Sara kicked at the wall again. Then again. She was sweating when she finally managed to break off enough of a section to climb through.

Her feet gently touched the ground. The air felt crisper behind the cabin. She couldn’t quite understand her emotions, but Sara realized what she was feeling was freedom.

No one had come running. No one was trying to stop her or threaten her or shoot her.

Her gaze took in the area behind the cabin. The forest floor was dense, thick with vines and poison oak.

The greenhouse.

Sara walked around the cabin. She found the path, tentatively making her way, eyes moving left and right to see if anyone was coming to stop her. There were no armed men blocking her progress. The deer stands were empty. She lifted her dress as she stepped over a fallen log. Humidity thickened the air. Her eyes kept darting back and forth, this time in search of the greenhouse. She had seen it twice, both times by happenstance. She made herself stop. She listened for the river. The waterfall made a shushing sound to her right, but to her left, she heard a kitten mewing.

Sara turned. She took a few steps down the path. She listened again.

She hadn’t heard a kitten.

A child was crying.

Sara was running toward the clearing before she could make a rational decision. The path narrowed in front of her. The child’s crying intensified. She felt like she was running on a treadmill. The harder she pushed, the farther away the clearing seemed.

“Help!” a small voice called.

Sara’s heart was gripped inside of a vice. Her life’s work had been answering the calls of children. She knew what they sounded like when they were afraid, when they were looking for sympathy, when they were terrified that they were going to die.

She raced into the clearing. She spun around the neatly tended grass the same way the girls had countless times before. What she saw was not the same. The eerie sense of wrongness tightened her skin. The cabin doors hung open. The fires smoldered in the cooking area. There were no women, no children, just pieces of white confetti scattered around the grass. The wind picked at the pieces. White material floated feather-like in the air before settling to the ground. She saw a bare foot, the glint of a white leg, a hand clutching the dirt, a face turned up toward the sun.

Sara stumbled. Her knees started to give out. Her heart gave a sharp, painful beat inside of her chest.

Not confetti.

White dresses. High collars. Long sleeves. Young and old faces bloating in the morning sun.

“Oh, no—” Sara fell to her knees. She pressed her forehead to the ground and let out a low moan. Her heart had frozen mid-beat. Her thoughts kept racing around, pushing away the truth until she forced herself to confirm it.

Sara crawled through the grass. Her fingers trembled as she checked for pulses, stroked silky blond hair away from unseeing eyes.

Esther. Edna. Charity. The cooking women. The young ladies who had set the picnic tables. The men in the trees. The guards hiding in the woods.

Dead.

“Help,” Grace whispered. She was lying under one of the picnic tables. Her frail body was curled into a ball.

Sara crawled to her. She pulled the little girl into her arms. Grace’s eyelids drooped. Her pupils were wide. She stared up at Sara. Her lips moved soundlessly.

“Sweetheart.” Sara smoothed her hair, pressed her lips to the child’s forehead. “What happened? Please tell me what happened.”

Grace tried to speak. The words gurgled in her mouth. Her arms draped lifelessly to her side. Her legs were dead weight.

“Oh, my lamb, hold on.” Sara lifted her up, carrying her toward the bunkhouse. “Hold on, sweetheart.”

White dresses blurred in Sara’s peripheral vision. Bloated bellies. Constricted muscles. Signs of agonizing, brutal death.

The bunkhouse door was already open. Sara could smell the bodies from the bottom step. She laid Grace down on the ground. “I’ll be right back, baby. Stay here.”

The request was unnecessary. The child could not move, could not speak. Sara ran into the bunkhouse. Benjamin. Joy. Lance. Adriel. She checked each one. Only Joy was still alive.

Sara grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her awake. “Joy! Joy! What did they do?”

Joy’s eyes were unmoving. Her abdomen was as round as a ball. Her expression was slack, but she was clearly conscious. Drool slid from the corner of her mouth. The pillow was wet with it. Her arms were limp. Her legs were paralyzed. She could not move her head.

