Green Fields (Book 3): Escalation (39 page)

“Yeah, I’ve been asking myself that very question all day long,” I replied, having to shout half of that after him as he dropped down to the ground.

“Why don’t you go screw yourself, Dr. Lewis?” Burns hollered up, stressing my name needlessly. “Because if you’re actually that arrogant, no one’s gonna want to screw you anymore.” He took off toward the town without waiting for my comeback. Not that I felt like replying to that. Although when Martinez remained quiet next to me, I turned my head and stared at him.

“Got something to say? Seeing as it’s already bash-the-girl day, you might as well get it off your chest.”

Martinez sighed, not looking particularly happy about having to deal with the mess Burns had started. “Look, I get it,” he confessed. “You’re tired. You’re strung out. You’re likely rocking some PTSD after what happened to Bates, on top of all the shit you’ve been dealing with since the shit hit the fan. But he’s right. None of us have it easy. Either you tough it out, or you don’t. If you really feel like we’re treating you like shit, why did you never say something?”

“And get ridiculed on top of everything else?” I asked, my voice rising. “That you’re asking me this just makes it even more obvious just how little you know me.”

“Oh, I do know you,” Martinez said, losing the fight to remain calm. “What is it exactly that crawled up your ass and died there? You’ve been weird since we hit the city, and I get that what you did there was difficult. But right now you’re downright obnoxious.”

“Maybe I’m just sick of all this shit, you know?” I suggested. “I’m sick of when I get hurt, you assholes make fun of me because I fumbled something. When I show emotions, you call me a crybaby. When I don’t, it’s suddenly not healthy for me to shut down and want to be all by myself. Which I never can be, because there’s always the entire bunch of you around. And don’t even get me started on that fucking ‘you just need to get laid’ shit. Or the ‘are you on your period’ shit. I may be a woman who has needs and can’t fight nature, but that doesn’t give any of you the right to constantly rub that in my face.”

I knew that I was overreacting there—and being quite the hypocrite, because what I hurled at them sometimes wasn’t an ounce better—but I just couldn’t stop myself. I could tell that I was hurting Martinez, and he of all people really didn’t deserve my anger, but he was there, and he kind of had it coming with that last remark.

He regarded me levelly for a few moments, as if he was fighting with himself what to say, or what he’d better not.
 

“And the people here treat you any better?”

I shrugged. “Stone offered me a folder today with the entire collected information about the virus, dating back decades. That’s a lot more than I expected to ever get my hands on.”

Martinez mulled that over for a second. “You really think that everything in there is true? That they’re not omitting all the uncomfortable details that make a huge difference?”

“How would that be different from the bullshit you’ve all been feeding me, only ever revealing the next bit when it wasn’t possible to hide it otherwise anymore?”

“You know what? He’s right. Never thought I’d say that, but Burns is actually right. If you’re so sick of us, and if you like it better here, why don’t you stay? Where no one will joke about you anymore, and no one will dare not take you seriously, even if you’re throwing a tantrum like a spoiled little child. But don’t forget—there’s a reason why they say that the grass is always greener on the other side. Just because you didn’t know that there was another side until yesterday doesn’t mean that it’s not just as rotten as this one.”

With that, he jumped off the roof, leaving me all to my fuming, miserable self. Now all I needed was for Nate to hold one of his grand speeches, and the day would be perfect. Considering how huge gossiping was among the guys, I had no delusions that he wasn’t already gearing up to deliver it the next time he got me somewhere alone.

Question was, did I deserve that speech? Or was it exactly what I needed to make up my mind?

Chapter 24

The next morning came, and still no change. Except for the fact that I slept in an actual bed—all on my own—and woke moderately refreshed, which was a first… since we’d left Wyoming weeks ago, I realized. As I stared at the small window above the bed—barely more than a cot, but pure luxury considering my life over the past year—I wondered if I didn’t already have my answer. I hated the idea of parting with the guys on less than stellar terms, but that would make it easier. They might not deserve the full force of my anger, but I had plenty of reasons to be mad at them. Would I miss them, and the feeling of camaraderie? A lot. But that didn’t mean that it wasn’t the right decision.

Getting up early—way before most people in town—came with the advantage that I had all of it to myself, for now. There was no one in the bathhouse yet, letting me clean up with cold water without anyone getting in the way. There was always some leftover food in the huge community kitchens that I could snatch up and take with me to the lab. And while the first two sleepy-eyed techs were already at work, the space was quiet, reminding me of all the weekends and nights I had slaved away in similar settings, thriving for goals that weren’t important anymore. But if I stayed here, I would have a new goal—a real goal, not just that diffuse sense of survival that had been my reality all winter long. And no one to constantly chide me, correct me, make fun of me… what was not to love?

That morning, I didn’t even ask if my group was still around. I presumed that Nate, at the very least, would drop by and say a few words to me, if everyone else was now pissed off thanks to my squabbling with Martinez and Burns last evening. I didn’t really care. At least not right now. I knew I would, eventually. But then one of the reasons why things between me and Sam had started drifting apart was my uncanny ability to get lost in my work—so why shouldn’t that be just like that when I was actually trying to save the world?

With a little more knowledge about what everyone was doing, I felt more at home in the lab, although I could still tell that most people didn’t know what to make of me. Like the girl I passed in the afternoon who was busy running another gel electrophoresis right now and was just returning from the dark room with a stack of western blots. She stopped in her tracks as she saw me studying the gel, holding the developed film protectively closer. What that was all about, I had no clue, but the blue blotches on the electrophoresis gel were next to useless.

“You should maybe run that one in two steps. Use one gel for the larger proteins, another with a different density for the smaller ones,” I advised.

