Affliction ab-22

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  ‘We have a hallway full of police officers. We will be okay.’

  ‘I love you, and I love Nathaniel, but this isn’t a debate. I’m coming,’ I said, and I hung up on him.

  ‘I’ve got some phosphorus grenades with me, but I’ve got more in the car,’ Edward said, and held out his car keys to me.

  I didn’t take the keys. ‘I’m getting to my guys first.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  I reached down and took two grenades out of one of the pockets low down on my tactical pants. I put the grenades into his hand and took the keys. ‘I couldn’t use them in the forest without setting it on fire.’

  Edward smiled, a tight, fierce, and strangely happy smile. There was a part of him that wanted to meet a danger that was more dangerous than he was – so far he really hadn’t, but he kept looking.

  Gonzales said, ‘I’m going for Rush.’

  ‘I’ll stay with Forrester, Jenkins, and the guards,’ Al said. ‘Tell Rush … tell him I’m doing my job.’

  Dev said, ‘But the sprinklers will put out the grenades, too.’

  ‘Phosphorus burns hotter when you get it wet,’ I said. Edward and I had a moment of remembering ghouls running through a stream screaming as they burned. It was old-fashioned phosphorus, and about the only people who still wanted it were vampire executioners. ‘Don’t die on me,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t,’ he said, and he leaned forward, lowering his voice so the other cops wouldn’t hear. ‘I’ve got European grenades in the car.’

  I gave him wide eyes, because in parts of Europe where vamps and shapeshifters can be killed on sight just for being, they had grenades designed to burn longer than even the old-fashioned phosphorus over here. They were designed to explode, get nasty burny stuff on the targets, and the burn kept burning until it burned through the target. They were illegal as hell here.

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘I’ll be back with more stuff when I can.’

  ‘I know you will,’ he said.

  I looked at Al, and didn’t know what to say to him. Jenkins and the guards I’d just met, but Al had grown up with Micah.

  I heard the doors bang as the zombies started working better as a unit. I’d never seen this many of them without a necromancer in control of them. I should have stayed with Edward and kept them contained. That would have been the best use of resources, but I was going for the loves of my life. Once they were safe I’d save the rest of the world; until that moment the world could take care of itself. Or that was what I told myself as I started running for the elevators with Nicky and Dev at my side and Gonzales bringing up the rear.

  44

  The elevator doors opened just as a huge crash came from behind us. I had to look back. Edward and the rest had thrown themselves against the door. He yelled, ‘Anita!’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  Edward yelled, ‘They’re using a gurney as a battering ram. I need my gear now! I’m sorry.’

  In all the years we’d worked together he’d never apologized for the job and the choices we had to make. Dev was in the elevator. He held out his hand. ‘Give me the keys, and you go on to Micah and Nathaniel.’

  There was another huge crash, and the men at the end of the hallway all put their shoulders into it, holding on. ‘Anita, you know how I pack. You can find them faster. We need them faster!’ The doors bucked as if some giant hand had slapped them. They weren’t going to hold.

  ‘Anita, now!’

  I got in the elevator. ‘Stay and help hold the door. I will be as fast as I can.’

  Nicky stepped out. ‘Don’t make me stay.’

  ‘I’ll keep her safe,’ Dev said.

  Gonzales stayed beside Nicky. ‘Hurry,’ Gonzales said. There was another thunderous crash at that far door.

  The elevator doors began to slide shut and I had one of those moments of revelation. I knew Nicky was stronger, more ruthless, and better at fighting than Dev; he was the one to leave. The only reason not to leave him was that I loved him. I love-loved him, and I hadn’t known it for certain until this second. I moved as the door closed and said, ‘I love you, Nicky.’

  He smiled then, and the doors closed.

  I wished there’d been time to kiss him good-bye.

  45

  I dug the earpiece for my phone out of one of the pockets and called Micah from the elevator. He answered on the second ring. ‘Anita, vampire on this floor is dead. We’re okay.’

