“Then what kind of sales is it? Where are you working?”
“It’s a temporary gig. It’s a pharmaceutical research company and—”
She shoved him, hard, against the wall again. “Fucking drugs!”
“No! Well, yes, but research. Legal drugs. I swear!” He kept his hands up, didn’t try fighting her off. “Hey, I was at the VA pain clinic a few days ago and this guy was looking for test subjects. Look at me.”
He finally stepped sideways out of her grip and did a little tap dance in place. “When was the last time you’ve seen me do that? This is legit.”
Her eyes widened as she stepped back. Even deep in a high, he still had pain. Getting high only made him not give a shit about the pain. “Do that again.”
Still grinning, he did a little dance in place. “See?”
“What…what the hell?”
“It’s a neuroblocker or something. I don’t understand it.”
She didn’t want to let hope creep in. She’d been down that road with him before and it only got her hurt. “Is that where you’ve been?”
“Yeah. Holy cow, I feel great! I was going to tell Dad, but since it’s a preliminary study, they said they can’t have him in it yet because he’s related to me.”
“So what, exactly, are you doing?” The bullshit buzzer was still clanging in her brain, only not as loudly now.
“Finding them people for the program. I get a kickback for every person, as well as free meds.” He stepped forward. “Sis, I swear, this is legit.”
“They know you use?”
“Yeah, they said it doesn’t matter. Honestly? As good as I feel right now, I don’t have any desire to use. I haven’t felt this damned good since I got hurt.” His expression turned sad. “Sis, I swear. I know I’ve sucked as a brother and a son lately, but this is it. This is my chance.”
“Why are they doing this secretly?”
“Because apparently all the government bullshit right now with Kite research going on, every available lab is supposed to be working on that and nothing else. They’d just started their clinical trials when all that hit the fan. So they’re doing these small-scale tests locally, under the radar, to make sure everything’s okay so that when a Kite vaccine is found and they can openly go back to their research, they already have data.”
Nope, back to bullshit. “You don’t find that…fishy?”
“No, man. And the place is clean. A real lab, not some meth house set up in someone’s shed.”
“Where is it?”
“I can’t say. I put the researchers in contact with potential test subjects and they go from there.”
“If this is a secret, why are you telling me? And why can’t you talk them into taking Dad?”
“They said once this round of research is done and they have their data compiled, then they’ll talk about expanding the field. He’s first on the wait list, I swear he is.”
“You going to tell Mom and Dad?”
“I can’t. Please, don’t tell them.”
“Why not?”
“Because they could kick me out of the program for even telling you.”
“Then why’d you tell me?”
He pointed to the knife still in her hand. “Because I love you, but you scare the crap out of me even without the knife, sis.”
She laid it on the coffee table. “Last chance,” she said. “Your dirty clothes are in a bag in your closet. You need to wash them. Clean your damn room up. Wash your sheets.”
“That’s one of the reasons I came home tonight. I actually feel like I can do that. I have to leave again tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be going out for about three days at a time between times I come home. They’ve been putting us up at a hotel downtown.”
“So are you going to be disappearing again?”
“Not disappearing. Sorry I couldn’t reply to the calls and texts, but they have a cell phone jammer on the lab for security.”
This still smelled soooo much like bullshit. “You realize I haven’t even been able to get new glasses because of all this, right? I can barely see to do my damn job. And now we’re down two people at work and working two and three days straight to keep the city moving.”
“Oh. Well, here.” He pulled his wallet out again and handed her another five hundred dollars. “They gave us an extra stipend for stuff for the week. I won’t use all of it. You take it.”
Her jaw gaped. “What?”
She was so stunned to have one thousand dollars, cash, in her hands that she wasn’t prepared for it when he hugged her. “Yeah. I’m sorry I’ve been a dick. Go get yourself new glasses, sis. Things will be great from here on out, I promise.”
He turned and headed for his room.
The money lay there in her hands. Counting it again, and once more, it was still one thousand dollars.
I wonder if it’s even real?
She didn’t know, but if it was counterfeit she was going to turn her brother in to the cops her damn self.
She folded the money and put it in her back pocket before grabbing the knife to return it to the kitchen.
Chapter Four
Juju and Delta sat, staring at each other across the card table.
“Well?” Juju asked.
Delta stared at him with those deep brown eyes, not blinking.
Between them on the table sat the last piece of pizza.
“I’m thinking,” Delta said in a soft, velvety purr. The one that got them laid plenty of times, when they were in a position to get themselves laid.
Although it’d been a long damn time since that had happened, unfortunately.
Juju groaned. “Oh, come on, man! You don’t even want it. You’re just fucking with me.”
Omega walked in. “What’s going on? Ooh, pizza.” Before Juju could stop him, their unit’s quartermaster scooped up the last slice of pizza. “Thought it was all gone.”
Juju glared up at him. “Maybe someone wanted it.”
Omega arched an eyebrow at him. “Maybe someone should have spoken up. Or eaten the damn thing instead of sitting there staring at it.” At six five, the large man looked even more imposing than he already was as light gleamed off his freshly shaven ebony skull.
