Zechariah turns his sharp blue eyes on him. “You’re not stealing Lucas’ truck.”
Condy checks the ignition. “He left the keys in it and everything. He’d probably be okay with me borrowing it, especially if you tag along.”
The young man only stares him down.
“Look, you clearly don’t like these uniformed assholes any more than I do. How about we head for the hills? When things quiet down, we’ll bring the truck back.”
“I’m not leaving Lucas.”
“Yeah, well, you already have.”
A few of Zechariah’s teeth appear in a silent snarl, but he can produce no argument.
“How about this? I’ll drive us closer to the action and let you out, and you can go find him. Just act natural and the soldiers have no reason to fuck with you. Then I’ll be on my way, and you can let Lucas know he’ll have his truck back when the heat dies down.” He starts the engine, wincing at its noise. “He’ll rip me a new asshole, but at least I won’t be in Gitmo.”
“I’m not letting you steal his truck.”
“Let me drive us closer, and then we can talk.” He shifts gears and carefully turns around, aware of how quickly the grass will turn to mud. But of course, the truck Lucas has chosen for himself is capable, and soon it has them nosing up to the edge of the grass. Only yards away, soldiers escort terrified civilians to the covered evacuation trucks near the gate.
Zechariah points down the parking lot, and Condy sees a mass of red and bloodied mud at the far end. Lucas and one of the soldiers are arguing, and the old man winces; he’s rarely seen the little beaner so keyed-up. Maybe one of the residents has gotten hurt. If so, he’d hate to be that soldier right now—
“It’s Io,” Zechariah suddenly realizes.
Lucas drops into a crouch and grabs something— a shotgun—
The soldier shoots Lucas in the head. He collapses in the mud like a sack of rocks.
“Ohmygod!” Condy shouts, and then slaps a hand to his mouth. “Jesus! Oh, Jesus! He just— He just fucking— Is he dead?”
Lucas lies motionless in the mud. Beside him, Io is prone, wrists bound behind her back, equally still.
Zechariah emerges from the back seat, eyes full of hate. “Killed them,” he growls, “killed them, killed them, killed—”
Condy grabs at him desperately. “Wait! Wait! We have to think! What about Io? Is she hurt, or do they just have her lying there?”
“—rip out his intestines—”
“Stop! I think I can fix this!” He forces Zechariah to sit down in the passenger seat and then presses his hands to his own mouth again. “Shit. I think . . . Shit. Gimme a second.”
“—tear out his tongue and eat it, so he screams and screams until he chokes—”
“Hand me that sack on the floor.” He pulls open the laptop and begins typing furiously. “Shit, the battery’s nearly dead. Is there an outlet around here?”
“—until his own mother won’t recognize—”
“Retard!” The slur grabs the younger man’s attention. “I need you to focus! Is? There? An? Outlet? Here?”
Zechariah stares at him a moment, then bares his teeth. “Why?”
“If you help me, I can bring Lucas back to life and get us out of this. I swear, I swear upon the doors of understanding’s house, I swear I can do it, but I need your help. We don’t have much time — the more entropy I need to reverse, the more expensive it is, and I don’t want to test my credit limit just yet.”
“What the fuck are you babbling about?”
“If I plug in this laptop, Lucas will come back to life.”
The younger man thinks for a long moment, then looks over his shoulder at the side of the community center. “Over there. We used it for the Christmas lights.”
Condy throws the engine into reverse and slowly backs down the side of the building, eager not to draw attention. When Zechariah indicates, he parks and climbs out, laptop in hand. “Follow me, and bring that bag in the footwell.”
A minute later, he’s plugged-in and set up, crouched against the side of the building. Zechariah winces as soon as the blue orb is revealed, and sits watching the old man from the cab.
“Come on, come on,” Condy mutters to himself, checking over the macro that seemed like a fun diversion only half an hour before. “Okay, I think this is all good, but keep in mind, it’s untested. This is a ‘run the compiler once and hope we don’t destroy the planet’ scenario.”
“If you obliterate me, I’ll kill you,” Zechariah tells him, without a trace of humor.
