It takes them mere seconds to reach the stairs. They carefully open the door, slip into the well, and hurry up the echoing enclosure. The bleach-scented air makes Lilly’s flesh crawl. She can hear the footsteps of the nurse fading away somewhere above her.
Lilly pauses on the landing at the top of the staircase, turning to Tommy.
“Trade with me,” she says to him, handing him the machine pistol. “There’s a certain way I want to do this, the less commotion the better.”
Without a word, he hands over the Glock, a surprisingly heavy weapon with its six-inch silencer attachment weighing down the muzzle.
* * *
The fifth floor is the former home of obstetrics, the female wellness center, and the maternity ward. Now, at the far end of the main corridor, a spacious reception area sits empty and desolate, completely ransacked, some of the original furniture overturned in the corners. The cluttered counter of an abandoned nurse’s station sits beside a huge bronze statue of a female patient holding a newborn. The tarnished, mossy green statuary stands in the center of a dry, out-of-order fountain. The carpet bears the stains of unidentified dark fluids and past struggles. The windows are covered with tinfoil and duct tape, a single bare bulb hanging down, casting a dim, jaundiced cone of light down across the worn nap of the floor.
A side hallway leads past a series of examination rooms, most of them unoccupied and locked up tight. The last room on the left has people in it. The telltale sounds of children whimpering echo out a half-ajar door, some of the voices familiar, some making muffled moaning noises, some hysterical and sobbing so hard they’re out of breath. An adult female voice scolds one of the kids. The smell of talc and ammonia and dirty diapers gets thicker and thicker the closer Lilly and the boy get to the partially open door.
Lilly pauses just outside the room with the Glock gripped tightly, barrel pointing upward, safety off, a hot round in the chamber. Tommy presses his back against the wall mere inches behind her, swallowing hard, waiting for her signal. Lilly feels the heat of adrenaline lighting up her gut, spreading through her tendons, the AR-15 loosened on her back for easy access, the stock dangling across her right hip. She is in the moment. She is clear, her mind completely purged of distractions.
She raises her left hand, holding up three fingers. Tommy nods as she indicates the beginning of a countdown. She stares at Tommy, watching the boy go as still as a cat as she lowers her ring finger.
Two …
Not taking her eyes off the boy, breathing in and holding her breath, Lilly lowers her middle finger until only her index finger is raised.
One …
The entire universe seems to freeze as she makes a fist and pulls down.
* * *
The moment she lurches into the room, Lilly fires off a single noise-suppressed blast at the gray-haired nurse, who is fifteen feet away from Lilly’s right flank (and in the process of turning toward a long rifle leaning against a coat rack in the corner). The report pops dry and metallic—like the clap of a screen door in the enclosed space of the examination room—sending a 115-grain 9mm hollow point into the woman’s left thigh.
The impact spins the nurse in an awkward pirouette for a moment before knocking her to the floor and slamming her against the baseboard near the radiator. A garbled grunt escapes her lungs as she holds her leg, but Lilly knows as well as the nurse that the bullet cleared the femoral artery and simply passed through the meat of the woman’s sturdy leg. Now the nurse writhes on the floor, holding her leg and trying to catch her breath and get her bearings. Lilly sees no reason to kill this woman … yet. The woman could be a captive herself. Who knows? Lilly doesn’t have enough information yet. More importantly, the nurse might be a valuable asset to them.
Quickly, Lilly takes in the layout of the room practically in a single glance. High ceiling, fluorescent lights shining down on plaster walls and tile floor, screaming baby in a crib pushed up against one barred window, Norman Rockwell prints of family doctors, captive kids in the opposite corner with strips of fabric around their mouths, their eyes luminous with watery terror. No sign of Barbara Stern, and no time to worry about that right now.
Lilly’s heart practically rises into her throat when she notices her sweet Bethany perched on a padded exam table, holding her brother in her arms. Little Lucas seems almost catatonic with fear. The sight of them squeezes Lilly’s guts and makes her eyes water with a bizarre mixture of relief and kill-rage for the monsters who would snatch and brutalize these precious children. Thank God they’re here, thank God they’re still in one piece, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God. Every molecule of Lilly’s soul wants her to go to them right now, to breathe in the soapy fragrance of their hair, to hold their spindly little bodies … but she can’t do that … she can’t go to them … not yet.