“I was waiting on him.” Juju pointed across the table at his partner.
Delta grinned.
“You know you outrank him, right?” Omega observed as he folded the piece of pizza in half lengthwise and took another bite out of it. “You could have ordered him to let you have it.”
“We try not to do that,” Juju muttered.
“Well, there’s your problem.” Omega chuckled as he turned and left the room.
Delta leaned back, arms crossed over his chest, grinning like a Cheshire cat. “Fortune favors the bold, my friend. You could have simply taken it.”
“Maybe this is why we haven’t been laid in over two years,” Juju grumbled as he stood and shoved his chair back. Sometimes, coming to a consensus between the two of them was about as successful as trying to make the repelling sides of two magnets stick together.
Juju picked up his mess kit and the pizza box. The box went in the trash, and he washed his mess kit out in the sink.
They were now part of the temporarily semi-permanent detail at the satellite safe house not far outside of Peachtree City, Georgia, helping the scientists who were going back and forth to the CDC and trying to nail down a Kite vaccine.
All five of the scientists in their unit’s care had been given new identities. Outside of their unit, only Archie, who was the commanding officer of SOTIF13 and now head of security at the Atlanta CDC complex—as well as Victor’s older brother—Bubba, and General Arliss knew the scientists’ true identities. And not all of the scientists were there in Georgia, either. The scientists took turns rotating out between Georgia and their primary safe house in southwest Florida.
Nobody wanted them all in the same place at the same time now out of an abundance of caution.
Right now, Waldo a
nd Q were here in Georgia. Sin, Mama, and Canuck were working in the Florida lab. Victor’s recent recovery after a bout with Kite had been a boon to their research, although it had been scary as shit for all of them.
They were doing live testing now in the CDC facility on that vaccine. The research in Florida was still focused on studying how the virus was mutating, and trying to work backward to help beat some of the other strains. Like influenza, Kite was changing. Unlike influenza, it was mutating faster than they could keep up with it, but at least it seemed to mostly be mutating into less lethal variations.
Unfortunately, if left to its own devices, Kite the virus would completely burn through the world’s population before it mutated all the way down into something resembling the common cold.
At least they had hope now. Doc, their unit’s medic, who’d also survived a bout with a less lethal strain of Kite, and his partners Tango and Pandora, had already guinea pigged a trial serum that made them immune to the strains of Kite derived from what Victor had survived. The rest of SOTIF1 had been likewise inoculated, including the scientists and civvies. Now the scientists were working on trying to put together enough to inoculate all of SOTIF13 and the rest of the staff at the Atlanta CDC. It wouldn’t make them immune to all strains of Kite, but it looked like it would help them fight off most of the worst of it.
They were still at least a month away from being able to put a final vaccine into production, though. They couldn’t produce a vaccine, declare it a win, and not make sure the virus wouldn’t then mutate into another lethal variety that rendered the vaccine useless. They didn’t want the public to have false hope that the vaccine would completely protect them. Yes, anything was a good start, and a definite check in the win column, but they couldn’t have people getting infected because they stopped taking precautions due to getting a vaccine.
Plus they had to thoroughly test it, keep trying it against as many strains as they could. Any varieties of Kite it didn’t work against, they needed to find out those commonalities and see what could be added to it to make it work.
They needed to be sure, and they needed to make sure the vaccines covered as wide a swath of the virus signature as possible.
For now their Georgia contingent consisted of him and Delta, Omega, Echo, and Chief, and Uncle and Zed. Their personnel switched out depending on where they needed them. Clara, and her two guys, Oscar and Yankee, were slated to rotate up here in a couple of days. Papa didn’t like spreading the unit so thin between the two locations, but it wasn’t as bad with SOTIF13 running security at the CDC facility. Their helo pilot helped pick up the slack when Victor wasn’t there.
Right now, Victor, Uni, and their third, Scooter, who’d just joined their unit, were down in Florida. Between Scooter’s friends getting murdered by Rev. Silo’s hired mercenaries, and Victor contracting Kite, Papa wanted to give the three a couple of days of downtime before having to split them up again with Victor returning to Georgia. SOTIF13’s helo pilot filled in for Victor, using the Drunk Monkeys’ helo to shuttle personnel between their new secret satellite base outside of Peachtree City and the CDC research facility in Atlanta.
Besides, Scooter wasn’t a fighter. She’d worked at a bank, and she was great at spotting patterns, especially in financial data. They wanted her on-site with Pandora, using the two of them to help Bubba sift through and analyze the data he was still pulling from the Church of the Rising Sunset’s servers.
And they had Ax, the hacker in touch with Mary Silo, at the Georgia satellite base, too. They’d left the comfortable house they were first in, now that they had the satellite facility up and running. Four former offices had been converted into dorm rooms, with more space out in the warehouse area, a fully functioning lab, kitchen, and bathrooms with showers. They still had several offices in the building to convert into quarters, which would happen eventually.
All out in the middle of nowhere.
They would have moved Ax to Florida, except he was trying to work on Mary Silo, earn her trust to talk her into coming in, come to them, so they could move her to Florida as well and keep her safe.
