Scorch Road (Scorch Series Romance Thriller Book 1)

by Toby Neal

  He’d done what he set out to do—got Elizabeth and her precious cells to safety. Jogging with Pinocchio down the wrecked streets of the nation’s capital, he could admit that he’d left his heart with her, too. Did a body survive once the heart had been ripped out and given away?

  An interesting question that he already knew the answer to. How had he loved and lost—again? It just wasn’t fair.

  The blast of a weapon jolted JT out of his reverie and a hot streak of pain lanced across his shoulder. He dove for cover and landed in the nearest doorway, a deep fieldstone alcove. Pinocchio, tongue hanging as he panted, jumped after JT into the narrow opening behind a large, ornate iron planter filled with sun-murdered ivy.

  He heard voices. “He went this way!”

  JT put his hand on Pinocchio’s muzzle, pushing the dog down, and the Catahoula flopped happily beside him as a rush of boots went by their crude hiding place.

  The men he’d killed at the entrance to the Washington Club hadn’t been alone.

  Perhaps some kind of militia had mounted that attack? His raid on the nest had been a lucky break made possible by a careless sentry, plenty of firepower—and the willingness to use it.

  He didn’t have grenades now, and the automatic was out of ammo. A couple of Glocks with fifteen rounds apiece weren’t enough to take on a troop of men bent on revenge—and he was wounded now, his arm reminded him, the first fiery hot poker sensation changing to a throb of liquid, pulsing pain. JT steeled himself to look at his injury.

  The bullet had torn through the meat of his upper bicep, embedding fibers from his shirt into a channel that welled with blood, trickling down his arm. A familiar coppery smell filled his nostrils, making him lightheaded. JT swallowed bile as shock set in.

  His left arm dangled uselessly now, pain distracting him. It wasn’t a bad wound, but it was going to need attention. “Shit,” he whispered.

  He shouldn’t have been so proud. He should have gone in with Elizabeth, at least got an armed escort out of the city . . . he could have asked that much for getting her there, for clearing out the Guard’s opposition.

  But he was afraid that if he went in with her he’d never be able to make himself leave her.

  And now it was too late.

  He needed to get somewhere safe where he could deal with his wound and wait for the cover of darkness to get out of DC. He poked his head around the doorway. The coast was clear.

  JT used his teeth, grunting with pain at the movement of his arm, to rip a strip off the bottom of his T-shirt, clumsily binding it over the bullet’s crease.

  A couple more minutes to breathe through the pain of that little adventure, and he was up, Pinocchio in his wake, headed for the nearest shelter he knew.

  Elizabeth’s parents’ house looked just like all the rest on its formerly refined street, hunkered behind boarded-up windows like a belle at a ball shutting her eyes.

  He went in the way they’d come out, through the garden gate with its hidden lock. The place appeared untouched since he’d been here only four short, but endless, hours before.

  “Perimeter check,” he told Pinocchio. He’d used the Catahoula to round up the goats with that command, and exhausted and shaky as he was feeling, he didn’t feel up to tramping through the house checking for intruders.

  He needed to get in the shower, wash the blood of a dozen men off him, and deal with his gunshot wound.

  He’d try to just ignore his broken heart for now.

  Pinocchio seemed to get the message, and took off up the grand marble staircase that rose from the ostentatious foyer.

  God, he hated this house.

  But they probably had a well-stocked medical kit and hot water, and that’s what he needed.

  It took JT an hour to find the medical kit, take the shower he needed, clean the wound, and get dressed in Elizabeth’s father’s clothes. His clothing was so covered with filth and blood he wanted to burn what he’d worn that morning. He made a sling and finally could relax a little with the weight of his arm no longer pulling at the wound.

  The senator’s jeans and cashmere turtleneck fit him weirdly well, and curious, he glanced at the family photo on the bureau top.

  Yeah, her father was around his height and build, but her mother was petite, like Elizabeth.