  ‘The morgue is not okay; I’ve got to help Ted contain it. I had to leave Nicky there to back him up.’ As soon as I said it, I realized I was looking for absolution, someone as strong as I was to tell me that it had been okay to leave someone I loved who wasn’t a cop down there with the other cops and the monsters.

  ‘What made you willing to leave him down there with Ted?’

  ‘Grenades and shit in Ted’s car, Dev and I are fetching.’ I transferred my badge from my hip to tuck it in a MOLLE strap on the front of my vest. We didn’t have any uniforms or locals with us this time. I wanted witnesses to know we were the good guys.

  ‘Because you know where the stuff is in Ted’s car,’ Micah said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, and the elevator doors opened.

  Dev paused before he went through, checking to make sure it was clear; he gave a small nod and held the door for me, leaning against it with his gun already out. Most handguns wouldn’t do much against zombies or rotting vamps, but Dev had never seen real combat like Nicky had, or I had, which meant he was more comfortable with handguns than long ones. I had my AR to my shoulder checking the hallway – left, right, and up. Vampires fly, or float, sometimes. The hospital ceiling was too low to really be a place to hide, but checking up was a habit that was good to have when you hunted vampires that could fly and shapeshifters that could climb.

  ‘U.S. Marshals,’ I said, for the startled nurses and doctors. ‘Police.’ I added that just in case. I yelled ‘Police’ again and kept Dev and me moving toward the outer doors. I ignored the questions, because they would slow us down too much and I didn’t know what to say. Captain Jonas had said out loud that he didn’t want to start a panic; if I told them what was in the basement and wandering the hallways, they might panic. They should panic and evacuate everyone they could, but I wasn’t in charge, not like that.

  Dev flashed them all his melt-in-your-socks smile. ‘We’ll be back, I promise.’

  One of the scared nurses actually blushed at him. That was some good flirting.

  ‘We’re going outside,’ I said to Micah, low voiced, over the headset.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said.

  ‘I think it’s safer outside, but I’ll be careful,’ I said, as I moved toward the outer doors with the AR snugged to my shoulder.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I love you and Nathaniel. I didn’t get to kiss Nicky good-bye.’

  ‘You’ll get another chance to kiss him,’ Micah said, and that was it, he’d given me my absolution, my that’s-okay-you-didn’t-leave-your-lover-to-die pat on the ethical back.

  ‘Thanks, gotta run. I love you.’

  ‘I love you more,’ he said.

  ‘Love you mostest.’

  He laughed, softly, and hung up.

  Dev and I were outside now. I looked up at the night sky, electric-kissed with the pools of light from the hospital behind us and the light poles rearing over the cars. Nothing moved in the darkness above us. The parking lot stretched empty and so still you should have been able to hear city crickets if it hadn’t been too cold for them.

  ‘Can we run now?’ Dev asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He took off like something elemental, so fast that his speed left me immobile for a heartbeat, and then I ran, too. I ran fast, going from a dead stop to making the parking lot a blur to my vision like some movie special effect. I moved and it wasn’t just to be fast to save everyone and get the weapons, it was a release of tension to be able to move as fast as we could even for a few moments,
to be able to RUN! I arrived at Edward’s SUV to find Dev there catching his breath. My heart was in my throat, trying to creep over my tongue and into my mouth. I felt alive, full of blood and thunder; it was the kind of energy that made you want to leave the guns in the holsters and wade into a fight with your bare hands. I wouldn’t do it, but I understood the urge.

  Dev grinned at me, a fierce baring of teeth that still managed to be sexy and charming. I grinned back and unlocked the back of the SUV with my pulse thudding behind my own fierce smile.

  Dev and I moved our gear out so I could get to where Edward kept his incendiaries. There was a reason he drove his SUV if the crime scene was close enough, or sometimes if it wasn’t. He had several compartments in his truck where the really bad things were hidden. If someone broke in and stole stuff, they wouldn’t get anything more dangerous than guns. Even if they stole the whole truck they’d likely never find the hidden shit unless they dismantled the truck piece by piece like at a chop shop, but even Edward couldn’t plan for all eventualities. Besides, some of the hidden stuff was illegal. I hadn’t known he had the European grenades. I’d read about them, seen videos of the effect, even photos of the victims. Some people in parts of Europe were using the grenades in my hands as a reason to give vampires and shapeshifters human rights, because the effects were too terrible to do to anyone, almost. No one cared about zombies, strangely. Not all dead are created equal.

