The Tide (Tide Series Book 1) (32 page)

Miguel inserted a blasting cap with a built-in time delay fuse into the C4. “Where do you want it?”

“I’ll take it,” Dom said. “Now get upstairs. Same with you, Renee and Hector!”

The three Hunters footfalls echoed in the halls as they pounded upstairs. Dom sprinted to the oven.

“Hold your fire!” he bellowed over the comm link.

The shrieks and cries of the Skulls filled the house as the gunfire quieted.

Dom reached behind the stove. He used the stock of his weapon to break the gas line. He placed the live explosive near the gas leak with fifty seconds to go. Noxious fumes filled his nostrils as he ran for the stairs.

One of the windows in the kitchen exploded inward, and a Skull tumbled in. He shrieked at Dom and charged. Dom threw his rifle over his back and whipped out a knife from his thigh sheath. He plunged the blade into the Skull’s face. Even as he did so, others poured in through the front door.

Firing on them now would almost certainly result in his death.

Forty seconds. Plenty of time.

Dom huffed up the stairs. Skulls filled the bottom floor of the house. The click and scrape of their skeletal appendages accompanied their terrifying bellows. As he rounded the landing toward the second floor, a Skull leapt at him from below. She stabbed her fingers at his throat. He grabbed her wrists and then kicked her back down the stairs. Her body bowled over the first couple of Skulls. It gave Dom a few extra seconds to follow the route his Hunters had taken. All the doors, except one, were open on the second floor.

“We’re right in front of you,” Miguel called over the comm link.

Dom nodded, catching sight of them through an open bedroom window. He charged for them. Then another cry sounded.

It froze Dom in his tracks.

This one was unlike the other Skulls.

It was
human
.

“What’s the delay, Captain?” Renee asked. “Front yard’s clear. We’re ready to go.”

“You go!” Dom yelled.

Twenty seconds to go.

There, he heard it again. The Skulls poured up the stairs as Dom searched for the source of the cry.

He ran at the only closed door on the hall and burst through. In the corner of the room, a young boy was crouched, huddled and pale. He held his small fists over his face, shielding himself from the intruder. Dom lifted the boy, no older than six or seven, under his arm.

Ten seconds to go. No time for introductions.

The boy wailed as Dom charged back down the hall. He plunged his knife into the first Skull barreling at them through the narrow corridor. He shoved its body backward, powered by adrenaline and desperation. The window lay open just yards away. He jumped through it, protecting the boy as he rolled onto the roof.

Already, Hector, Miguel, and Renee were on the other side of the street. Skulls filled the bedroom behind him, scrambling to catch their quarry.

Dom leapt from the roof, kept his legs limber, and rolled onto the grass. Pain shot up through his ankle as he rolled, still protecting the boy, and ran toward the street. The windows blew out behind him as a rumbling explosion leveled the first floor. Heat, glass, and wood fragments washed over Dom. The concussion sent him sprawling as he formed a protective barrier between the boy and the blast.

His arms and legs scraped across the asphalt. A lancing blast of heat rolled over his back. But Dom didn’t care. His team was alive; he was alive.

Bits of gore and bone rained down on them from Skulls torn apart in the blast. His ears rang as he stumbled forward, carrying the boy in his arms. Miguel, Renee, and Hector ran toward him, shouting, their mouths open but no sound seeming to come out.

Dom fell to his knees, dizziness bringing him down. He set the child on the ground before him. Blackness threatened to overtake him, but he fought against it.

The boy opened his eyes, still shivering, still frightened. He said something. Just one word. One word Dom easily read on the boy’s lips:
Mom
?

That was who the Skull had been in the house, the woman who had attacked him. The woman whose body was now burning with the rest of the Skulls.

––––––––

T
he ringing in Dom’s ears faded. The crackle of fire and the acrid scent of smoke filled the air around them. He and the Hunters ran through another yard toward a familiar street. The sight prompted a second dose of adrenaline to shoot through him. He limped faster, waving his Hunters away from the smoldering Skulls.

Renee took point as temporary squad leader. Hector carried the boy in his arms.

Dom limped along, helped by Miguel. A fierce pain throbbed through his nerves, but he pushed past it. “We’re almost there,” he grunted. Each time he breathed, agony swelled in his lungs. It felt as though the hot air had singed them, and he struggled to regain his voice. “Frank, Adam,” Dom called over the comm link. “What do you see?”

