Joe Rush 02: Protocol Zero Read Online Free PDF Page B

marks. Someone must have just smashed it.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “How the hell do I know?” I snapped.
    I fought off a wave of sickness.
    The upper bunk was untouched, a sleeping bag unrolled and zipped, just lying there. Mom’s probably. The women slept on one side of this cabin, guys on the other.
    Eddie knelt in the center of the room, by the second body. The shooter, from the look of things. Merlin’s cousin Clay Qaqulik. Eddie going through the pockets. It’s funny how, even in the wild, some people carry a wallet.
    “It’s Clay, all right.”
    He lay by his shotgun, but only half of his face looked back, one pale brown eye gaping, slick cheekbones visible on the left side, as in a medical school display.
The human male skull.
The rest of what had once constituted a face was splattered across the thick planking, with more gray matter glommed onto the legs of a small splintery wooden table, below a tin of canned milk, a box of Trader Joe’s wheat bran flakes, a box of cracker-like Sailor Boy Pilot Bread, a half-played Monopoly game, with a plastic hotel sitting on Park Place, and a bagged half-loaf of Wonder bread—with a lone fly trapped inside, stuck to the condensation in the bag.
    I also saw a pack of Zithromax, a five-day antibiotic, with three of the five pills missing. And an open bottle of Tylenol.
    They were sick, sure, but with what?
    The shooter’s trigger finger—left hand—was still snagged in the guard of the Remington pump action and the left arm was twisted, dislocated. When he’d blown off half his face, the recoil had snagged the finger, torn wrist tendons as the blast pulled the shotgun one way, the man the other.
    Eddie flicked his head toward the door, referring to the bodies outside. “Mom and Dad were on their backs, so—”
    “So Kelley’s still in her sleeping bag, which she would have tried to get out of if she heard shots. You think the first killing was here?”
    “The shooting on the phone call was in here.”
    “So Clay comes in here first, and the parents hear it and run toward the house to help. He steps out and shoots them, too. He comes back in. He shoots himself.”
    In my head, I heard it:
BOOM . . . BOOM . . .
    Eddie said, “Or he shoots the parents first, Kelley’s too scared to move. Then he does her. But why?” Eddie said, pulling on rubber gloves.
    I tried to remember the phone message. “Kelley said something about Clay seeing things. Hallucinating.”
    Outside, Merlin and his deputies walked the perimeter of the camp, checking for people or evidence.
    “I’m thinking Fort Hood,” Eddie mused as we got out the Ziploc bags and tie-on masks, forcing ourselves to start the awful collecting: fingernail clippings, blood samples, hair bits for a toxics test.
    Eddie said, “He wouldn’t be the first vet who went around the bend. Kills three. Turns on himself. Alcohol . . . drugs . . . plenty of that up here . . . Or maybe being sick made everything worse.”
    I thought about it. I shook my head. “It doesn’t explain the call. She said they were all sick. She was terrified
because they were all sick.
She didn’t even mention a shotgun. Don’t you think, if it was just about Clay, that the whole call would have been about him?”
    Eddie sat back on his heels. He showed a lot of white in his eyes when he was concentrating. He shook his head. “This won’t have anything to do with us, or our mission. Don’t look at me like that! I’m just saying.”
    “She called
us
, Eddie. She needed help. The mission? Who cares about the goddamn mission!
What the hell happened here
?”
    “She’s scared. Disoriented. Babbling. I can think of drugs or chemicals that would make you paranoid as hell.”
    “I want to test these bodies,” I said.
    Despite the cold, I felt sweat in my eyes. There was a quick, small movement to my left, and I instinctively moved sideways, grabbed for my Mossberg, only to see a miniature mammal, a rodent-like