stop!”
But she didn’t stop, and his back popped and snapped, ribs cracking and breaking under her powerful grip. She grunted with the effort, face twisted in a grimace.
“No, don’t. Stop--”
“Randy, you have a visitor.” Someone touched his shoulder. “Randy. Are you awake?”
He opened his eyes and stared at a woman’s waist. His brain was foggy, the effects of his pain medication. Still, his back radiated agony. It was on fire, flayed open, exposed. He lay on his stomach on a hospital bed, head turned to the right and resting on his arms.
The person asking the questions was his nurse, a woman he’d never seen but who had a sweet-sounding voice. He moved his head, trying to look up, but all the movement brought him was more pain.
“Does it hurt? Do you need more medication?”
He shook his head with a brisk effort.
“Okay, are you able to turn a bit?”
Randy tried to push himself up using his arms, but they shook and shivered until he dropped back down on the bed.
“I’m weak as a damn kitten,” he said, spitting black gunk onto his pillow.
“Not surprising.” The nurse reached in with a towel to wipe his lips before placing a clean rag beneath his cheek. “You came in pretty beat up. You have three gunshot wounds to the back, two cracked ribs, and a likely concussion. That’s not even counting a sprained knee and a dozen serious bruises. You won’t be walking for weeks. You’re lucky you didn’t break more bones.”
Randy closed his eyes and let his head drop to the pillow. “Where am I?”
“You’re at the Redpine facility in Little Rock. Some friends found you and brought you in. They did a good job keeping the wounds cleaned. You came out of surgery two hours ago, and Dr. Sands removed all three bullets. Isn’t that great?”
Randy nodded. He remembered. Moe, Trainor, Hicks, and Bryant. The mysterious helicopter crew who’d picked him up and carried him out of death’s grip. They’d kept him alive on the last few hops, nursing him and changing his bandages. But they couldn’t stop the spores. His chest ached with infection, and his pillow was stained with dark spots.
“I’ll tell your friends you’re still recovering.”
“No,” Randy said. “I can see them.”
“All right. I’ll send them in.”
The nurse left. He pulled his arms to his chest to provide more leverage. Then he pushed, groaning, lifting himself up and onto his side. He brought his knees up, anchoring him into position. The pain was excruciating, but his spine and neck thanked him for it.
He looked around at his plastic chamber. Isolation. Just like back at the Major, but worse. He didn’t have Jenny and Trisha to keep him company.
The plastic parted, and his nurse called softly. “Please keep your mask on and stay six feet distant.”
“Hey kid,” a gruff voice said. “It’s me, Mo
e. Remember me?”
Randy looked toward the sound, and the stout figure of the Navajo man came into view. He’d cleaned himself up and wore a pair of soft white pants and short sleeve T-shirt stretched tight across his shoulders. A surgical mask covered his mouth.
“Looking good, man,” Randy quipped. “I hardly recognized you.”
“You, too.” Moe grinned with his eyes. Then turned and spoke to someone entering behind him. “Like I said. We found him running from some folks near Tulsa. He rolled his Cadillac and got tossed twenty yards.”
“Amazing he’s alive,” a woman replied in an awe-filled voice.
“That’s what I told him,” his nurse spoke, pointedly. She went over the list of his injuries, drawing a gasp from the new lady. Moe only shook his head in disbelief.
“You’re a tough kid,” Moe said. “I’ll give you that.”
“Do you mind if we talk to him alone for a bit?” the new lady asked.
“Not at all. Call me if you need me.”
“We will.”
Moe drew up a chair beside Randy before stepping off to the side. A woman eased down in the seat, not bothering with distance.
She had loose, dark brown hair that hung in waves. Her blue eyes regarded him from a thin, rugged face. She wasn’t beauty school pretty, yet there was something about her that held his eyes, even with the fresh scars on her lips and forehead. It looked like she’d tangled with someone recently and won.
“Hi, Randy,” she spoke carefully. “My name is Kim Shields. I’m a CDC agent. Moe tells me you’re sick with the fungus.”
He blinked and nodded. “Hard to breathe. Getting worse.” He coughed twice, hacking up pieces of black and pink onto the clean rag. “Why aren’t you wearing a mask?”
Kim leaned closer. “That’s because I’m infected, too. I’ve been taking a serum that will help reduce the symptoms. And the vaccine is on its way.”
Randy’s heart lifted through the pain, but he quickly tamped down on it. “Don’t bullshit me, lady.”
She chuckled, dropping her chin and shaking her head. Then she looked around for the nurse. Seeming satisfied she wasn’t being watched, Kim reached into her pocket and raised a capped syringe.
Randy blinked at it. “Why the secrecy? Is it illegal or something?”
“There’s some politics involved,” Kim explained. “We’re trying to keep a low profile, for now. There are side effects. Stomach cramps, headaches. But it will clear your lungs in a few days.”
“That’s the cure?”
Kim shook her head. “You’ll have to keep up the treatments. Coupled with the vaccine, you’ll become immune to the spores.”
Randy blinked again, thinking of how he’d left Tricia and Jenny hanging up there at the Major. They may have given him up for dead after hearing about the failed raid on Ft. Leonard Wood.
“Do you want it?” Kim raised her eyebrows.
He imagined returning to the Major, fully healed. “Jenny and Tricia would freak out if I showed up alive.” He saw the confused look on Kim’s face. “Jenny’s my sister, and Tricia is my girlfriend.”
“Is that a yes?”
“That’s a yes,” Randy confirmed.
Kim leaned closer, taking a sterile wipe and bandage from her pocket. Moe stepped around her and stood off to the side to block the nurse’s view.