  Under other circumstances I might have hesitated to use something illegal while I was wearing my badge, but today … the European grenades gave us a real chance. I grabbed all that were in the compartment, shoving them into pockets on my tactical pants and handing some to Dev to carry, too. The grenades would burn long enough to actually destroy the zombies, if we could cut them up first so that they didn’t catch us, or the hospital, on fire. It was looking at Edward’s extending magazines that gave me the idea. I grabbed his, and mine, and an extra cross-draw bag because Dev and I couldn’t carry all of them in the pockets, or even the MOLLE straps on the vests. Usually it was overkill to travel with this many magazines for the ARs, but tonight it might just get the job done.

  We shoved everything back in the truck. Dev shut the back. I hit the key lock and without asking each other we ran back to the hospital. The world blurred past as I tried to keep up with Dev. He was a foot taller and a lot of that was leg, oh, and the whole weretiger thing, too, but I wasn’t far behind as we whooshed through the doors.

  The nurse who had smiled at Dev looked even paler, eyes huge in her face. ‘You’re not human, are you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Human’s overrated,’ Dev said with another sex-on-wheels smile as we went for the elevators.

  My phone rang in my earpiece, ‘Bad to the Bone,’ which had been Edward’s ring tone since Nathaniel put it on as a joke back when I didn’t know how to change it. I hit the button and said, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Bring all the extra mags you can,’ he said, and I could hear shooting in the background magnified oddly over the headset.

  ‘Already have them,’ I said, as we stepped into the elevator.

  ‘You had the same idea,’ he said.

  ‘We have enough ammo to cut them into pieces and then …’

  ‘Use the Euros to burn them in place,’ he finished for me.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, and then he laughed that deep, masculine sound that most men reserve for sex or moments more private with the lovers in their lives.

  ‘I love the way you think, too,’ I said.

  He gave that date/sex laugh. I guess there was more than one reason that Donna thought I was his lover. Someone yelled, and a man screamed. Edward said, ‘Gotta go,’ in a voice so serious it was as if the laugh never existed.

  I whispered, ‘Edward,’ to empty air.

  ‘He all right?’ Dev asked.

  ‘I don’t know. It sounds like the zombies are on top of them.’

  Dev holstered his handgun and unhooked his AR from the back of his vest where the MOLLE straps kept it.

  ‘A head or heart shot won’t do anything but irritate a zombie. We’re going to use the ammo to cut off the arms, legs, anything that makes them mobile, and then decapitate, or explode the entire head. When that’s done we burn ’em.’

  ‘You and Ted didn’t discuss details; how do you know that’s why he wanted the extra magazines?’

  The elevator was slowing. I snugged my AR to my shoulder and said, ‘I just know.’ The doors opened, and a zombie fell into the elevator.

  46

  Dev yelled like a guy. I tried to tell him don’t do it, it was already armless, but he was already pulling the trigger. He shot the zombie in the head while it was trying to bite his foot. The reverberation of the shot was actually painful in the metal box of the elevator, as if someone had stuck something sharp and hard through my ears.

  His hearing was better than mine, and he wasn’t expecting it. He hunched over, free hand to one ear, face grimacing with pain. I didn’t bother trying to say anything; I let him have his moment of disorientation while I stepped over the armless zombie as it tried to push itself to its knees, leaving most of its brains on the floor of the elevator.

  I put my shoulder against the open doors to hold them, AR snugged to shoulder, and tried to use my eyes to see what was happening in the hallway while my hearing recovered. I’d learned to push through the disorientation of that kind of noise in small spaces; it let me stand there and see the hallway while Dev was still struggling for his brain to process anything but the pain and shock.