“The moment I hit ‘go’, I’ll throw this kit into the truck and climb in, and you’ll drive over and pick up Io and Lucas. Get them into the truck and get the hell out. If Io’s hurt, I’ll fix her up later, same way.”
“What about the fuckface who shot Lucas?”
“Run him over if you can. Might make it harder for him to shoot us. In fact — Jesus, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but — run over as many soldiers as you can.” His finger hovers over the ENTER button as he checks the last few lines of code. “Ready?”
Drews rubs a pressure point between his eyes, trying to ward off the headache threatening his temples.
Of course, it could be worse. He spares a glance down at Mr. de la Mora, who lies on his back in the mud, brown eyes hazy and fixed on the winter sky. There’s a penny-sized hole in his forehead. His mouth hangs open a little.
Some of the dying sharp’s blood has pooled dangerously close to the man’s freshly aerated head. “Blue,” he tells his radio. “Decon, bring an extra bag. We need to transport a dead sheep back to FOB Abbott, check for contamination. Over.”
“Decon. Roger, Blue. Out.”
“Sir,” murmurs one of his soldiers. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Granted.”
She stands a little straighter. “He may have simply been retrieving his weapon. I am not convinced he was going to attack you, or that lethal force was necessary.”
“I appreciate your concern. However, at the time, I was less occupied with any physical threat, and more with his promise to make known certain elements.” He indicates the humanoid sharp dying in the mud. “I hope you understand that if knowledge of this noon-it’s existence gets any further, global stability will be at stake.”
She and the others around her are nodding. “Yes, sir.”
“Mr. de la Mora chose to escalate, and I had to meet him in kind. After the volatility he had already displayed, I couldn’t risk—”
Io lies on her belly, wrists bound behind her back with zip-ties. She stares wide-eyed at Lucas’ profile even as she fights for her final breaths. Her wounds are closing, but not quickly enough. The only thing worse than her own despair and terror is knowing that a good man — maybe the first she’s met since her infection — has died trying to protect her.
Drews notices her shuddering and steps closer, stares down at her.
He points his sidearm at her head.
She lets out a soft, helpless sob and squeezes her eyes shut, flinching from the coming blow.
Lucas’ leg spasms.
Drews glances down at the motion, then does a double-take and stares.
The corpse has awakened. Lucas lies on his back, blinking up into the dim sunlight, a bullet sitting comically on his forehead.
“What?” Drews mumbles. His eyes fly to the sharp’s blood, but there’s no way it reached the dead man, no way he would have been infected and resurrected this quickly—
“What?” Lucas whispers, starting to sit up. The bullet rolls off and is lost in the mud.
“Wh—?” Io manages.
Space silently rips itself open mere feet away, and a portal forms. Drews has just enough time to register it, look back down at Lucas, and shout, “HOSTILES INCOMING!”
Black vines pour forth from the portal, grasping for something to strangle. Drews backs away toward his men, gun still drawn, leaving Io and Lucas helpless.
The air fills
with a shuddering engine roar.
Drews and his soldiers jerk around just in time to see a pick-up truck barrelling toward them. A few are caught off-guard and go down under its wheels; others jump out of the way and land heavily in the gravel.
The truck’s back end fishtails around in a wide arc and slams into Drews; he flies two yards and hits the ground on his arm.
The driver’s door opens and Zechariah rolls out, using the vehicle for cover. Io writhes in the mud at his feet, trying to push herself up but too weak with blood loss.
“He shot me,” Lucas mumbles, sitting propped up on his elbows. His legs are like jelly, and he thinks he might never stand again. “Motherfucker shot me.” He notices the black vines wiggling at his side and weakly pushes himself away from them.
Zechariah kneels beside Io, snaps the zip-tie binding her wrists, and hooks his hands under her armpits. He heaves her toward the truck with a grunt.
Lucas stares straight ahead, half-oblivious to the chaos all around him, other than the vines worrying at his sleeve. This isn’t happening. Clearly, he’s reached some new, uncharted level of nervous breakdown. He just hallucinated that Drews shot him in the head, and then the next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground.
