Time Bomb: Chapters 26–36

He’d never gotten into a fight at school or pummeled anyone.

Diana knelt under the tall chemistry tables and tried to get her bearings.

A hand clamped around her wrist like a vise and yanked her through the doorway with such force that she lost her balance.

He squelched the panic and forced himself to give an encouraging smile as he walked back and knelt at her side.

“Here’s the plan. We're going to get out of this room. Then we’ll look at those bandages, and after we make sure you’ve staved off the vampires, we’ll get out of Dodge. Deal?”

He made a beeline for the storage room to the left.

Frankie ignored the way thinking of Tad made his stomach lurch, and he finished tying the final knot.

Frankie pitched a board obstructing his path to one side, shoved another, and then realized Cas hadn’t answered.

But the way she was evading the question told him it should.

The broken glass that had sliced the artery in Mrs. Barnes’s neck showed how little was safe now.

He remembered when the discussion turned to the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

She’d made sure the class knew it was never fair to condemn an entire racial group based on the actions of a few and had everyone in the room do a project on the time and place when their heritage was considered a threat.

The beard was to have been his first step. A small but important test to see how others would react. How he would feel before forging down a path different from the one his father expected him to take.

How could anyone see the scars on the streets and buildings and the wariness in the eyes of people trying to go about their lives and not feel their anxiety and fear?

The door to repentance was always open.

He shook his head and raked a hand through his hair.

“They see you,” Diana said as he craned his neck to get a better view of the parking lot and the dozens of people in uniforms who were standing in the hot sun, looking up at the building while gesturing and shouting but essentially doing nothing.

Ducking back inside, Diana said, “We have to be patient. They have to follow protocol.”

It wasn’t going to work, but Diana found herself almost hoping it would as she said, “Wait a second. Before you do anything, let’s find bandages so we can make a tourniquet for her legs when we pull her out. She’s going to hemorrhage, and we have to stop that as fast as possible or she’ll die before we ever have the chance to leave this room.”

It wasn’t going to work, but Diana found herself almost hoping it would as she said, “Wait a second. Before you do anything, let’s find bandages so we can make a tourniquet for her legs when we pull her out. She’s going to hemorrhage, and we have to stop that as fast as possible or she’ll die before we ever have the chance to leave this room.”

He quickly helped Diana wrap Z’s shirt and paper towels around her legs while Z bound the makeshift bandages with duct tape.

Frankie wrapped ripped pieces of T-shirt and paper towels around the puncture wound to stop the bleeding, then told Diana to look for something they could use for splints.

A blast of heat seared his skin and his lungs as he inhaled the scorching air.

From here it was impossible to see the door, which didn’t bode well.

“I think I can move stuff underneath it without causing anything else to fall, but there’s a hell of a lot of smoke and a big-ass fire heading this way. So whatever you want to do to get down here, you’re going to want to do it quick, or you might get singed.”

The smoke was getting thicker as Frankie helped Cas make the descent.

The more buffer he had between him and Tad when they finally were face-to-face, the better.

Frankie looked expectantly at Tad.

He then leaned down and whispered something to the seemingly unconscious girl before he headed to the storage closet on the far side of the room.

Then, shaking his head, he walked over to ransack the teacher’s desk.