Once Bitten, Twice Dead - By Bianca D'Arc Page 0,22

be gone by now?” she asked worriedly, watching Xavier stay out of arm’s reach. If he was touching the creature with bare skin when it imploded, there was the possibility of some of the toxin making its way into Xavier’s body. Since the toxin was so incredibly deadly, that was to be avoided at all costs.

“Sometimes it takes a while to work through their systems,” Xavier finally answered her, but she could see the furrow in his brow. He was concerned, too, though he wouldn’t speak of it.

She didn’t want to argue with him. Not while he was facing off against something out of a nightmare. Later, they’d have time to talk through what was going on. In the debrief. Right now, they had a job to do to make sure they both made it to the debrief.

The zombie lunged at Xavier, scraping those inch-long claws the zombies all seemed to have, too close for comfort. He barely missed Xavier’s midsection as Sarah watched helplessly from above. She could see Xavier’s darts sticking out of the man’s back as they circled. The guy had been shot with four doses of toxin. Xavier had told her it usually took only two doses to end one of these creatures. Had he been disastrously wrong?

Sarah was afraid they were about to find out.

“Dammit, stop this,” she prayed aloud, watching the action intently. The zombie looked up at her and something flickered through his dead eyes. A look, almost of uncertainty, passed over his ruined features.

Could it be he understood what she’d said?

“Stop!” she said again, louder this time, directly to him, putting all the authority she could muster into the command.

The creature hesitated. His mouth opened. He seemed to be struggling to speak, though Xavier had said these creatures were incapable of forming words. Still, it looked like this one was trying to do just that.

“M-mst—”

Dammit, he really was trying to speak.

Just then, his body disintegrated. It flowed like sand…or runny Jell-O…right down to the floor. The toxin had done its job. If she understood it correctly, the man had been reduced to a gooey puddle of biological material. The bonds between his cells had been dissolved on a molecular level.

“Holy shit.” She’d never expected anything like what she’d just seen, even though Xavier had warned her what would happen.

“You’re not kidding.” Xavier stepped into the circle of light emitted by her flashlight. “That son of a bitch was trying to talk to you. Could you make out what he was trying to say?”

Sarah stared blankly at him for a short moment. She really needed some time to regroup, but she knew it was impossible. They still had the rest of this basement to search. That one might not have been alone down here.

“Hard to say.” She started back down the ladder, joining Xavier on the concrete floor. “It sounded like mst—must. Or it could’ve been ‘mast’ or maybe ‘mist.’ M-S-T something.”

Xavier pulled a small device from one of his many pockets and twisted it between his fingers. A small LED light began to blink. He dropped the blinking object on the pile of old clothes and goo that had once been the zombie and picked up his more powerful flashlight, doing a sweep of the area.

“Tracker,” he explained as she looked at the softly blinking electronic device. “For the cleanup team. We label all kills with these so the nerds know exactly where we dropped the tangos. They come in after us and sanitize the place.”

He’d alluded to that before, but in all the tumult she was having a hard time recalling exactly what he’d told her about his process in the field. Hearing about it and actually doing it were two very different things.

Dammit, she was better than this. Maybe the blow to the head really had scrambled her brains. She was a professional. An officer of the law. No matter how bizarre the situation, she should at least be able to remember what she’d been told, and how to perform her duty.

Instead, fear was choking her and the insanity of this entire ordeal was making her weak. She wasn’t pulling her weight on this team and they both knew it. Xavier was babying her, ushering her along like some feeble-minded responsibility rather than an equal partner.

She’d do better from here on out. She could handle this. She had handled this—all on her own—just a week ago. She needed to find her reserves of courage and pluck to get back on