He touches a shaking hand to his forehead, finds no wound. This only upsets him further. His tether to reality has proven surprisingly weak today, and now it is broken.
Io hacks, coughing up blood from a pierced lung. As Zechariah hauls her into the front seat, she grabs a seat belt with a shaking hand and pulls herself deeper into the cab. Her other arm hangs limp, elbow still shattered.
Bullets zip through the air over their heads. Zechariah ducks back down beside the truck.
“Cease fire!” someone shouts. “The Director is on that side!”
Sure enough, Drews is on his feet only a few steps away from Lucas — holding his injured arm to his hip, searching the ground for his gun. “You’re surrounded!” he roars shakily. “Give up before more innocent people get hurt!”
There’s a handgun at Zechariah’s feet; he grabs it up and shoves it under his belt. Then he turns his attention to Lucas. Just as Condy promised, his friend is alive again, staring around dazedly. The black vines have nearly engulfed him.
Drews dives for the ground, then comes up with Lucas’ shotgun. “Get on the ground!” he roars, and fires one-handed at Zechariah. The shot goes wide, and the recoil knocks the gun clear out of his hand.
Zechariah grabs Lucas by his lapels and lifts him closer to the truck cab, tearing him free of the vines’ steely grip. “Drive, drive, drive!” he orders, shoving him up into the seat. Then he hauls himself up into the truck bed and lies down flat, grabbing whatever handholds are available.
Lucas finds himself behind the wheel. Io cowers in the passenger-side footwell, her good hand pressed to her face. She sobs with terror and relief, staring up at him like a risen savior.
Bullets pepper her side of the truck; she shrieks and cringes still lower against the seat.
Lucas shoots Drews a final, bewildered look and sees the man pumping the shotgun one-handed. Then he slams his door shut, shifts gears, and hits the gas.
For a spine-freezing moment, the wheels spin in the mud — and then the truck rams forward, swerving toward the line of soldiers. He stays low, wrenches the steering wheel.
Men leap out of the way at the last second, some aided by glancing blows from the truck. Bullets shatter the passenger-side window and pock the windshield; Io covers her bloodied head with her hands and screams as glass rains down over her.
And then they’re through the line of soldiers and barrelling for the gate. The way is partly blocked by an evacuation truck full of civilians, who see the pick-up roar into sight and frown at it confusedly. It sweeps past, swerving in the wet gravel, and shoots through the open gate like a cannonball.
Lucas sits up just in time to jerk the steering wheel and avoid the ditch. They begin the steep climb up the mountain road away from the camp.
Io stares up at him from the footwell. “Where are we going?”
“Any-fucking-where but here!” he swears. Just as they reach the top of the rise and he spots the main road ahead, sirens start up down below.
They fly out onto the main road. Somewhere to their left lies Shire, and beyond it, the Gothic Quarantine Zone. Lucas takes a hard right, and the moment his tires meet the pavement, he pushes the gas pedal to the floor. In seconds they are zooming through the Arkansas countryside, gripping every turn in the road.
Io crawls up into the seat, shaking like a bird. “You saved me,” she whispers, staring at him with wide, tear-filled eyes. “Thank you.”
His attention is on the road, but he doesn’t like how their momentum makes her slide around on the seat beside him. “Seat belt. Now.”
She obeys, careful with her bloodied arm. “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you.”
Zechariah sits up and presses himself against the back of the cab. “Lucas! Help!”
Io twists around to look, and her eyes go wide. “Fuck! The blue orb is back there!” It glows in the midst of a mess of wires against the tailgate, half-hidden by Condy’s laptop.
“Where’s Mr. Condy?” Lucas calls, glancing into the rear-view mirror.
“Had to leave him behind!” Zechariah shouts. “He told me to drive, so I drove! He couldn’t keep up!”
“Fuck,” Lucas mutters. “No chance to go back for him, either. Fuck!”
“Just don’t brake!” Zechariah adds, fighting to be heard over the roar of the wind. “That goddamn blue orb is back here!”
Lucas takes a sharp turn far faster than he knows he should. “You. No more lies. Leave nothing out. Talk.”
