Chapter Five
“Ping-Pong?” Beth held the paddle as if it were an explosive device. Her face expressed similar horror.
“Yes. Ping-Pong.” He grabbed the other paddle and snatched the white ball. “When I feel like I can’t cope, and running doesn’t work, I come down here and bang the ball around.” There had been a Ping-Pong table in the basement of his home in Glory, and he’d escaped there often, when his father’s eccentricities became too much to bear.
“I tell you I was having a panic attack, and you suggest Ping-Pong?” She propped her hip against the table and pushed her glasses up on her nose, studying him like one of her biology experiments.
“Too good for Ping-Pong?” Teasing her came too easily.
She snorted, turning the paddle in her fingers. “No, just surprised.”
He chuckled. At least she didn’t look as panicky as she had when he found her in the stairwell. That was good. Leaning forward on his hands, he winked. “Come on, help me put the table down, and we’ll give it a shot.”
The table was set up with one side upright so he could use it alone, ricocheting the ball back to himself. There weren’t many people who lived in their barracks. Their team was specialized, and Luke assumed that Martins wanted to minimize those with access. Add that to his strange hours, and he was usually down here alone.
Together, they shifted the table flat. He motioned to the other end with his paddle. “You ready?”
“One minor problem.”
He lowered his hand. “What?”
“I’ve never played Ping-Pong before.”
“You’re kidding.” Who made it to her age without playing Ping-Pong?
She shrugged, pointing at herself. “Child prodigy. I studied a lot. My parents… My dad was deployed pretty often, and my mom didn’t entertain. I mean, I’ve seen the table. But, I’m not really the sort to…” She let the words fade.
“To ask if you can join in?”
Her eyes widened, and then she jerked her head in the negative.
“Right.” Damn it. He’d wanted to help her sort through all the shit in her head, not make her feel awkward. “No problem. Let me give you a few pointers.”
Stepping around the table, he stood behind her, placed his hand on hers, positioning her fingers on the handle. As his body curved around hers, he hunched over, unable to resist. Something about cocooning her soothed him. He didn’t understand it, but he wasn’t ready to step away, either. The soft press of her body was heady.
Once again, he was surprised by the calm that washed over him, like her presence warmed something in him that had been cold.
That was some kind of stupid romantic crap. After all these months, he was losing his grip for real.
Doing his best to hold it together, he cleared his throat. “If you grip it like this, it will give you better control. Do you know anything about tennis?”
“Yep.” Her voice sounded off again. It sent a flare of heat through him, into his gut and lower. When he glanced at her, she looked normal enough, if flushed, and the pink on her cheeks made him want to lean in and press his mouth against the soft color.
Shaking his head, he squeezed his eyes closed briefly. She’d had a panic attack. That probably explained the heightened color.
God, get it together.
Forcing his mind back to the task, he adjusted her hand in his, ignoring whatever raged through him.
“Okay, then. This is how you serve.” He guided her through the details of the serve, explaining the mechanics. If he’d worried that he was getting too technical, he forgot who he was dealing with. As he explained, her flush vanished, and within minutes she was asking rapid-fire questions, faster than he could even keep up.
He grinned, folding his arms over his chest.
There was his Beth.
His grin faltered, and he shook his head. She wasn’t his, his. Just his friend. That’s all.
Oblivious to whatever craziness had overtaken him, she furrowed her brow, exactly like she did when picking through a complex problem. Then she started talking to herself about physics theory, which turned into muttering mathematic computations under her breath. With relief, he stepped back, leaving her to it and returning to his side of the table.
“Okay, then,” he said. “I’m going to start out soft, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“Velocity times the…” He missed something in the middle there, but he heard, “Weight to speed ratio…”
“Beth?” he interrupted. “Did you hear me?”
“Yes. Starting off soft. Got it.” She nodded, rocking back and forth on her side of the table like she was one of the Williams sisters. Completely adorable. He lobbed her a soft serve…which she smacked right past him.