  “Keep watch,” he told Pinocchio as he ran his thumb over Elizabeth’s face in the photo. The dog whined in protest, but went to the doorway and flopped down, facing away from JT.

  JT set the twin Glocks on either side of him. He sat up one more time, listening for intruders, and took a couple of painkillers from the medical kit. He lay down on his back, grimacing as he picked up the photo again. Elizabeth was smiling, but it was a stiff, fake smile, and she looked small and smothered between the bookends of her well-dressed parents.

  Elizabeth was going to hate living in an underground bunker, which he’d venture to bet was what the army was guarding so carefully underneath that innocuous-looking building. She belonged working in the lab he had waiting for her under his cabin.

  She belonged with him, at his side, in his bed.

  “I really fucked this up, didn’t I, E?” JT addressed the photo. “You didn’t really want to go there at all. You went because you had to. Because I let you go.”

  He looked around the room at the luxurious appointments: the cherry wood highboy, the racks of suits, the sparkling droplets of the light fixture, dim in the soft glow of his flashlight.

  All of this was meaningless, irrelevant now.

  The only things that mattered, had ever mattered, were what a man or woman could do with his or her two hands. The plague was leveling the playing field between the rich and the poor—but even if an elite remained, he didn’t care.

  He loved her. And she loved him.

  The Elizabeth he’d come to know wouldn’t want to be stuck behind a wall, insulated from it all. She’d want to be helping.

  Could he really walk away without even asking her to join him at the Haven, just so she could be safe in a gilded cage?

  He wanted her back. He wanted her in his arms, preferably sooner than later. For better or worse, she was his and he was hers. He owed it to both of them to act like it.

  The arm wound felt sore and stiff in the wee hours of pre-dawn, but a quick check on the dressings showed that it was scabbing over with no signs of infection. JT dressed all in black and used some of Elizabeth’s father’s shoe polish to darken his face and hands.

  He didn’t have any more ammo for the automatic, so he left it along with Pinocchio at the townhouse. If all went as he hoped, they’d stop back here for the dog and the supplies he hid on their return.

  “Stay, boy.”

  Pinocchio cocked his head but obeyed, sitting inside the door JT shut carefully and locked with the key he replaced in Elizabeth’s hiding place.

  Three in the morning was the ideal time to get through the streets of DC during the apocalypse. Even the criminals were too tired of it all to make any trouble.

  JT approached the reinforced entrance of the Washington Club bunker from a different direction, giving the area of the Hummer a wide berth. He found a building whose entrance had been breached and went up a few floors, using his sniper rifle’s night vision scope to see the way. Entering a gutted apartment, he ghosted over to a broken window and looked down at the barricade with the NV scope. No signs of life. The burned-out hulk of the Hummer was empty. Through the scope, he could pick out the heat signatures of the soldiers guarding multiple layers of sandbag walls before the bunker’s entrance.

  No hope of sneaking in. Maybe he could identify himself as the man who’d taken out the enemy nest and ask to get in to see Elizabeth?

  The time to do that had passed when he opted not to go in with her. They’d shoot him on sight as a hostile with no proof of his claim.

  Frustrated, JT scanned up and down the street. No movement.

  Then, inside the barricade, a glimmer of white.

  Someone in a
hazmat suit was coming out of an entrance hidden behind a brick memorial statue.

  There was some sort of secondary entrance, and a hazmat suit could conceal his identity if he could make it inside. He just had to get inside the perimeter and get one. Then, the situation would go from impossible to merely ridiculous.

  He smiled in the dark as he stowed the NV scope, and settled in to surveil the area and look for his opening. He’d never much cared for ridiculous odds—but they were better than no odds at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Elizabeth

  Elizabeth tossed and turned in the soft bed. The thousand-count cotton sheets abraded her naked skin. The whisper of air conditioning, which should have been soothing, instead sounded like accusing voices, mocking her safety.

  JT was out there somewhere.

  Just thinking of him brought a flush of heat deep within her. She shut her eyes and let herself remember how it felt when, in that rough camp, both of them shaking with adrenaline aftermath, he’d lifted her onto him.

  “Oh,” she’d cried, as everything empty in her was filled, and everything small and tight expanded, and the dryness of alone softened into the slick heat of together.

  Every time with him had been incredible. Everything about him was incredible—except for the way they’d parted. Mr. Gruff really came out, and she’d reacted with violence. She was shocked at herself.

  She rolled over onto her stomach and crushed her face into the pillow. Elizabeth wanted to scream, to release the pent-up anger, pain, and humiliation that he’d left her with.

  Should she put the memories of him down in that well with Brian? Let them mingle with the worst of her?

  No. Being with JT had made the best memories of her life—even with the hurtful things he’d said. Calling her a distraction. To imagine herself as nothing to JT sent shock waves of pain and humiliation through Elizabeth’s body. If that was true then the brave, strong, honorable man she loved didn’t even really exist.

  Elizabeth didn’t believe it. JT had lied. Knowing him, it was to protect her, so she would be safe behind these walls.

  She thought about Ana Luciano’s words . . . sometimes you have to ask for what you want.

  Elizabeth covered her face with her hands, pressing a palm over her mouth to smother the sobs that threatened to escape. She should have told him she loved him.

  She was a coward.

  He was just trying to do the right thing: to free her from himself. To make it okay for her to return to the safe cocoon of her parents’ influence. He didn’t understand, and she’d never explained, how suffocating it was to be here.

  Elizabeth had fought to tell the truth about Brian—battled her parents to let her go to the police, stood strong in the face of media scrutiny and attacks against her character: whore, murderess, slut, killer. She went to a west coast school, found employment in a west coast lab, all to escape the lies and secrecy of her parents’ world.

  Elizabeth became a scientist because it was based in universal truths—elemental facts could not be altered. But they could be lied about.

  She flopped back onto her back. She was stuck here. There was no escape, and if she made waves, things would get a lot worse for her, even with her parents’ influence.

  After her outburst in the lab, Dr. Tether had hustled her out by main force. He’d lectured her. “How could you recognize that image on the screen as a different strain from what you brought? By a mental comparison of something you remember seeing back in Seattle? You’re hysterical from your experiences. I’m calling for an emergency appointment with our on-staff counselor.”

  Elizabeth had tried to shut that down, but the steely glint in the man’s watery blue eyes had told her he’d have her restrained if she didn’t comply.

  “Perhaps I do need to talk to someone,” she’d said. “There were so many b-bodies.” And she’d burst into genuine tears.

  Dr. Tether had been happy about that, patting her back, comforting as a kindly uncle. But he was hiding something, and he was setting Elizabeth up if she tried to say anything. She could see it all happening, helpless to change the outcome.

  The “on-staff counselor” was a famous shrink who the current president favored, and Elizabeth had enjoyed unburdening herself to an objective, sworn-to-confidentiality third party.

  After listening to Elizabeth’s outpouring, the psychologist adjusted tinted John Lennon specs and eyeballed her. “Seems like you fell in love on your way here.”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Anything you can do to get hold of this guy and tell him you love him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll call you.”

  “How? He doesn’t have or believe in cell phones even if he had a number for us in here. Wherever we are.”

  A long pause.

  “Well, I’m sorry. That sucks.” The doctor patted her arm. “Throw yourself into work. It might help, and it couldn’t hurt. Who knows? You might be able to use that angst to find us a cure.”

  Elizabeth glanced at the glowing green numbers of the battery-operated clock beside her bed—it was three a.m., but what did time matter underground?

  She couldn’t sleep, so maybe she could work.

  She got out of bed and dressed in the old clothes Lucy had lent her, now clean and pressed. She wanted nothing to do with capris and espadrilles. The apartment was dark and quiet as Elizabeth walked through the living room and out the front door. A sentry stood by the elevators. His gaze scanned Elizabeth’s ill-fitting outfit and then quickly jumped away when he reached her eyes. Clearly, she was a senator’s daughter and could wear whatever the hell she wanted.