Io stares at him for a full minute as they barrel through the Arkansas countryside. At last, “Out here, outside the quarantine. Do you know about the infection?”
“Monsters infecting the city?”
“Holy shit, you don’t know. Okay, uh, um.” She presses her hands to her face. “Ohhhh, I’m going to explain it badly! Okay, uh, under certain circumstances, extremely rare circumstances, the needle monsters can infect humans. I was infected during the Disaster.”
“How? What are these ‘extremely rare circumstances’?”
“It’s better if you didn’t know. We’ve kept it a secret to avoid—”
“Who is ‘we’? How many of you are there?”
“At this point? It’s just my— my sister and I. Any others were destroyed in the blue pulse.”
“So you’re just a human with an infection? Drews made it out like you’re some kind of alien invad—”
“Drews is a fucking lunatic!” she screams.
“No argument there!” he hurriedly amends. “So this infection makes you immortal?”
“We can heal from any wound, even if our brains are destroyed.” She looks dizzy at the idea. “It’s horrible. It’s, it’s like the worst insanity. It makes you not human.”
“How did you survive the pulse?”
“We still had human parts, with clusters of needles hiding inside. After we resurrected, the soldiers found us. They knew we were afraid of being shot in the head, and of the black hammers— Please be careful when you brake! If that orb gets too close, it could destroy me!”
Zechariah has finally had enough of its proximity, and climbs in through the shattered passenger window. (Io transfers to the middle seat and dutifully buckles her lap belt.) His gangly legs slide in first, and then the rest of him. The moment he’s inside, he reaches across Io and grips Lucas’ shoulder. “I’ll kill him, buddy. I’ll rip his throat out, first chance I get.”
“Let’s focus on getting away first,” Lucas says distractedly, and then spots the turn-off. He takes the turn fast instead of braking, so that the orb stays in the back of the bed, and continues down the pocked and bumpy road until the blacktop is out of sight behind them.
He pulls off the side of the road and slides to a careful stop. They sit in silence, ear
s straining for the sirens. Lucas plans to bail out the moment he hears them, leading the way into the woods — though, on foot, their chances will go from minimal to negligible.
tick tick tick goes the cooling engine, and birdsong gradually fills the trees on either side.
Lucas opens his door. “I’ll put the orb back in its case.”
“Thank you,” Io whispers, giving him an exhausted smile. Her mutilated elbow cracks back into place, and the wound begins to close.
He climbs out, goes to the tailgate, lowers it. The orb slides neatly into the hammer, which he clicks shut and clips to his belt as Drews did. Then he gathers up the laptop and cords under his arm, pushes the tailgate closed, and returns to the cab. As he hands over the items, he indicates the mace. “Can they track that?”
“They tried putting GPS chips in the cases, but the orb puts out too much interference.”
He pulls back onto the road, and they continue down the side road and deeper into the Ozark Mountains.
Lucas looks warily to Io. “I don’t really care if you’re technically human or not, as long as you’re not on the monsters’ side.”
“My sister used to say that we’re on our own side. But, yes, we definitely don’t want the Earth invaded by monsters. Even though we’ve been under quarantine ever since the Disaster, the old Director let us help with research, trying to find out how to close the portals.”
“Hang on. Portals? So Condy was telling the truth?”
“I don’t know about that, but the monsters came into Gothic through portals from another dimension. Only a few dozen humans know that. It’s why Gothic couldn’t be reopened, even after the blue pulse — new monsters were still coming through. We were trying to figure out how to close them, and I think we were pretty close, but then the Director was killed, and Drews took over.”
Lucas grunts. “Tell me about him.”
“Some kind of Special Forces or Special Ops or something. Since he set off the blue pulse and knew about the infected, he was kept in the Quarantine Zone just like us. I’ve never liked him, mostly because of the blue pulse, and apparently, the feeling was mutual. Oh, he played nice under the old Director, but the moment he was in charge, he killed my sister — in a temporary way, that is. Now I’m pretty sure he has her in ‘containment’, whatever the hell that is—”
New Night (Gothic Book 2) Page 8