Obviously, she did have it.
He grinned. “Game on.”
She caught on fast. He’d never seen Beth as athletic or in possession of quick reflexes. But within fifteen minutes, she’d figured out his weaknesses, devising a strategy that might have defeated him if he hadn’t been playing his entire life.
“Not bad for a rookie,” he told her when they decided to call it a draw. “You sure you didn’t compete in Wimbledon in another life?”
She laughed. “Doubt it. If so, reincarnation is a real letdown. Didn’t fix my two left feet.”
Chuckling, he knocked his knuckles against the table. “Next time I need a Ping-Pong ringer, I’m calling you.”
“High demand out there for quality Ping-Pong partners?”
“Who knows? But I know where to go if I’m ever in a bind.”
“Sounds good.” She put her paddle down, running her fingers over it. “So, Ping-Pong is how you deal with all of this?” She gestured to take in everything going on at Detrick.
“No, not really.” He propped his paddle beside hers. “I don’t really deal with it.”
That was not what he planned to say, but the words escaped. He shook his head. “I mean, this…” He opened his arms wide. “The army life? Wasn’t exactly in my life plan.”
“No?” She cocked her head. “What was in your life plan?”
“International hacker?” When she laughed, he grinned, but he was only partly kidding. After all, that was the family business. “I don’t know.”
“From international hacker to superhero. I do see how that might be a difficult transition.”
“I’m no superhero.” All of his earlier joking gone, he dropped his hands to his side. When she cocked her head, he turned away
Now he’d have to explain. Awesome. “How much do you know about what happened in Glory?”
“Some. The drug came through the water. There weren’t many survivors.” She paused, meeting his eyes. “And you lost your father.” Her sympathy seeped into her words, warming him in the way he was coming to view as uniquely Beth’s. Except he didn’t deserve it, not at all.
She needed to see him—the real him, not this hero she’d made up in her mind. “You might know the facts, but not the story. When I woke up after the sickness from the drug passed, my father was dead. Jack found me. His family’s farm wasn’t that far from my father’s…” What was the right word to describe his childhood home? “Compound. From my father’s compound.”
Her brow creased, but he didn’t feel like going into how his father was afraid of the world and hid himself in a fortress, preferring the internet to real people. He hurried on. “Jack had found his sisters in their beds. They were just little kids.”
The two little girls… He’d met them a few times in passing. They’d been precocious, with the sweetest smiles and a love for Disney princesses.
He pushed off from the table, unable to remain still while he got this out. “Then we found Blue’s grandmother. Blue… She’d already run after finding her Gran dead. Kitty… She might have had it the worst because she had to listen with her mindreading ability as her parents died.” He shook away that image. Hearing thoughts had to be the worst of their superpowers.
“That’s awful.” Her horror, it was so accurate, so pure. He wished… God, he wished he could still feel so purely.
“All of that would have been bad enough. But we were different, too.” He tried to remember those first days, when they were running from Goldstone, afraid and not sure where they could turn. They’d been frightened and alone. “We didn’t know how it all worked, we didn’t adjust well.” He swallowed. “I didn’t adjust well.”
What a god-awful understatement.
“Of course not. No one would. Your father…”
He didn’t want her pity, didn’t deserve it, and he refused to listen to her explain it all away. “I killed someone.”
Her mouth closed with a snap. Her eyes searched his. Finally, she asked, “In self-defense?”
“No. Accidentally. I killed someone.” The soldier in La Junta’s face sprang to his mind. Closing his eyes did nothing to stop the image. The man’s surprised eyes, his brief flare of fear. “The people looking for us wanted to bring us in. They weren’t shooting to kill, not then. But when the soldier arrived, I panicked. I was afraid, I wasn’t thinking, and I threw him out a window.”
“Good God.”
