“He’s got more,” Mark said.
“CRO can shove it up their asses,” Roland said, forcing himself to focus on Wendy, who was struggling to slide one slim leg into her pants. “Now, give me the key to the front door and open the gate, and if I have to come back here, I’m going to be a little unhappy.”
His heart felt like a bottomless black hole. But that was okay. It was deep enough to swallow anything.
He took the key from Briggs and put his free arm around Wendy. “Come on, babe.”
They limped a few steps in the direction of the main entrance, Roland walking backwards. He debated locking the three people in Briggs’s cage, and his money would be on Alexis to be the last one standing. That was one cunning bitch.
“Look out!” Alexis yelled, and he dodged on instinct.
Briggs was a blur of movement, and the glass jar hit Roland’s shoulder and bounced to the floor, shattering, its liquid seeping out and soaking into the concrete. Roland pulled the trigger twice before he even thought about it.
Briggs gave a grin, winked at Wendy, and then he collapsed. The shirt hadn’t stopped bullets after all.
The plastic bottle busted open as Briggs dropped it, and dozens of green pills rolled across the floor. One crunched under Roland’s foot as he escorted Wendy past the rusting equipment.
He thought about collecting a few pills, but decided he’d rather take his chances with madness rather than the sick brain candy of Dr. Sebastian Briggs.
“Did you kill somebody?” Wendy murmured.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t remember.”
One thing he did remember. He sure as hell wasn’t David Underwood.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Alexis frantically gathered the pills as they rolled across the floor.
She couldn’t believe this was all the Halcyon Briggs had manufactured. She fought an urge to kick his sorry corpse.
“My head’s clearing a little,” Mark said. “But my tooth is killing me.”
“The gas has lower efficacy than the other forms. You’ll make it.”
“Yes, Dr. Morgan.”
“Help me pick up these pills.”
“I have to let the others out first. If they haven’t eaten each other’s livers, that is.”
“That’s not funny.” She glanced at the bloody plow blade.
“How are you doing? Is the Halcyon working?”
“Barely enough.” You fucker. You’ll probably tell CRO everything. And all this could be mine.
“You look okay. I can leave you alone for a minute, huh?”
“Sure.”
As Mark jogged off, she retrieved the plastic bottle and began dropping pills in it-tick tick tick.
She wondered how long the Seethe would run through her system without the Halcyon suppressing it. It could be hours, or it could be days-or maybe the rest of her life. As far as she could tell, she was the only one who’d been injected with the serum form, though God only knew what David Underwood had gone through or how long he’d been imprisoned in the Monkey House.
Briggs probably had a backup hard drive somewhere. And he’d probably been too paranoid to move data off-site, so it would be here somewhere.
She glanced at his face and the blank eyes staring past the world. Then again, secrets to Seethe and Halcyon might be locked in the dead vault of his brain.
Her eyes kept going to the plow blade and she recalled how it had felt driving the tip through Kleingarten’s skull. She’d never felt so alive and powerful. And she could have that feeling a long time, if she cracked the formula.
Fear is its own kind of pleasure. Up there, it all gets cross-wired.
A few of the pills had rolled into the pool of Sebastian Briggs’s blood. She fished them out, wiping them one by one, and slipped them into her pocket. She’d retrieved most of the pills by the time the others returned.
Anita stood between Burchfield and an unsettled Wallace Forsyth. Mark was supporting a pale skeleton she recognized as David.
“You killed Susan,” David said, upon recognizing her.
Alexis glanced at the blade. As the Halcyon eased, she didn’t want this transitional feeling to end-that cliff edge of awareness, the black abyss on one side and the peaceful plateau of forgetfulness on the other.
Two kinds of oblivion.
No choice, really.
“No,” she said. “She died of fright.”
Anita nodded, closing a couple of buttons on her blouse with shaking fingers. “Yuh…yeah. It was a fake experiment, David. It was make-believe.”
Burchfield looked subdued and embarrassed. He cleared his throat and attempted to sound authoritative, but he failed. “This is official property of the U.S. government, Dr. Morgan.”
“Shut up, Senator,” Mark said, pointing to the monitor bank. “The cameras recorded your behavior. Fox News will love it.”
“Are you threatening me, Morgan?”
“Just playing by your rules.”
“Where is it?” Wallace Forsyth said in his tremulous, hoarse voice. He sounded a century old. “Where’s the Seethe?”
It’s mine, you bastard, and you better put the fear of God in you, or I’ll get there first.
She reached for the plow, but there was a green pill beside it. She pinched it and slipped it into her mouth as Mark moved toward her.
“Don’t!” he yelled. “You don’t know if it’s Seethe or Halcyon!”
She swallowed as he jammed his fingers between her lips. She wanted to bite him, but she decided she’d hurt him enough.
Restraint. Must be coming down.
Mark yanked the bottle of pills from her.
She glanced at the blade again.
Ah, shit. I love this man.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
They’d dressed their wounds as best they could, using Briggs’s emergency first-aid kit. Alexis’s arm was the worst, and as Mark cleaned it with water and a gauze pad, she made little growling noises that scared him. He only hoped the pain was enough to keep her tamed.
His tooth was still throbbing, sending colossal waves of pain through his jaw, but he clung to its rhythm like a boat riding out swells.
“This has to be worked out between CRO and the government,” Burchfield was saying, although no one was listening to him. Anita was tending to David, who was slumped in the leather chair.
“Alexis,” Forsyth said. “The Lord spoke to me back there in the dark. The devil is in them pills. And I don’t think they can be trusted with either corporations or governments.”
“That’s why we’re keeping them,” Mark said.
“We’re all on the same team,” Burchfield said. “And if what I experienced is any indication, Briggs was onto a winner.”
“No,” Mark said. “The Seethe is gone. I looked around, and unless he had off-site storage, that jar was all he was able to synthesize.”
“Briggs didn’t go anywhere without our knowledge,” Burchfield said. “We’ve tracked him with GPS since the beginning. Picking you up at the airport was the only time he’s been out in three weeks.”
Mark pointed to the wet blotch in the concrete, where the liquid fear had mingled with old oil stains and Kleingarten’s blood. “Good luck cutting that up and isolating it, because that’s all we have left.”
“I’m back, honey,” Alexis said. “But you’ll have to tell me what happened.”
Her eyes almost looked normal. Still, there was something in them that inspired him to nudge the bloody plow blade away with his foot.
“Give us the Halcyon, then,” Burchfield said. “That’s an order, in the name o f national security.”
“These people need it,” Mark said, waving at Alexis, David, and Anita. “We don’t know how long the Seethe will last.”
“Just one pill,” Burchfield said, glancing around the floor to see if Alexis had missed any. “We can analyze it.”
“A drop of the devil’s blood is enough to pollute the whole ocean, Daniel,” Forsyth said. “Nobody should have to see what I saw in my head.”
“If there’s a hell, that’s the only place it could exist,” Alexis said.