Jeaniene Frost - 07 Up From the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

Author:Jeaniene Frost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-one

Katie wasn’t in the underground facility anymore. Tate followed her scent and discovered a secret shaft between the walls that led straight up to the surface. The thick metal plug over it had been kicked off. It was too narrow for an adult to fit through, so it might have been a ventilation shaft, once upon a time when this facility was a bomb shelter. But to a slender child with a double dose of inhuman genetics, it would have been a relatively easy climb to freedom.

Once topside, the ponds, lakes, and surrounding wetlands dissipated her scent enough to make it untraceable. Then the only footprints Katie left ended in a shallow canal, so we couldn’t find her that way. It was still daylight, too, which meant we couldn’t risk doing an aerial sweep. Something man-sized flying above the McClintic Wildlife area would fuel Mothman rumors for decades, and we couldn’t risk hanging around until after dark to do it then.

We’d have to come back another time to search for her. Superhuman or not, Katie was still only a child. She shouldn’t be too hard to find.

Once back in the compound, we determined that the surviving employees weren’t directly involved in Madigan’s cross-species experiments and replaced their memories of the day’s events with a new version. Then we left them topside in a concrete igloo with instructions not to leave it until dawn. If a distress signal hadn’t been sent, we wanted the extra time to get away.

Then we went back underground and torched the rest of the facility. My DNA was on file with these people, and I didn’t want to leave more of it as proof that I’d been involved in the destruction even though I’d be the first, second, and third guess for Madigan’s shadowy backers. That’s why I was calling my mother as soon as I had a working cell phone. Madigan might have been bluffing about her being at our old house in Ohio, but if he wasn’t, I wasn’t about to test his drone strike threat. If we were ridiculously lucky, Madigan’s backers would believe the cover story we implanted in the survivors’ minds: an internal malfunction triggered the Dante machine’s explosion, which ignited other flammable gases in the compound and resulted in a fiery chain reaction.

It was a plausible theory unless someone bothered to autopsy all the bodies.

Madigan still hadn’t woken up yet. The delay wasn’t unheard of, Bones told me, but it didn’t bode well for his chances of rising as a ghoul. Most did within minutes, as Dave had. Maybe Madigan had managed to escape us after all. If so, I could only console myself that he wouldn’t escape God.

So, blood-spattered and weary, the seven of us emerged from the igloo that contained the secret elevation shaft. Spade was waiting nearby since Fabian gave him the all clear to enter the wildlife area. The ghost had been overjoyed to see we were all alive and well since, like me, he hadn’t known that my arrival with my husband’s corpse had been a setup.

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