  I gave myself a second of eye-sweep to see Nicky’s blond hair and Edward’s white cowboy hat, upright and firing in the direction of zombies, and then I was able to take in the scene. They’d taken their stand in front of the elevator doors, but the line had crumbled to the right of the doors, because the young guard, Miller, was sitting against the wall bleeding, with the other guard holding pressure on a neck wound that gushed crimson over his hands. Jenkins had moved up to take their place in the half-circle of guns, but he had a handgun and the zombies didn’t give a shit. Two of them launched themselves at him and the weak part of the circle. Damn smart for zombies.

  Gonzales was there firing point-blank into their faces. He had a .45 and at that range it blew one head to pieces, so that it was just left with hands reaching blindly, but he was dry-firing into the face of the second, and it turned to him with a hungry, evil expression. I fired into its head from less than two feet away with the frangible round, and the head exploded in a fountain of blood and brains. There was bone in there, but it was always the soft, wet parts that made for the spectacular visuals.

  Gonzales glanced at me with wide eyes, his naturally dark skin paled almost gray. The look was enough; he’d known he was almost out of ammo when he stepped up to shield Jenkins and the two guards. Dev was beside me; he still seemed shaken and didn’t have the AR to his shoulder yet. I didn’t have time to babysit him, but in that moment I realized he’d never seen combat. He’d seen action – shootings, violence, hand-to-hand, and hand-to-claw – but he’d never been in this kind of chaos. I counted him out for the fight and started shooting the zombies that were trying to pour through the gap in the defenses. I tried to take their lower faces out first, because once they couldn’t bite, they were half-disarmed. I blew off most of a zombie’s shoulder and arm as it reached for me with its remaining arm. The ruin of its face meant it couldn’t bite me, but it could still strangle me or tear out my throat if I let it get a good grip.

  Al was on the other side of me firing his own .45 into the reaching hands and gaping mouths of the zombies. The slide on his gun slid back and stayed there, showing he was out of ammo.

  Gonzales moved back up beside me with the bull pup shotgun in his hands. Dev had recovered enough to start handing out the extra weapons and ammo; good.

  Al fell back; I hoped to get more ammo, or another gun, and I kept shooting anything that moved outsi
de our small circle. Nicky was beside me now; he shot the face off one zombie, then let his AR swing on its tactical strap so his hands were free, grabbed the zombie at the shoulder and upper arm, and pulled. I had a moment to watch his muscles strain, the veins on his arms raising with the force of what he was trying to do, and then he pulled the zombie’s arm out of its shoulder socket. It was fresh zombie, so basically he’d just pulled a man’s arm off with his bare hands. It wasn’t just a matter of being fucking strong, but he’d known where to grab to disarticulate the shoulder joint. Maybe later I’d ask him how the hell he knew that.

  No matter how impressive it had been, it meant Nicky was out of ammo.

  Al was on my other side between me and Gonzales. Al’s .45 had the slide back in place, and I didn’t ask if he was locked and loaded; I knew he was. Let’s hear it for grabbing all the extra ammo we could carry.

  I stepped back, letting them know they needed to cover me if they could, and both of them stepped up. I opened the flap of the bag I was carrying and Nicky was close enough to reach in and get his own fresh magazine. He swung his AR on its strap, slapped the magazine home, and we started to move up again.

  Edward’s voice was in my earpiece. ‘I’m out!’

  I dropped back, and Nicky and the others moved up to cover the gap. I had the AR magazines, just like Dev had most of the handgun rounds. I reached in the bag one-handed and had an extended magazine in my hand as Edward’s hand came into view. He took it like we were running a relay race and we’d made a smooth pass of the baton. He slammed it home, and I moved back out to the circle with him on one side and the freshly armed Nicky on the other.

  Dev was finally up and shooting on the other side of Nicky. When we all survived I’d talk to him about how long it took him to orient himself, and we’d have to figure out some kind of training to prepare him and any other newer guards for the serious shit, but that was later. Tonight, right now, it was just shooting zombie heads, blowing shoulders away from bodies, or shooting their legs out from under them, anything to make them immobile and disarmed.