  Elizabeth used the key card she’d been issued after her meeting with the therapist to enter the lab. Like the President, Dr. Tether followed the man’s advice.

  The lab was dark and deserted. She didn’t have a desk yet but Elizabeth found a workstation and sat down, turning on the computer. While she waited for the PC to load, Elizabeth went to get a cup of coffee.

  Dr. Tether had given her detailed instructions on how to use the espresso machine. Elizabeth watched the dark roast drip into her cup with a pang of guilt that was becoming familiar. Drinking fine Italian espresso while the rest of the world suffered was wrong.

  As Elizabeth returned to her station, sipping the fragrant brew, she passed a door with a keycard entry that Dr. Tether had failed to show her during his extensive tour.

  Curious, Elizabeth swept her card across the entry pad. The door unlocked with a click and a sigh, cool air releasing in a wave. Elizabeth pulled the door open and stepped into a refrigerated room. Automatic lights flickered on overhead. The walls were lined with metal shelving covered in boxes of small glass bottles.

  Elizabeth read the printed label on the first white box she approached. It was labeled as a vaccine for A/3/H2H4. She cocked her head.

  A vaccine for the mutated version of Scorch Flu? But that didn’t make sense. They didn’t even have a vaccine for the original.

  Elizabeth pulled the box out and looked at the small bottles filled with clear liquid, the lids designed for the insertion of a needle. She checked the next three boxes, they were all labeled the same. Turning to the opposite side of the room she found more.

  The entire room was filled with vaccines for a virus they only recently learned existed. How was this possible?

  She took one of the vials and slipped it into her pocket before heading back to the workstation, her coffee cup forgotten.

  At her desk, Elizabeth searched the computer for A/3/H2H4 and found the folder. She watched a video of the mutated virus being handled by a vaccinated host—and the body’s defenses crushed it.

  Elizabeth’s hands began to shake. They had the vaccine already. Why were they keeping it from the public?

  She had to tell her father.

  Her parents were still in bed. She knocked on their door before opening it. Her father blinked in the light from the hall, sitting u
p. “Honey?”

  “Dad, I need to speak with you now.”

  “Is everything okay?”

  “No.”

  Her father pulled back the covers and, grabbing a bathrobe off the end of the bed, he joined her in the living room.

  “What is it?” Her father was looking down at her, his brow furrowed. “Are you okay?”

  “Dad, I came all this way with those cells—and there’s already a vaccine.”

  His shoulders slumped and he looked away from her.

  “Dad?” Her father moved toward the kitchen with Elizabeth in his wake.

  Her father went to the coffee machine and began to fill it with grounds. Elizabeth pulled the vaccine vial from her pocket and held it up. “Dad, did you know about this?”

  Her father set the coffee machine going and then turned to her. “Yes.”

  “How could you?”

  “Sweetie, it’s not what you think.”

  “What do I think?”

  “We didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “Didn’t do it on purpose! What does that mean? I wasn’t thinking that.”

  Her father reached out to her but Elizabeth jumped away as if his hand was a hot coal. His eyes grew sharp and steely. “You have to break eggs to make an omelet, Elizabeth. You know that.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “We only had a limited amount of vaccine. We had to be careful. Had to make sure that the structures of society would survive.”

  “Are you serious? You know that you failed, right? Nothing is surviving.”

  “We will survive, honey.”

  “We.” Bile rose as she stumbled back from him. “Who you decide to give the vaccine to, you mean.”

  Of course, a man who would try to cover up his daughter’s attempted rape and her self-defense killing—that man believed in selective truth, and that was the foundation of her father. He was not Elizabeth’s childhood image of a noble and honest public servant fighting the good fight.

  Her father was a part of hoarding vaccines from a dying population.