Tommy softly shuts the door behind him in order to avoid drawing any unwanted attention to the noise, and Lilly lunges toward the rifle in the corner, kicking it out of the nurse’s reach before the gray-haired woman can grab it. The nurse flops onto her back, still holding her leg and starting to scream: “BRYCE! DOCTOR! SOMEBODY GET—”
Her words get cut off by Lilly’s hand slamming down on her mouth. “That’s enough—quiet now, goddamn it—quiet the fuck down or you’re gonna force me to—”
Lilly’s own words are curtailed by a sudden and unexpected stabbing pain in her hand.
The nurse has bitten into the fleshy part of Lilly’s palm—hard enough to draw blood—and Lilly involuntarily pulls her hand back and lets out a yowl. Blood stipples up across Lilly’s face, stinging her eyes, and momentarily distracting her as the nurse claws at her.
Something primal bubbles up inside Lilly and all at once her vision tunnels and she grasps the nurse’s head by its ears and slams it down on the floor.
On the first impact—the sound a sickening crunch—the nurse gasps. On the second impact, she chokes and struggles to breathe. On the third, her eyes roll back in her head. Lilly keeps slamming the woman’s skull against the floor at least a half dozen more times until the nurse has gone completely limp and blood has begun to seep out from under the woman’s head in a great billowing ruby-red sheet unfurling across the tiles. Lilly can see nothing but the blurry remains of a woman’s face gone bloodless and still beneath her, the eyes frozen open, taking in nothing. In fact, Lilly is unaware of anything else in the room for several seconds … including the fact that Tommy has stepped in between Lilly and the children, blocking the children’s view of the grisly proceedings.
“Lilly!”
She feels Tommy pulling her off the nurse. Like a switch being thrown, Lilly almost instantly snaps out of her rage reverie and blinks as though seeing clearly for the first time. She looks up. “Lock the door, Tommy. Now. Lock the door. And help me with the window.”
* * *
Notwithstanding Lilly’s vendetta directed at the kidnappers, and her cancerous rage, and her sparking synapses now telling her to shoot first and ask questions later, the plan has always been to make every attempt to rescue the children as quickly and efficiently as possible, and evacuate them from their confinement with a minimum of engagement with the enemy. But those options seem to be dwindling with each passing second as Tommy struggles to open the transom window above a storage locker positioned against the room’s outer wall.
The other windows are lost causes with their impermeable bars and safety glass. Tommy stands precariously on one of the exam tables and discovers with great frustration and alarm that the transom window is also useless, welded shut from generations of dried, congealed paint.
“Are we gonna die?” Across the room, little Bethany presses up against Lilly, her mouth red and swollen from the gag, her eyes wet with agony. She keeps averting her gaze from the crumpled, blood-sodden remains of the nurse across the room, the woman’s empty face marbled with blood, her head caved in like a deflated bladder. The little girl’s voice is crumbly and hoarse from terror. On the other side o
f the room, the baby is sucking on a pacifier in its bassinet, quiet for the first time since Lilly arrived.
“No, sweetie, we’re not gonna die.” Lilly touches the girl’s downy hair. “We’re gonna get outta here now and go home. Okay?”
The girl doesn’t reply. She is a sturdy child, approaching puberty, with dirty-blond pigtails and strong, intelligent brown eyes. She still wears her filthy little Duck Dynasty sweatshirt under a ratty denim jumper. Bethany has never allowed herself to be this scared, and the sight of her open display of fear has rattled Lilly a bit.
Bethany and Tommy’s little brother Lucas clutches Lilly’s other leg like some kind of marsupial offspring clinging to its mother. A freckled waif of six years with unruly hair, Lucas Dupree hasn’t said a word since Lilly arrived. He has spoken only with his eyes, which continue to radiate utter horror.
“Okay, listen to me, everybody. Here’s the deal.” Lilly announces this to the kids in a sort of encouraging, camp-counselor-style tone of voice, giving Bethany Dupree a reassuring little squeeze. “Nobody’s gonna die, we’re all gonna get outta here, but we have to do it quickly, as quick as you’ve ever left a building. You understand what I’m saying? Yes, it’s like a game, except that it’s way more important than a game. You understand?”
