The Hunger (Book 5): Decayed

by Brant, Jason

  The firefight grew louder as they approached the first floor. By the time they stopped in front of the door, Lance holding the handle, they heard men shouting from the other side.

  The incessant gunfire didn’t abate.

  Cass questioned how much ammo the ex-cons could have. They hadn’t stopped firing for several minutes, chewing through ammunition at a ludicrous rate. Then again, they might have picked guns off the bodies of their victims.

  “Where is everyone?” Cass asked. “I thought all residents in The Light were supposed to be armed?”

  “I dunno.” Lance shook his head. “Everyone is used to fighting Vladdies, I guess. Having a shootout with someone storming the castle isn’t what they were expecting.”

  “I guess.” Cass adjusted the rifle against her shoulder, nodded at her husband. “Let’s go.”

  The firing stopped as Lance yanked the door open.

  They went in side by side, guns held high.

  A handful of men, all armed and wild eyed, spun in their direction.

  One yelled, “Freeze!”

  The bodies of two Bandits lay prone on the floor, riddled by bullets.

  Lance held his hands up, pistol pointing at the ceiling. “We’re friendly.”

  “I recognize them.” The oldest of the group put a hand on the shoulder of the man to his right. He had gray hair he’d pulled into a messy ponytail. A birthmark colored one of his cheeks. “They’re the ones who brought Charlie back.”

  A younger guy, not a day over twenty, sneered. “They’re the reason this is happening! They pissed off Valerie and Higgins and now we’re paying the price.”

  “We’re paying it, too,” Lance said. “We all are.”

  “I only see two there.” Cass didn’t bother lowering her weapon. “Where are the others?”

  The older man pointed to the ceiling. “I think they went farther up. These are the only two who came in here.”

  Cass turned, headed for the stairwell.

  “Hold on now,” the younger man said. “You need to stay here and—”

  “Shut up.” Cass slammed the door open with her good hip, listened for a second.

  Another battle raged above them, though she couldn’t tell how many levels up it was. The sounds of the shots were small, barely audible. If she had to guess, Cass would put them at least two or more floors higher, with a door or two closed between them.

  “You’re so good at making friends,” Lance said as he joined her. “They’ll probably vote you mayor after this is over.”

  Cass ignored his snark. “We should go straight to our floor, get the kids out of here. Then we’ll come back for Higgins.”

  “Getting trapped with the kids in the stairwell doesn’t sound like the best idea. It’ll be like shooting fish in a barrel if they catch us in here.”

  “You have a better suggestion?”

  Lance’s forehead wrinkled as he thought. “Get to the kids, fortify the floor, kill anything that comes in through the door.”

  “Nice rhyme.” Cass started the laborious process of dragging her leg up the stairs. “Let’s get moving. I should reach our floor in the next hour or so.”

  “I should have been a rapper instead of a computer nerd.” Lance passed her. “I’ll go ahead and check it out. You make sure no one comes up behind us.”

  “What would you have rapped about?” Cass asked between heavy breaths. The long day was taking its toll on her. “Watching Judge Judy and shoving potato chips in your mouth?”

  “Maybe back in the day.” Lance was already half a flight ahead of her. “If I rapped now, it would be about my pain-in-the-ass wife—”

  A door blasted open above them, a battle spilling to the stairs. The gunshots were deafening. Higgins barked orders between the blasts.

  He told his men to go for the children first.

  Lance took the stairs two at a time, his knee hitching with each stride. Grabbing the railing with one hand, using her rifle as a cane with the other, Cass did her best to keep up.

  38

  The Wildman glanced over the railing, searching the stairwell below them for movement. He shook his head, descended to the next landing. Though they could hear men shouting, guns blazing, they had yet to see anyone.

  When Brandon had looked down thirty seconds earlier, he’d spotted muzzles flaring several floors down. The Bandits waging war had remained out of sight, their bodies hidden by the stairwell.

