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She pushed off from the wall and turned completely to him, her eyes hostile and hot. “The fuck are you trying to say, Billy?”
“That guy didn’t die from a bite. Maybe he got infected some other way. Maybe he got some of the black blood in his mouth. When Goat and I interviewed Volker he said something about the infected spitting. So maybe it was that.”
“Shit.”
“Or maybe it’s just enough to get blood on your skin. Everybody’s pretty badly dinged up. Maybe the worms in the blood can get into an open wound and…”
His voice trailed off. Both of them wore clothes that were caked with dried blood. A lot of that was black blood. Dez began wiping at her clothes—almost absently at first and then she started slapping at her uniform faster and faster until her hands became a hysterical blur.
“Stop it!” yelled Trout.
He had to yell it three times before she froze. For a moment Dez’s eyes were so wild that the whites showed all around. Crazy eyes. Trout had seen her like that before. Once, naked and wild-eyed, she’d chased him with a shotgun. Not one of their better moments as a couple.
“Dez … we wiped ourselves down with Purell, remember? Remember? You damn near did Jell-O shots of the stuff.”
The wild look slowly faded, and she gave him a slow nod. She was panting, though. “Right, right … sorry. Jeez … I’m sorry.”
Trout tried to touch her, to give her arm a reassuring squeeze or maybe coax her into a hug, but Dez walked a few paces away, hands on hips, and stared at the wall as she worked on her breathing.
Without turning she asked, “Volker gave you all that research stuff on a couple of flash drives, right?”
“Sure. Goat has them and—”
She half-turned. “Did you think to keep a copy of it?”
Trout shook his head. “There wasn’t time for that. Things were already falling apart. I dropped him at the county line and he walked across a field to the Starbucks in Bordentown and I went to my office to get the satellite phone. Things just kept going wrong from then on. Why?”
Dez chewed her lip for a moment, then tapped the walkie-talkie on her hip. “General Zetter called me on the walkie-talkie. They want the drives.”
“I bet they do.”
“He said that they need the science and research on them. Apparently that ass-pirate Volker did something to the Lucifer disease thing. Changed it somehow. They don’t understand what he did and they can’t come up with a way of stopping it without Volker’s notes.”
Trout slumped. “Ahh … damn it.”
“Zetter thinks you have them.”
“How do they even know about them?” mused Trout. “Wait, no, that’s my bad … I may have mentioned something in my last broadcast.”
“That was stupid.”
“I was making a point.”
“About being stupid?”
“Dez…”
“They need that stuff. Zetter didn’t go so far as making a direct threat, but with all those guns out there pointed at us, he doesn’t really have to. I told him that if he tried to storm the place and take the drives by force I’d destroy them.”
“What did you do that for?”
Her eyes shifted away. “I didn’t know what else to tell him. And I—”
“You wanted him to think we had something he needed. Okay, I get it. It was—”
“What? ‘Stupid’? Are you going to throw that back in my face?”
“No, I’m not,” he said with a smile. “I was going to say that it was an understandable stalling tactic.”