Tommy’s voice penetrates Lilly’s train of thought from across the room: “It won’t budge!”
“That’s okay, Tommy. Get down, grab your gun, c’mon. You still got that rope?”
“This?” The boy climbs down, pulling the coil from his belt loops. The heavy-duty hemp rope is frayed and soiled from the ascent up the side of the building. He hands it over to her.
Lilly gathers the kids with exaggerated hand gestures, waving them into a semicircle around her, ushering the smallest ones against her hips. Most of them still semicatatonic with trauma, they press up against her like little pilot fish. Lilly turns to Bethany. “Go get the baby, sweetie.”
“Why do I have to—”
“Don’t argue, sweetheart, just do it—we’re really in a hurry here.”
Bethany goes and retrieves the infant, the baby still chewing its pacifier with relative calm. The child’s cornflower-blue doe eyes seem to take in Lilly as a worshipper would take in a god.
Lilly turns to nine-year-old Jenny Coogan with her thick horn-rims decorated with nerdy masking tape wrapped around the center and her Japanese anime T-shirt. Jenny is the hipster of the bunch, and also one the strongest kids for her age. “Take this, honey, and don’t let go no matter what.” Jenny grips the rope with white-knuckle intensity. Lilly looks at the other kids and suddenly feels a wave of emotion pass through her, memories of little preschoolers like guppies following their nannies down the suburban sidewalks. “Everybody grab a handful of the rope, and hold on tight! Gonna move quickly toward the closest stairs, and don’t stop no matter what. Even if you hear gunshots.”
Nods from some of the older kids. The Slocum twins, dressed in their identical tattered pinafores and tiny Chuck Taylor sneakers, stand shoulder to shoulder like a Diane Arbus postcard. The freckled, ruddy-complexioned ten-year-old Tyler Coogan stands behind them, dutifully clutching the rope. He still wears his shopworn Braves cap as though it bestows superpowers to its owner. Lilly looks from child to child as she prepares to lead them to freedom.
These are all essentially children orphaned by the plague, and Lilly loves these kids with all her heart and soul. And for a brief moment, Lilly realizes she shares that distinction with them. Lilly, too, has been orphaned by the outbreak. She nods one last time, heavy with emotion and resolve, and reaches for the AR-15 strapped across her back.
She pulls the charging handle and releases the bolt, injecting a round into the chamber, and takes a deep breath before crossing the room to the door. Then she turns the knob and leads the group—with Tommy bringing up the rear, two-handing the machine pistol—out the door.
Unfortunately, nobody hears the heavy shuffle of combat boots charging down an adjacent staircase until it’s too late to do anything about it.
FOURTEEN
Neither group realizes that each is stumbling into a head-on collision with the other until Lilly and Bryce make eye contact at practically the exact same moment, each of them rounding a corner at opposite sides of the reception area. Each instinctively fires off a single shot, both blasts going wide and high. Lilly’s round chews a chunk of the lintel above the nurse’s station, sending a spray of plaster dust into the air as thick as gauze. The other blast—a single blue flash from Bryce’s stainless-steel .357 Magnum—shatters a glass cabinet still filled with long-out-of-date magazines one foot to Lilly’s left. Crystalline dust sprays across Lilly’s flank and sends her reeling in the opposite direction. Bryce and four other unidentified figures instantly duck down, most of them reaching for their guns. At the same moment, across the waiting area, Tommy shoves the children back against the wall like a crazed traffic guard, blocking them from the line of fire. Neck veins bulging, eyes bright with fury, the young man has the machine pistol in one hand—safety off, full auto—and he turns and lets out a strange war-cry that raises the hackles on Lilly’s neck. It sounds like a hoarse, garbled bark—a mucusy howl—that makes all heads turn. Lilly answers it with her own cry: “Tommy NO-NO-NO!!”