  “What do we do?” Brandon asked.

  “Good question, kid. Can’t just charge them, n’at. Can’t sit here and talk about it too long either.”

  “That doesn’t narrow it down.”

  “No one likes a smart-ass.”

  “But all your friends are smart-asses.”

  “Can’t hear myself think with all your yappin’.” The Wildman waved him off with a flap of his hand. “Guess we keep going, see if we can catch them off guard.”

  “How will we catch them off guard by running down the stairs? They have to have someone watching both directions. The Bandits aren’t complete idiots.”

  “How else are we going to get down there? Fly?” The Wildman shrugged. “Elevator is busted. Stairs are covered. We’re running out of options.”

  “What about the floor above it? They shot out a bunch of windows, right? Maybe I can climb down from the next floor up. Swing inside a busted-out window.” Brandon regretted the idea as soon as he said it. Hearing his plan aloud made it sound incredibly stupid.

  And dangerous.

  But mostly just stupid.

  Having nearly fallen from the roof just a few minutes before, he wasn’t too keen to hang outside the building again. Swinging through busted glass, while hoping he didn’t get shot at or fall to his death, seemed like a monumentally bad idea.

  “Sounds dumb.” The Wildman scratched his stubbled chin. “I like it.”

  “Really?” Brandon wanted to kick himself. “We should come up with something better. I doubt there’s anything I can even swing on. We don’t keep rope stashed around the building for no reason. Let’s work on another plan.”

  “I’m sure we can find something that’ll hold your weight.”

  “Oh, crap.” Brandon resumed his descent, his dread increasing with every flight they passed. Though he didn’t want to face the Bandits at all, he really didn’t want to do it after swinging through the window like Tarzan.

  The whole plan assumed the Bandits couldn’t see him while he was doing it. If they had a clear line of sight of him, they’d shoot him before he could even make it inside. As he thought it over, he wondered how he’d possibly thought any part of it was a good idea.

  He needed to think things through before he opened his mouth.

  Maddening noise thrummed in their ears, the war raging beneath them growing exponentially louder the closer they got. An acrid, metallic stench filled the air. Smoke stung their eyes.

  The cries of the wounded and dying whittled away at their courage.

  When they were two stories above the shooting, Brandon thought of something. He had to yell for The Wildman to hear him over the battle. “We have garden hoses stashed around here somewhere. In the summer, we grow vegetables on the roof in these little boxes. They’re pretty cool because—”

  The Wildman cut him off. “Where are these hoses? Those could work.”

  “Uhh.” Brandon thought about it for a second. He’d scavenged the gardening equipment a long time ago, and he hadn’t helped with the growing process since. As it turned out, he’d brought several hundred feet of hosing they didn’t actually need. He’d been less than pleased when they’d told him that he had too much because it had taken him all day to carry the last load across the city. “I think they’re a floor above us, actually.”

  A bullet ricocheted off the railing, less than a foot from where Brandon’s hand rested. He jumped back, almost rolling his ankle as his foot slid off a step. Brown paint had torn away from the railing, the metal dented.

  “I�
��d say they heard us!” The Wildman grabbed Brandon by the elbow, shoved him up the stairs. “Haul ass, kid!”

  Brandon didn’t need to be told twice. He almost flew up the stairs, his shoes barely touching each step before vaulting up three more. When he reached the next floor, he had the door open and was lunging inside before The Wildman had left the last landing.

  A vast space opened before him.

  The floor didn’t have any cubicles or crudely constructed walls designed to segment a living area. Fully sorted and categorized goods filled much of the space. Shelves lined all four walls, intersected the floor in aisles short enough he could see over them if he stood on his toes.

  After going through the organizing process outside of Emily’s office, someone brought the goods down here to store them until they were needed. Brandon’s responsibilities typically stopped at scavenging, so he had little idea what went into sorting and stashing everything.

