by Dana Fredsti
In this particular instance, the big picture and the little picture were the same size to me.
“I have a confession.” Gabriel continued massaging my head and neck as he spoke.
“I am here to absolve.” Or dissolve, I thought, as tension vanished underneath his strong fingers.
He gave a small chuckle, was silent for a few seconds, then spoke.
“I didn’t really come up here to check on you.” Another brief beat. “I just wanted—” He swallowed. “I needed to see you. I wanted to spend some time with you before we go out there again. Because—” he swallowed again, as if it hurt “—we may not make it.”
I started to protest, then decided to do something against my character and just shut up. I listened, tracing circles on his T-shirt clad chest with one finger.
“It’s going to be bad,” he continued. “Like the swarm, but worse. And even if we make it to the lab. there’s no guarantee there either.”
“You don’t think Dr. Albert can find a cure?”
“Oh, I think he’ll eventually find a cure. It just may not be in time to make a difference to me.”
I acknowledged the truth of his words.
And then rejected it.
“Uh-uh. Never give up, never surrender. If we have to dose you up every ten minutes while he figures this shit out, that’s what we’re going to do.”
“It’s not that simple, Ash.”
“Yeah, it is.”
I rolled over so I was lying on top of him, face close to his.
“I will not give up on you,” I said fiercely. “I refuse to enter the dating scene again, okay.”
Gabriel wrapped both arms around me again, holding me close.
“You’re the most amazing woman I’ve ever known, Ash.”
“Good or bad?” I smiled down at him.
“Both. But either way—” he stared up at me with those amazing denim-blue eyes “—you make me feel human, and give me a reason to keep trying.”
He kissed me then, with a long, deep kiss, equal parts passion and tenderness combined. One of ten perfect kisses in the history of the world. It kicked the ass out of Buttercup and Westley, and we very quickly lost whatever G rating we might have had, stripping off our clothes in record time, to lose ourselves in each other’s bodies for the second—and what might be the last—time.
Finally, with limbs and bodies still intertwined, I drifted off into a thankfully dreamless sleep.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
* * *
I was jarred out of sleep by the sound of Gabriel’s labored, gasping breathing.
Sitting upright in a tangle of blanket and comforter, shaking the last dregs of sleep from my brain, I realized Gabriel was crouched next to me, body sweating and shaking as his breathing came in hyperventilating gasps. Even in the dim glow from the streetlights outside I could see the sickly pearls of sweat beading up on skin gone sallow. The whites of his eyes had started to yellow.
Shit. Keeping it together, I put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll get Dr. Albert,” I said.
“No time,” he choked out. “Meds in the bag.” He jerked his head toward his duffel, then doubled over as if he was transforming from human to werewolf. It looked like a mega-evil case of cramps, with a migraine on top.
Oh, jeez...
I unzipped the duffel, pawing through it frantically to find the little vials I knew were in there. After what seemed like forever I found them in an inner zip compartment, along with syringes. I pulled one of each out, jabbed the syringe into the vial and extracted the antiserum, wincing as I did so.
“God, I hope I did this right,” I muttered as I drummed up the courage to actually inject him. “What about air bubbles?”
“Just. Do. It,” he gritted, sweat pouring off his now totally jaundiced face.
I did it, jabbing the needle into his deltoid and slowly depressing the plunger on the syringe. My face started tingling and my vision grayed around the edges. I didn’t quite have a needle phobia, but I’d always had to shut my eyes, whether for getting an injection or watching a scene in a movie that showed a close-up of a needle going into the skin.
Hold it together, girl, I told myself. Now is not the time to wuss out.
There. The plunger was all the way down. I grabbed a corner of the blanket and held it against Gabriel’s arm as I withdrew the needle, catching a droplet of blood as it welled up from the injection site.
Ugh ugh ugh!
I quickly put my head down face first against my pillow and took a few deep breaths until the urge to vomit passed, all the while listening to the sound of Gabriel’s breathing returning to normal. After a few minutes I felt his hand on my shoulder.
“You okay there, Ash?” His voice was almost steady, with just a hint of rasp underneath.
“I’m a liberal arts major, not a doctor, dammit,” I muttered into the pillow.
He chuckled quietly.
“At least you didn’t throw up.”
“I still might,” I groaned. “I hate needles.”
The sound of breaking glass followed by a bloodcurdling shriek brought us both to our feet, adrenaline driving any lingering dizziness out of my system.
“Was that downstairs?” he said.
“Yeah.” I nodded. We didn’t waste any more time on words, pulling on our clothing in record time. We grabbed our gear, slinging weapons over shoulders, and dashed out the door just as G emerged from his Batcave, still wearing his jeans and Dr. Who T-shirt.
“What was that?” he said in his heavily accented Dark Knight rasp, as the unmistakable noise of zombie moans sounded below, along with frantic cursing and the sound of someone choking on his or her own blood.
A loud splat followed.
“That is deep shit,” I said, taking the stairs two at a time right in front of Gabriel. I hit the landing, dumped all my gear but my tanto on the floor, and ran into the living room, where Tony had just pile driven the business end of his sledgehammer into Hicks’ skull.
