The Virus Within: Third Wave (Book 2)

Chapter 81

"Ugh. No, thank you. I like my toenails right where they are."

"I believe I'll go track down Nina," I said, backing out of the room.

"Not hard to track down," Nicky muttered. "We walked past her on the way here."

"It's a figure of speech," Jess murmured distractedly while she evenly spread a handful of buds across a piece of cloth to dry.

I walked away, leaving Nicky with Jess, who undoubtedly had more patience than I did. My footsteps were once again sluggish since my destination likely wasn't going to be much fun. I paused in the doorway and watched Nina tweak the dials on a machine until the display satisfied her.

As she turned around, she noticed me darkening her doorway. "Oh, you're here already. Thanks for coming. How'd your afternoon go?"

"It went as it went," I said dismissively. "No zombies got close, and I found most of the plants Jess was after. I assume you want more blood or saliva?"

"Actually, no. I have an even stranger request."

I tilted my head and waited, not entirely sure I wanted to know what she counted as "strange".

"Would you possibly be willing to give me two or three strands of your hair? I'd need the roots attached. I'm hoping the intact strands will help me figure out this riddle."

"Which riddle is this?" My Nightstalker stubbornness made me reluctant, although there were a couple of short strands along the edge of my face I wouldn't mind getting rid of.

Nina wandered over to a counter and stared at several pages of notes. "Once I ran some samples through my machines, I realized the zombie in the barn is even stranger than I originally thought. The more I see, the more I'm convinced this isn't a natural occurrence."

"What do you mean?" I took a few steps closer, more focused than before.

She gestured to her notes. "I've done countless tests with the zombie virus since the first outbreak, and at this point, I can identify an untampered blood sample fairly easily. But something just doesn't seem right." She picked up a piece of paper. "Look at these sequences. Particularly these two areas. They should be much more similar than they are."

The garbled numbers and letters meant nothing to me. "And what is that?"

"A chemical signature from a strand of his hair. As hair grows, it can catch certain drugs and records them much like an ice core reflects air composition through time. The hairs you donate will have to be long since I need to check if this is the sort of thing that shows up when a Nightstalker turns, or if I have to look into other less-appealing explanations."

"Wait. We found that zombie to the south, didn't we?" I was suddenly connecting some very unpleasant dots.

Nina nodded slowly. "Almost directly south of where we found the chained-up zombie. On top of that, the same secondary highway went past both places and leads right to Ironwind."

A faint growl rumbled through my chest, but I was already removing the hair tie from the end of my waist-long braid. "You've done a lot of work with these chemicals. What are the odds Louise is behind this?"

"I really need to run a few more tests to get the answers, but the odds are stacked against her judging by where we found those two zombies and what I'm seeing in these samples so far."

My fingers ran between the three sections of hair as I unraveled my braid. I pulled the silky strands over my shoulder and selected five of the longest ones. I traced them back to my scalp and yanked them out. Four of the five came out with the small nub of root attached, although the fifth snapped just before that point.