She was already in a bad mood since her brother, Nate, hadn’t come home last night and wasn’t answering his cell phone. He’d probably forgotten to charge it, or had left it sitting under a pile of papers on his desk, or had dropped it in the toilet. Her brother was brilliant, but he had no common sense. If he got caught up in an intellectual puzzle, he would even forget to eat or sleep.
Raymond’s body shoved her backward into the door. The man was of average height and build, with a plain face and a limp grip when he shook hands. Ick.
Today, those hands were shaking.
“He’s lost it.” Raymond’s voice shook, too. “He’s got—” He paused, his mouth working as if trying out words, only to discover none of them fit. “—crazy eyes.”
Well, you would know. She managed not to say that out loud, but it was a close call. He was a microbiologist who thought walking through an empty room was cause enough to wash his hands. Repeatedly. He also took twice as long to do a job as anyone else, liked to gossip, and treated any female coworkers like they were there to pick up after him.
The he who Raymond was referring to could only be one person—his current supervisor, Henry. And because she worked with Henry, too, Raymond thought he could whine and complain to her about their short-tempered boss. A man who’d followed her this morning from her house to work in his black SUV.
Ruby checked her watch. “It’s only seven twenty-five in the morning.” She stepped around her coworker. “It’s too early for anyone to have crazy eyes.”
He grabbed her arm. “He threatened to cut my balls off and feed them to me.” By the time Raymond finished the sentence, his voice was high enough to make her suspect someone had already gotten to his balls.
She looked at his hand on her arm, then aimed her glare at his eyes.
He dropped her arm like it was on fire and stepped back until he bumped into the wall.
“At least he didn’t threaten to eat them,” she said with as much patience as she could muster, which wasn’t much. Raymond was getting on her last nerve, too.
He never stopped whining.
When he didn’t respond to her comment, she asked, “Did he assign you a task yesterday, but since it was after lunch you decided you’d do a better job, and be more focused, if you saved it for this morning?”
Raymond closed his mouth and frowned. “H-how did you know?”
“I’ve heard several versions of that excuse, and I’ve only been working here a couple of months.” She leaned toward him and whispered loudly, “If you ask me, he was quite restrained.”
“But…but…” he sputtered.
“You’re lazy, spoiled, and complain too much. People would be nicer to you if you’d close your mouth and do your job.”
His jaw dropped open and stayed there.
Ruby walked around him and toward the elevators. Her shift started in two minutes. If Raymond made her late, she might just hold him down so Henry could do a little amputation. Emphasis on little.
She entered the lab three minutes after leaving Raymond and expected Henry to be a barely contained storm inside the sterile space, but the lab was quiet. There were other people there, staff who were settling in to do their work at microscopes and analyzers, but they fit. There was nothing remarkable about scientists working in a lab wearing white lab coats over scrub uniforms and cloth booties over their shoes.
Some people were typing information in on computers, some were running an analyzer with its attendant beeps, and some were having barely audible conversations with coworkers.
She went to her desk, logged in to her computer, and began checking lab results that had come in overnight. She was tracking the measles outbreak across the country. It had already peaked, the number of cases dropping, but it was still spreading into smaller towns. Henry was attempting to understand the virus, figure out why it behaved the way it did. Children infected with it fared worse than adults. Much worse.
They were trying to get ahead of the virus, but it was so easily spread that it was the commonly held opinion that it was going to take months, if not years, to eradicate the virus a second time.
The automatic doors opened, and a towering thunderhead blew into the lab with enough force that a couple of people backed up a step or two.
Henry strode as far as his desk, which was parked next to hers, and sat in his rolling chair. It creaked, and she was sure he was growling under his breath.
She watched him, fascinated by the fury on his face and in his posture. He was tall, six two or three with wide shoulders and powerful arms that strained the fabric of the lab coats he wore. He walked with a slight limp, but it only made him seem stronger. Dangerous.
People had told her he’d been in the army, seen some bad shit, and lost a leg to an IED. A couple of people had warned her about his bad temper and gruff attitude, but she didn’t mind it. It was honest.
He reminded her of a bear. He had a beard he kept neatly trimmed, but it gave him an air of mystery. His hands were large and strong, but she’d seen him handle fragile samples with grace. Would he touch a woman with the same confident poise?
Just looking at him made her want to fan her face.
No one else was looking at him now, as if afraid of attracting his attention.
“Raymond ran into me a few minutes ago.” She made sure her tone was nothing more than conversational, as if she’d mentioned where she’d gotten takeout the night before.
Henry tried to pin her with a look. “What do you mean, ran into you?”
She kept her expression blank and slid her gaze away from his. “Nearly ran me over. I think he was scared. Of you. Something about cutting his balls off…?”
Henry swore under his breath. She couldn’t quite make out the individual words, but it was definitely swearing.
“That jackass was supposed to compile our high-containment lab inventories. A simple job. It should have taken no more than a couple of hours, but he didn’t do it.” Henry’s hands curled into fists. “I have a meeting in thirty minutes, and I need that information.”
He was worried about the Free America From Oppression terrorist group. They’d killed a lot of people using both conventional bombs and biological pathogens. Only a couple of weeks ago, one of the CDC’s own, Dr. Halverson, had helped the FAFO by giving them samples of a measles virus. It had come from one of the CDC’s high-containment labs—secure facilities capable of containing and maintaining some of the worst pathogens the world had ever seen. The virus had been changed, mutated slightly, but the CDC had found a way to offer the public some protection.
Too many had died anyway.
Henry had stayed awake for more than two days to untangle the virus, confirm it had come from their lab, and figure out a response. His work ethic only made her admire him more.