“There’s no way to learn to deal with that, Beth.” He raised his hands, taking in the entire room. “Ping-Pong doesn’t fix it. Neither does running. It does keep me busy, though, teaches me how to focus on the task at hand. That’s all I have to cope with what’s going on—try to focus on a goal. That helps.”
Look at him, trying to be helpful.
Why the hell did he talk about this with her, of all people? People wondered how they would react if faced with a good-versus-evil decision. He knew because he’d failed that test. That was something he would live with forever.
She would run away from him now. He was certain. She should, anyway. If that bright and cheerful primer on what it was like to be him didn’t scare her off, he didn’t know what would.
Except she stepped closer. When she glanced up at him, her eyes were big and green behind her glasses. “You didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”
“I’ve been telling myself that for months. He’s still dead.”
She covered his heart with her hand. “In here, you didn’t want him to die.”
“No. But Seth, Blue? Kitty even? They were being heroic. I was afraid, and it got someone killed.” She needed to see him clearly, who he was down deep. The coward he faced every day in the mirror.
“I don’t know what they went through, what they did. But I spend a lot of time with you all. My father was a soldier, and I’ve seen men who’ve seen war. The group of you? You’ve been through a lot. You all have scars.”
That was letting him off the hook. It wasn’t that simple.
Since that moment with the soldier in La Junta, he’d struggled with what kind of man he was. He wanted to believe that had been a moment of weakness, born of fear, but he didn’t know. And he wouldn’t let her forgive him.
Not when he wasn’t ready to forgive himself.
“My friends didn’t run. I went to Mexico, and I stayed with Parker and Jack. If I’d listened to my gut back then, maybe I could have done something about Parker before he started this.”
She glared at him, stepping closer. So much ferocity in such a small package. “Or maybe you couldn’t have. You don’t know that. Could never guess that. None of this makes you a bad guy. It makes you someone who was put in a bad situation.”
He didn’t agree, so he said nothing. How could he explain how ashamed he was that he’d run while they all stayed and stood up for themselves?
Beth stepped forward. Unsure what she was going to do, he moved back. But she ducked her head, folding her arms around him.
Her hug took him completely by surprise. He stiffened, but after a moment, he wrapped his arms around her, too. She felt so damn good tucked against him, and he wasn’t strong enough to resist the way she brought him peace, if only for a few moments. Closing his eyes, he dropped his face into her hair. It smelled like strawberry, and he breathed in, allowing it to sooth him.
In her arms, he fantasized that he was the man she saw. Someone in the wrong place at the wrong time. Envisioning it, he pulled her closer.
Nothing prepared him for how well she fit against him. Beth’s personality and intellect were so big, he’d never paused to realize how little she was.
She gazed up at him, and her mouth dropped open the slightest bit. Her fingers dug into his arms like she would hold onto a lifeline. He wanted to be the strength that she needed.
Except he wasn’t that guy. Stiffening, he stepped back. Pain flashed in her eyes, and she glanced away.
Damn it. He’d been trying to find a way to work with her, to be around her. He’d had the perfect opportunity to befriend her, to connect, and he’d messed it up.
“Excuse me.” A new voice broke in, making them jump back. The girl who’d interrupted them looked young, probably an intern. “Mr. Kincaid. Dr. Jenkins. I was coming to find you, actually.”
Beth stepped back, composed again. “Yes?”
“We’ve found something.”
…
The street outside the factory in Baltimore, Maryland, was full of cops, ambulances, and first responders. A spotlight flooded the space, illuminating the neglected road and graffiti-riddled buildings. People in uniforms and hazmat gear scurried from the propped-open door to emergency vehicles. Nick Degrassi, one of the other changed soldiers in their group, parked their unmarked car on the corner. There wasn’t much traffic thanks to the early morning hour and the location of the warehouse, tucked away in the commercial district.
Nick killed the engine. “This looks bad.”