“It’s… it’s just a control,” she offered, stammering. Turning from her back to the gel, I studied it again. There were clear similarities between some of the lanes, but the entire thing didn’t look particularly homogenous. I didn’t want to harass the poor woman any more than I already had, so I left it at that, retreating to the upper level where that folder in Stone’s office was like a beacon to me.

He looked up from the files he was perusing as he saw me duck through the door. “It’s right over here,” he said, not even questioning why I was dropping by. My eyes snagged to the dark green folder, but I tried to restrain myself a little longer.

“Are the results from the DNA analysis in yet? The PCRs you wanted to run, I mean,” I asked.

He looked confused for a moment, but then seemed to realize that I must be talking about our blood samples. “Any hour now, I’m sure,” he explained. “We ran the samples of the women and children you rescued first. As you probably already saw, our equipment is quite limited.”

“It’s okay. I’m just curious,” I replied. “Exactly what loci are you looking at, anyway? I don’t remember anyone here mentioning the specifics to me.”

The smile on his face grew. “Do you think that I actually know the first thing about that? They need to think that I know it all. You know better.”

That was cryptic enough that I decided that, right now, I didn’t really need to know.

“Have you come to a decision yet?” he asked as I was about to turn away.
 

I hesitated, my eyes snagging to the folder again. “I think so. I’m just not completely sure yet,” I admitted.

“Anything I can do to speed the process along?”

Mulling that over, I leaned against the doorjamb. “Not sure anyone can help me there. But thanks for asking. I really didn’t expect you to be so candid about everything.”

He made a sound low in his throat that I thought had started out as a laugh. “There are no sides to this anymore. Just us. I won’t hold it against you that you’ve retained the bias your associates seem to have about this project. And I get it. If someone working for a company had murdered my brother, I wouldn’t easily trust them or anyone associated with them, either. It just remains to hope that you as a rational scientist can rise above such petty squabbles.”

I was sure that Nate would have a field day with such a statement, but didn’t tell Stone that.

“Working on it. I’ll let you know tomorrow morning,” I promised.

“Perfect.”

After that, I went back into the lab proper, but I couldn’t help but feel like something had changed in the past few minutes. While I went through another stack of results from Ethan, I noticed the girl from downstairs ducking into Stone’s office, quickly closing the door behind her. I couldn’t hear them talk, but the blinds weren’t completely drawn and I could see her gesticulate wildly as she handed him a stack of papers. Stone’s face was out of my view, but when they both exited a few minutes later, the set of his shoulders was perfectly tense. That was something I was intimately familiar with. Something was going on, and I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not.

“Who’s that woman?” I asked Ethan as I watched the girl disappear downstairs again, her head swiveling from left to right as if she was checking on her surroundings—never a good thing if it happened in a virology lab.

“Who? Oh, that’s Stace. She’s one of our techs. She usually does the groundwork stuff. Has a really calm hand so most of the analytic gels are done by her. And she’s a magician with the PCR machine. I swear, half the time when someone else runs that thing, she has to do it all over again because the results were useless.” As strange as that sounded, I knew—had known, rather, I reminded myself—a coworker who’d been like that, too. He’d usually done all the PCRs for the entire floor if the super-clear pictures were needed for publications. I had no idea how he’d done it—I’d watched him often enough—and how the simple fact that someone else did the same pipetting steps using the exact same protocols and materials could yield a better result was still beyond me. So much for science being the opposite of magic. In the end, we were all still alchemists cooking our stinking concoctions.

Remembering that anecdote almost made me ignore the actual information Ethan had just dropped, but with a little pause my mind caught on to it.

“Any idea what she’s working on right now?”

He shrugged. “Some protein gels, I think. Why? Finally ready to have someone run the first new project for you?”

I was just about to answer him when Megan appeared at my side, looking a little green in the face.

“Something wrong?” I asked, feeling my hackles rise.

“No, no, of course not,” she assured me, clearly lying. “Do you have a minute? Dr. Stone and Dr. Lowe are gathering everyone in the meeting room upstairs. They asked me to fetch you.”

“Everyone” clearly didn’t include the other scientists, because none of them were flocking toward the stairs, like they usually did around lunch time. It was hours too late for that, of course, but something else about this was hinky.

“Sure,” I said, not quite so sure whether I wanted to follow her, but this was likely just another instance of my paranoia screwing with my head. Martinez was right—the last weeks had left some mental scars, and I felt rather ill-equipped to deal with that right now, so I ignored it.

As I followed her up the stairs to the upper level, I wondered if I should have ditched my lab coat. It had seemed normal to shrug it on this morning—it simply was the easiest way to carry all the knick-knacks around that I needed, like a calculator, pens, a notepad—but it definitively made reaching for my backup gun harder. And with my thigh holsters stashed in the backpack next to my bed, that left me feeling vulnerable all of a sudden.

The moment I stepped into the meeting room and the door closed behind me—with Megan remaining outside—I knew that this was one neglect I shouldn’t have allowed myself. Then again, judging from the fact that a good two thirds of the people crammed into the room were guards, it was debatable how useful my weapons would have been in the first place.

“What is going on here?” I asked as heads swiveled in my direction. The tension in the room was thick enough to cut, and I didn’t need to see the pinched expression on the Ice Queen’s face to know that something was very wrong here. Nate barely glanced at me, but that split-second that our gazes met was enough to convey a warning. None of my people seemed to be carrying weapons, and judging from the stack piled up on the desk in front, someone had been thorough in patting them down.

Stone and Lowe were standing in the front part of the room, flanked by more guards, also looking at me when I spoke up. Stone had a more or less neutral look on his face, but Lowe was practically gloating. So much for hoping that he wouldn’t cause any trouble for me. That would have been too easy.