My Next Breath

by Shannon McKenna

  “I understand. Retesting you to find out more will be our top priority. Would it be possible for you to meet with me and my colleague Dr. Cheung next Friday at this time?”

  “Sure, I guess. That’s fine.”

  “Excellent. It’s settled, then.” Dr. Kenner got to her feet. “You don’t even have to make the appointment. I’ll talk to Dorothy at the front desk myself and set everything up for you. And we’ll waive all fees, of course.”

  “Okay. Thanks,” she said, bemused.

  Kenner followed them out into the corridor, shook Zade’s hand and then Simone’s, pressing it earnestly. “Once again, on behalf of all of us, I regret that this happened.”

  Simone opened her mouth to make some polite reply, but a woman’s shrill, quavering voice rang out from somewhere back in the office suites.

  “No! You’re not doing it to me, you son of a bitch! Don’t you dare … No! Don’t touch me! Don’t—” The words rose to a desperate shriek.

  The sound choked suddenly off. Thuds and thumps followed a crashing sound.

  “Excuse me, please.” Kenner took off at an urgent trot. “See you Friday!” she called back over her shoulder.

  Zade gazed thoughtfully as Kenner disappeared around the corner, and grabbed Simone’s hand. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They went straight out past the desk and through the waiting room to the elevator banks without breaking stride. Zade squeezed her cold hand as they stood side by side in the crowded elevator.

  She couldn’t even breathe until they were back out on the street, hustling along the crowded sidewalk. Zade urged her to a quicker pace. “Come on. Walk faster. That whole thing creeped the living shit out of me.”

  They half-walked, half-ran down several city blocks before Zade lifted his key fob and she heard the Jeep’s answering beep.

  They got in and sat for a while in silence. She felt dazed.

  “That was strange,” Simone said.

  “Agreed,” he said.

  “I should have asked more questions,” she said. “I can’t believe I didn’t. I was just so damned surprised. My mind went blank.”

  “I don’t blame you,” Zade said.

  “I met Fayette a few weeks ago,” Simone said. “He struck me as competent. Precise. Not even remotely unbalanced. And speaking of unbalanced, how about that woman screaming in the back? Do you think she was the same woman who came into the office?”

  “Yes. I do.” Zade started the motor and pulled out into the street.

  Simone shook her head, searching for any interpretation of the limited facts that made sense. There wasn’t one.

  “She wanted to tell me something about Fayette,” she said. “Something that had to do with me. But how?”

  “I don’t have explanations,” Zade said. “Just a bad feeling.”

  “It’s like she was trying to warn me,” she said. “But the only thing she could be warning me against was what Kenner told me. If it wasn’t true, then it means they were putting on a show for me. But how would that be possible? That place was packed. A dozen people in the waiting room coming and going, phones ringing off the hook. Faking all that would be a huge enterprise.”

  “True,” Zade said. “But maybe most of it was legit. Remember, Kenner didn’t send you back to the front desk to schedule your appointment. She said she’d take care of it herself. A little too nice of her. Doctors don’t do that.”

  Simone shuddered. “This is so weird. And senseless. I was tested for a genetic disease, that’s all. I’m not trying to prove that I’m the queen of Romania. So why would they jerk me around? Why would anybody else even care?”

  “I don’t know,” Zade said. “But on the bright side, I would bet you body parts that you don’t have Frey-Moller.”

  She harrumphed. “Maybe not. But I definitely want a second opinion.”

  “Fair enough. Just don’t go back to that place.”

  She stared out the window. “I still want to talk to Fayette.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “Really? How?”

  His lips twitched. “Telepathy. You were thinking loud thoughts. Do you have Fayette’s home number?”

  “No, only his work number.”

  “First name?”

  “Gregory,” she said.

  Zade pulled off into a parking lot and pulled a slim laptop out of his leather bag. He tapped the keys for a moment, and he passed it to her. “There. Gregory Fayette. Address, landline, cell.” He held out his smartphone.

  Simone dialed the landline first. The cell phone buzzed ten times and went to voicemail. She didn’t leave a message.

