Free The Judas Contact (Boomers Book 1) by Heather Long Page B

“The hazmat gear is over there.” He pointed to a closet on the far wall. “We’ll do the extraction in the isolation room.”
    “You have an isolation room?” Ilsa swung around even as she opened the closet door. Her gaze fixed on him and her pupils dilated.
     
    * * * *
     
    Ilsa’s breath clogged in her throat. Garrett’s arms looked huge in the thick black jacket, the heavier shirts and combat pants in unrelieved black he wore. The sight of the veins popping on his bicep and the corded muscle tightening along his forearm sent a tremor through her nervous system. Her mouth dried. Her heart seemed to hiccup and literally skip a beat. Heat flushed through her as though a fever had broken loose in her system.
    “Doctor Blaine?”
    “Yes. Yes. Hazmat suit.” She fumbled with the vinyl and jerked it off the hanger. She stuffed herself into the suit. Sweat slicked her legs as she dragged the rest of it on and pulled on the helmet. She could barely get a full breath and it was hard as hell to button the thing while he stared. His arms were crisscrossed with blazing white scars that stood out in thick welts against his ruddy skin. He wasn’t quite tanned, but he wasn’t pale either. It was like his skin had a caramel coating on it, a sweet color that enhanced the scars. Her fingers itched to trace the ridges.
    “This can wait,” Garrett repeated his earlier offer.
    “No. No, it can’t.” She stuffed her hands into the first layer of latex gloves and then into the second, heavier set. Her breath fogged on the shield before she remembered that she needed to plug into the respiration system. She glanced around the room. “Isolation room?”
    He pointed and she lumbered towards the door. There was no other way to walk in these ridiculous suits. She always felt ungainly when she wore one. Thankfully, her line of work meant it was a rare occurrence. Inside the room she found the orange oxygen cords and plugged one in, dialing up the control until cool air flooded inside the suit. Breathing became a great deal easier and she forced herself to calm down.
    She was a scientist, not some teenager in the first throes of a crush. Besides, he’s nice enough, but you still have no idea if he’s truly delusional. You’re not impulsive like Rory. You need facts. Find the facts.
    Somewhere between walking in the room and plugging in the oxygen, Garrett had followed her inside. He stood patiently, waiting next to a case of syringes and vials. He had to have gotten them out because she certainly didn’t remember to do it.
    “The fact that you’re so willing to participate in this leads me to believe you’re telling me the truth.” The chatter spilled out of her. One of her professors complained that she couldn’t work without talking and he’d been right. It was why she preferred to work with animals. They didn’t get aggravated at her need to chatter. “That concerns me.”
    It took her a couple of minutes to set up the syringe and the vials. She didn’t need a lot of blood. She just wanted to look at it under a microscope, run it through the equipment. Reasonably, it would give her a baseline for starting. Starting what? His microchip isn’t in his blood, it’s in his brain.
    She ignored the skeptical little voice of contention nattering in the back of her mind. Garrett stood ready, his gloved hand a fist and a vein already ready for the needle’s invasion. He stared at her calmly. “Why does it concern you, Doctor Blaine?”
    “Rory said you came from a bleak future. How bad is bleak?”
    “Bad.”
    She swallowed. His expression darkened with that one word. The lines around his eyes tightened and his lips flattened together. “And if we find out that my work contributed to that future? Would taking me out of the equation fix that?”
    The thought popped up out of nowhere but, the moment she gave voice to it, she realized it was true. The concept of quantum time suggested that, for every action, there was a