Adam answered. “You guys are looking clear to the target. Whatever mess you caused down there pretty much attracted all the Skulls in the vicinity. There are still some milling around, but they don’t look like they’re anywhere near your trail.”

“Great,” Dom said with a pained breath. The group paused for a moment near a berm in another backyard. Renee and Miguel kept watch as Hector tended to the boy, ensuring he suffered from nothing but shock. “Any word from Detrick?” Dom asked.

“We haven’t gotten any hits through UHF yet,” Adam said.

“Something’s got to be up with those boys,” Frank said. “Makes me worried we won’t have a place to land at all. If comms are down, we’re going to be hard-pressed to convince them to let us in.”

“Meredith said she saw Black Hawk activity over the base. They’ve got to be active on some channel.” Dom paused. “Though I suppose that could’ve changed.”

Frank’s voice crackled over the comm link again. “If I were guessing, worst-case scenario, their comm station is down or overrun or whatever, but there’s got to be someone on the ground monitoring a SINCGARS. Although Adam’s giving me the output power to transmit a message to them, we might not be able to receive a message until we’re within line of sight.”

“How’s your fuel?” Dom asked.

“We’re still fit for a round trip, but if we’re floating around for much longer...”

“Got it,” Dom said. “You’re going to need to land one way or another.”

Dom struggled to his feet. Miguel offered a hand, but Dom waved him off. He hoped Meredith had had better luck. They’d barely traveled a mile, and she’d had much farther to go to find his ex-wife’s place. And she didn’t have the benefit of a squad full of Hunters.

“I’ll keep to your south,” Frank said. “If you need me, give me the signal and I’ll bring this bird to you.”

With each step, pain arced up from his ankle. But it could do nothing to delay him from seeing his daughters again. Despite the odds, despite the destruction he’d seen around Maryland since they’d disembarked from the
Huntress
, he knew his daughters would be alive.

They had to be.

If not...he shook the thought from his mind as he bounded forward through a thin line of trees separating this row of houses from the next. He plunged through foliage and crashed through the underbrush. The other Hunters kept pace.

When a Skull looked up from a trickle of a creek, Dom rushed at it. He withdrew his suppressed HK45C and plugged two .45 caliber rounds into the Skull’s face. It dropped before it could utter a shriek.

Onward they ran into another backyard. He recognized the vegetable garden at once, along with the brick-lined fire pit. They rushed toward the house, and Dom’s heart pumped wildly in his chest. His world seemed to narrow. He almost tripped over the stake in the middle of the yard used to secure Maggie’s chain. His boots hit the deck, the pain in his ankle distant. He looked back, ensuring his Hunters were still safe, still with him.

Then the sliding glass door whooshed back. Two girls with auburn hair stood before him. He stared at them a moment.

No, not girls. No longer. The shell-shocked gaze, the bags under their eyes. Their survival had come at a cost. He could see it.

All the same, he enveloped them both in a hug. He swept them into the kitchen, twirling them around. He barely saw Meredith step forward to greet him and the Hunters, a grin plastered across her face.

“You kept your promise,” he said to her.

“Oh, it wasn’t me who saved them,” she said. “Kara rescued
me
.”

***

T
he rhythmic beep of the EKGs and low hum of biomonitoring equipment filled the isolation ward. Lauren dabbed a cotton swab doused in isopropyl alcohol over a vein in Glenn’s arm.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Still hurts like hell where you first injected me,” Glenn said.

She eyed the injection site of the EDTA chelation therapy. A red ring encircled it, bright against his dark skin. “Anything else?”

“Not really,” Glenn said. “Is that good, bad?”

“Good,” Lauren said. “No headaches? No pain?”

Glenn shrugged. “Nothing yet. Maybe a little queasy.”

“It’s probably a side effect of the antibiotics. We loaded you up a bit high to err on the side of caution.” She hoped she was right, hoped she’d found a treatment. If Glenn didn’t feel any worse, it might be a good sign. He certainly seemed to be in good spirits, and his head was screwed on right. But until she tested his blood for antibodies against the Oni Agent, she wouldn’t know if anything had changed.

