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I still didn’t trust Kristi. Sure, she’d shown an unexpected human side in the limo, but so what? Didn’t excuse all the shit she’d done.
Except . . . except some of her arguments made sense, like the part about her trying to find more medical uses for the parasite. And her zombie-soldiers project had indeed gone bust, even before I escaped and she was forced to blow up the abandoned factory.
Kristi claimed she was working independently from Saberton. Maybe Andrew had information as to how true that was.
Either way, I still had threads to pull, and one big shiny one was currently sitting in the St. Edwards Sheriff’s office impound lot. Wherever the hell that was.
Bear’s pickup was parked in front of my house, and it took me several seconds to realize Kang must have driven here after dropping off the humans at the lab. Made sense, now that I thought about it. Where else would he go? Oooh, maybe he’d be up to helping me with my little mission? A second set of zombie hands sure would come in handy.
Kang was on the couch when I stepped in. He bolted upright, hand closing on a baseball bat beside him.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, relaxing his grip.
“It is my house, y’know.” I dropped my bag on the coffee table. “You must have been deep in dreamland not to hear my car, or me clomping up the steps.”
He smiled wearily. More than weary, I realized. His eyes were dark pits in his face. “I figured I’d be more use after a little rest,” he said. “I was wiped.”
“You look like you still are,” I said. “Get some serious sleep. I’ll change the sheets on my dad’s bed.”
“That’s not necessary.”
I pinned him with a glare. “You might be ancient, but you just re-grew. One little nap isn’t enough. Push too hard too fast, and you’ll regret it. And if you mean changing the sheets isn’t necessary, you don’t know my dad.”
He lifted his hands in surrender. “I suppose I can use more sleep.”
It took me no time at all to remake the bed with fresh sheets, though probably not to Gina’s standards. With a grateful nod, Kang unabashedly stripped to his skin and crawled into bed.
I flicked off the light and closed the door to just a crack. Time to connect with Andrew. Pawing through my dresser drawers yielded a bright blue T-shirt with a giant extended middle finger emblazoned across the front—a holdover from my loser-and-kind-of-a-jerk phase.
After turning it inside out to hide the rude gesture, I hung it in the bathroom window. That’s what Andrew had told me to do if I needed to talk to him. Well, he’d said hang something blue, not specifically an inside-out obscene t-shirt. Not that it mattered. How would anyone be able to see it, considering it was full dark? And besides, the bathroom window faced a patch of woods and—
My phone rang. No way.
“Congratulations!” a robotic voice announced. “You’ve won an all-expense paid cruise to Argentina!”
Crap. The response to my signal had been a jillion times faster than I expected. And what the hell? Did he have a camera trained on my house? I hurried to call my dad.
“Hey, time to be Momzombique,” I told him. “I need you to ask Andrew something. Do you have a way to write it down?”
“No, I ain’t got no way to write it down,” he grumbled. “Hang on.” I heard a muffled, “Any of y’all got a pen and paper? Angel needs me to deliver a message!” More rustling then, “Okay, shoot.”
“Ask Andrew if Kristi really is working projects on her own, apart from Saberton, and if Saberton really is as focused on defense contracts and weaponization of the parasite as she says they are, and if she really is as fed up with it as she claims. She says she wasn’t involved in our swamp encounter with Saberton or Connor’s murder, but I’m not sure whether to believe her. Tell him to do a check on a guy named Harlon Murtaugh.”
“Dang, girl, slow down! I got ‘If Kristi is working’ . . .”
I repeated my questions much more slowly until he had it all. “Write down his response, too, please? Then call me back.”
“Got it.”
I hung up then trudged to the living room and booted up the computer. Dreading what I might discover, I went online and searched the local news. I was the source of the shambler epidemic, so it didn’t feel right to hide from the consequences.
Sure enough, the top story was about a band who was in the middle of their set at a local bar when they started turning shambler, one right after the other. Shaky video taken by a bar patron accompanied the story. I watched, nauseated, as bar-goers screamed and tried to flee, tripping over chairs and each other to evade the shambling bass player and lead singer.
I stopped the video and leaned close to the screen, peering at an out-of-focus blob behind the bass player. Making the video full-screen simply made it a larger out-of-focus blob, but going back a few seconds and slowing the playback to a crawl earned me a clear shot of a water bottle at the base of the singer’s mic stand, along with another on its side by the snare drum. Nice Springs Water.
Fingers trembling, I copied the link and texted it to Dr. Nikas.
A moment later:
