Page 50 of The Black Rider
“Well, I already know how to synthesize angel blood. I’m still figuring out yours. Patient Q should be easy. We’ll probably never know what kind of demon he was, and that sort of thing would have set me back for a little while, but Doctor X already did the work. He deserves to have his sick research twisted into something good.”
“And that knife wound to the gut,” Aeron said. “What do you want to do today, Ariel?”
“We still need someone going through those flash drives. The emails make me sick, but we need to know if something worse is coming.”
“Is there a flash drive I could actually understand?” Aeron said.
“You could help go through the emails,” Leif said. “I’ve already copied them to my second computer. Ariel started at the beginning. You can start at the end, and you can meet in the middle. Since when do you want to look at emails instead of killing things?”
“There are plenty of things to kill right now. There will be a lot more, and no one left to save if Doctor X found a way to infect everyone with immunity. The person I really want to kill right now is sitting in the Oval Office and finding little ways to ruin his day just puckers my butthole.”
“Yeah, Asher’s reports are pretty satisfying,” Leif said.
“Care to share?” I asked.
“Remember that president that spent all day on Twitter? That’s Isaiah and his radio show. The Antichrist needs acolytes and followers to succeed. His angel superpower is charm. That’s how he got so many people do tap into their darkness and do awful things. Dice took away his radio show, and now he’s pissed. It’s like getting banned from Twitter if Twitter was still around. He’s pitching tantrums all over the White House trying to get someone to fix it, but any time they turn a radio on, they hear Dice and his music. Dice is treating the entire thing like an apocalypse podcast with a playlist. Your father is listening, not because he’s trying to find out what we are up to. He’s like some narcissist asshole reading all the bad press about him and getting mad about it.”
That hit me right in the feels. The kind of feels you got when you were being a rotten bitch, and you knew it. I didn’t know Dice and Asher, but now I really wanted to meet them. While we were here doing our thing, they were pissing off my father and preparing for us to all eventually meet and kill him.
“Let’s get to the lab then. And I want to hear all about my father’s tantrums.”
Chapter 33
A
eron agreed to help, but he was having trouble sitting still. He kept tapping a pen on the table, and I was ready to shove it in his ear. I was pretty sure it was irritating Leif too because he took out a radio so we could listen to Dice’s show. Dice didn’t appear to be in a chatty mood at the moment, but he had excellent taste in music.
Now that I wasn’t listening to that infernal tapping, I could focus on the emails, and Aeron could sit still better.
“Listen to this,” Aeron said, nearly knocking over his tea. “I don’t think Doctor X finished what he was working on. He was still emailing your father when the place had been overrun with Rage Heads. He wanted Isaiah to send a rescue team to get him out and set him up in a safer lab. Your father replied he wasn’t sending anyone until Doctor X confirmed you were still alive and showed him some modicum of progress on his research since he had failed so far.”
“Ha! Then I guess I don’t have to read any more of these gross emails.”
“If he was trying to tweak Ariel’s blood so that the people with her blood type would lose their immunity, how are you going to make a vaccine for those who aren’t?” Aeron said.
“Because I’m just that good.”
“You sound like Aeron,” I said.
“Everyone has a little Aeron in them,” Aeron said.
I threw a tortilla chip at his face.
“There is nothing little about you, Aeron.”
“Did you want to meet little Aeron again, Speedy?”
“I think you both need to shut up because if this protein is right, then I’ll have Ariel’s blood synthesized and can start distributing formulas to save the world.”
Aeron and I just stopped and stared at Leif. He was hunched over a tube with a dropper in his hand. He was in his lab coat with those big fucking goggles on. He was so fucking adorable. I just wanted to eat him up. Right then, Dice playedImagineby John Lennon. How fucking appropriate.
Leif dripped a few drops of liquid into the tube and gave it a gentle shake. I watched it turn blue, like Smurfette. Leif stoppered the tube and stood.
“Let’s go see if I got it right. Let’s go kill a zombie.”
“You will sacrifice one of your pets?” Aeron scoffed.
“They are here for research.”
