“What was that for?” Eva asked.
“A decoy,” he muttered.
“Won’t that send them down here?” Eva asked.
“But we won’t be here,” he said.
She just shrugged and kept on going. “As long as you know what you’re doing,” she muttered.
“I don’t think you trust very easily, do you?”
“I do,” she said, “but I also like to see some proof. So, if you tell me that it’s this or that, then I want to know that this is the truth, and I have something that visually allows me to confirm it.”
“Life isn’t always so clean-cut,” he warned.
“It’s never clean-cut,” she said. “That’s why I like science. When you work with it, it’s black-and-white and easy to understand. But all this theoretical stuff drives me crazy.”
“Not everything is theoretical though,” he said.
“I know. I know that,” she said, “and sometimes I wish it was a whole lot better than what it is.”
“Got it,” he murmured. “In this case, it’s concrete enough that we will move with it,” he said. “But we can’t take any chances of getting caught, so, as soon as there’s any kind of firepower going on, you need to drop to the ground and stay down there.”
She nodded slowly. “If you have a spare gun,” she said, “I can shoot.”
He looked at her and smiled.
“Really, I can.”
“What? Are you from Texas?”
“No, Wisconsin, but I used to go hunting with my father.”
“That’s a surprise,” he murmured in a low voice.
“I hated the killing part,” she said, “but my father wanted to make sure that, when push came to shove, I could do the job.”
He nodded slowly and said, “Well, I do have a spare rifle, so I might take you up on that.”
She looked at him, looked at the weapon on his back, and said, “I’ll take it right now actually.” And she quickly disengaged it from his shoulder and put it over hers.
He shrugged and said, “If I see that you can’t handle it …”
“Got it. If I can’t handle it, you’ll take it away from me.”
“Exactly.”
She shrugged. “It is what it is. I just don’t want to feel like a victim anymore.”
“Understood. Were you taken from work?”
“At home actually.” She sighed. “Who’d have thought that we weren’t even safe in or near our own homes? Since word of my work got out, my life became even more public.”
He said, “I imagine that would have been hard.”
“Very much,” she murmured.
As they moved ahead, Marge turned to look back, saw the rifle now in Eva’s hand, and gasped. “What are you doing with that?” she asked.
“I don’t want to be taken by any of these assholes again,” Eva said in a hard tone. “This is my insurance that I won’t be.”
Chapter 3
Eva actually had another reason for wanting the gun, and that was more because of her own fears. Her mother had been shot in a break-in when Eva was just seven. She’d heard it happen, and it’s the reason why her father had made sure that she knew how to handle herself, if she were ever in a similar situation. She couldn’t help back then, as the gunman had come in, fully weaponized himself, and hadn’t given anybody any chance.
He’d been high on drugs and shot up her mother, leaving her bleeding on the kitchen floor, while he grabbed food. Eva had called 9-1-1 and stayed hidden upstairs. She watched him leave out a window, and, as soon as he had disappeared, the officers arrived. She’d raced downstairs to help her mother, but it was too late. She told the officers where the gunman had gone, and he’d been picked up not very long afterward.
But her father had come home, his grief over the loss of his wife overshadowed by his anger, realizing that his traumatized daughter had been left alone in the house during the murder and could easily have been killed herself. After that, he’d taken it upon himself to help her learn more about self-defense and to ensure that she wasn’t quite so easily taken.
Regardless, when the men kidnapped her from her home some twelve days ago, they pulled a gun on her. She knew the odds of fighting armed men. However, she certainly knew how to use the weapon with her right now, and it gave her a little bit more confidence. She understood that the professionals would say it was false confidence and that she certainly shouldn’t count on it.
Often in these home invasion scenarios, it was common for the gunman to take the weapon from the homeowner because they weren’t sure that they wanted to shoot somebody. But most of these gunmen forcefully entering a house did not care one way or the other if they did kill someone. Same as with these gunmen in the Chinese lab.
So Eva had learned a big lesson. Twice now. When you raised a firearm, you had to be sure that you were ready to pull the trigger.
Right now she was more than ready to pull the trigger. She also knew that poor Marge and Paul couldn’t handle too much more. She whispered to Diesel at her side, “Marge seems quite ill, and Paul has not been feeling well for the last few days.”
“Anything serious?”
“Despair is possibly one reason. Marge won’t talk about what may be ailing her. As scientists, we have a tendency to know a little more about our symptoms,” she said. “So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they have a good idea but just aren’t sharing it.”
He nodded. “Any reason to think they can’t keep moving like this?”
“They definitely can’t for the long-term. Can they keep up some pace? Yes. I just don’t know how long or how fast.”
“We have to get out of the building,” he said. “After that, it’s a whole different ball game.”
She nodded.
Up ahead was more gunfire. Jerricho turned, sent a hand signal to Diesel, who then took the other two scientists and headed left.
Diesel took Eva right.
“No,” she said, “we don’t want to do that. We need to