“Thanks, Doc.” Glenn patted her wrist, as if he could sense her doubt. She smiled back as she drew his blood. He didn’t so much as wince. She took samples from Amir, Scott, Ivan, and Divya, too. The others remained unconscious. Divya was still out from her injuries. Amir and Scott were kept under medical sedation to protect the others from any potential aggressive outbursts.

She reached for the door when Glenn called out, “Doc, one second.”

Lauren went back to his side. He wrapped his fingers around her wrist again. For a battle-hardened Hunter, his touch was warm and soft, reminding Lauren of their more intimate past. “If I am going to turn into one of those things, will you tell me? Don’t sugarcoat it, okay?”

Lauren hesitated.

“I’m serious. I want to know before I lose my mind.”

“I promise. I will.”

But she prayed she’d never have to say those words to him. She left him again, passed the samples through a sterilization and disinfection chamber between the lab and the isolation ward, and exited into the lab. At the lab bench, she squeezed in next to Sean and Peter, both preparing solutions for the antibody assay.

They worked in silence with the blood samples, pipetting small aliquots into plastic tubes. Lauren then ran a radioimmunassay to detect the Oni Agent antibodies in each of the patients. She held her breath as they calculated the results and compared them with the initial antibody concentrations. The numbers lit up on the computer screen between them.

“Is this right?” Lauren asked.

“I think so,” Peter said.

Sean grinned behind his visor. “You did it, Lauren. You actually did it.”

Lauren couldn’t restrain the victorious grin spreading across her face. Her pulse raced with the growing sense of achievement. The Oni Agent antibody levels had dropped in all four of their patients.

“I’ll admit it, you were probably right,” Peter said.

“Probably,” Lauren said. But soon the smile vanished and her short-lived giddiness evaporated. “Of course, our treatment could be hampering their immune systems, which might be responsible for the drop in antibody levels. If that’s the case, we’re getting a false positive.”

Sean held up a finger. “I took the liberty of testing your treatment in some cell cultures, too.” He withdrew a couple of cell flasks from the incubator and examined them in the biosafety cabinet. “Take a look at this!”

Lauren and Peter crowded around him.

“The mineralization process appears to have stopped. No more calcium apatite production, which would mean the suckers causing these formations have probably died out. And look at this.” He swirled the flask around, and the mineralized tissue disintegrated into particles clouding the pink liquid media.

“The EDTA therapy actually ate away the calcium apatite like we predicted,” Lauren said. Again, she felt a mixture of satisfaction and worry. “But that means Glenn and the others will have to be careful. Their bones could be especially brittle as they recover from the treatment.”

“Definitely,” Sean said. “But I’m willing to bet they’re not going to turn now.”

“I appreciate your confidence,” Lauren said. As a doctor, she wanted her patients to recover. But in her dual role as a researcher, she knew a test population consisting of a couple of tissue culture samples and only one time point in a rushed clinical trial wouldn’t cut it. “Let’s keep an eye on them as this develops. Either way, I want to get this information to Dom. It might be useful if he’s anywhere near Detrick.”

Peter and Sean promised they’d be fine with the patients, and Lauren went through the decon chamber and into the ship’s corridor. She entered the electronics workshop. The room was alive with humming computers and the intermittent squawks of radio chatter. Chao and Samantha’s fingers tapped away at their keyboards, their eyes glued to the banks of monitors. Crumpled cans from energy drinks lay in a heap on one side of Chao’s desk. Samantha’s desk shared a similar memoriam of conquered caffeine-laden beverages.

“Can you put in word to Dom for me?” Lauren asked Chao.

He nodded, his mouth slightly agape and his gaze remaining on the screen before him. “Can do.” He clicked an icon on the monitor and handed Lauren a handset.

“Dom, this is Lauren. Dom, do you read me?”

“Loud and clear, Doc. What’s the news?” He seemed strangely happy.

“You’ve found your girls,” Lauren stated.

“I have indeed. We’ve reconnected with Meredith and several other survivors.”

“Any luck reaching Detrick?”

“Nothing on our front,” Dom said. “We haven’t had any luck over UHF. Adam is hoping there’s someone on the ground listening to chatter over a SINCGARS, but we have to get in range to make contact. I’m hoping you’ll have something for us to tell them.”