Luke agreed. They’d gotten word of the APB an hour ago. At least three dead and others viciously ill. Victims were being quarantined at a local hospital. Beth made a flurry of calls in the car, compiling their diagnoses and getting initial reports.
“The victims fit our profile. Vomiting, bleeding, increased pulse…delusions.” She filled them in from the backseat, tapping on the face of her phone. Probably letting Martins know.
“Sounds familiar,” Luke commented, staring at the chaos on the street in front of them.
Kitty Laughton’s eyes were closed. He’d spent enough time with her to know when she was listening to the people around her. Luckily, her flu had only been a twenty-four-hour deal, because he hated going into situations without knowing what to expect. “The responders and emergency personnel are confused. The detective in charge believes it might be a chemical attack or a virus. Poison. And the sick are hopeless.”
“Hopeless?” Beth glanced up from her phone. “As in, a lost cause?”
Kitty shifted, leveling her bright-blue gaze at each of them. “No. As in, they want to die.”
Beth’s hand holding her phone dropped into her lap as she inhaled sharply. But Nick’s mouth thinned. He undoubtedly remembered that feeling all too well. They all did. “Some of them will get their wish.”
If it was Solvimine, it was inevitable. Luke nodded. “Let’s go.”
Kitty and Nick got out immediately, but Beth caught his arm. “What does she mean they want to die?”
Sometimes he forgot that while Beth had studied the drug extensively, there were some things that were hard to explain.
“It hurts, Beth. A lot.”
That was an understatement. It was torture. Even though it had been months, he still remembered the nausea, the vomiting. The endless burning. The exhaustion and the delusions. That night was nothing he’d ever want to repeat and nothing he’d wish on anyone.
It also wasn’t anything he talked about.
He expected her to ask a million questions. It was Beth. Questions were Beth’s thing. But instead, she dropped her hand and got out, leaving him staring after her.
She’d been strange since their Ping-Pong game.
He’d never had a hard time getting along with people before Solvimine. Since the drug, since the soldier in La Junta and losing Jack and Parker… He didn’t like this new distant side of himself.
He didn’t like a lot of the other sides of himself, either.
He’d talk to her when they got back.
Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe this was for the best.
Who knew? He sighed, checked the pistol he carried, and slipped out of the car.
The scene on the street was worse up close. He flashed his credentials at a police officer, who nodded, stepping aside to let him pass. If any of them thought it was strange that a bunch of early-twenty-somethings had special FBI and military documentation, they didn’t say anything. In the thick of it, people bustled around, assisting victims actively vomiting, giving oxygen to others who were unconscious.
Beth turned from where she’d been talking to a man whose detective badge hung from a lanyard around his neck. He joined her.
“We can go in.” She headed for the door. He and Nick fell in behind her, and Kitty brought up the rear.
“Brace yourselves,” Kitty whispered. “It’s bad.”
There hadn’t been time, though, to really warn Beth. Inside, she ground to a halt. He flanked her on one side, Nick taking the other. As she staggered, he caught her arm. In front of them, bodies were everywhere, at least a dozen. While some of the people here were still alive, there were more dead than the three they’d originally expected. Most of them lay on their sides or slumped over. Some were in a circle, the others were separate, alone. The smell of illness hung in the air, though the personnel in their hazmat gear probably didn’t notice.
“Oh God,” Beth breathed. He pulled her behind him, wanting to shield her from this, knowing he couldn’t.
“Look.” Nick pointed to one of the bodies closest to them. A young man, probably in his late teens, sprawled backward. His legs were under him, as if he’d been positioned on his knees and had fallen to his back. Sick was all over the floor around him, and Luke did his best not to gag.
Blood tracks streaked the boy’s face. They had smeared when he fell, but the trails led to his sightless eyes.
Behind Luke, Beth covered her mouth, her eyes full of anguish. Reaching for her, he wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close. He would take this from her if he could.
“These are our guys,” he said, his voice ringing in the hushed room. “Definitely.”