With the M.D....at the Altar?

by Jessica Andersen

  Exhaling a long, frustrated breath, he turned to Thom and Bug. “I’m sorry about that, too. Things between Rox and me were never exactly quiet and peaceful. But I’m serious about it being time to go home. I’ll—”

  He broke off when he realized they weren’t looking at him sympathetically.

  They were glaring.

  “What?”

  Bug shook his head, disgusted. “She’s right. You’ve checked out on May, and we let you. Well, guess what? That’s over, starting now. We’re staying right here, and we’re going to come up with some new treatment ideas, the crazier the better.”

  “I’m not checking out on anybody,” Luke snapped. “I’m being a realist. And you know what the reality is? Sometimes people die when you don’t want them to. It’s not right and it’s not fair, but it’s the truth. Holding on to them, fighting for them…it’s just a waste of effort. I’d far rather concentrate on the things I can change rather than the ones I can’t.”

  Thom’s expression went sad. “Then I pity you, dude. If you’re not fighting for something—or someone—then what’s the point?”

  “The point,” Luke snarled, “is that we came here to do a job, which was to support the local medical professional in an outbreak situation, identify the pathogen or toxin and take measures to prevent the spread or reoccurrence of the issue.”

  When the others didn’t interrupt, he ticked off the points on his fingers. “One, in a few more days, Rox is going to be down to a few Violent patients who aren’t contagious, and who seem stable enough for transport to a secure facility. Two, we’ve done what we can on the identification front—we may have to leave the details up to the feds and the Fish and Game Department.”

  He added a third finger for his final point. “And three, we’ve done the best we can with our containment and prevention measures. The locals are going to catch and destroy all the large fish they can find, and whatever’s going on with those fish, it doesn’t seem to be passed on to their offspring. Once the locals have taken care of the DLD fish currently out there, there shouldn’t be another case of the human disease.”

  Thom shook his head. “You’re assuming there won’t be any new cases of contamination, but that doesn’t play. Someone’s been sabotaging our efforts so we can’t uncover an antidote. That suggests he—or she—intends to continue using the contaminant for some purpose.” He paused. “It also suggests that Rox is going to be in even more danger if we leave. You don’t really think she’s going to stop investigating because we’re gone, do you?”

  “I asked her to come with us,” Luke growled through clenched teeth, not sure how he’d become the bad guy here.

  “And she turned you down,” Thom countered. “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Luke glared at his biochemist. “I’m not going to do anything about it,” he said, hating the twist in his gut that came with making the most logical decision. “She’s an adult, and she can make her own choices, no matter how screwed up I think they are.” He gathered up his dinner dishes, along with Rox’s, and dumped them in the sink, signaling that the discussion was over. “We start wrapping things up in the morning.”

  Thom stood and said with quiet defiance, “If you take off, you’re going without me.” He left the room without another word.

  Luke cursed under his breath, then turned to Bug. “What about you?”

  The stocky, bearded geneticist nodded. “Sorry. I’m staying, too. But that’s not really the point here.”

  “Oh?” Luke arched an eyebrow, warning the other man to tread carefully. “And what, precisely, is the point if it’s not about the mutiny of my so-called team?”

  “The point is that Rox is right about one thing. You owe May better than this. She trusted you to keep her safe, and she got sick instead. Running away from that isn’t going to make it better. If anything, it’s going to make it worse. You either come to terms with your responsibility there, or it’s going to haunt you for the rest of your life.”

  The breath backed up in Luke’s lungs and a heavy weight settled in his chest, making him feel as if he was suffocating. “That’s not fair.”

  “Neither is the fact that she’s dying,” Bug said bluntly. He stood and gathered up the rest of the dishes, dumping them in the sink to soak until one of them got around to cleanup. On his way out of the kitchen, he lobbed a parting shot. “Any one of us would’ve done better by you.”

  And the hell of it was, Luke thought as Bug strode from the room, he was right. They all were—not about staying and fighting a losing battle, but about his responsibility to May.

