Juggernaut
Page 32
The back of the wounded man’s head splattered against the floor beneath him almost before he finished speaking, and Nico raised his eyes from the barrel of the gun he’d used to finish the fucker off to look at the slaves still in the room. “You. What’s your name?”
A boy who couldn’t have been more than seventeen stepped forward. Pretty, haggard, half-starved, but with a sober, rational look in his eye that said he wasn’t as far gone as the rest of his companions were. “Bailey.” He nodded to a young woman next to him, who was holding the sobbing woman who would have finished tearing the man at Nico’s feet limb from limb if they hadn’t restrained her. “This is my twin sister, Brenda.”
“Bailey, I need you to listen close. Other Jugs are going to be coming along soon, and they’ll help all of you. We’re not all like this guy was, okay?” Bailey nodded, a quick dip of his head, his face pale beneath the spatter of blood. “I need to go, all right?”
The boy nodded again, and so did his sister and the two other slaves, all listening intently.
“Good. As far as you’re concerned, you never saw me. Please?”
He watched them process that. They had no reason to trust him, none of them. For all they knew, he could be just like the people in Charlie Company. But eventually they all nodded again.
“Good. Now here.” He dropped his rucksack and pulled his spare set of fatigues out. “Put these on a corpse and throw it into one of the burning buildings. If anyone asks, you last saw a guy matching my description running in there, trying to rescue someone who was trapped.”
Nico turned on his heel and walked away. Marc had been his only true confidante, after all this time, and Marc was gone now. He had friends in Sierra Company who would miss him, but he couldn’t let them know where he was headed, or why.
Last year, it had been all the Jugs could talk about when the Clean Zone’s newly formed Department of Pandemic Research and Prevention had had the gall to issue a request for the Jug medics to put together field reports of their observations on the transmissibility and spread of the Bane virus. Too many Jugs were still bitter about how the civilian population had treated them that they’d resented the fuck out of being asked to do a damn thing for the Clean Zone. The medics were hardly less bitter, but they had seen the benefit of contributing what limited knowledge they had in the interest of preventing another outbreak.
Two things had been nagging at Nico ever since, though.
The first was that the letters asking for field reports from the Jug medics had specified that the DPRP wanted to know about the transmissibility of the Alpha strain as well.
The second was that the request came directly from the head of the DPRP—Secretary Stephen Littlewood.
He’d spent months convincing himself that it was irrelevant. It didn’t matter if Littlewood wanted to know about the transmissibility of the Alpha strain, because no one knew for sure if the Alpha strain even was transmissible.
But now they had confirmation. And God only knew what Littlewood wanted with that information.
He needed to know what Littlewood was after. And he knew exactly one person positioned to help him do it.
Shrugging his rucksack onto his back once more and shouldering his assault rifle, Nico put the Gulf of Mexico behind him and set off for Colorado Springs.
Don’t miss the continuation of Nico and Zach’s story in Bane!
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Explore more of this exciting universe in Strain!
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The Laird’s Forbidden Lover
Saugatuck Summer
Player vs Player
Strain series
Strain
Bane (coming soon)
The Professor’s Rule series, with Heidi Belleau:
Giving an Inch
An Inch at a Time
Inch by Inch
Every Inch of the Way
To the Very Last Inch
Impulse (A novel in three parts)
Inertia, Book One
Acceleration, Book Two
Velocity, Book Three
Impulse: The Complete Trilogy
Amelia C. Gormley may seem like anyone else. But the truth is she sings in the shower, dances doing laundry, and writes blisteringly hot m/m erotic romance while her son is at school. When she’s not writing in her Pacific Northwest home, Amelia single-handedly juggles her husband, her son, their home, and the obstacles of life by turning into an everyday superhero. And that, she supposes, is just like anyone else.
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