Oh shit, he’d died and came back.
Becky lay dead on the floor next to him with her throat torn out, expression frozen in wide-eyed horror, the remains of a Samwise Gamgee lamp lying in shards around her. Nathan kneeled over her as he withdrew a wickedly sharp knife from her skull.
“Oh, no.” G came up behind me, taking in the corpses of Becky and his Lord of the Rings collectible.
Lil crouched protectively over Mack, wearing a feral expression as he pressed a hand against one shoulder, blood seeping out from between his fingers, face drawn in pain.
“Mack, Lil, you okay?” I asked anxiously.
“I’m fine,” Lil growled. “Mack got bit!”
He gave a dismissive cluck.
“It’s more a scrape than a bite. No real damage. Not like that poor guy.”
A choked gurgle to my left brought my attention to Shaggy, now sprawled against the coffee table, bright red blood pouring out from his carotid artery even as Dr. Albert tried to staunch the flow with a handful of blanket. There was nothing he could do, though. Shaggy died in less than a minute.
Nicks immediately stepped forward with a handgun, but Gabriel raised his hand to stop her.
“Too noisy.” He looked at me. “Ash?”
I nodded and took care of things with the tanto, wiping the blade clean on the same blanket Dr. Albert had used to try to save him.
I looked at Red and Carl, both of whom looked totally shell-shocked. The remaining snipers looked shaken as well, under their stoic expressions. They had lost their friends and colleagues.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. These men and women were risking their lives, knowing that even a small bite or scratch that penetrated their skins was a death warrant, unless they were one of the miniscule percent of the population who were wild cards. And even then, they’d have to survive the transition period of bone-wracking pain and fever, if they didn’t die of blood loss or trauma first.
“W
hat the hell happened?” Gabriel gestured at Hicks’ body.
“Most likely an epidural hematoma from the head injury he sustained during the crash.” Dr. Albert made a tsk-tsk noise. “Death can be very sudden.”
“He wasn’t bitten,” Nathan said, sheathing his knife in a practiced move. “So why did he turn?”
“There’s always a possibility that infected blood will get into a surface wound,” Dr. Albert said, sounding as anxious to convince himself as the rest of us. “Even a scrape would do, if it were deep enough.”
“But if that’s not the case, then what are we looking at?” Nathan pressed.
Dr. Albert gave him a very worried look.
“Why, then we’d be looking at the possibility that the virus has mutated, and gone airborne.”
Whatever reaction we might have had to his potentially catastrophic statement was cut off by a sound so mundane, at first I couldn’t figure out what it was. A loud buzzing sounded in the entryway, like a hive full of angry baritone bees.
We all jumped, weapons raised and ready—all except for G, who looked at the front door.
“It’s the front bell,” he said, then he looked at us quizzically. “Should I get it?” The buzzer went off again, followed by a rapid-fire knocking.
I shook my head.
“I’ll check,” I said, and I glanced at Gabriel, who nodded his approval. G didn’t object as I went to the door and peered through the peephole. Peering back at me under the glow of the streetlight and the first glimmer of dawn, all wonky and out of proportion from the fish-eye lens, was a young man somewhere in his twenties, wearing a red bandana in a paisley pattern that brought to mind amoebas tied around his head. His eyes were brown, no sign of the sickly yellow corruption of Walker’s in the whites, and his grin was... well, I’d have to say manic.
He looked familiar. At any rate, he wasn’t dead so I unbolted the door and opened it a few inches.
“Yes?”
“Heya,” he said, sounding weirdly cavalier. “I’m JT. Thought you all might wanna know there’s a bunch of those walking dead things headed your way.” He looked to his right, in the direction of the med center. “Whoever screamed pretty much rang the dinner bell.”
As if in agreement, moans emanated pretty much from everywhere.
The guy looked around him, then back at me.
“Uh, can I come in?” He grinned. “Just until you all head out. Which should be pretty quickly, unless you want to see a zombie reenactment of the white blood cells swarming the Proteus and Raquel Welch’s memorable bosom in Fantastic Voyage.”
At a rare loss for words, I looked back over my shoulder at Gabriel and Nathan. They exchanged a quick glance.
“I’ll check the view from upstairs,” Nathan said. Gabriel nodded, then gave me the go-ahead, so I opened the door to admit our visitor. He strutted into the townhouse, as cocky and carefree as Tony Manero. I could almost hear Stayin’ Alive playing in the background. He wore loose-fitting black pants, like something a martial artist would wear, and a sleeveless black shirt with a white Darwin fish on the front.
He looked around, taking in the decor.
“Nice,” he commented with a total lack of irony. G beamed, despite the fact there were three corpses in the middle of his living room. Whatever kept him sane, I thought. Or at least kept him from flipping out.
“Did you say your name is JT?” I asked, trying to figure out why this cocky guy looked so familiar.
“I did indeed.” He grinned at me. “You’re Ashley, right?”
I frowned.
“How the hell do you know my name?”
He just laughed.
“Bet you never expected a stalker in the middle of this sort of shit, right?”
By this time Gabriel and the Gunsy Twins were staring at JT with deadly intent, weapons ready. He noticed and laughed again.
