Free The Ninth Day by Jamie Freveletti Page A

heels of the thought came the realization that Raoul and La Valle had to know this. All they wanted was to get the shipment into the building. Once inside and Oz was dead, investigative personnel would descend on the shipment, touching it, inhaling it, and possibly spreading the disease. Oz was expendable. It was a suicide mission.
    “You can’t deliver that shipment. You know that, don’t you?”
    Oz gave her a grim look. “I’m going to do what it takes to stay alive. If that means I take out the DOD security, then I will.”
    Emma could see he was serious. “I won’t let it come to that. I have friends who work there. I won’t let La Valle hurt them, or you.”
    Oz stared at her a moment, then sighed. “I’ll help you escape.” She wanted to tell him to join her, and almost did, but clamped her jaw shut. He wouldn’t make it.
    “I’m headed back to the far end to look at some slides. Let’s talk about this after dinner. I can’t make a move until it’s dark in any event.”
    Emma returned to the ranch house by the stables and began preparing the slides for review. She used some of the scrapings from the sores to innoculate petri dishes containing various mediums. She wanted to see if the disease grew under various circumstances, not just when offered a plant or human host upon which to feed.
    The camera attached at the center of the ceiling contained one glowing LED pin light underneath a dark glass globe. While Emma worked on the slides, her mind was elsewhere, creating and discarding escape ideas. She wanted to attempt it without including Oz if she could. She didn’t know him well enough to be sure that he wasn’t acting as the “good cop” in a “good cop, bad cop” scenario, but her gut told her he was just as desperate to leave as she was. Even so, she would rather not involve him.
    Her mind wandered to the world outside the compound. By now her absence from her office would be noted, but she doubted that anyone would have begun worrying about it. The plants that she scoured the earth for were often in remote areas accessible only on foot and after hours or days of hiking. As a result, she routinely slept in the field, and had become adept at carrying her own tent, water, and all the supplies she would need for an overnight. Her colleagues knew this. Banner, the CEO of Darkview, might grow suspicious, but if he was in the field as well, there was no telling how long she’d be gone before someone worried about her.
    She completed her work and put the petri dishes aside. She placed a slide under the microscope and peered through it at the tissue. The image sprang into focus, a large red scale with irregular edges. Emma recognized nothing unusual.
    She blew out her breath in irritation. Solving this problem with such inadequate tools was impossible. Emma removed the slide and added another. Same picture, same problem. Ten minutes later she’d viewed them all and was no further enlightened. She pushed away from the counter and headed to the armadillo barn.
    The sun had long since peaked and was heading downward. The air remained heated, but large clouds of gnats flew low, keeping below the tree line. Emma glanced at the sky. Heat lightning flashed in the distance. Cameras placed at the corners of the armadillo barn remained stationary despite her movement. A glance at them revealed that they were mounted on rigid arms. These eyes, then, were fixed. Staring. Their LED lights didn’t glow. They were the only ones she’d seen on the compound that remained dark.
    “Dummy cameras,” she thought with satisfaction. La Valle must have thought the ground-armadillo-plate border would protect anyone from taking his pets, though Emma thought it more likely that no one wanted the damn things anyway.
    She passed into the barn and was once again struck by the smell of animal dander, straw, and the funk of old water and dried dung. Emma loved the smell of horses and liked the smell of dogs. She was less than