Page 136 of Shadow Blind

White screaming faces…

Aiden banished the image. He was not letting those assholes haunt him during the day. “I don’t know what my dreams represent, but they sure as hell aren’t about your shadow gods.”

Wolf’s grunt was full of disbelief. So was the look he turned on Aiden.

“Jesus, man.” Aiden’s voice rose. So did his blood pressure. He was not the mouthpiece of the Shadow Warrior! No fucking way! “I admit the dreams are whacked. But, if I’m the fucking mouthpiece to your Shadow Warrior, why the fuck doesn’t he give me anything to say? Nobody says a damn word in those dreams.”

His brother stopped so abruptly, Aiden cruised past him and had to wheel back around.

“Perhaps…” Wolf’s voice was so tight, Aiden had to strain to hear the words. “You refuse to listen.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

Yeah—this was getting them nowhere fast. Time to focus on what was important, which wasn’t trivial superstition.

“Look, let’s shelve this discussion and move on.” He waited for Wolf to walk again. “You said the nanobots are vibrating. What’s going on there?”

The last he’d heard, the bots Wolf had retrieved from Kuznetsov were still sitting in their containment tank in one of the labs.

His brother shrugged but accepted the change of subject. “The case the bots are in started vibrating. This is all I know.”

“Is the vibration coming from the bots?” Aiden asked as they reached the two utility carts. Wolf climbed into the driver’s seat of the vehicle that was there when Aiden arrived.

“It appears so. The case has no cause to vibrate. Faith says the bots are huddled together. The vibrations appear to be coming from them.”

Aiden hopped into the passenger seat.

Before the phone call from the lab, Benioko had announced the beginning of the end of times—or something to that effect. He’d issued the warning prior to Faith’s report about the nanobot vibrations. The two warnings had to be connected.

“We should turn back and talk to Benioko, find out what he knows about these vibrations. He knew something was up before Faith called.”

Wolf frowned at the suggestion, his finger hovering over the cart’s start button. His phone rang again. Wolf plucked it from the cargo pocket of his tactical pants and lifted it to his ear. Even from the passenger seat, Aiden could hear the shrill voice coming over the cell phone. Not the words—but the tone, the sharp pitch and urgent cadence to it.

His scalp tightened beneath a sudden surge of foreboding.

What the hell was wrong now?

His brother’s face paled, going from flat to stunned, and then horrified. Even more horrified than it had been earlier during that fucked up conversation with Benioko.

“This is not possible,” Wolf huffed out. He listened more. “Lock them in. Vent the oxygen from the room. They must not escape. We are on our way.”

Aiden’s gut twisted. Memories slashed through his mind.

Squirrel’s snarling face and twitching fingers. Muddy, enraged eyes. Rifles rising. The crack of gunfire.

“The bots got out?” Christ, what a catastrophe.

Had they already infected the lab techs? How were they going to contain a microscopic entity that could slip through the smallest of cracks? According to Kuznetsov, when Samuel had interrogated him, the bots had a built-in kill switch, which had been activated after the testing on his team. Which was why no one from the Shadow Mountain team had been infected. How the hell were they going to turn this new batch off?

“It is not just the nanobots in the lab.” Wolf punched the start button with a stiff index finger, slammed the cart into reverse, and rapidly backed the utility vehicle out onto the main thoroughfare. He glanced at Aiden, disbelief heavy in his eyes. “Your teammates just sat up. All of them. At once.”

“What?” Aiden reeled back in the passenger seat. “That’s not possible. They’re dead! They’ve been dead for weeks.”

“Nevertheless…” Wolf’s voice, hoarse with shock, trailed off.

There had to be some mistake. The dead didn’t sit up.

The trip to the new section of base was silent, tense. Wolf pulled into a parking slot in front of the ER. The isolation unit had no dedicated morgue, so one of the sealed chambers had been filled with gurneys and flooded with cold. His teammates’ sheeted bodies were stored there. A short dude with thinning red hair and a full-body tic met them as soon as they stepped out of the cart.

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