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“What is she, Dad?”
I jerked in surprise and turned to see Nick standing in the doorway, eyes wide and hands clenching and unclenching. Bear yanked his fist down to his side, but Nick had already seen his dad threaten me. Given the circumstances, I had zero motivation to explain the situation and let Bear off the hook.
Nick stepped forward, breathing hard. “What is she? A redneck? The wrong breeding stock? Or just ‘not good enough’ for me? She’s my friend, and I have every right to—” He swallowed and flicked a self-conscious glance at me. “—to hang out with anyone I want.”
Bear’s lips pressed into a razor-thin line. He squared his shoulders to loom over me and Nick, then forcefully smoothed down the wrinkles on his shirt with both hands. Holy shitballs, the man knew how to be intimidating.
“You want to know what she is?” Bear said, voice mild and murderous. “How about you see for yourself.” He stepped to the desk and spun the laptop to face the room. I knew what was coming, felt the impending disaster and was helpless to stop it. Not without making it worse.
No flash drive in the laptop because he already copied the files.
Bear hit a key, and the screen filled with a video. Me in Kristi Charish’s horrible lab at the abandoned car factory, my hand gripped tight in the hair of the piece of shit who brought me there—Walter McKinney. Faces were purposely blurred out, but anyone who knew me would recognize my bleached hair and scrawny butt. High-definition, color. No sound, thank god. Frozen, I watched video-me repeatedly slam McKinney’s head into the bulletproof glass, then rip his skull open and gulp down his brain. On the screen I straightened, hands and mouth covered in gore, and with bloody bullet holes in my T-shirt.
Nick’s expression melted into grief and horror that sliced right through my soul. His gaze cut to me for the barest instant—long enough to take in the grey skin and rotten spot on my cheek—before darting away again.
“Your girlfriend is a zombie, Nick,” Bear said as the video shifted to a new scene: Blurred video-me, looking every bit the monster as I bit and ripped and tore at the flesh of a big blond man. Philip.
Nick slammed the laptop shut and backed against the wall, face white.
“Judd gave me a flash drive Saturday night,” Bear said. “He told me it would blow my mind, but he says that about all kinds of shit, so I ignored it. Until today, that is, when I heard he was a goddamn murder suspect and started thinking maybe the drive had something to do with that crap.” He folded his arms over his powerful chest and leveled a nasty smug smile at me.
The ice holding me immobile shattered. I rounded on Bear. “I’m part of a survivalist group, too, you festering asshole,” I shouted, voice cracking. “And all we want to do is survive. We’re not monsters, but that man whose skull I smashed against the window was a monster. He murdered innocent people and kidnapped my dad to get to me. My dad!”
Bear’s smile slipped, but I was too wound up to stop.
“That fucking worthless prick put me in an animal cage and brought me to that lab”—I stabbed my finger at the laptop—“so that I could be experimented on! I was lucky because I got out, but others like me haven’t been. They get chained up and chopped up, over and over without anesthesia, in the name of research. That’s my family in those horror show videos!”
Bear held his hands before him as if trying to calm a raging beast. “Angel, please settle down. We can—”
“Settle down?!” I grabbed the hem of my T-shirt and yanked it out to show the smears of mud, blood, and swamp slime. “See this? Wanna know why I’m so dirty? It’s because your buddy Dante Rosario was hunting me through the swamp so he could capture me and put me in a cage and drag me to a lab. I got away this time, but he won’t give up.”
Bear dropped his arms as I advanced on him. He opened his mouth to speak but I didn’t give him the chance.
“Yeah, I got turned a year and a half ago, but I had zero say in it. None!” I stabbed a finger at him. “So, Mr. High and Mighty Bear Who Shits in the Woods, you tell me what the hell you would do if one day you woke up as a monster, and people were out to hurt you and your family and friends. Would you just roll over and take it?” I took a heaving breath. “All I want is to work and go to school and have a life without hurting anyone and without anyone fucking with me.” My throat was raw, and I realized I’d been shouting as I spewed out my rage. I couldn’t bear to look at Nick again, but Bear’s face was like stone.
The rage drained away, leaving me empty and exhausted. “I’ve been fighting to survive ever since I got turned,” I said, voice hoarse and thin. “But it’s never going to stop. There’s always going to be someone who wants to hurt or kill us.” I moved drunkenly to a chair and sagged into it. “Maybe I need to get the fucking message. Look at me, trying to be a hero. How the hell am I supposed to catch Rosario before he gets me? Who the fuck do I think I am?”
No one spoke. I half-expected Bear to grab a gun and put me out of everyone’s misery right then and there, but he didn’t move.
“You’re Angel Crawford.”
I dragged my eyes up to Nick. “Huh?”
“You’re Angel Crawford,” he repeated, though he couldn’t bring himself to look at me. “You’re the girl who doesn’t back away from a challenge when it matters. I still remember your first day. I detested you on sight, because you didn’t seem to give a shit about anyone or anything.”
I winced. “You weren’t wrong.”
Nick snorted. “I knew I was going to waste time training you only to have you quit or be fired in a few weeks, so I figured I’d make you puke and chicken out.”
He shook his head. “But you didn’t. You weren’t going to let me win. Then you decided to get your GED, and so you did.” I opened my mouth to speak, but he rolled right over me. “Then you started college, because you want to do better. Be better. Now this asshole Rosario wants to take all that away from you and your . . . people. And you’re going to let him?”
My stupid eyes picked that moment to swim with tears. “No.”
Nick took a deep breath, nodded and turned to Bear—who could have been carved from granite for all the reaction he showed to my tirade.
“I’m not going to med school in the fall, Dad,” Nick said without ceremony, though I noted the slight tremble in his hands. “And I’m not going to be a surgeon. Ever. I’ve already talked to Allen and Dr. Leblanc about staying on as a death investigator for at least two more years. I’ll reconsider my options then, but if I decide to go to med school it’ll be in forensic pathology, which actually interests me.” He took a breath as if drawing in composure for a speech he’d obviously rehearsed a million times. “Also, I’m volunteering in the Central African Republic this summer with a medical relief team. And . . . I’m trying out for Les Misérables next week at Tucker Point Little Theater.”
Bear remained silent and stony for at least a dozen agonizing seconds before he sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “Well, shit.” He gave me a frown as if I’d suddenly become a referee to keep everything civil. Weird. Not that I minded the unexpected shift away from the Angel-is-a-zombie crisis. He sighed again and shifted his frown to Nick, though it was a thoughtful frown and not scary. So far. “Just as well. You’d probably wash out of a surgical residency.”
