Page 17 of Deadly Strain

Asshole. “No, I was planning on taking my suit helmet off and puking on your lap.”

The soldier stopped grinning and leaned away from her. “Seriously?”

“If we don’t get out of this turbulence, I’m very serious.”

“Sorry.” A plastic bag was thrust in front of her face. “Just in case,” he said.

She rolled her eyes and took it. It would take hours of bone-jarring air travel before they arrived at the naval base in Bahrain where Max waited to confirm the Sandwich’s test results, and they’d have to stop for fuel before the Iranian border.

“How did you get tapped for this duty if you get airsick?” the soldier asked.

She gave him a sidelong look. Did he think trauma doctors or infectious disease specialists grew on trees? “It’s only flying that makes me sick. A lot of the time I don’t have to fly to where I’m needed.”

All told, there were seven people on the helicopter besides the pilot and copilot. Everyone else was there to keep her, and her samples, safe. Three of them could kill a person with their little finger.

She leaned back against the harness of her jump seat, closed her eyes and began a relaxation technique to put herself to sleep.

She’d need all the rest she could get now, because she had the suspicion not a lot of it was going to be available later.

* * *

Grace woke with a start, dizzy and disoriented. They were still in the air, but they weren’t flying, they were falling. The helicopter was twisting and turning like an insane amusement park ride, losing altitude fast. Sharp was out of his jump seat yelling at the pilot, and the soldier beside her was trying to get out of his harness.

Where the hell did he think he was going to go?

She watched as he finally hit the release on his harness. There was a flash and a deafeningbang.

The world went dark.

* * *

Why couldn’t she breathe?

Grace inhaled, but the air choked her like it had hands around her throat.

Coughing, she clawed at those invisible fingers, opened her eyes, and realized there were no bumps or vibration.

They were on the ground. Smoke formed a black wall around her, shutting her away from the rest of the world. Smoke, inside her suit helmet. She forced her mind to think.

The aircraft was down. That meant injuries and death.

Her suit was compromised. That meant possible exposure to infection and death.

For a moment her stomach took over, rolling like they were still in the air, but she wrestled it into a lockdown and forced herself to think through the shock of what had happened.Injuries, infection, and death.

Her limbs and lungs all seemed to be working. Time to get at it. She released her harness and pitched out of the seat and onto her hands and knees.

Within touching distance of her left hand was the face of the soldier who’d been sitting next to her. He was staring up at her, his mouth slack, eyes fixed and pupils dilated. Blood was splattered all over his bio-suit, inside and out, and a piece of the aircraft stuck out of his temple.

She stared at him unblinking for a couple of seconds, her stomach twisting tighter than it ever had while she was the air.

She’d just been talking to him and now he was dead.

She tried to push her jumbled emotions aside, but there were too many. Old traumas and the new twisted together into an uncontrollable boiling mass of confusion and pain.

Her body had only one way to get rid of it.

The world narrowed and grayed, and she wrenched her bio-suit helmet off as she vomited all over the soldier’s chest. She scrambled sideways to get away from the body, her stomach still heaving.

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