  She’d trusted him, and he’d let her down, just like he’d let Rox down before.

  That was why he tried to keep his friendships on the surface and fleeting. If he wasn’t around people for long, he could be what they expected him to be—strong and smart and a hell of a doctor. It was only later that the cracks started to show.

  Standing alone in the monastery kitchen, with tens of thousands of dollars of field equipment humming nearby, he cursed bitterly, wishing things could be different, wishing he could be different.

  He wished he could be the man Rox wanted him to be, the leader his teammates expected him to be. He wished he could be the doctor that the residents of Raven’s Cliff needed.

  And maybe a small piece of him wished he hadn’t intercepted Rox’s cry for help, hadn’t muscled his way into the investigation when she’d specifically tried to exclude him. Because if he hadn’t come to Raven’s Cliff, hadn’t gotten himself neck-deep in a case that was far more complicated and dangerous than any of them had anticipated, he wouldn’t be where he was now—all stirred up, with one of his team members in a coma and the other two furious with him, and Rox…

  She was furious with him, too, and with good reason. If he hadn’t come back, their relationship could’ve stayed dead and buried. Another team would’ve taken the outbreak, with probably the same level of success and far less interpersonal drama.

  So why had he come back?

  He didn’t know. And he wasn’t figuring it out—wasn’t figuring anything out—standing in the kitchen. He told himself to go to bed, told himself to shut it off for a few hours and let his subconscious mind percolate the things that his conscious mind was having no luck with.

  Instead, he headed for the auto-sampler and the attached laptop computer, and pulled up all the data they’d amassed so far on the fish enzyme and human DLD. He opened up a new spreadsheet and started plugging in details, then moved them around, poking at the information, trying to make it fall into a new pattern…hell, any pattern at all.

  He was still at it three hours later when the motion detectors shrilled to life and all hell broke loose.

  THE ALARMS YANKED Rox from a deep sleep, and it took her a moment to orient. When she did, when she heard shouting, and footsteps pounding out in the hallway just beyond the door to her room, fear jolted through her, hard and hot.

  What was going on out there?

  She struggled up from her cot, hit the light switch to illuminate her room and then jammed her feet into her shoes, jerking the laces tight. She was at the unlocked door, brandishing her heavy flashlight when the doorknob turned and the heavy panel burst inward.

  Aztec Wheeler stood in the doorway, eyes blazing red with anger and disease. His expression lit with terrible glee when he saw her. “Roxanne.”

  Rox screamed and backpedaled, trying to get away from him as he lurched into the narrow room, arms outstretched, repeating her name over and over again in a guttural, growling voice.

  She slammed into the far wall beside the barred window, and her heart clutched. Aztec was between her and the door, and there wasn’t another way out.

  The hallway was in chaos, with shambling figures running back and forth, wearing hospital jonnies and roaring curses and pleas. All of the Violents were up and moving, and they’d gotten loose!

  “Roxanne, Roxanne, my Roxanne,” Aztec crooned horribly as he advanced on
her. “Pretty, pretty Roxanne.”

  She thought she heard Luke shout her name, and heard the whiz-zap of his Taser out in the hallway, but knew he’d be too late, if he got to her at all.

  “Get away from me!” she shouted at Aztec, and threw the flashlight with all her strength.

  He didn’t duck, and the missile caught him in the eye, impacting with a solid clunk. He howled and reeled back, grabbing for his face. In backpedaling, he tangled with the contents of her suitcase, which were still strewn on the floor because she hadn’t had time to organize.

  Roaring, he tripped and went down, smacking his head on the edge of the cot.

  Heart pounding, Rox took the momentary distraction and bolted past him, headed for the door, for freedom, for—

  He snagged her ankle and yanked, and she fell face-first, slamming her chin on the unforgiving stone floor. The impact dazed her for a moment, making the room spin as he dragged her backward by her ankle, moving his grip to her calf, her thigh.

