Page 16

He rounded the corner and skidded to a halt in the middle of a high-tech lab set-up that looked like it belonged at a pharmaceutical firm. “What’s this?” he blurted.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” she muttered over her shoulder as she fooled with a keyboard and monitor attached to a computer tower sitting on the floor.

“Are you aware that the house is on fire?”

That made her look up. “What?”

“Burning merrily overhead as we speak. We have to get out of here, now.”

“I can’t go, yet. I’ve got to collect samples. Bag and tag them so we can figure out what was going on in here.”

“Piper. The house is on fire .”

As if to emphasize his point, a burning ember fell from the ceiling at the far end of the long lab, right about underneath where the bonfire ought to be.

“I’m sorry, Ian but I can’t leave until I get samples. This is too important.”

“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. What was this 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’s go .”

“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 staring back 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 we go now?”

“Yeah. Sure. Cool your jets?—“

The rest of her words were drowned out as the ceiling gave way in slow motion, blackened beams cracking and falling like a flaming mass of pick-up sticks.

He shoved her violently behind him, then swore and threw up his arm to ward off a burning brand from above.

He batted at his hair to quell any burning embers.

Inferno-esque heat poured over him. This place was going to be a no-shit oven in a few seconds.

“Up the stairs!” he shouted over the roar of the bonfire as the entire pile of flaming mattresses and bed frames collapsed through the hole.

Searing heat made the air too hot to breathe. Sleeve thrown over his mouth, he turned and ran for his life. Piper scrambled ahead of him as a rush of unbelievably hot air followed them up the makeshift chimney the stairwell had just become.

Smoke, black and blindingly thick, billowed around them. He found the handrail and clung to it for all he was worth as he raced upward in blackness blacker than night.

He burst into the kitchen and fell to his hands and knees, beneath the pall of smoke filling the room fast. Piper became visible a foot ahead of him. She was looking back over her shoulder in panic toward him.

“Where to?” she screamed over the unbelievable noise, hands outstretched and obviously disoriented. He saw her eyes were screwed shut. Must have gotten smoke in them and temporarily blinded herself.

He crawled past her fast, heading for the back door he’d seen the Palestinian use earlier.

On the way by, he grabbed her hand and wrapped it around his belt.

She hung on for dear life as he scooted for the door as fast as his hands and knees would carry him.

The ceiling was on fire and burning crap rained down all around him, burning his scalp and back.

The top of his head banged into something hard. He felt a door panel and groped frantically for a doorknob. His fingers screamed in pain as he touched scorching hot metal. Quickly, he yanked his cuff down over his hand and opened the door.

He started to stand up to make better time—and was slammed flat by Piper throwing herself on top of him—just as a violent wave of fire rushed through the doorway barely above them.

“Backdraft!” she shouted as she rolled off him.

Jesus H. Christ. She’d just saved his life.

He scrambled on his belly across the porch and down the steps. Shit was falling off the sides of the burning building and he pushed to his feet and sprinted a hundred feet or so away from the house until the worst of the blistering heat on his back subsided.

He fell to one knee, coughing like a chain smoker.

Piper hacked and coughed beside him. Her face was soot-smudged and blistered, and tears streamed down her cheeks, striping the mess. Yet she still managed to be just about the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.

He’d found her in time. And he’d pried her away from her damned investigation in the nick of time. They’d made it. They were alive.

“Well, that was fun,” she gasped.

He sucked in a lungful of cool, fresh air just as a half-dozen popping noises exploded behind them. “Get down!” he ordered her urgently.

“What’s happening?” Piper asked from above him. “Is the house exploding or something?”

He grabbed her arm and yanked her off her feet violently.

“Hey!” she protested as she hit the dirt beside him.

“Gunfire,” he bit out, pulling out his sidearm. “Someone’s shooting at us.”

“Who the hell’s firing at us?” she exclaimed.

He took a general position fix on the direction of the gunfire and realized it would ultimately drive them back into the burning building. Sonofabitch.

“Someone wants us to go back into that fire.”

“We can’t go back in there. We’ll die!”

No shit, Sherlock .

“Cover,” she bit out. “We need cover.”

He looked around desperately. Off to their left. A cluster of bushes with a small boulder nestled in the middle of them. “On my mark,” he bit out in her ear, “Run for that rock.”

As soon as she nodded, he ordered, “Now.”

They jumped up and ran like bats out of hell for the scant cover of the boulder. He noted that she knew to zigzag and make herself a harder target to hit. He dived behind the rock just as another volley of gunfire exploded behind them. From the direction of the driveway.

“Gotta be the white guys who went into the house after the Palestinian left,” he muttered tightly.

A distressed look crossed Piper’s face. Under her breath, she muttered, “They had better not be shooting at me.” Louder, pitched for him to hear, she suggested, “Maybe it’s locals who don’t appreciate foreigners poking around.”

Doubtful. Despite being on the wrong side of a violently disputed border, this place was out in the middle of nowhere.

She asked low, “How much ammo have you got?”

“Not enough for a gunfight. You?”

She pulled a pistol out of a holster in the small of her back. “Two partial clips. Call it twenty rounds.”

“How are you at stealth evasion?”

“I guess we’re about to find out,” she replied wryly.

Good point. They couldn’t sit here and get picked off like sitting ducks. He held up his fist and gave her the signal to move out.