The Girl who Saved the World (Death Fields 6)

“I love you, too.”

Chapter Nineteen

The house carries the chill of abandonment. Unlike every other building I’ve rummaged through, slept in, and used for shelter over the last two years, beneath the thin layer of dust lay memories as well as useless objects from another life. My life.

I point to a basket next to the TV. A comfortable blanket folded neatly on top. “My mother hid her gossip magazines in there. People, Us Weekly…all the trashy tabloids she knew better than to believe.” I walk over and reveal them. Pristine and untouched. “My dad thought they were ridiculous. I mean, they were, but it was just her guilty pleasure.”

I walk through the kitchen and see the note on the refrigerator. We left it for my father—hoping he’d catch up to us at any minute. I pick it up and study it, reliving those last moments in the house.

“There’s not any food in here. We either ate it or took it with us.”

“I’m not hungry.”

I glance down the hall. “My father’s office is down the hall.”

Wyatt follows me quietly, clicking on his flashlight, which doubles as a lantern. The white glaring beam leads the way. The office door is shut and I take a deep, dusty breath before I open it.

The hinges creak and Wyatt holds the light over my head, splaying it across the room. The shades are drawn and my mother and I moved a large shelf over the window early in the early days of the quarantine.

Everything is in place. His chair and the framed certificates on the walls. The picture of him and my mother at some conference in Texas.

“Can I have that?” I ask, reaching for the light.

He hands it over without a word, silently taking in the room. I walk around the desk and pull out the heavy, padded, leather chair. It rolls easily on the hardwoods and I tug at the lower right drawer.

“Locked?” he asks, looking away at a photo of me and my sister when we were in preschool.

“Yeah, but…” I open the middle drawer and feel around under the bottom of the desk. My fingers catch on a strip of tape and I pry the metal out of the drawer. “He left a key.”

I open the drawer and reveal a long row of files. I pull out half with both hands and pass

them over. Wyatt takes them and says, “What am I looking for?”

I lift out the other half and place them on the desk.

“When Jane created the original virus, E-TR, she was working around the bureaucracy of the official government. She was tired of the red tape and wanted to do something to fight the growing fanaticism around the world. She saw ISIS coming long before the rest of us were paying attention and she used Avi’s laboratory at PharmaCorp to make it happen.”

“Right—except we know Avi was almost a pacifist. He was adamantly opposed to biological warfare.”

“Which means someone else backed her project.” I look up at Wyatt. “Do you know who hired and paid for your mission? The one to find me?”

“I worked through PharmaCorp, you know that.”

“But who really paid for it? Because we both know Avi didn’t.”

He frowns. “There’s no way your father paid for it. He was involved in stopping the spread of the virus. Not developing it.”

“There are two things I know about my father.” I pulled open two more drawers and showed Wyatt the contents. Then the closet and another file cabinet disguised as a bookshelf. “He kept papers about everything. Compulsively.”

“So he was a pack-rat.”

“He was tracking this thing from the beginning. Maybe even before the beginning. If there’s a connection between an outside source and Jane, he’ll have it.”

He sighs and sits at the chair across from the desk, files piled in his lap. “And you want that connection.”

“I don’t want it. We need it.”

“Why?”