  When he needed a particular item, he rarely came up to the storage floor to find it. He’d just grab whatever it was while he was on a run in the city. The process of finding something in an apartment building was a lot more enjoyable than digging through boxes and shelves.

  “I have no idea where the hoses might be.” Brandon groaned. “This could take—”

  “How about in the boxes labeled gardening?” The Wildman pointed to a shelf in the far corner.

  Brandon squinted as he tried to make out the writing on a white piece of paper taped to a tall cardboard box. “You can read that from here?”

  “You can’t?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  “Time to grab some glasses from an eye doctor’s office. Assuming we survive the night.” The Wildman jogged over to the boxes. “This plan is dumb as hell. Hope you realize that.”

  “I tried to tell you that!” Brandon ran past him, grabbed the big box.

  “Didn’t want to dissuade you before we even got started.”

  “You aren’t the one who has to climb down the side of the building like freaking Spider-Man.”

  Someone had removed the flaps from the top box, leaving it permanently open. A bunch of seeds and watering pots were set inside. He cast it aside, grabbed another. The next box had a bunch of stuff he didn’t recognize.

  The third had coil after coil of unused hoses.

  “Got ‘em.” Brandon ripped a few handfuls out of the box, tossed them to the floor.

  The Wildman bent down, pulled a knife from his pocket. He flipped it open, went to work on the bindings securing the coils. “You ready for this, kid?”

  “No.” Brandon realized he hadn’t checked to see if any of the windows on the floor were broken. With even a modicum of luck, everything would remain intact and he wouldn’t have to follow through with his own idiotic plan.

  The first window he looked at was destroyed.

  Glass shards covered the shelving in front of it.

  “Dang.” Brandon inspected the boxed-up goods on the obstructing rack of shelves. “What are we going to do about this stuff? It’s going to take forever to move everything out of the way and—”

  The Wildman grabbed hold of the top shelf, pulled the entire rack over. It crashed to the floor, goods spilling out of containers. Packs of socks rolled between Brandon’s feet. “Done.”

  It took them a few moments to figure out the best way to secure the hoses to Brandon. They settled with looping it under his arms and tying it off in a heavy knot in front of his chest. The thickness of the hose made it difficult to tie it together, but they managed after a few tries.

  “Wonder what the weight-bearing capacity of this is?” The Wildman mumbled.

  Brandon gaped at him. “The what? Can we check that?” He pointed to a piece of cardboard The Wildman had ripped off one of the coils. “It probably says on there. Let me look quick.”

  “No time, kid. It’s now or never.”

  “But—”

  The Wildman squared off in front of Brandon. “You hear that?”

  “What?” Brandon listened for a moment.

  Wind howled outside.

  It carried a woman’s scream up the side of The Light.

  Rifles cracked.

  Brandon closed his eyes, held his breath. “I’m scared.”

  “I know, kid. I know.” The Wildman released him. “They’ll tell stories about what you did today.”

  “Yeah?” Brandon blinked, puffed his chest a bit. “You think so?”

  “Yup. I’ll be the first one talking you up.” The Wildman smiled. “Besides, that Charlie chick will go nuts over this. Yinz’ll have a grand ol’ time between the sheets. Chicks dig—”

  “Oh, God. Get me out here before I hear anymore.” Brandon maneuvered over the fallen shelving, stood at the edge of the broken window. The glass panels stretched the entire height of the wall, the sill a fraction of an inch above the floor. With his toe, he kicked a few remaining shards away from the bottom, not wanting them to slice into the hose. “Dandy Savage time, right?”

  “When this is over, I’m sending you to a video store to find some old wrestling tapes.” The Wildman wrapped the hose around a support pillar running from floor to ceiling once. He held the green tubing with both hands, giving the kid a nod. “The Macho Man will change your life.”

  “What’s a video store?” Brandon asked.

  “What’s a—get the hell out the window.” Window sounded more like win-duh.

