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His phone buzzed on the bedside table in the middle of the night. Caught in the web of a pretty intense nightmare, Major was slow to wake, and even slower to realize what the buzzing was and that he needed to do something about it.
"Hello?" he mumbled into the phone.
"Majey! You better get down here?"
"What? Who is this?" He pulled the phone away from his ear to look at the caller ID and groaned. "Don E, what the hell?"
"Something you're going to want to be in on. You know the place."
Resting the phone on his chest, Major considered pretending he had been sleep-phoning, and just ignoring the whole thing. But where Don E was concerned, a moment's distraction could cause all sorts of things to go south. Sighing heavily, Major got to his feet and started getting dressed.
When he arrived at the Scratching Post, he found Don E and the girl from the other day there, both wearing plaid flannels. "Don't freak out," Don E said.
"Not a good start. It's three a.m., Don E."
"I know you told me and Darcy not to go after Sloane's kidnapper, but we did, and we found her. But then she sees us tailing her out of Warmbloods, and she takes off. And we chased her onto her roof."
Oh, god. How many ways could this possibly go wrong? Knowing Don E, the options were limitless.
"And then she pulls this move," Don E went on. "Just like Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson. And she jumps to the next building!" He illustrated the jump with a wide swing of his arm.
Major waited, but the story appeared to have ended there. "She got away?"
"Maybe it wasn't just like Dwayne Johnson," Don E admitted. He went over to a carpet on the floor, pulled it aside, and revealed a body lying there. He pointed at the dead woman. "Five stories down."
"Sorry," Darcy said.
Major could not believe he had gotten out of bed for this. He knelt, confirming that the woman was officially and completely dead. In New Seattle, it was always wise to be certain. Getting to his feet again, he glared at the perpetual thorn in his side. "I told you to stay out of it."
"But we got her! I mean, can't you just CSI her or something?"
"Did you get anything out of her before you chased her to her death?"
"We yelled stop; she said no."
Great. Wasn't that helpful. "Did you check for ID?"
Both of them looked at the body, then up at Major. So that was a no, then.
"You're pretty good at this," Don E said.
Major knelt again, hunting through pockets, ignoring that remark. He took a wallet out of the inside of the woman's jacket.
"So what now?"
The ID hadn't told him anything. The only thing left … was the brain.
"I'll take care of this," he told Don E and Darcy. "You two … try not to mess anything else up."
"No promises."
"Right."
Lifting the body, rug and all, Major carried it out to his car and then drove to Fillmore Graves, where the body was taken care of and the brain removed, while a team searched the woman's apartment, looking for anything that might lead them to Sloane.
He carried the brain, pink and appetizing, into his office, and put it down before three carefully selected soldiers whom he had called in for this special assignment.
"Kristen Fox," he explained to them. "We IDed her on security cam kidnapping Sloane Mills. We searched her apartment and found tape, rope, but no Sloane. If we don't find her, there is nothing keeping her father, General Mills, from trying to wipe Seattle clean off the map. So hopefiully one of us will have a vision that can lead to Sloane. And fast. Dig in." He put a bottle of hot sauce on the table, and between the four of them, they consumed the brain.
Disgusting as it was, there was something about eating a whole brain, firm and chewy and perfect, that was so much more satisfying than brain paste.
And then they waited. Hours. Major resisted the urge to keep texting his fellow guinea pigs, hoping to hear that one of them had seen something useful. He kept trying to go into a vision himself, but with no luck.
Finally, in late morning, Collins, one of his fellow brain consumers, came into his office. "Commander. We've got something."
"A vision?"
She nodded crisply. "Ames saw it. Looked like East Lake Marina. Unknown male said something about 'ditching it here'."
"East Lake Marina. Let's go."
At the marina, they found a port-a-potty truck, abandoned. Port-a-potties were being used at the pie event going on in the adjacent park, so maybe that's why this was here. On the other hand, the truck did look as though it had been ditched.
"Berths are all in use, no sign of Sloane," his team reported.
Collins ended her phone call. "Dustin's Port-a-Potties reported this truck missing today at ten a.m."
"What the hell? Who steals a port-a-potty truck?" Then, from the park, Major heard someone scream. "Grab the rifles."
They mobilized quickly, armed and on the move toward the park, where two full Romero zombies were terrorizing the people who had come for pie. Collins took one out with a clean head-shot. Major was about to shoot the other one as she knelt next to an unfortunate victim, scarfing down brains, but he froze when he recognized her.
Sloane Mills. The other Romero was her boyfriend, he had no doubt. She looked up at Major and snarled at him, no recognition. No humanity. Nothing left of her. Sorrowfully, Major raised the rifle, knowing even as he pulled the trigger that this shot might well end in the total destruction of all of New Seattle.
But he took the shot anyway, because he had no other choice.