Personal Protection by A.R. Moler

Author:A.R. Moler [Moler, A.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The Florence Scientific building was never totally vacant, and that didn’t include token security either. There were too many animals and too many projects in progress, but Saturdays were definitely slacker than the work week. After blowing off Friday, I needed to check on a few of the monkeys and take a look at the blood work Emily had run on them. We were trying to maintain a fixed level of drug 384AZ in the monkeys, high enough to have the desired results but below toxicity levels. We’d lost one to an unexpected kidney problem a few weeks ago.

Brendan shepherded me into the building.

“This is gonna take a couple of hours,” I said.

He tapped the laptop case in his hand. “I still have more entries to read through. I didn’t get them done last night.” He smirked a little.

It had been really nice to have even one evening where my mind wasn’t totally obsessed with worry about the lunatic after me. I left him in my lab reading while I went to the animal housing wing. The company had people who fed my monkeys and cleaned the cages, but since I was doing work on a drug that affected brain chemistry, I always felt it behooved me to check on them personally several times a week in between testing runs. The project studied eleven total, four controls, four low dose, and three high dose. I spent several minutes observing each one and making myself some notes before heading back toward the lab.

An hour’s worth of uninterrupted data crunching and I felt fairly caught up after having missed the day before.

“Are you done?” Brendan asked as I leaned back in my chair laced my hands behind my neck, stretching.

“Yeah, enough to get by. How ‘bout you?

He shut his laptop and stuffed it in the briefcase. “It’s slow going.”

We walked toward the door to the side parking lot. Nobody came in the front way on the weekends. Brendan went out the door first, pulling keys out of his pocket. There were three steps down to the sidewalk, and I was a few feet behind him when there was a loud crack-shatter noise as the glass in the window beside the door exploded in fragments. Brendan grabbed me and flung me down. I missed the bottom step entirely and slammed into the concrete, one hand flung out in a vain effort to break my fall and my cheek hit the sidewalk at the same time as my knee. Brendan’s body slammed down on top of me. Lost in a blinding moment of pain, I was just barely aware that his arms were around my body as he rolled us under the front bumper of somebody’s pickup truck. There was another sharp crack. I felt him move slightly, but I was still pinned under him. That noise…Oh hell…somebody was shooting at me…him…us.

I think I made a sound. Shit, it was probably a whimper.

Brendan nudged me a little further under the truck with his knee against my back “Don’t move.

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