“No—” Sara whispered. “No.”

She bolted through the door, down the stairs, over Grace. Her feet pounded across the clearing. She found the path, headed toward the river. The rush of the waterfall got closer.

Sara spun around, looking for the greenhouse, screaming, “Where are you!”

Sunlight mirrored off the glass.

Sara tripped through the undergrowth. Two men clad in black lay on the forest floor. Another man had fallen from a deer stand. His neck had been broken by the fall. His head was turned backward. His arms were splayed to the side.

Sara kept walking toward the greenhouse, the glass serving as a lighthouse to warn her away. The pungent odor of death cut into the back of her throat. Sara opened her mouth to breathe. She could taste the simmering fluids leaching out of bodies. The closer she got, the more her eyes watered. She was reaching the epicenter of death. Whatever Michelle had been concocting inside of the greenhouse had taken as its first victims the men and women working inside.

Sara gagged. The bodies outside the greenhouse had started to melt in the heat. Skin slipped from bone. Eyes bulged. Gaping mouths showed pools of blood and vomit that had caked into throats.

They were young and old, men and women, dressed not in black but in white lab coats. Their faces showed the horror of their deaths.

Fully conscious. Paralyzed. Slowly suffocating.

Sara knew what had killed them.

She shoved hard against the greenhouse door. A body was blocking the way. Sara pushed him with her foot. She walked into the thermal tent. The heat was almost blinding. The electricity was off. The air conditioners had gone dormant. The thermal tent and glass acted as a magnifier for the sunlight, boiling the contents inside.

She saw exactly what she had expected to see.

A commercial laboratory.

Beakers and flasks, ring stands, pipettes, tongs, burners, vacuum tubes, test tubes, droppers, thermometers.

Spray bottles filled with clear liquid were scattered along the table. A metal rack contained raw materials. Sara pushed aside bags of spoiled apples and rotting potatoes.

Black box.

In Sara’s long list of possibilities, this was the last thing she had expected to find at the other end of Michelle’s message. The small box of HBAT was actually white. The black box was literally a printed black rectangle around a warning mandated by the Food and Drug Administration:

DANGER! USE EXTREME CAUTION! EQUINE SERUM REQUIRES ESCALATING DOSE CHALLENGES TO OBVIATE SENSITIVITY AND POSSIBLE MORTALITY

Sara opened the box. The vial inside was from the US Department of Health and Human Service’s Strategic National Stockpile. The agency stored and controlled push packages of emergency antibiotics, vaccines and anti-toxins that were sent out under armed guard in case of a biological attack.

Biological attack seemed like a muted way to describe what Dash was planning. This was why he had predicted that historians would never be able to accurately calculate the number of people murdered today. The Message was excruciating, unforgiving death. Sara was holding in her hand the only thing that could stop it in its tracks.

HBAT was specifically designed to treat botulism, the most acutely poisonous toxin known to man.

21

Wednesday, August 7, 9:17 a.m.

Faith stirred a packet of blue stuff into her black coffee. Van was still at the counter adding approximately one pound of sugar to his mocha latte. Her phone had buzzed with three shotgun-style texts from Amanda demanding an update, which meant that Amanda hadn’t been called in to see the governor yet, which meant that she was probably stomping around the Capitol like an angry lunatic, raving about how everyone was wasting her time.

Faith texted a simple response—working on it.

Amanda fired back immediately—work harder.

Faith turned the phone face down on the table. She watched Van add chocolate sprinkles to his latte. She had only given him the information he had probably already gleaned from Beau Ragnersen: Will was going undercover. They knew that the IPA was planning something big today. Faith had kept in her pocket the information about Will being whisked away from the Citgo on an untraceable dirt bike. And Lyle Davenport, the Kia driver who’d met him at the gas station, invoking his right to remain silent. And the GPS tracker in Will’s holster that was apparently not tracking anything.