Mr. Fairview slapped it out of his hand. The syringe skittered across the floor, and Mr. Fairview stepped on it, cracking the plastic and leaving a wet smear on the tile floor as the drug leaked out.
Then he took out a gun from a drawer next to him and aimed it at Mr. Jones’s chest, and pulled the trigger three times, the booms shockingly loud in the tiled room.
Before Mr. Jones fell, Bryn bolted for the door. Freddy grabbed her and pressed her up against the wall just as Mr. Jones hit the tile floor, light already fading from his wide, surprised eyes. His wife cried out and dropped down next to him, but after a second of horrified staring, she scrabbled for the vial of the drug held loosely in his dead hand.
Mr. Fairview scooped it neatly away. “Freddy,” he said. “Stop playing with the new girl and take care of all this mess, please.”
“Yes, boss.” Freddy let go of Bryn and hit her. Hard. She saw darkness and flaming stars, and the world tilted sideways on her.
Cold floor.
By the time she got her eyes open again, Freddy was at the shelves. He yanked open a drawer and pulled out two body bags. Then, after a glance at Bryn, he added a third.
He unrolled the first one on the floor, dragged Mr. Jones over, and zipped him inside.
Bryn scrambled in slow motion to her feet, fought for balance, and staggered for the door, but Mr. Fairview was already there, and the sight of the gun made her slow and stop. She knew he’d shoot her.
She’d already seen the proof.
“How much do you know?” Fairview asked her. “Who are you working for?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Let me go!” Her heart was hammering. Fear screamed at her to stay still, but she knew fear was going to get her killed. She needed to go back to her training. She needed to think. She had no idea what had happened to Joe Fideli, but if he hadn’t already shown up, she had no reason to think he’d come riding to the rescue in time to save her now.
Freddy finished zipping Mr. Jones into his storage bag, and then unrolled a second one. Bryn caught her breath as he grabbed Mrs. Jones by the arm and dragged her over onto the plastic. The woman slapped at him weakly, but she just couldn’t fight back.
He was zipping her into the body bag, still alive.
“No!” Bryn blurted, and lunged toward them to let the woman out. Freddy punched her, a true, no-holds-barred impact that sent another wave of blackness over her in a sticky, cold flood. She stayed upright somehow, and raised her fingers to her mouth. They came away bloody.
And just like that, her training came back to her, like a ghost returning to her body. The fear went away and the pain got blocked. She altered her balance, wishing for body armor, for boots, for a knife and a gun and all the things she didn’t have. Then she let that fall away.
She’d manage.
Freddy’s eyes were cold and avid. “She’s not like you thought. Look at her. She’s a fighter.”
“I can see that, Freddy.”
“I’m going to have to kill her.”
Fairview sighed. “I really can’t keep replacing people. It’s just impossible, the recruiting fees; you have no idea.”
“So don’t replace her,” Freddy said. “Kill her and give her the shot. She’ll be just as reliable as I am, after. Bonus points—you get to have special fun with her, too.”
Mr. Fairview smiled, but it looked bitter and pinched. “I hardly have enough to keep you fresh, plus our retail stock. You know that. And I still have Mr. Garcia to contend with, which is entirely your fault.”
Garcia. That name rang a bell, something immediate…. They’d mentioned, during her hiring process, that she was replacing a man named Cesar Garcia, who’d left town.
Maybe he hadn’t left town at all.
“He’s nearly done.” Freddy shrugged. “It’s been five days since his last shot. He won’t last the night.”
“Check him,” Mr. Fairview said. “I don’t want an unpleasant surprise.”
Freddy opened up the walk-in refrigerator and wheeled out the other body that had been in the freezer, the one in the body bag. And Bryn, to her horror, heard that sound again.
That scratching.
Not rats. She could see the bag moving, very slowly.
“Oh, God,” she whispered. She couldn’t seem to move as Freddy unzipped the body bag.
The smell spread through the room, sickly sweet and foul, and from all appearances, what was in the body bag was at least several weeks dead and decomposing. Bryn was used to the stench, but what made her eyes widen and her throat close up was the fact that this corpse, this decomposing thing, was still moving. Not involuntary biological twitches. Real, directed movements.
The lipless mouth opened, and air scraped out—not a scream, because the vocal cords were gone, but she understood.
Deep inside, she knew it was a howl of utter horror.
“Christ,” Freddy said in disgust. “He’s hanging on better than I’d expected. I may have to disassemble him.”
“No,” Mr. Fairview said, and came to stand next to Freddy, looking down on the remains of Mr. Garcia … Bryn’s predecessor. “This is fine. We can document the progress, until he’s too far gone to be of any use to us. Five full days is the longest anyone’s lasted, right? Maybe he’ll go to six. Or Mrs. Jones will. I suppose we can give up any hope of a payday on her as well.”
“What—” She hadn’t realized that she’d spoken until the word slipped out, and then it was too late. She’d drawn their attention.
Bryn grabbed a scalpel from the tray of sterile instruments and menaced Freddy as he came her way. “Back off!” she said. “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.”
He laughed. “Late to the party, Double Trouble. Fairview got me first.”
She was fast, but he turned out to be faster, slapping the scalpel out of the way and slamming her face-first into the wall. Everything went vague, except for the pain, which remained cuttingly sharp, and then she was on the floor in a heap, watching her own blood crawl red over the tile. Just like Melissa.
The voices came at her smeared and disembodied, from what seemed like a great distance.
“Do you want to keep her?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe. It’s a bother to set up her disappearance properly. Let’s do it and get her in storage. I’ll decide later, once we dispose of Mr. Jones.”
Bryn felt herself being lifted, then settling into place on a stiff, cold surface.
A preparation table.
“No,” she whispered, and Mr. Fairview looked down on her with that distant, professional compassion she’d thought was so wonderful before. Adrenaline surged through her, and she tried to get up. He had leverage, and muscle, to keep her down.
“Sorry it didn’t work out,” he said. “You really did have a lot of promise, Bryn. I hope you don’t take this personally.”
He nodded to Freddy, and Freddy snapped on a pair of latex gloves, then lifted up a clear plastic bag.
He put it over her head.
Bryn involuntarily gasped, but the plastic filled her mouth and nose and blocked off her air. Freddy made sure of it by pressing his hand down over her face, and all her struggling didn’t make any difference at all. It seemed to take forever, and the panic was so extreme that it was painful, like needles in her skin. She was screaming, but the sound couldn’t get out. Her lungs ached, then hurt, then shrieked for air. God, it hurt. It hurt so badly.
Then it all started to go softly gray at the edges, and the edges pushed in, and in, until it was all a hazy mist, and she couldn’t remember why she was fighting so hard, and it was all pain, all of it. Dying was supposed to be easier.
Something crashed in the room, loud enough to penetrate even her fading senses, but she couldn’t make sense of it. Nothing made any sense. Everyone was yelling, and there was smoke, and fire, and the sharp pops of gunfire. Freddy’s chest exploded in a red mist, and he fell away. Blood splattered the bag over her eyes, and she couldn’t see anymore.