Lilly’s shriek comes one millisecond before the HK crackles, a barrage of automatic fire spraying the opposite wall where the others hunker down near the floor. One of the men—a middle-aged soldier in ratty green fatigues—takes one in the neck. He gasps and slams back against the nurse’s station, dropping his gun, clutching his neck, choking out as the blood issues forth in a fountain of deep crimson arterial spray between the man’s fingers. Pages of documents and paper registers and boxes of Kleenex and pens erupt across the counter of the station in blooms of white matter and shards of plastic detritus. Everybody hits the deck except Sergeant Beau Bryce. Lilly can see the graying, rawboned former soldier go down on one knee, assuming a shooting position, aligning the front sight of his massive stainless-steel revolver on Tommy, which prompts Lilly to raise the barrel of her AR-15 and prepare to take Bryce out—all this happening within the span of a single half second—when all at once a series of equal and opposite actions and reactions unfold, registering one at a time in Lilly’s brain, bringing the gunfire to an unexpected and abrupt halt.
“BRYCE! HOLD YOUR FIRE! PLEASE! EVERYBODY! THERE IS NO REASON FOR THIS BARBARIC, RIDICULOUS GUNPLAY!”
The voice comes from one of the three surviving figures huddling down against the floor behind Bryce, their faces obscured behind the cover of the nurse’s counter. The voice is feeble, scratchy, and ancient, but it seems to carry much weight with Bryce, who instantly averts the muzzle of the .357, letting out a tense breath. Then the source of the voice reveals itself as a man who looks to be somewhere between seventy and a hundred, awkwardly rising to his feet on wobbly knees, smoothing out the folds in his white lab coat, brushing off his baggy corduroy pants, and adjusting his eyeglasses. He has spidery silver hair, a cadaverous, wrinkled face, and thick, Coke-bottle glasses behind which his gray eyes are magnified into huge omniscient orbs. Lilly fixes her cobralike gaze on this older man as he raises his palsied arms as though surrendering.
All of this encompasses less than a minute, and in that length of time, Lilly hasn’t moved from her position in the archway of the side hall, down on one knee, her assault rifle raised and ready, the back sight pressed to her eye, the magazine still filled with enough rounds to make every last one of these motherfuckers sorry they entered this vestibule. But before the old man can say another word—in fact, before anybody else in the waiting area can shift or say anything or shoot or even move—Lilly makes an instantaneous decision. It bubbles up out of her forebrain fully formed and galvanized with resolve. She realizes that this older man must be the ringleader of this circus, and from the way he’s speaking to Bryce, it’s clear he carries some kind of authority in the folds and stained pockets of that dull white lab jacket that
drapes over his emaciated, stooped shoulders. All of which propels Lilly to her feet.
Before the old man can say another word, two things transpire in complete synchronous conjunction with each other: 1) Lilly leaps across the gap between her and the old man—a distance of about ten feet, maybe even less—at the same time, with one violent, fluid motion, dropping the rifle and pulling the twelve-inch tactical knife from the lining of her boot; and 2) Bryce pivots toward her with the barrel of his .357 raised, and he even starts to squeeze the trigger, when the old man in the lab coat cries out in his crumbling voice, slamming the brakes on the proceedings: “BRYCE, NO! HOLD YOUR FIRE! HOLD YOUR FIRE! PLEASE DO NOT SHOOT!”
Lilly presses the serrated edge of that brushed black steel knife against the wattled, turkey-like neck of the old man.
Time stands still in the dim, yellow light of that derelict reception area.
* * *
For the longest time, nobody says anything, and the silence seems to drip from an invisible faucet in that gloomy space, with its bullet-riddled nurses’ station and tufts of paper littering the carpet now like cottonwood fluff—the fragments of happier days, the shards of once joyous moments documented on tearstained maternity forms. A dead man lies amidst the litter, soaking in his own juices. The children softly whimper. Tommy holds the machine pistol aloft, aiming it at Bryce, the weapon ready to roar at a moment’s notice. Bryce seems oblivious to the boy’s killing position. At the moment, the sergeant major is apparently interested solely in holding his enormous gleaming revolver on Lilly, his upper body coiled and poised to blow her away. Lilly can sense the barrel of the .357 aimed directly at a spot a few inches above her temple, and she can feel the old man trembling in her arms. She can hear his weak heartbeat racing—in fact, she can feel his faint pulse against the back of her thumb as she holds the business end of the knife against his jugular. She can smell his odors—stale Old Spice, bad breath, BO, and something unidentifiable like rubbing alcohol or ammonia—and she can sense his wheels turning. What now? How do we proceed in the face of this interesting turn of events?
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