“Are you the only one back?”
“The others will be here soon,” Tanner said, walking past Peter into the meeting house/dining hall. “They’re transporting the wounded.”
Chad intercepted him before he could take more than a few steps. Tanner ignored him for the moment, focused instead on finding Zarina. He let his nose guide him, following her scent to the far corner of the big open building. She and Lillie were surrounded by a bunch of scared-looking kids. As if feeling his gaze on her, Zarina lifted her head and looked his way. Smiling at him, she said something to the kids, then detached herself from the group and moved in his direction. His heart slowed drastically at the sight of her until he realized she was wearing a gun on her hip. What the hell was she doing with a gun? She didn’t have the first clue how to even use one. Not that she had any business using a weapon in the first place.
He started toward her, but Chad sidestepped to block his path. “How bad was it? Was anyone badly hurt?”
Tanner resisted the urge to pick Chad up and physically move him out of the way. He knew the older man was simply worried. The prepper communities up here were like an extended family, and like family, they looked out for each other.
“No one from here was injured,” Tanner said as Zarina reached them, Lillie at her heels. “But the other camp took some serious injuries. Five people, three with gunshot wounds.”
“I’ll get the medical supplies set up in Lorraine’s cabin,” Lillie said. “It worked well as an operating room before. We can make it work again.”
Zarina nodded as Lillie hurried off, then looked at Tanner. “You said five people were injured. What happened to the other two?”
“They were hit with some kind of tranquilizer darts. They were still unconscious when I left.”
“Tranquilized?” Chad’s eyes filled with confusion. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” Tanner admitted. “All I can say for sure is that whoever attacked the camp was in the process of dragging them away when I got there.”
Tanner hadn’t realized that the rest of the building had gone quiet until surprised chatter suddenly filled the silence. Chad frowned and turned to field questions, even though he had no answer to most of them. Tanner used the interruption to finally focus on Zarina.
“Why the hell do you have a gun?” he demanded.
She lifted her chin to look up at him. Something told him she didn’t like the question. “Why do you think?”
“Dammit, Zarina. This isn’t a game.” He stepped closer and lowered his voice. “There are some seriously bad guys out there. They’re well trained and heavily armed, and they haven’t shown any hesitation when it comes to hurting people. You’re not some kind of comic book superhero. You should have stayed in the cabin like I told you.”
Her brows rose. “Like you told me? What am I, your pet?”
“That’s not what I meant, and you know it.”
She folded her arms. “Then what did you mean?”
This wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go. “Just that I want you safe.”
“You mean you want me to stay all safe and tucked away while you go out and risk yourself for others.”
He ran his hand through his hair. Why was she turning this around on him? Couldn’t she see how terrified he was at the thought of something happening to her? “Zarina, you know how much you mean to me. You have to be careful.”
“And you don’t?” she demanded, her voice rising. A few of the preppers looked their way. “We’ve been together long enough for you to know me. If someone is in trouble, I’m going to help them the same as you would. I’d never expect anything less of you, so don’t expect anything less of me.”
He was trying to come up with a reasonable response to that when a ringing noise interrupted him. He frowned. None of the preppers had cell phones, so where the hell was it coming from?
When the sound came again, he realized it was from Zarina’s backpack. The satellite phone. She must have figured it out at the same time, because she shrugged the bag off her shoulder and quickly dug the phone out.
“This is Zarina Sokolov.”
She said it so tentatively that Tanner would have smiled if he wasn’t still mad at her. He guessed she wasn’t used to answering a DCO satellite phone. But the urge to grin disappeared the moment he recognized the voice on the other end of the line.
“It’s Cam,” Zarina said, holding the phone out to him. “He said he needs to talk to you, that it’s urgent.”
Ignoring the curious looks Chad and the other preppers were giving him and Zarina, he took the phone from her and put it to his ear. “What’s up, Cam?”
“I tracked down two of the missing preppers and three of the homeless people you mentioned,” his brother said. “It took a while, because the descriptions you gave me were the only thing I had to work with, but once I found the first one, locating the others went faster.”
“And?” Tanner prompted, even though he had a feeling he already knew the answer.
“Two of the men and a woman washed up along different stretches of the west shore of Lake Washington. The other two guys were found way over in Elliott Bay. Without any IDs on them, they all ended up getting labeled as John and Jane Does and their cases put on the back burner, but when I started poking around, the ME office noticed the connection and started digging. He says that all five victims were beaten to death.”
Tanner cursed. “Were any of them drugged?”
“Yeah,” Cam said. “How’d you know about that? Even if you could get TV up there, we’re keeping that detail out of the news.”
Tanner took a deep breath and told him about the attack
