Because it is not a sin to be living proof of God’s will.
He realized he was standing stock-still in the hallway, and people were filing past, some in scrubs, all looking at him queerly. He carefully tucked his hands in his pockets and went to the elevator, the now empty backpack on his shoulder.
It was done. In fifteen minutes, they’d all be dead, and the ones who didn’t succumb in the blast would get a nice whiff of abrin and die later.
Die, mother...fuckers.
He stopped himself from giggling. He didn’t use bad words often. Just thinking one was tantamount to shouting it at the top of his lungs, but that thought felt very, very good.
The elevator dinged and the doors slipped open. He kept his gaze averted and entered, ignoring the two nurses inside. He counted it down.
Thirty.
Twenty.
Ten.
Ding.
He walked straight out and made a beeline for the doors.
“Hey! Hey! Electrician dude.”
Stop walking. Turn around slowly. Don’t look anxious.
He followed his own advice. The security guard was on his feet, pointing his long finger right at his...oh, the badge. They wanted their badge back.
He allowed himself half a breath, and detached it from his pocket, walked it back to the security guard, who grunted thanks and took it.
He turned and hightailed it out of there. At the door he hesitated for a second, looking over his shoulder. The fire alarm was on the wall to the right of the glass door. No one was looking.
He pulled the white bar, and the sirens sang out. Quicker than a breeze, he stepped out the doors and began a quick march away from the building.
The previous glee returned. He was golden.
The truck was parked five hundred yards away, and he glanced at the gorgeous, sunny summer sky, wondering what the people inside the four walls of perdition were thinking.
Panic.
Fire.
Apocalypse.
He bet they’d been looking outside their windows, gloating about their advances, cheering each other with their test tubes full of the abominations they created, reveling in the sun, thinking it signified God’s pleasure at their interference with his plan, and yet they had no idea that they were staring into the brimstone sky of their real creator. And then the warning system kicked in, and they’d have to abandon their work, scramble into the stairwells, where his vengeance lay in wait.
He would show them. Breathe your last, hellspawn.
He counted the steps to the truck. Reached the door. Opened it, and swung his big body into the cab.
“Ruthie, my darling...”
The truck was empty.
“Ruth? Where are you? Ruth?”
No answer.
And the cell phone, stashed so carefully behind the gearshift, was gone, too.
Terror filled him, bleeding into his blood, and he went ice-cold before breaking out into a flop sweat. His breath came fast, and he couldn’t see. The blackness was coming, it was going to take him.
Breathe, man. She can’t be far.
Ruth was going to be in some serious trouble. She had strict instructions not to move. She had defied him, and stolen the phone from him, as well. He would tan her hide the minute he found her.
Think. Think!
He got out of the cab of the truck and scanned the street, up and down. The office building was the only one on the street, and people were actually starting to stream out of the doors, white lab coats flapping in their hurry to escape.
Oh, God, where was she?
He searched up the west side of the street, saw nothing, then turned and scoured the east side. Half a block away on either side were some of the college’s classrooms. The University of Colorado campus was extensive, stretching all over Boulder, their octopus-like tentacles spreading through the streets and into the businesses. She could be anywhere, in any direction.
And she had the detonator.
Chapter 44
Washington, D.C.
Detective Darren Fletcher
Fletcher had to coax the story out of Loa, a little bit at a time. It wasn’t terrible, by any means, but he could see how much it hurt her to relive.
“You can’t know what love is when you’re thirteen. My mother kept trying to tell me that, and I kept trying to make her see that of course you can. But she was right. She was almost always right.”
Loa was calm again, settled in. She had leaned her head on her right hand, was idly playing with the ends of her hair. She seemed strangely disconnected from the story as she told it, clearly a self-protecting device. Either she’d told this story a hundred times, or she’d rehearsed how she would relay the details.
Fletcher wasn’t so bad as an ethnographic researcher himself. He pulled the pieces from her, slowly at first, as if he’d been digging for days in the desert, and the shovelfuls of information hit the screens, and the sand sifted out, leaving the remnants to expose themselves.