  She had no justification for the dread that kept building. She was haunted by the thought that someone could have actually hurt Fayette. Or that red-haired nurse. Because of her.

  Her brain hurt trying to find a reason for it. Any reason at all.

  “Let’s go to his house,” she said abruptly.

  “Why?” Zade asked. “What can his empty house tell you?”

  “Kenner told me that Fayette was lying. If Kenner was lying, maybe Fayette was telling the truth. And besides. I’m worried about him.”

  “Let me go talk to him,” Zade said. “It could be dangerous.”

  “I met Fayette. He sure as hell didn’t strike me as dangerous. Exactly the opposite, in fact.”

  Zade made a disapproving sound, but he didn’t protest any further.

  Fayette’s house wasn’t far, but midday city traffic was thick and slow. In a little over an hour, they were circling a block of Victorian houses.

  Fayette’s house had a small lawn shielded with meticulously trimmed shrubs on all sides. Zade circled the block and parked some distance away under concealing trees.

  She rang the doorbell, not surprised when no one answered. A peek through the glass panes in the door and then through the bay window revealed a foyer with a staircase, a corridor opening onto the dining room, a kitchen in the back. The place was sparsely furnished. Classic antiques. No clutter, no sign of family life.

  Simone hit the doorbell again. A long, insistent buzz.

  “Let’s go check out the back door,” she said.

  Zade preceded her through the gate in a wrought iron fence. They followed a walkway that skirted the house, wending through a neatly tended garden. They climbed onto a covered back porch and peered through the glass panes in the door at a mudroom, and beyond that into the kitchen. The door between it and the mudroom was ajar.

  Simone gasped. There were two shiny black shoes resting on the threshold. Toes up and sagging outward.

  Someone was lying on the kitchen floor.

  Chapter 15

  Zade covered her hands, stopping her from frantically rattling the doorknob.

  “Shhh,” he soothed. “Calm down.”

  “How? He’s on the floor! He must be sick, or hurt!”

  “I can see that,” he said.

  “So? Let’s get in there and help him!”

  Another thing he knew but could not share. No heart was beating in that house. There was no thermal cloud of body warmth. That guy was long past help.

  But whatever. He shattered a pane of glass with his leather-clad elbow, hoping that the neighbors weren’t watching, and reached inside to turn the knob.

  Simone slid in behind him before he could extricate his arm and stop her.

  He hurried in after her. They both stopped at the kitchen door.

  Dr. Gregory Fayette was most definitely dead and had been so for several hours. His balding scalp was pale. He lay on his back, eyes wide, mouth open as if gasping for air.

  A bespoke business suit. Shined shoes. A broken coffee cup lay on the floor near him, a dot of brown residue still inside. Splattered coffee had dried over the floor tiles all around him.

  Zade and Simone kneeled on either side of him. Zade touched his throat.

  Fayette’s flesh was cold, his skin gray. The room was chilly. There was no scent of human decomp that an unmo
d would be able to sense.

  They stared at each other over his body, speechless and dismayed.

  Things were moving fast. Simone was not on board. He couldn’t make her see the danger until she understood about her mods and Obsidian and the rest of it. The truth stood between them like a towering wall, and ignorance was deadly.

  “Simone,” he said. “You need to disappear now.”

  She looked up, confused. “Me? What could this possibly have to do with me? I didn’t know him! I only met him that one time, at his office!”

  “I know. But finding him dead, right after that bizarre scene with Kenner … what are the odds?”

  She put her hands to her temples, her face contracting. He felt a twinge of sympathetic pain himself. He was all too familiar with the sensations that gripped her.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” she whispered. “Oh God, the poor guy. We have to call someone.”

  He winced inwardly. Fuck. “Guess so.”

  He hated being caught on time-and-date stamped public records, like all the other skittish, paranoid Midlanders. They had good reasons for being so private, but he couldn’t share any of those reasons with Simone. Not yet, at least.

  Simone rose up and gazed around the room, a remote look in her eyes. She’d gone into data-processing mode. A defense mechanism. He could relate.

