Chapter 33
33
As soon as she got to the room, Ani started packing their bags. She had no doubt that Gil would insist on them leaving. Somehow, danger had caught up with them here. Probably thanks to Victor.
“Are you sure that performance wasn’t from the omegavirus?” Victor asked as she buzzed around the room tossing things into bags. “Like I said in the forum, hallucinations can be a symptom in severe cases. I’ve been studying it.”
Crap, she’d have to get their laundry out of the washing machine in the guest laundry room. Could she trust Victor with that task? He seemed off, even stranger than when she’d first met him at the Blackbear airport.
“I don’t think so. I know he was acting strange, extremely so, but when I met his eyes he looked completely lucid. And the things he was saying weren’t totally off the wall. They made sense.”
“Not to me.”
“They made sense to me,” she said firmly. Then she paused and narrowed her eyes at him. “ Everything red, everything dead . Don’t you remember that?”
“No, I told you. I don’t remember most of what I wrote. That’s why I’d like to get my notes back.”
Gil had Victor’s binder tucked away somewhere, and Ani had no intention of handing it over without talking to Gil first. Ever since Victor had sat across from her, barely recognizable with a thick curly growth of beard and blue contact lenses, she’d been on edge.
She had so many questions for him, but all he wanted to talk about was whether Gil had dug up that damn binder. He hadn’t even seemed especially worried about Gil’s health. Granted, she didn’t know Victor well—at all, really—but he seemed off, somehow. Maybe that was what going on the run from the CDC did to a guy.
“That’s not the most important thing right now. Gil is going to be back any minute, and he’ll want to sneak out of here. Trust me, I’ve been treating Gil, we’ve been through a lot together?—”
“You just met him.” Victor adjusted the backpack on his shoulders. Apparently he’d been living out of it for days, staying in an abandoned cabin near a lake—but not Smoky Lake, as they’d thought. “He’s a hard guy to get to know. I’ve known him for years and he’s still an enigma.”
“Then leave,” she snapped. “Take your chances. I know Gil well enough to know he did that whole thing to warn us.”
“I don’t need a warning. I’ve been staying three steps ahead of everyone.” Then he added, almost sheepishly, “Except for you guys. You’re very good at disappearing.”
“That’s thanks to Gil.” She grabbed her jacket from the hook by the door and stuffed it into her bag.
Victor scratched at his chin. His beard was even longer than Gil’s sickbed scruff. He looked so much more unkempt than before. “I’m the one who asked Gil to watch out for you. Seems like it’s going pretty well.” He surveyed the double bed in which they’d both been sleeping. “Maybe you need the warning.”
“What do you mean?”
“Be careful. Gil will never settle for one woman. Lachlan says he decided that after he lost his virginity as a teenager, and he’s never changed his mind.”
Ani ignored the stab of alarm that tightened her stomach. Gil had told her that he’d dated a lot of women, but he’d never put it that way.
She shoved aside the entire topic. That wasn’t important right now.
Where was Gil? What was taking him so long? What if he got arrested for that stunt on the RV? Or hauled off to a mental hospital?
She’d just about decided to go find him, no matter the risk, when the door opened and Gil slipped inside.
“We need to jet,” he said in a low voice. He narrowed his eyes at Victor. “Do you know anything about the sniper in the alder bushes?”
“ What? ” Ani gasped.
Victor went a little pale. “It’s them. How many were there? Did they have faces?”
“What?” Gil squinted at him.
“I mean, what did they look like?” Victor asked impatiently.
“It’s just one guy in camouflage gear.”
“But it could be more. Are you sure it’s not more?”
Gil met Ani’s gaze; she knew they were thinking the same thing. Victor didn’t seem entirely clear-headed. “We can talk about it later,” he said. “Ani, where’s the laundry? Can we grab it on the way out?”
“Yes, it’s just around back. Bad timing to decide everything needed to be washed at once.”
“Actually, it worked out well. Helped me look like a drunken lunatic.”
She scanned him, looking for signs that he was still fighting the virus, but he seemed back to his old self. A little more scruffy, a little thinner in the face, but just as striking as ever—maybe even more so, with his green eyes set even deeper in his face, like jade in a forest. “How are you feeling?” she asked him as she shouldered her bag.
“Better.” That curt answer was all she was going to get—and that fact alone told her plenty.
“What’s the plan?” Somehow she knew he had one. And she was right.
She went first to retrieve the laundry, while Victor stood guard outside the laundry room built onto the back of the structure. A few minutes later, a vehicle pulled up at the door. She recognized it as one of Donohue’s rigs. In his spare time, he liked to tinker on old junkers. A raft of them were parked along the creek. This one was a Ford F-250 with cardboard taped over the driver’s side window and a rear bumper held on with a bungee cord. An Alaskan rig if ever there was one. It would attract no special attention, and the cardboard would block the view into the cab.
Gil had exchanged his jacket for a hoodie and a beanie that he’d somehow acquired in the last few minutes. She jumped into the passenger seat, while Victor climbed into the crew cab. Gil gestured for them to duck below the level of the windows, so she lowered herself onto the floorboards.
“How’d you convince Donohue to give up his truck?” she asked Gil as he shifted out of neutral.
“It’s a loan. I used the Subaru as collateral. He’ll report this truck stolen if we don’t get it back to him in two weeks.”
“Fair.”
They cruised slowly over the gravel of the parking lot. Ani squeezed her eyes shut, thinking of snipers lurking in bushes and buildings blowing up and Army sergeants slumped in hallways.
Was her life ever going to get back to normal?
“Head south,” said Victor when they hit the pavement of the highway. The truck made a turn. Ani stayed curled up in her uncomfortable hideaway on the floorboards until she felt Gil’s gentle hand on her hair. She looked up and caught his private wink and flash of smile. The relief of seeing Gil be Gil again, and not a suffering patient fighting an unfamiliar virus, brought tears to her eyes.
“Hi,” she whispered.
“Hi,” he murmured back. “Nice to see you. Thanks for saving my life with all that damn tea.”
“Back at you.” She meant the life-saving, not the tea, but he seemed to understand. “Hey, I’ve been thinking,” she added, after settling into a proper position in the passenger seat. “Do you think we’ll ever own the same vehicle for more than a few days?”
They both burst out laughing. The release from the tension of the last few days sent tears streaming down her face. The world righted around her and seemed to glow with sunshine and possibility. Gil was okay. He was no longer at death’s door. She wasn’t going to lose the man who’d become incomprehensibly important to her in such a very short time.
“When you’re done giggling like a couple of hyena, can you give me a quickie update on where you’ve been all this time?” Victor grumbled from the back seat.
Ani and Gil looked at each other again, and burst out laughing again. She wiped the tears off her face. “We were trying to find you , make sure you were okay, and then one thing after another kept happening,” she explained to the scientist. “And now here you are. And more things are happening.”
Gil’s jaw tightened at the reminder.
“Our next move was to go back to Smoky Lake. We thought you might be hiding out there.” Gil frowned over his shoulder at the scientist. “Why aren’t you? What have you gotten yourself into? Who followed you to Carlo Creek?” Before Victor could answer, he flung up a hand. “Biggest question. Is someone trying to weaponize the omegavirus? If so, who?”
The light seemed to drain from the sunny day as those words sank in. Ani stared at Gil, then looked back at Victor. His expression said it all. Gil was right. It explained the diplomatic plates, the military involvement, the secrecy.
Someone wanted to turn the new omegavirus into a biological weapon.