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“You won’t get any samples out if you don’t leave with me. Now.”

“Shut up and find me a plastic bag or something like that.”

He stared at her in disbelief. Was she shitting him? The house was burning down around their ears and she wanted to play forensic investigator?

Swearing, he searched for a heavy object to conk her over the head with. He would knock her out and carry her from the burning building?—

—He spied a cardboard box of plastic sandwich bags sitting on a shelf. Momentarily derailed from his plan, he spat, “Here are some damned bags.”

“Put those dead mice in the bags. One mouse per bag. And whatever you do, don’t touch the mice. You might want to hold your breath when you’re in proximity to them. No telling what diseases they incubated.”

He stared in disgust at the pile of little corpses she must have retrieved from the trash can next to her.

Incubated? Diseases? Jesus. Whatwasthis place? He glanced around and spied another row of those little blue bottles on a high shelf along with other bottles of chemical supplies.

A forearm-sized piece of wood tumbled to the floor with a loud clatter behind them. He jumped. “Gotta go,” he urged in a singsong voice of impatience.

“I think I’ve found it…one more sec…ah hah!”

He couldn’t help glancing at the computer screen she was watching intently. Numbers and long scientific words scrolled across the readout. “Just take the whole damned hard drive with you and let’sgo.”

“Can’t. Hard drive is in that tower over there.” She pointed at a man-sized server array in the corner. Jesus. What was going on here that required so much computing power?

She plugged a thumb drive into the side of the computer terminal on the desk and grinned up at him triumphantly. “Take a quick look around while I download this data. As soon as it’s done, we can get out of here.”

“Assuming the kitchen’s not an inferno,” he replied grimly.

He took a few steps toward the far end of the lab and spied something that made him suck in a sharp breath.

“What?” Piper asked quickly.

“Don’t look,” he bit out. “Finish up over there." He whipped out his high-intensity flashlight and pointed it into the shadows.

“Ohmigod,” Piper gasped from behind him.

Of course, she’d looked. Dammit.

He stared in raw horror at the pile of dead human bodies encased in clear plastic body bags They weren’t neatly laid out like a morgue. Some of them were curled into fetal balls, some had arms or knees sticking up inside their transparent plastic sarcophagi. Some lay in dark pools of dried blood inside their individual body bags. The flashlight caught a pair of eyes staringback at him out of a black-skinned face. What should have been the whites of the young woman’s eyes were blood red.

He lurched and took a staggering step back.

That satanic death stare chilled him to the bone. He’d seen some messed up shit in his day, but this took the cake.

Piper bumped into him from behind. “Are they all dead?” she asked in horror.

He bit out grimly, “If living people get put into body bags they suffocate soon enough. Those bags are meant to keep in bodily fluids and smell of decay. They’re water- and air-tight.”

“How did they die?” She started to move forward toward the pile of corpses.

The ceiling over the dead bodies was sagging noticeably and the smoke that had started gathering near the ceiling was seeping upward into cracks in the sagging spot at an increasing rate.

“No time to investigate. The ceiling’s about to collapse, and we’ll burn to death if we stay here!”

“Pictures. We need proof.”

“Jesus Christ!” At this point it was more efficient to do what she said than to argue with her. Frustrated and frantic, he whipped out his cell phone and stabbed at it to bring up the camera function. He snapped a half-dozen pictures fast. “Can wegonow?”

“Yeah. Sure. Cool your jets?—“