  Her gaze swept the rigidly neat kitchen. Then she started opening drawers. The first one held two stacks of perfectly aligned dishtowels, snowy white and ironed flat. The next had a single place setting laid out on a placemat. A third held meticulously folded white linen tablecloths and napkins. The cupboards were full of perfectly placed plates, cups, and bowls. So far she hadn’t opened a junk drawer with the usual jumble of rubber bands, paper clips, twist ties, and takeout menus.

  She moved around the kitchen, peering into a porcelain double sink, icy white and spotless. No coffee cup. No sugar spoon.

  She opened the fridge. The food inside had been divided on the basis of color. Reds, whites, greens, browns. Spinach and grapes together, tomatoes and prime rib, cauliflower and parmesan cheese. Corners were squared. Beverages in the refrigerator door were organized in descending order of height.

  She crouched back down to stare at Fayette, the data-buzz still in her eyes. “His shoes are wrong,” she said.

  Zade looked at Fayette’s shoes. “What’s wrong about them? They look expensive. Shiny. I’d say they’re in keeping with the rest of his outfit.”

  “No, they’re not. This guy would not be psychologically capable of falsifying test results. The stress would kill him. He’s obsessive. But look at those shoelaces. One loop is a third bigger and one tail a third longer than the other. A man who likes that much starch in his shirt collar wouldn’t leave his shoelaces this way. He’d notice it, and it would drive him nuts until he fixed it.”

  “Meaning?”

  She shrugged. “If we’re doing conspiracy theories, why not another one? Somebody could have staged all of this.” She gestured at Fayette, the kitchen.

  Zade looked at the shoelace. Huh. It was a good sign that she was already starting to think along these lines. “You missed your calling,” he told her. “Should have been a detective.”

  Her mouth tightened as she looked down at Fayette’s rigid face. “I don’t think so,” she said unsteadily. “I wouldn’t want to have to get used to this.”

  The look on her face made him nervous. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “We can’t just walk away,” she said. “We have to call the police. And probably wait for them.”

  He took a deep breath. “I know you want to do right by him,” he said. “But we can call the police from the car.”

  “It doesn’t feel right to just walk away.”

  “I know. But he’s gone. You’re still alive, and I want you to stay that way. And this place is not safe. I feel it on my skin.” He had to summon all his self-control to keep his voice low and calm. “Please, Simone.”

  She closed her eyes. He held his breath for a long moment.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  “Great. Come on.” He looked around the kitchen. The drawer to the napkins still hung open. He reached inside and snagged one, and proceeded to quickly wipe down all the handles in the kitchen that he had seen her touch.

  He herded her gently toward the door and wiped down the inside doorknob as he opened it. Simone glanced back at Fayette’s gleaming shoes, lingering there until Zade was on the edge of shoving her forcibly through the door.

  He didn’t do it. She finally yielded to his tug and came out onto the porch.

  He shoved the napkin into his pocket. The wind had picked up. It whipped the tree boughs, making the shrubbery sway and bend, whining around the eaves. Stray locks of hair fluttered around Simone’s face as she went toward the stairs.

  He didn’t know what alerted him but his arm shot out suddenly, shoving her backwards. She hit the door with her back as two men dropped off the porch roof.

  One landed right where she would have been standing.

  Zade kicked him in the teeth. That one reeled backwards as the other one came at him. He blocked a punch, landed an uppercut, an eye jab. The guy howled in protest and grabbed Zade. They rolled head over ass down the porch stairs.

  He landed on top. An elbow to the face stunned Guy Two, but Guy One had recovered. Zade leaped to his feet just in time to block a flurry of blows as fast and hard as any no-holds-barred sparring he’d ever done with the other Midlanders.

  Modifieds. Very fast. Very strong. Shit.

  He blocked a slashing blow to the head, landed a punch to the throat, lurched to avoid a knee to the groin. ASP jacked to the absolute max but he could barely stay ahead of this guy. And this was only one of them.

  These two together would wear him down if he didn’t finish this fast.