“Relax, kids. Not that kind of stalker. I saw you in action—” he nodded at me “—back on Marina Boulevard.”
His face suddenly clicked in my memory.
“You were the guy leaping from car to car!”
“Gold star for the babe with the sword!” His grin lit up his face in a cute—and scary—sort of way.
“So you followed me?” I was amazed—and okay, more than a little flattered—that someone would have been able to keep up with us. “Why?”
“Hot chick in a uniform with a gun?” He shrugged. “No brainer.”
Gabriel bristled. JT noticed and rolled his eyes.
“Okay, you all need to take the sticks out of your asses and get going, because right now standing in this room is like being in an all-you-can-slap buffet.” He spoke with the stylized rapid patter of a Howard Hawks movie.
Tony, by this time, was looking at JT with the expression of someone who’d stepped in a pile of particularly stinky dog shit.
“Who the fuck is this guy?” he said.
JT ignored him.
“Is there a back door here? Probably a good idea, since things are about to go all House of the Dead at the front.”
“Video game or movie?” Tony said with a challenging glare.
JT shrugged.
“Video game,” he replied. “The movie sucked.”
Tony shut up, unable to argue.
Nathan reappeared at the foot of the stairs.
“Pack up, people. We need to move.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
Whatever Nathan had seen from the upstairs window had lit a serious fire under him, and it spread to the rest of us. I’ve never geared up as quickly.
G watched our preparations with bemusement.
“You’re leaving?” he finally asked me as I shrugged my knapsack onto my back.
“We have to go,” I said. “And—” I felt like shit, but I had to say it “—if you want to live, you need to come with us. I’m sorry,” I added, hating the stricken look on his face. “But they know you’re here now. And that’s our fault. But if you come with us, we can protect you.”
I felt even shittier for saying that, knowing I couldn’t guarantee anything of the sort.
“But...” G’s gaze flickered around his home, pausing on each of his beloved collectibles. “Everything I own is in this house.” I had no trouble translating this time.
I put a hand on his shoulder.
“And when this is all over, it’ll still be here. But you won’t be if you stay.”
“But I—”
JT popped up in front of us.
“Look. I admire your taste in decor and all,” he said to G, “but if you don’t get your shit together, I am going to dickslap you so hard, it’ll leave a mushroom print on your forehead.”
“Right then.” G nodded as if coming to some agreement with himself.
He vanished upstairs.
I glared at JT.
“Really? Did you have to be such a jerk?”
“Don’t worry, he’ll be back.”
Before I could argue the point, G loped back down the stairs, wearing a black hooded jacket, and a Bat-satchel slung over one shoulder. He pulled a pocket watch from an inner pocket, checked it, and vanished into the kitchen, where we heard water running.
The water shut off and G reappeared, drying his hands on a hand towel.
JT grinned at me as if to say, “See?”
I ignored him.
G put the hand towel down on the entryway table.
“I’m ready,” he announced.
Our only problem—and it was a big one—was that there wasn’t a back door. There was the sliding door that opened onto the patio, and the front door. Both faced the main courtyard that lay between the townhouses, where a veritable shitload of zombies was now shambling down the stairs.
In the five minutes we’d taken to pack up, dozens had found their way in from the Carl Street entrance, funneling in like cattle in a slaughterhouse chute. JT pointed his thumb to the moaning swarm cascading down toward us.
“Yeah, those are
the ones I was telling you about.”
“We need to create a distraction,” Gabriel said. “No way we’re fighting our way through that many without losing someone.”
“I got you covered,” JT said.
Gabriel ignored him, consulting his iPhone maps. Nathan, on the other hand, folded his arms and looked at JT as though he’d discovered an interesting new bug.
“Oh, really?” he said.
“Sure.” JT swung his arms back and forth as if warming up the muscles. “So where are we all headed?”
“A super secret government laboratory up Medical Center Way,” Nathan said. He did it with a straight face too.
JT’s eyes lit up.
“Secret government lab... no shit?”
I nodded solemnly.
“He shits you not.” That elicited an appreciative whistle.
“That is sooo cool.” JT frowned for a moment, working out some mental navigation, then said, “Okay, no problem. Tell you what I’m gonna do. I’ll distract this bunch, lead them downstream, towards the Haight. You guys go around the corner the other way, up Arguello to the UC parking garage. Then take a left and a right up Hillway. Got it?”
Gabriel looked up from his iMaps and regarded JT thoughtfully.
“Good route.”
It was my turn to frown.
“Um, yeah, but what about him?” I said, nodding my head in JT’s direction.
“Awww, she worries about me,” he said to Gabriel, then he grinned at me. “I’ll catch up with you on Hillway. Won’t take but a minute.”
“How the hell do you propose to perform this miracle, without becoming zombie chow?” I asked with an admirable lack of sarcasm.
“It’s quite simple,” JT said. “I will compel them with my deliciousness, then confound them with the speed, grace, and power of Urbobatics. Follow... and observe.”
He bounded up the stairs. Nathan and I looked at each other, then at Gabriel.
“Go ahead,” he said. “See what he’s got in mind. I’ll work on plan B, just in case.”
