The interior heat barely registered against his skin.
“Someone’s here,” he mumbled, hating that she and the wall were the only things holding him up.
Angel opened her mouth to yell but stopped, turned to him, and asked, “Something seem off to you?”
He tried nodding, but it ramped up the pounding. Eyes closed, he cleared his throat and whispered, “Yeah.”
As quietly as they could, they made their stumbling way along the wall through the eerily deserted hall. Farther down, light poured from an open door on the right. Coop’s pulse picked up. Jesus, he could use a vacation after this. Someplace calm, where his pulse would stay slow. Nothing exciting at all.
They exchanged a look before crossing the open doorway and, as one, stepping in.
A man sat at a desk, staring at several large screens.
Coop leaned against the doorframe, trying to make his eyes focus right.
What the actual hell?
They weren’t screens but windows into what looked like living quarters. Or prison cells.
He stumbled forward. Was that Jameson laid out on a bed? Marlon? Every winter-over from Burke-Ruhe was in there, three to a room, complete with bunks and a toilet. And absolutely zero privacy.
“What the hell?” Angel croaked, her eyes wide. She stood stock-still, like Coop, dependent on the door for support.
Coop pulled his blurry gaze from the cells and focused on the small balding man, who scrabbled at his desk for something.
Disbelief and anger and a desire to do damage made Coop take three unsteady steps before he had to stop and catch his breath.
“Oh, sonowyou make it.” The man’s mouth let out a fine spray of spittle when he spoke and his eyes seemed to focus somewhere above Coop’s head.
Coop squinted past him to the cells, where almost every occupant lolled around like zoo animals on a hot, sunny afternoon.
“Jameson!” he tried to yell. “Pam! Marlon!”
The little man blinked too rapidly and wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his pale forehead.
“What’s wrong with them?” Angel asked.
“They’re fine,” the man said, obviously lying, and then aimed a weapon at Angel. “Now, where’s myfucking virus?”
Coop shook his head hard to clear the cobwebs and went down like a ton of bricks.
Chapter 47
Angel ripped her eyes away from the two-way mirrors just in time to see Ford slide down the wall, bloody, bruised, beaten to a pulp.
She rushed to his side.
“Where’s my virus, Ms. Smith?”
Squinting, she turned, slow as molasses, and rose back up to standing. “What did you say?” Every muscle, tendon, and nerve vibrated with hate.
“The Frond virus.” One side of the little a-hole’s mouth lifted in a condescending smile. “The one your little cohort have been lugging around this—”
“You want the virus?”
There was movement in one of the cells. Out of the corner of her eye, Angel saw Pam and two other women lifting a metal bed between them.
Beside her, Ford shifted with a groan, pressed back against the wall, and pushed slowly up. She glanced back and caught his eye. Down but not dead, his expression said.
