The Becoming: Redemption (The Becoming Series Book 5) by Jessica Meigs

wave.
    “We don’t know that,” Lindsey
protested. “Not for certain. The last thing we need to create in
this facility is a security risk.”
    “What do you think he’s going to do, Dr.
Alton?” Bradford asked. “Grab a gun and start shooting up the
place?”
    “He could,” Lindsey acknowledged. “He could
lay all the blame for his prior living situation squarely on this
facility’s shoulders and—”
    “And we’re following orders from a much
higher ranking person than I am,” Bradford interrupted.
    “Somehow, I don’t think Evans would consider
that to be an acceptable excuse.”
    “We need to show this to him so maybe he’ll
cooperate with us. Is it your opinion that we should hold off on
showing him this because he might get pissed off?” Bradford asked.
She nodded. “Is that a personal opinion or a medical one?”
    “Both,” Lindsey answered.
    Bradford looked away from her, turning his
attention to the paperwork in front of him. Near the corner of the
desk, Lindsey spotted an acquisitions form for glassware for the
labs that she’d filled out and submitted for approval nearly two
weeks before. It was, of course, unsigned. The man clearly didn’t
give a shit about the work she and her lab partner did every
day.
    “I’ll keep your professional and personal
opinions in mind when I make my final decision,” he said. His tone,
however, suggested that he’d already made that decision, and it was
the opposite of what Lindsey was encouraging.
    She squeezed her hands into fists, digging
her fingernails into her palms and clenching her teeth, anger
flaring up in her.
    “Major Bradford, this is not a good
idea,” she tried again. “We still haven’t managed to get a complete
history of what he’s been through. He has injuries that make it
clear he’s been attacked by the infected at some point in the very
recent past, and that’s only on a physical level. We don’t know
what sort of scars he has mentally. We don’t know what sort of
triggers this is going to activate—”
    “I said I would keep your opinions in mind,”
Bradford retorted, turning his eyes from his paperwork and back
onto her. “You’re dismissed, Dr. Alton. I’m sure you have plenty of
work to do.”
    It took everything in Lindsey not to growl
out her frustration. She turned away from the major’s desk and
stormed out the door, not slamming it shut like she wanted to but
shutting it hard enough that she hoped her displeasure came across
loud and clear. She strode down the carpeted hallway until it
transitioned to white tiles, heading toward the labs that she spent
most of her time working in. A figure clad in the bulky, Level
4-style biochemical suit that had become a regular part of their
working lives was visible through the glass wall at one of the
workstations lining the hazmat room, hunched over a microscope,
looking through the eyepieces with a clinical eye. She bypassed her
office space and stepped into the outer room to don her own biochem
protection suit. The figure looked up from the microscope, saw her,
and held up a hand to motion for her to wait. She set the suit down
and moved to her desk, sitting down to page through the thin folder
on Michael Evans while she waited for her coworker to go through
decontamination.
    Her emotions on her sleeve, she jerked the
cover of the paper folder open and nearly ripped it in two. Her
hands shaking, she set the folder on her knees and clenched her
hands again, trying to still them. She had to get a handle on
herself. She let things get to her much too easily. But she
couldn’t help it, not this time. The very presence of the man who’d
been sitting in the cell right down the hall for the past week was
a promise of a possibility of finding her sister and her daughter,
both of whom had been lost to her and presumed dead when the viral
outbreak had begun. That one utterance of his, when he’d looked
wildly at her and said her sister’s name, clearly confused,
mistaking