The glass doors slid open as Raul leaned in from the outer hallway. He swept his gaze around before it came to rest on Kyle. “Hey, Griffin, could I see you for a minute in the security office?”
Kyle carefully marked his page with a scrap of paper, set his book on the counter, and moved lithely to the door. Raul gave the rest of us a nod, then the doors slid closed behind the two.
I spun my chair again. “How long has it been?” I whined.
Philip leaned against a counter and folded his arms over his chest. “I think we’re up to a whole five minutes.” He straightened and patted his pocket. “Crap. Left my phone in the treatment room. Be right back.” With that he headed back the way we’d come.
Pushing off against the desk, I sent my chair careening across the floor. “I just want to dooooo something.” My eyes fell on Kyle’s book, and I scooped it up to peer at the cover, which had a cool painting of a sword with dragons carved into the hilt. I began to flip through to see if I could find out more about the dragons, then jerked my head toward the main corridor at the unmistakable sound of a gunshot.
Naomi bolted upright. “Kyle!”
Shoving up from the chair, I sent it skittering back across the room as I ran to the door. It obligingly slid open before I realized that if people were shooting, opening the door might not be the safest thing to do though by then it was too late to change my mind.
Across the hall and a little to the left the door to the security room stood open, giving me a perfect view of Raul crumpled against the wall, gurgling and clutching at his throat while blood poured between his fingers. Dan stood beside him with a tranq gun in one hand and a real one in the other, both leveled at Kyle who already had one dart sticking from his lower stomach. As I took all this in, Dan fired the tranq twice more. Kyle staggered as the darts struck but still managed to lift the gun in his hand and squeeze the trigger. Dan jerked and bared his teeth as the round took him in the shoulder, even as Kyle slumped back against the desk and slid to the floor.
All of this happened in the couple of seconds that it took me to cross the hall. “What the fuck?” I stopped in the doorway and stared at the completely unexpected scene.
“Angel, stay back,” Dan ordered, keeping both guns on Kyle.
“Kyle!” Naomi pushed past me and hurried to him.
“What happened?” I demanded. “Why’d you shoot him?”
“We need to take him into custody,” Dan replied, jaw tight and tense.
Teeth bared, Kyle fought to lift his gun. “Take . . . him . . . out.”
Take Dan out? “Goddammit,” I snarled, “who’s the fucking bad guy here?”
Naomi jerked around to shoot me an Are you fucking kidding me? look an instant before she spun and drew her own weapon on Dan.
Dan didn’t waver, but I saw the hesitation in his eyes. Shooting Naomi with a tranq would kill her—the powerful drugs designed to stop a zombie in seconds were lethal to humans in the same amount of time—but Dan obviously didn’t want to shoot her with a regular gun either. “It’s orders,” he said through clenched teeth. “He’s been implicated in today’s actions and we’re detaining him. That’s all.”
“Shit,” I breathed. Naomi trusted Kyle, but the fact that they were lovers probably had her a teensy bit biased. I clenched my hands in frustration, and realized I still held Kyle’s book.
Raul let out a gurgling cough, his color already grey as the parasite used resources to keep him alive, and Dan flicked a quick glance at him. I turned as if to move back, then slung the book as hard as I could at Dan.
Holy hell, but I hope I’m not making a huge fucking mistake, I thought as it arced through the air, closely followed by the hope that Naomi could take some sort of advantage of the distraction.
Fortunately, the last thing Dan expected was a thick book with a big sword on the cover to bean him in the head. He let out a startled yelp and staggered, but that was all Naomi needed. She launched up and drove a shoulder into his gut, seized the tranq gun, twisted, and shot him twice.
Dan tried to bring his other gun up, but between my literary attack and the tranqs, Naomi had no problem relieving him of that weapon as well.
“What the hell’s going on, Naomi?” I all but shouted as Dan crumpled. “Tell me why I threw a book at Dan’s head.”
“Angel!”
I looked back down the hallway to see Philip running my way with Jacques some distance behind him. “Angel, I heard shots!” He slid to a stop and took in the scene in the room. It was a sign of his experience and training that he didn’t say anything stupid like “What the hell’s going on?” or “Who’s the fucking bad guy?”
Instead he moved toward Raul while pulling a packet of brains out of his pocket. “Jacques!” he called over his shoulder. “We need more brains here.”
Philip crouched by Raul and began feeding him brains to stabilize him and keep him from going into too much rot, even going so far as to press some into the wound. Naomi stepped back from Dan and looked over at me.
“I don’t care what they say,” she said with a lift of her chin. “Kyle didn’t have anything to do with the abductions.” She pivoted back to Kyle and began to carefully extract the darts from him.
Philip glanced back at me. “Angel, Raul had this in his hand.” He tossed me a phone, which I managed to catch. “See what’s on it or if he had someone on the line. Something instigated this.”
A number of pictures had recently been texted. I scrolled through and fought to make sense of them. Four showed different angles of Chris Peterson, half in and half out of what could only be a shallow grave in a heavily wooded area. The lower half of his body was covered in dirt, but it looked like he’d partially sat up, then collapsed to the side. A cell phone lay on the ground by his hand. Bloody face, ligature marks around his throat, and an ugly hole at the base of his skull—a fatal wound for a zombie. A fifth picture was of nothing but the ground, and the last was of Rachel crouched beside the exhumed body, one hand on his chest, glaring into the camera with an I’ll destroy whoever did this look on her face and her eyes scarily demon-red in the flash.
“Oh my god,” I breathed. “It’s Chris. He’s dead.”
Naomi sucked in a breath. “And Rachel’s saying Kyle did it? It’s a lie!”
“Would you chill?” I snapped. “Let’s figure out why anyone would think that.”
Jacques stepped in to take over the care of Raul. Philip came over by me to look at the photos. Face grim, he examined each one carefully, then moved to a cabinet and removed zip ties and a set of handcuffs.
“For now we’ll lock all three down,” he said, then shot a stern look at Naomi as she began to protest. “You too if you don’t settle.”
“That seems more than fair,” I said. “At least until we know more.”
Philip handcuffed Kyle’s hands behind his back and ziptied his ankles, then moved to Dan and Raul and ziptied them both at wrists and ankles. As soon as he finished, Jacques administered tranq antidotes to both Dan and Kyle. Dan began to perk up almost immediately, but Kyle was slower to recover, probably because he’d been tranqed three times. Raul’s wound had closed, and he was breathing more easily but was still terribly pale with a grey cast to his skin.
Jacques murmured something about finishing the blood analysis then departed. Philip took the phone from me and once again looked through the pictures.
“Rachel will be on her way out here soon, or will send someone,” Philip said, half to himself. “Hopefully all this shit will get straightened out then.”