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Kenna got the rifle up just before he was too close. The gun jerked between them, and Earnest froze. She pushed him away with one hand and the gun, and he toppled back. The bullet had gone through the right side of his abdomen and exited out the back, hitting the Plexiglas of the vat behind him.
The round hadn’t penetrated the glass.
Cracks began to form, and a slight dribble of liquid ran down from the spot where the bullet had smashed into the exterior.
Kenna said, “Time to go.”
She spun around and hurried after where Axel had gone. Ramon was right behind her.
“I should?—”
“It’s fine.” Kenna kept running. “You don’t always have to be in front.”
He grunted, but she ignored it when she spotted an open door. Axel cried out from inside the room that was full of rows of hospital beds. Tiny bodies lay on each one, hooked up to wires connected to IV bags. Beeping machines. Each patient had a mask on their face.
Ramon dragged her back and went into the room first, saying nothing.
She followed him and shut the door behind her.
Axel lay on the floor, the gun discarded out of reach. Or dropped because the slide was back. He had run out of bullets before he even finished the job.
“Did you kill him?” Kenna asked.
Doctor Marcus Buzard stood over Axel with a hard expression on his face. An interesting change from the usual blank he gave her. Not that Kenna had all that much experience with him.
He wore black shoes, slacks, and a cream shirt under a white lab coat with two pens in the breast pocket. His skin was still clammy, as it had been the last time she saw him. She might wish that was a sign of some kind of end-stage illness, but if he died, she wasn’t going to get Jax back.
“I really wanna kill this guy,” Ramon muttered.
“Maizie, are we still live?”
Buzard flinched, just a tiny flex of the skin around his eyes.
Maizie said, “Yes. Everyone can hear you.”
Kenna rolled her shoulders. “You have eleven children in this ward. You had even more that were in holding cells. You and your staff kidnap people and keep them here, where you do experiments on them. Do you deny that, Doctor Marcus Buzard?”
The doctor stared at her. “How can I? The evidence would appear to be damning.”
“What justification can you possibly have for stealing people like this?”
He lifted his chin, just a fraction.
She spotted a tiny amount of movement on the floor. Axel wasn’t dead. He’d just been knocked to the ground. “Ramon,” she whispered.
“On it.” He went over, dragging Axel away from the doctor just in case either one of them decided to end this more decisively.
“Well?” Kenna asked. “Surely, you have a reason for what you’re doing. Some kind of master plan or research project no one would sign off on because you’re certifiable.”
The corner of the doctor’s mouth curled up. “Is that a clinical diagnosis?”
“That you’re bat crap crazy?” She shrugged. “It might be. You’ve given me enough justification to believe that with the amount of times you’ve kidnappedme. Experimented on me. Altered me in ways I don’t even begin to understand.”
“You think I’ve experimented on you, Kenna?” Buzard looked around. “When I’m so busy in here, working on my master plan?”
“Tell me what it is!”
Buzard said nothing.