  No time to think. Protect Simone. The only thought in his conscious mind, flashing like neon. The guys were huge. Crew-cut, lantern-jawed behemoths, modded to the teeth. Younger than him. New and improved. He was used to being the baddest of the bad, but Obsidian research kept churning onward.

  Simone shouted a warning. He whipped up his arm to deflect a club, twisted his hand around to grab it. No guns. So Obsidian wanted to talk with him before they killed him.

  Not today. He jabbed the club into his opponent’s throat. The guy swept his leg. They pitched to the ground, their bodies tangled. He took a hard knock to the head. Fuck.

  When his sight cleared, he saw Simone hefting a wooden deck chair. Her downswing was too slow; Guy One swatted it from her hands before she could land the blow. It hit the recycling bins. Cans and bottles scattered everywhere.

  Guy One grabbed Simone around the waist and carried her off, twisting and thrashing. Zade was stuck here fighting off the other fucking bozo.

  Had to end this. Right now.

  He ducked a punch, seized the guy’s thick wrist and twisted until agony bent him over, then rammed him headfirst into Fayette’s wrought iron fence.

  He flung the guy senseless to the ground between two bushes and sprinted after Simone. When he rounded the house, her captor was trying to get the van open while holding onto a writhing, scratching, flailing hellcat. His nose was bloody, his face scratched.

  The guy’s eyes barely had time to widen as Zade barreled into him.

  He caved in the side of the van with the asshole’s head.

  He pushed Simone into the clear, flung the guy’s limp body down, and delivered a couple of vicious kicks to his spine at neck level, just to be sure.

  He stared down at the guy, air rasping heavily in his chest.

  Simone was curled against the van’s wheel, eyes frozen wide. He grabbed her under the armpits and hoisted her up. “You okay?” he demanded. “Hurt?”

  “N-no. What was—”

  “Later.” He spotted her purse on the lawn. Scooped it up, grabbed her hand.

  They sprinted through the neighborhood, between houses, down alle
ys, aiming for the tall trees waving over the spot where he’d parked. He was grateful for the paranoia that had prompted him to leave the car some distance from Fayette’s house. Maybe Obsidian didn’t have a bead on his vehicle yet. He hoped not.

  It took twenty minutes of frantic driving before Zade could let himself believe that they’d gotten away clean. He found an out-of-the-way street and parked, needing a moment to get his hands to stop shaking, his heart to stop thundering, and his ASP to chill out. That ninety-mile-an-hour scroll in his field of vision drove him wild.

  They sat there in appalled silence. Finally, he reached out and grabbed Simone’s hand. It was icy cold, but her grip was strong. She squeezed back.

  “We still need to call the police,” she said. Her voice was thin but steady. “I have no idea what the fuck is going on, but Fayette’s family needs to know.”

  “Oh yeah?” He let out a harsh laugh. “We’re running for our lives, Simone.”

  “From the people who murdered Fayette, no less,” she said. “We have to tell someone. They must have attacked us because we found him.”

  He let out a doubtful grunt. “If Fayette was murdered, whoever did it went to a lot of trouble to make it look like a natural death. This attack is about us. Not him.”

  “But there isn’t really an ‘us,’ Zade,” she said. “We’ve just met, and our meeting was random. All we have in common is last night. And you keeping me company this morning. When have we ever pissed anyone off together?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But call the cops with your burner phone. I don’t want to be logged on any more databases than we have to. And then we disappear.”

  She blinked at him. “We do?”

  “With your consent, obviously,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m not kidnapping you. I’m trying to protect you.”

  “Yeah, I noticed. That was … words fail me. I have never seen or imagined anything like that. I didn’t know human beings could move that fast.”

  Yeah. Because they couldn’t. He shifted uncomfortably. “I’ve had a lot of combat training,” he muttered.

  She pulled out her burner phone and tugged and wrenched at the plastic shell until he took pity on her and passed her his pocketknife. “My place is close,” she offered, prying it open. “If you want to hole up for a while. I gotta get my electronics and some fresh clothes. I’m covered with mud and blood. His, not mine.”