  “I’m going, I’m going.”

  Brandon backed up until his heels rested on the edge of the windowsill. He tested the hose with both hands, giving it a yank to see if it had any give. The material making up the tube, whatever it was, stretched a bit, but seemed sturdy enough.

  The stretching heightened his anxiety.

  He really wished he’d kept his mouth shut in the stairwell.

  “Crap, crap, crap.” Brandon leaned back, letting the hose tighten around his chest.

  When he was at a forty-five-degree angle, he carefully stepped down the outside of the building, putting his shoe a few inches beneath the window.

  He didn’t fall to his death.

  “Give me some slack,” he said. “Just a little.”

  The Wildman loosened his grip a bit.

  A length of hose several feet long flitted through his fingers until he caught it again.

  Brandon plummeted away from the window, his feet skidding off the wall.

  His body spun in a half circle, his stomach doing cartwheels, as he fell.

  The hose snapped tightly against his chest, digging into his armpits, pinching the skin around his incision. An immense pain radiated through his flesh as more of the stitches popped free. Blood ran down his stomach.

  “You okay, kid?” The Wildman hollered from above.

  Brandon couldn’t see him anymore. He’d fallen too far down the side of the building. The edge of the windowsill was just outside his reach as he looked up, straightened his arm toward it. “No! I almost fell, you butthead!”

  “Sorry about that. The speed caught me off guard.”

  “Sorry? Sorry?” Brandon was about to unleash a torrent of obscenities when he realized his entire life dangled from a knot The Wildman had tied in the hose. If his Boy Scout skills were anything like his rope-slackening skills, then Brandon might be doomed. “Just get me down there.”

  “You got it.”

  The hose jounced him as he started lowering again.

  Knowing he had to take some weight off the knot, Brandon squirmed around until he faced the building again. Positioning his feet against the wall, he walked up. When his shoes reached the same height as his beltline, he reached up and grabbed hold of the hose, using his arms to pull some of the weight off the knot.

  The pain eased as the hose around his chest loosened.

  He knew the scarring would be way worse now. It felt like the wound had ripped all the way open. Having the doctor stitch him back up was going to suck.

  Snow blew into his face, made him
squint.

  The cold prickled his hands.

  Brandon had more control over his descent now that he had a decent position against the wall. Looking down, he noticed the window below him remained intact. It took ten or fifteen seconds for him to reach it.

  The window he’d climbed out of appeared to be on the other side of the planet. Even if he chickened out now, he knew he had zero chance of pulling himself back up there. He was in it for the long haul.

  Half the next window was gone, shattered by the Bandits.

  Brandon guided himself to the left, dodging the broken section as best he could. When his shoes pressed against part of the window, it threatened to give way.

  Cracks wormed into it.

  Before it could shatter under his weight, he rappelled lower, approaching the war zone beneath him. The shouting of men and women, the cries of children, grew louder as he descended.

  The pace of the gunfire had slowed, but still continued.

  While The Wildman had secured the hose around his chest, Brandon had tucked his pistol into the front of his waistband. When he was a few feet above his destination, Brandon released the hose with one hand, plucked the gun free.

  The metal was cold against his palm

  His hand shook in fear as he held it in front of his face.

  No matter how much craziness he’d encountered the past few days, he didn’t know if he’d ever get used to using a gun. The situation demanded it, but it didn’t change the fear he felt every time he grabbed one. It just wasn’t in his DNA. Even if he’d proven proficient in firearm use, it was one thing to shoot at demons.

  Firing on other humans felt impossibly wrong.

  Beyond that, it was just downright dumb.

  So few remained.

  If they kept fighting each other, the demons wouldn’t have a chance to wipe out their species. They’d do it themselves.

  The window beneath him resembled the one above—partially broken with large chunks missing. Inspecting the biggest hole, which was a foot down and to his right, he figured he could probably fit through it.

  He’d probably get cut up if he attempted that, though.