Randy rested back and offered his left arm. She pulled it toward her, cleaned the area, and tied off his arm to isolate a vein. She found it and stuck him. Three seconds later, she drew the needle free, capped it, and jammed it in her pocket. She produced a small bandage and placed it over the tiny spot of blood on his arm.
“All done,” Kim said, settling back on her chair. “You’ll start to cough a lot, but don’t worry. That’s your body kicking out the bad stuff. Ask the nurse for a cup to spit it in.”
Randy nodded and pulled his arm back, rubbing his right hand over the spot.
Kim reached out and gently patted his arm. “We’ll come and check on you in a couple of days once the politics dies down. By then, we shouldn’t have to worry about all this secrecy.”
“Thanks.”
“Talk to you soon,” Moe said, and the pair left the isolation chamber.
Randy watched their shadows behind the clear plastic before curling up tighter. He closed his eyes, trying to find a pleasant dream and wondering where he’d heard Kim’s accent before.
Chapter 30
Lexi, Redpine Facility, Little Rock, Arkansas
Lexi pulled on her black workout shorts and sports shirt. Then she slipped on her running shoes and grabbed a standard issue towel from a drawer. She looked around her room with its bare-bones decorations.
A single picture of Pedro sat on her desk, positioned so she saw it from her bed. Every night she said a prayer for herself and the boy that they would be reunited.
It was just a matter of finding the right opportunity.
Her only other decorations were her specialized weapons and belts she’d collected over the years, leftover from the relationship that had spawned her son. While Lexi had always been a good wrestler and solid in mixed martial arts, Sam had introduced her to the real weaponry. Guns, knives, grenades, and traps.
And then street thugs had gunned down her boyfriend in cold blood one night as he walked home from the gym. Lexi hadn’t given up the training habit. If anything, she increased it to the extreme, much to the thugs’ dismay.
One late summer evening, she’d walked down a dark alley where the gang bangers met in the basement of an abandoned house. She’d risked a lot to find out where they met. It had taken weeks of scoping the place to catch four of them there together.
In one of the bloodiest Miami shootings that year, Lexi entered the basement through an old doorway that used to be boarded up. She interrupted their drug operation by blowing two of them across the dingy, drug-covered table with a Benelli M2 automatic shotgun.
It had been Sam’s favorite weapon.
The third man had pulled his pistol and tried to shoot her in that sideways gangster style that made him miss. She’d ducked behind a shelf full of stolen rims and came out the other side, turning her shotgun on him and firing hot buckshot at his head.
Before his body had hit the floor, the fourth gangster charged from a side room and tackled Lexi to the ground, sending her shotgun scattering away. The female thug pummeled her, cursing and windmilling her fists without caring where they landed.
Lexi remembered the calm patience coming over her as she grabbed the woman’s shirt, pulled her in tight, and wrestled her into a position where her arm was hyper-extended at the elbow. The move was called an arm bar. In regular competition, her opponent would have quit the match before having their arm broken.
But it wasn’t a normal match, and Lexi hadn’t come to play nice. She grabbed the woman’s wrist, pulled it taut, and extended her leg across her chest to gain leverage.
“What the hell are you doing?” The thug asked, grunting as Lexi performed the move in less than two seconds.
The woman found out a moment later when Lexi straightened her body and dislocated her elbow an instant before it snapped and broke. A howl shrieked from her throat, something between animal and human. The sound rose from a whooping bellow to a lung-wracking scream. Over and over she went on until Lexi let her go and stood.
She allowed the woman to writhe in pain as she retrieved her shotgun. Then she pointed the weapon at her and capped the evening with an explosive boom, followed by the silence of revenge realized.
Since then, she’d held all challengers with contempt. Anyone who stood against her or got in her way became targets. They were pigs for the slaughter, just like the thugs that had taken her Sam.
Grinning, Lexi threw her towel over her shoulder and exited her Redpine apartment. Turning up the hallway, she passed a female soldier coming the opposite direction.
“Hello, little pig,” Lexi sneered, and the woman dropped her eyes and slunk by, giving her pl
enty of room.
The security barracks was a mix of soldiers from many nations. From Tripoli to Africa to Serbia. They housed two Russians, a Frenchman, three Americans, and many others. Their primary qualification was to be completely loyal to Jens Mueller.
They were rough men and women who’d gotten kicked out of their own armed forces for minor disciplinary issues, or worse. Lexi knew because she’d read their backgrounds one night over a glass of wine. And all were pigs but there were a select few whom she’d hesitantly befriended.
She reached the end of the hall and entered the cafeteria. A handful of soldiers were having dinner or drinks and talking quietly. Two men sat at a table, plates pushed aside.
They glanced at Lexi as she strode by but quickly averted their eyes. They’d tested her once when she’d first arrived at Redpine five weeks ago, cornering her in the rec room late one night. She made them pay for their transgression by snapping one man’s thumb and fighting the other so hard that he’d given up and limped away with a sprained wrist.
She stooped close to the man on the left and whispered, “Remember last time, piggy.”
He hunched over, pulling his shoulders tight.
She chuckled and walked faster, tired of playing with the pigs. She wanted to work out and burn off some steam until she decided what to do about Burke.
Lexi approached the elevator and hit the call button. The door opened, and she stepped inside. She reached out to make a selection when Dr. Bonnie Brewer walked by with Nancy and the other facilitators in tow. They rushed through the rec room, heading for Mueller’s suite just off the cafeteria.
Lexi threw out her hand as the doors tried to slide closed. She stepped from the elevator and followed the group, edging toward the wall as they knocked on Mueller’s door. The captain answered, and after a glance around, he let them in.
Spore Series | Book 5 | Torch Page 24