Read Online Life Among the Dead (Book 4): The End by Daniel Cotton - Free Book Online Page A

stopped pretending to listen. “All right, out with it. What’s eating you?
    “Huh?” A jab from Nina sits him up right, the man stares into space while his eyes adjust to the poorly lit world around him. “Nothing’s ‘eating me’.”
    “Something’s up,” she insists. Around the man are the Wilkes Pharmaceuticals that Mercott & Price secretly keep on hand for comparison. “You can’t just be here, at this hour, trying to see why choosy moms choose Jiff.”
    Price leans back in the high swivel chair, rubbing his eyes to let them rest. “You never told anyone about us, did you?”
    “Is that what this is about?” she asks. “I was on a date! Trust me, I am so over you!”
    He believes her. The mafia man had to have found out some other way. “So, your date, he’s dead?”
    “Or dying…” she answers with a shrug, “he was old. So, to answer your question, no. I never told anyone about our, as you put it in your bullet-pointed break-up memo, ‘poorly timed indiscretion’—‘See you on Monday’.”
    “Ok.”
    “Why are you asking?”
    “No reason.”
    “Bullshit.”
    He has no response, and doesn’t look like he’ll be forthcoming with one anytime soon. He just returns to the microscope. Nina gives up “What are you looking for?”
    “Trends in the composition. Recurring elements. Foreign substances,” he tells her. “The PDR is no use.”
    “Well, no. They just print the same stuff we do: Mechanism not fully understood. Patient may experience; headache, upset stomach, purulent bowel discharge, and sometimes death. It’s a wonder people actually take this stuff.”
    “I was just thinking that,” he smiles, taking a sip from his long cold mug of coffee. He slides a cigarette from his cheap pack, happy to find one without a factory defect. Half of the cigarettes in the pack have a hole where the filter meets the rest, he’ll be able to take full drags without holding his finger over the breakage. There are many in the ashtray he had neglected to smoke, now just lines of ash.
    “I called you here tonight, hoping that since you actually have…” Price starts to say.
    “Experience with the Wilkes formulary,” she finishes his statement, knowing full well by now that is why she was summoned. “I wasn’t with Wilkes that long.”
    “Please, Nina, I need you.”
    “Yeah, for my mind,” she scoffs.
    “Will you help me?” he asks sounding pitiful.
    “Yes,” she surrenders.
    The man leaps up, elated. He hugs his assistant and takes her by the hand to another part of the lab. She carefully keeps up with him on her high heels all the way to the isolation room where dangerous materials are used and studied.
    Nina watches Price as he prepares an experiment within the room. Upon the table within he places a vile of some unknown green substance and clean instruments that they will need to examine the stuff once they open the glass tube under controlled conditions.
    “Where did you get this?” she asks.
    “I’d rather not say,” he answers. Price stands in the small room for a moment, making sure he has everything he will need since reopening the booth would not be a wise move once he gets started. Techs are usually on hand to anticipate his needs and enact any and all safety measures required. “Let’s just say, this may be what makes Wilkes Wonder drugs so wonderful.”
    “Or, it’s snot,” she counters.
    “Let’s try to be positive, shall we?” he asks, going back through the mental checklist of items in his head.
    “I’m just saying, you get what you pay for.”
    Price pauses in his tracks. He slowly turns to her and looks at her through the glass partition. “I never said I paid for this.”
    “I… I just assumed,” she stammers, giving herself away.
    “You?” the man looks at her, hurt. “You were working with the mob?”
    “Well…”
    “How long?” his hurt becomes anger.
    “Do you remember when I applied here?” she tries to use levity to diffuse the