“-a week, then we can expose her to it again,” an anxious female voice sounded out in the corridor and I strained my ears to listen.
“Every day of recovery she has, the more American lives that are lost. The doctor has given me the go ahead on this, so you need to stop fighting it,” my old friend Jonas replied and I craned my head to try and see them out in the corridor, but they must have been standing just beyond the door.
As far as I knew, no one knew I’d made that call from Jonas’s phone. It still infuriated me that I’d managed to get a phone off of the only prick in this place who apparently didn’t keep his charged up. Had Saint heard me? Did he know it had been me at all? I’d tortured myself thinking about it, hoping he’d known, hoping he’d at least think to look into the mysterious call. It was something he might have done, so maybe there was still a chance he’d gotten something useful out of it.
“She needs time to recover, why are you so determined to push this?” the woman hissed. “Is it about revenge because she gave you that sedative?”
Jonas tutted. “No,” he clipped. “Stop questioning me, Darla.”
They walked to the door and opened it, striding in as Jonas glared at me through his visor. I placed my empty cup down beside me and levelled him with a cold look right back.
“We meet again, Jonass,” I said airily, like I gave no shits what they did to me, even though fear was trickling into my chest again at the way he was staring at me.
“We’re going down to the lab,” he announced and my blood ran cold. They really were planning to expose me to the Hades Virus again so soon. “We need to make more of the vaccine to replenish our supplies,” he continued as Darla threw him a frown.
“Well maybe we wouldn’t have to if the batch we already have wasn’t going to be given to the founders and the rest being auctioned off to the highest bidder today,” Darla muttered and my pulse rate spiked.
“Stop questioning me,” Jonas snapped at her then approached me with cruelty in his eyes. He wanted to make me pay for humiliating him. And he had the chance to do so because of this sick company and Troy Memphis giving them the green light to do anything they had to to create as much of the vaccine as possible before I succumbed to the virus. “Get up.”
“Make me,” I growled.
I wasn’t fit to fight or do much at all with how shaky my body felt. It wasn’t just because of the virus either, so much blood had been harvested from me yesterday, I was running on fumes.
Jonas grabbed my arm in a vice like hold, his eyes blazing with rage and I tried to pull free.
We were suddenly plunged into darkness as all the lights went out and my heart jolted. Silence fell eerily as the sounds of all the machines in the building faded away with the loss of power and my skin prickled as I strained my eyes to see in the dark. There was just something about a power cut that made you feel vulnerable somehow, like all of the electronic crutches you leaned on every day were ripped away with no warning and you were left wondering, can I even survive without them? If they never came back on, what would I do?
Of course, I’d be just fine if that happened. Dad had made certain of that. I could live in the wild like a beast if the need ever truly arose, but for most people, the loss of electricity would be like the loss of a limb.
Jonas released me in surprise but the lights all flooded back on a beat later.
“I swear the whole world is going to shit,” he muttered as he shared a confused look with Darla. “Thank fuck for back-up generators though, am I right?”
She offered a slightly nervous laugh, parting her lips to speak, but just as suddenly, they all went off again, the silence in the building becoming thick. Holy shit.
Then realisation hit me like a hurricane. Because this was no normal power cut. A laugh bubbled up in my chest as I realised what was going on. Relief and hope and excitement twisted together inside me until I was laughing like a maniac and Jonas was demanding to know what was wrong with me.
He grabbed hold of me, just a shadow in the dark as my laughter grew out of control. “Stop it, you crazy bitch,” he commanded, but I didn’t give a damn about listening to him. I didn’t give a damn about anything at all in this fucking hell of a place. It could burn for all I cared, and I was starting to think it just might.
“What’s wrong with her?” Darla asked in alarm and I was glad that I was creeping them out. I hoped they were scared. I hoped they were freaking terrified and quaking in their damn boots. Because they should be. In fact, if they were smart, they’d turn tail and run for the goddamn hills before it was too late.
“Just go downstairs, find out what’s going on. I’ll watch her,” Jonas growled, and a flashlight on his phone illuminated as she hurried out of the room.
He swung it down to flare in my eyes and I scrunched them up against the punishing light. “Why are you laughing?” he demanded again, his features cast in shadow beyond the light and making him seem like a monster in the dark. But he was no monster, not in comparison to what was coming.
I let a wide smile pull at my lips as triumph pumped through my chest.
“Because the reapers of hell are here, Jonas,” I told him in a deadly whisper. “And they’ve come to collect your soul.”
T he funny thing about buildings which are locked down as tight as a duck's ass against intruders, is that all you have to do to breach the security is set the fire alarm off. I always thought that was dumb as fuck. I mean, yeah, someone could be trapped inside and need to get out or the firefighters could need to get in and all that shit. No one wants to burn to death, blah, blah, blah. But it seemed to me like they needed more counter measures in place against the prospect of some psychopath strolling up to their place of work and letting themselves in via the auto unlock system. I mean, honestly, they might as well have sent me an invitation and just opened up the front doors.
Sure, it wasn't a total guarantee that the door locks would be hooked up to the alarm. But in all the times Niall had taken me to break in to an office building or even an apartment block in the city, it had worked. It had to be a real fire though mind, not just some half-assed attempt at tripping the drill alarm. Real flames and real smoke and a real reaction from the security system to the threat. Then Bob’s your uncle, Fanny’s your aunt and I’d be strolling right on in to their super secret evil lab. Because yeah, I was calling it an evil lab and if Saint had a problem with it, he could suck my balls.
So we required an honest to shit fire. And that was just fine by me.
"What's taking so long?" Monroe grumbled in my ear and I had half a mind to just tug the earpiece out and toss it aside.
Honestly, these assholes acted like Saint was the only reason we were going to be getting our girl back today, but who was the motherfucker currently rigging a car to blow? I'd like to see Sainty boy flat on his back in a parking lot, half wedged beneath a car while he cut the fuel lines. He’d be all like ‘for the love of all that is holy, I just got dust on my posterior.’ Yeah, that wasn’t going to fly for this job. Sometimes getting your hands dirty literally meant crawling around in the muck and blood and piss before rising up victorious, and I was down with that. Saint could lord it over us from afar with his plans and commands but when it came down to it, our team of hooligans needed all varieties of fucked up and if my role was to be the guy who got the job done, then great.