  Rox screamed and fought. She heard gunshots from the hallway, and the sound of more shouts and footsteps, though she didn’t know if they were from friend or foe.

  “Luke, help me!” she cried, unable to get any leverage as Aztec rolled her onto her back and loomed over her, his body hard and hot against hers, leaving no question as to his intent, only the question of whether he’d kill her before or after.

  She arched her body beneath his, scrabbling with her hands, trying to find leverage, a weapon, something, anything.

  “I like it when you scream.” Aztec grinned horribly, wrapped one strong fisherman’s hand around her neck and squeezed.

  She gurgled and strained, grabbing at his hand and trying to pry it away as she struggled for air, for life. Her vision went gray and her pulse pounded in her ears, hard and erratic.

  Luke! she screamed in her mind when she couldn’t get the cry past the hand closing her throat.

  Aztec moved to straddle her, his heavy weight pressing on her chest and lungs, his too-strong hand choking her. His eyes were alight with excitement, along with something that looked disconcertingly like love. “Roxanne, Roxanne,” he crooned in a singsong growl. “My Roxanne.”

  As the gray haze went dark, she saw movement in the doorway. Seconds later came the crack of gunfire.

  Aztec stiffened, got a surprised look on his rage-contorted face and collapsed atop her, his hand going slack on her throat.

  Rox thrashed as the warm wetness of his blood seeped onto her and a thin trickle of oxygen entered her lungs, but he was too heavy. He was crushing her, suffocating her even in death. “Help,” she gasped. “Get him off!”

  Then Luke was there, hauling Aztec off her and dragging her up, clutching her in his arms so tightly she still couldn’t breathe, not because she was suffocating, but because she was holding on just as tight.

  She pressed her face into the crook of his neck, breathing and sobbing and shuddering, and he held her, just held her, seeming as solid as the stone around them.

  “It’s okay,” he said, voice shaky. “I’ve got you. Hang on, I’ve got you.” He pulled her up and away from Aztec’s body, and guided her out of the room, shutting the door at their backs.

  The hallway was empty now, but there was evidence of the brief war that had been waged. The wireless motion detectors had been torn down and lay in splintered pieces on the floor. There was a small blood spatter on the wall and a streak of the red liquid farther down, and at least one of the Violents’ doors was lying flat on the floor, like it’d been smashed outward by some terrible force.

  As they headed toward the entryway, Rox’s head cleared and she began to believe that she was away from Aztec, that Luke really had rescued her by killing a man.

  “How did they get loose?” she asked in a trembling voice, turning to look back at the farthest set of rooms, where the Violent patients had been locked. Only the one door had been battered down. The rest stood open. “Did you catch them all?” She caught her breath as a horrible thought occurred. “Are the nonviolents okay?”

  What if the Violents had gotten at Jeff and Wendy? What if they’d killed May?

  “The other patients are fine,” Luke said quickly, steering her toward the entryway.

  Bug and Thom were there, looking bruised and battered but alive. Several of Swanson’s officers were there, too, breathing heavily and looking wild-eyed, like they couldn’t believe what they’d just experienced. Jenks and Jake Welstrom lay facedown, their arms and legs cuffed as they squirmed and swore, and cast red-eyed glares around the room.

  “Aztec?” Thom asked quietly.

  Luke shook his head. “He’s dead,” he said bleakly. “I had no choice.”

  There was a moment of profoundly uncomfortable silence, broken only by the curses of the two restrained men.

  “What happened?” Rox finally whispered, because none of it made any sense at all. The Violents had been nonresponsive for so long, and they’d all gotten sick at different times, making it illogical that they would all come around simultaneously.

  “They were faking it,” Thom said. “Or else someone was drugging them to keep them down until it was time to bust them loose.”

  “Impossible,” Luke said dismissively. “An intruder would’ve tripped the motion detectors.”

  “Not if he was using secret passageways,” Rox countered.

  He looked down at her, faint frustration crinkling his brow. “Which would be a good explanation…if we could prove they exist.”

