“Kang,” Naomi breathed. They’d been close friends before he was murdered.
“Run,” Philip ordered. He took my arm and propelled me to the hallway. “Get them and you barricaded up and safe. We’ll handle these guys.”
Naomi slammed and locked the door to the security room behind her. “We got this, chick,” she said when I hesitated. The main door beeped, and she gave me a shove. “Go!”
She and Philip turned to the door, flattened against the wall with Naomi crouched low, and lifted weapons.
They knew what the hell they were doing, so I did what the hell I knew how to do.
I turned and ran.
Shouts and the sound of gunfire followed me as I raced through the central lab rotunda and down the hallway to find Jacques, but all the noise was drowned out by the thoughts screaming through my head. They had the codes. They used the codes to get through the first two doors.
Those codes were barely two hours old, which meant that Brian wasn’t the only insider. Naomi had set the codes. Who else had them besides Philip and me? Probably Raul, Dan, Kyle, maybe Rachel. Kyle. Shit. There were plenty of other possibilities, but I didn’t like his name on the list.
I slammed doors in my wake and locked or jammed each one as best I could in the hopes of buying myself more time. To my relief Jacques was in the first place I looked for him, in the treatment room. “Jacques!” I tried to catch my breath without success. “Bad guys . . . here to get you . . . and Reg . . . and heads . . . I think.”
He turned, and now I saw that he was on the phone. “It’s Angel,” he said, apparently answering a question of who was speaking to him. “She thinks they’re here for the heads or for Reg and me.”
I moved toward him. “Who are you talking to, Jacques?”
He lowered the mouthpiece a couple of inches. “It’s Rachel. She’s on her way here.”
I yanked the phone from his grasp and hung it up. “Someone gave these guys the codes to get in,” I explained as he gaped at me in shock. “That means Brian wasn’t the only insider, and we don’t know who to trust.”
Eyes wide, he visibly swallowed. “Oh, dear.”
“We need to get you and Reg and the heads to a safe place,” I said. “Is there a room y’all could barricade in? Y’know, like a safe or a bomb shelter?” I threw the last two in in an attempt at humor, then blinked in surprise when he actually nodded.
“We have an emergency bunker,” he said hesitantly.
“Really? That’s awesome!” I didn’t hear gunshots anymore, but I had no way of knowing if it was a pause in fighting or if one side had been defeated. “C’mon, let’s get y’all tucked away.”
Looking more than a little dazed, Jacques hit the intercom button on the phone. “Reg, meet me in the regrowth lab. Now. With gurneys.”
The intercom crackled. “Roger that.” Good ol’ Reg, as go-with-the-flow as anyone I’d ever met.
I strained to hear if anyone was trying to get through my lame-ass attempts at barricades. I thought I heard some thuds and thumps, but that could’ve been my paranoia working overtime. “Is there anything you need from here?”
The phone rang. Jacques began to reach for it then stopped and looked at me uncertainly. “It’s from outside the lab.”
“It’s probably Rachel calling back,” I said. “Let’s pack up fast and move.”
“The bunker is stocked,” he said, looking and sounding shaken. He glanced once again to the ringing phone then headed to the hallway. “I’ll get what I need for the heads from their lab.”
I picked up the phone and hung it up again, then followed him at a jog. Reg was in the room with the heads when we arrived. I gave him a terse rundown of the situation as I helped disconnect vats and transfer them to the gurneys.
The muffled sound of more gunshots spurred us all to move faster. In less than five minutes we had all the vats loaded up, along with a cart filled with supplies and equipment, and were pushing it all down a narrow corridor that I’d passed a billion times but never been down. At the end of the hall stood an extremely solid-looking door with a heavy handle.
“Holy shit,” I said as Jacques heaved it open. The damn door was nearly a foot thick. “Y’all could survive a nuclear war in here.”
Lights flickered on within, and Jacques stepped in and tugged a gurney after him. “Barring a direct strike, yes,” he said matter-of-factly.
I wanted to gawk and poke around and see what a bunker really looked like, but I knew I was running out of time. I helped get the gurneys and cart into the bunker, then gave Jacques a troubled look.
“I don’t know who we can trust,” I told him. “Promise me you won’t open the door until you hear from me, or Pietro, or Dr. Nikas, or . . .” I struggled to come up with anyone else who I knew could be trusted without a shadow of a doubt. Guilt flickered that I couldn’t put Philip or Naomi in that category, but I swallowed it down to let it sit like a rock in my gut.
“We’ll lock it down,” Jacques said as he worked quickly to get the vats reconnected to power. “No one can open it from the outside if we seal it from within. Ari . . .” His voice faltered. The pain and distress on his face nearly brought me to tears, and I realized I’d never heard him call Dr. Nikas by his first name before. “You have to get him back,” he went on when he could speak again. “He can’t tolerate being out.”