Apparently, Mary Silo had plans of her own she wasn’t revealing to Ax. Ax wasn’t sure what those plans were, but it was no secret that she wanted her husband dead for how he’d tortured her for over forty years.
The Drunk Monkeys were good with that, and would even help make it happen once the time was right, but they needed to be sure Hannibal Silo didn’t have any fail-safes in place first.
The absolute last thing they needed was the man releasing more Kite virus into the wild. They had enough problems to deal with. The CDC was pulling in more solid casualty numbers. So far, all the new deaths from the Kite virus were traceable directly back to the LA basin infection, which had been contributed to by Silo’s Preachsearch Project. The infections on the east coast had been contained and were slowing as they ruthlessly got ahead of the virus.
Meaning innocent people who weren’t testing positive were getting euthanized with po-clo, despite what the President had told people a couple of weeks ago. But the ruthless strategy was working. There had been no new reported infections in the New York area in four days, and the most common strain there had been incorporated into the vaccine testing in Atlanta. All public safety, medical, first responders, and military personnel in New York would secretly be getting the experimental vaccines as soon as possible.
And cold weather had set in, helping further slow the spread of the Kite virus. The homeless were being driven inside to shelters, where a clean needle program was instituted to prevent any spread there among drug addicts. It didn’t hurt that there’d been a mass exodus from the city when the Kite virus was first discovered there, dropping the population by half.
Finally, there was some hope. Had Kite exploded unchecked in New York and the northeast US the way it had in LA, no one in authority doubted the result would have been even more catastrophic.
Even the public demonstrations had died down in light of the progress being made on the virus. Government food banks were being set up, easing some fears and relaxing tensions even more. People were still broke and scared, but at least they didn’t have to worry about how to feed their families. The President had also signed several executive orders forbidding electricity and natural gas from being turned off for nonpayment over the winter months, and forcing hospitals and doctors to treat people regardless of their ability to pay.
Another two tensions, relaxed.
General Arliss, the Drunk Monkeys’ commander and the man in charge of the SOTIF program, had been behind those moves as well. He’d known that if you took away some of people’s biggest worries, that most of them would stop protesting. Which helped prevent the spread of Kite even more by keeping large crowds from gathering.
They were, hopefully, looking at a more peaceful winter.
“I’m getting sick of this quiet,” Delta said.
Juju wheeled around to face him, jaw gaping. “What the hell’s wrong with you? Are you trying to jinx us?”
Delta shrugged. “You know me. I like to be doing something. Not much up here for me to do.” He shrugged. “I’m bored.”
“Seriously. Are you trying to jinx us?”
“No, I’m just being honest.”
“So you’re saying you’d rather be down in Florida with six sets of people fucking their brains out at night around us?”
Delta’s gaze dropped. “No.”
It was bad enough with Omega, Echo, and Chief in the building. At least Chief was a working part of the team, between her law enforcement experience and her past history as an MP while in the military. She took watches, went on missions, could help guard the scientists.
He didn’t begrudge his brothers their happiness, but when his own cock had forgotten what it felt like to be inside a pussy, the last thing he needed to hear was a bunch of people screwing around at night.
“Then shut up,” Juju told him. “And be careful what you wish for. I’ll t
ake this assignment over slogging through jungles in Vietnam with raging Kiters on our tail.”
Delta shrugged. “Guess I’d take a couple thousand Kiters in a jungle over a couple million of them in the Atlanta metroplex,” he said.
Chills raced up Juju’s spine. “You sure know how to kick Fate right in the balls and piss him off, doncha?” It wasn’t that Juju was superstitious—
Fuck that, he absolutely was superstitious. “We’ve been damned lucky so far,” Juju reminded him. “Just remember that and instead of bitching that you’re bored, be thankful that you’re bored, because it could always be worse.”
“Not saying it can’t be worse or that I want it to be worse. I’m just saying that I don’t feel like I’m contributing anything.”
Juju shook his head. “You’re contributing to keeping the scientists safe. They’re going to save our asses. The whole world’s asses. Just keep that in mind. If you’re so fucking bored, go talk to Omega and have him give you something to do, like building out another bunk room or something.” He turned, glaring at his partner. “And fuck that, I’m absolutely gonna pull rank. That’s an order.”
Even though they were both twenty-eight, Juju had made sergeant while Delta was still a specialist, mechanical. Delta’s skills lay mostly in repairing military equipment, not general skills like Annie and Ak had, but he’d been useful over the years.
Delta stood, smiled, and flipped Juju a bird before going to wash his mess kit.
Juju leaned against the counter and shook his head as he watched the guy. He loved Delta like a brother, but sometimes the guy really hit every last wrong nerve in Juju and set him off.
In at least half of those circumstances, he was convinced Delta did it on purpose, just to get a rise out of him. Like a farking science experiment or something.
Unlike some of the guys in their unit who’d served together before or even went through basic together, he and Delta had never met before making the cut for the SOTIF team and getting assigned to SOTIF1. They’d sort of fallen in together as a result, rather than face “last kid picked” syndrome when it was obvious that’s the way it would shake out anyway.