  Realizing she was still burrowed into his arms, she pulled away, though she stayed close to him, drawing strength from the knowledge that he was at his best in a crisis.

  “We should look again,” she said. “Organize a real search, and bring in some equipment.”

  “We’ll take care of that,” Captain Swanson announced, appearing in the front entryway with the dark of a gloomy, foggy night behind him. “You doctors have other things to worry about.”

  Thom’s face fell. “You didn’t catch Doug Allen.”

  Rox’s gut knotted at the news that a Violent who’d already killed two innocent victims was on the loose.

  “That’s not the only problem,” the police chief reported. He waved behind him, to the front parking area, where numerous engines rumbled, one of them the low-throated growl of a big truck, or a bus. “We got here so quickly because we were already on our way. You’ve got more patients. Lots more.”

  Luke cursed and crossed the entryway to look out, with the others on his heels. Rox gasped when she saw the number of fog-shrouded police cars, each with two or three people locked in the back. “How many?” she whispered.

  “Thirty-two at last count,” Swanson replied. “We’re doing another house-to-house now.”

  “How many Violents?” Luke demanded.

  “That’s the strange thing. None.” The police chief scowled. “If I were an optimist, I’d say that was good news. But given what’s been going on around here, and the fact that we’ve got nearly fifteen people currently unaccounted for around town, I’m thinking it’s a bad sign.”

  Luke nodded. “I’m with you.”

  One of the other cops frowned. “Why is it bad? Doesn’t the lack of violent patients mean that the disease is losing steam?”

  “No,” Rox said softly. “It means whoever broke out our Violents tonight has already collected the others. He’s building himself an army.”

  But why? And how could they stop him?

  Chapter Eight

  The doctors worked through the night getting the new patients settled, and watched them descend into catatonia despite all efforts to counter the progression of the toxic response.

  Each time another patient went still, Luke’s tension ratcheted up another notch. He was a toxicologist, damn it, and he was supposed to be a hotshot. He sure as hell ought to be able to figure this out.

  So he left the others to sleep in shifts and tend the patients under round-the-clock police protection, and went back to wo
rk in the field lab.

  He was on to something. Maybe.

  The preliminary results from the subtractive hybridization were a mishmash of growth-related genes and stress-related proteins, any of which could reasonably be turned on by the effects of whatever change had kicked the growth into high gear.

  The question was, which one among them was the starting point, the change that sat at the apex of the genetic response? What was the damn trigger?

  He found a clue in an e-mail from a scientist at the Cod Project, identifying the genes from their last round of subtractive hybridization.

  One of the genes had been identified as: Unnamed open reading frame, designated Cod Project 12.21. What was interesting was the appended note, which read: frmshft del 4bp.

  Luke knew enough to identify that as meaning there was a frameshift mutation, in which four base-pairs of DNA had been deleted from the normal gene.

  He wasn’t sure why Bug—who was the geneticist on the team—hadn’t picked up on the note. Maybe it had something to do with how much time he’d been spending at May’s bedside, looking more and more haggard as the hours passed and her EEG started to show signs of the waking coma that preceded death.

  Luke’s anger upped a notch. Someone was trying to kill his people, and the residents of Raven’s Cliff. That was the only logical explanation for the sudden rash of new cases. The bastard had dosed the victims with something tainted—the water supply, or an aerosol spray. Luke didn’t know whether this was some sort of twisted clinical trial, or a madman’s efforts to create an army of violent human beings without inhibition or self-control. Either way it was diabolical. Terrible.

  And Rox was smack in the middle of it.

  “Come on, come on,” he muttered to the DNA sequencer as the machine did its thing. He’d isolated DNA from all the overgrown fish they’d collected, along with all the normal controls, and now he was testing to see if the frameshift mutation was present in every one of the altered fish and absent from every one of the controls. While that didn’t explain how the mutation had occurred, if he’d found the gene that turned on production of the aberrant hormone in the fish, maybe they could reverse-engineer a protein that would nullify the effect of the overproduced enzyme.