Page 81 of Hotter than Wildfire

She checked the message board, opened the video attachment, saw something terrible come up and simply froze. She’d been holding a pen and it clattered to the floor. The breath stopped in her lungs.

It was almost impossible even to process what she was seeing—a person with a red shoulder, with a red…cap?.

Kerry. Oh my God. That was Kerry, slumped in a chair. She’d been—oh God—she’d been scalped. And part of her torso skinned.

Bile rose in her throat and she leaned over the waste paper basket and vomited the coffee and yogurt she’d had for breakfast.

A deep digitized voice came online through her headset. “Ellen Palmer, this is your friend Kerry.”

She sat, shaking, keening, rocking back and forth in shock.

She didn’t want to hear any more, couldn’t. This had escalated to a level of horror she couldn’t deal with. That alien insect voice was saying something but she couldn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, so she cut off the audio.

All she understood was that her friend Kerry, gentle kind Kerry, had fallen into the hands of monsters. Her monsters. Her monsters had come roaring up out of the deep looking for her and had found Kerry.

Out of sheer instinct, trembling so badly she could barely key the words in, Ellen forwarded the file to the FBI, picked up her purse and fled the room, stumbling. There was no one in the corridor, thank God, because she would have rammed through anyone who tried to stop her.

Her heart was pouding, legs barely able to hold her.

Kerry, sweet Kerry, who liked music and books and had been running from something, too. Kerry’d been skinned like an animal. That horrible digitized voice, like something echoing up from the bowels of hell, said that Kerry was alive, but how could she be? And maybe being dead was better than being skinned alive.

Ellen bent over in the elevator, stomach clenching, but all that came up was bile. Her eyes were tearing up so badly she could barely see. When the elevator doors pinged open, she was able to make her way to the exit only because it was straight ahead and the big windows let in light.

She followed the light because it was the only thing she could think of to do and because she instinctively wanted light after the dark horror of what she’d seen. In any other place, she’d have lost her bearings and banged into the walls.

Aero Drive. The words lit up in her head and she longed to be there, longed to be among FBI agents who would take one look at that monstrous video and arrest Gerald. Arrest him and put him into the deepest blackest hole possible, forever.

Aero Drive. She had to get there.

Go go go! A voice in her head pounded. Because what she’d seen hadn’t been human. No human being could do that to another. These were creatures from some other planet. The FBI had to deal with this because she couldn’t, not in any way.

Out on the street, she stopped, blinking in the bright light. Her throat burned from the bile she’d vomited, her stomach hurt, her legs hurt. Her heart hurt.

Oh, Kerry.

She glanced back to see if a taxi was coming but all she saw was a tall blond man, almost running toward her. If he wanted to ask directions, he was plain out of luck. She couldn’t talk to anyone in any rational way. She felt barely capable of telling the cab driver where she wanted to go.

The tall blond man moved fast. She was starting to step out of his way when she felt a sting in her arm and the edges of the world turned black.

They were parked a block south of the Morrison Building, Piet riding shotgun, Montez at the wheel.

Piet had his ruggedized laptop open, carefully researching the websites of all the businesses in the Morrison Building and its annexe. There were over a hundred but he was patient and besides, what else was there to do? Talk to Gerald Montez who had a huge vein throbbing in his forehead, looking like a stroke in waiting?

He’d rather shoot himself.

He’d just opened the site of the study of a group of lawyers and was perusing it—the rates these bastards charged per hour and they called him a criminal?—when his laptop beeped softly.

Montez jumped. “What? What was that?”

“Easy, mate,” Piet murmured, but his own heart had speeded up a little, the predator catching scent of the prey. It was the end game, now. “She’s logged onto the site.”

He tapped furiously at the keyboard. A three dimensional map came up, rotated, the floor plan of a tall building. A green dot flicked on the 9th floor. “And she’s…yeah, she’s in the Morrison Building. Right fucking now.” He manipulated the image, input some data. “And she’s on the 9th floor. Hang about…” He pulled up the building’s space allocation specs he’d pre-loaded during the flight. “Right. So she’s on the 9th floor in an office called Wordsmith.” He brought up the site. “A translation agency.” He shot a glance at Montez. “She know languages?”

Montez shook his head, confused. “Not that I know of.”

“You have any incriminating material you shouldn’t have in other languages, like Arabic?”

That made Montez pause. “No,” he said finally.