“Anna,” Jared called and waved her over. Stewart looked over his shoulder and waved, then went back to talking to Juan and Carlos about the rifle. She met Jared halfway and he pulled a pair of bright orange earplugs from his pocket. She took them.
“Good morning, Sleeping Beauty.” He cupped her cheek in his hand and gently rubbed a finger under her eyes. “Maybe you should have slept longer. You look exhausted.”
“Gee thanks,” she retorted.
“Well, you can take a nap after we shoot. I want you to be comfortable carrying a pistol. When your arm heals up a little you can learn the M4.”
He handed her a pair of shooting glasses and led her to Violet, who had just put her pistol in a pouch on her waist. Anna was surprised that Violet was shooting and said so.
“Child, I’ve been shooting since I was a girl. My stepdaddy taught me how to use the .22 when I was eleven, and then the .38 when I was a little older. Of course, it’s a bit harder to do now. My hands aren’t what they used to be.” She flexed her fingers and winced.
Jared took her through the basics of loading, unloading, and firing again. This time she got to shoot, and it wasn’t as bad as she thought. She shot the .38 revolver he had given her, and then he taught her how to fire the nine-millimeter Sig Sauer.
She found that she preferred the Sig Sauer. It was smoother and more intuitive, plus she liked having the larger magazine capacity and safety features. Jared told her to save the .38 for emergencies. She told him their life was now one big emergency.
They stayed far longer than Violet, who left shortly after Anna started shooting. James took Juan and Carlos back to the house. Jared took care to teach her every aspect of the weapons throughout the afternoon. She got sunburnt on top of all her other injuries.
He packed his gear away in his bag and slung it on his shoulder. He gave her a belt with a holster that rested against her thigh and strapped around her leg. She put the pistol in it, and he stood back.
“Sexy,” he said and came toward her.
She rested her hands on his chest and looked up at him. She still couldn’t believe they were here together, that they had gone from co-workers in an office to partners in survival in two short days. He leaned down and pressed his lips against hers. They were firm and warm. He smelled like sunshine and sweat, and it was…stimulating. Her mouth opened and he teased her tongue with his. His hands gripped her harder, pulling her against him eagerly. She hissed in pain and he pulled back quickly.
“Shit, I’m sorry.” He released her immediately.
“Its okay,” she said and reached for him again. He gave her a softer kiss this time and held only her hands. She pouted a bit when he pulled back and he chuckled.
“I’ll let you ravish me later, when you’re all healed up,” he promised. She blushed and hoped the sunburn covered it.
“Let’s go get something to eat. I believe tonight is our date. Too bad it turned into a group date,” he scowled.
She laughed and elbowed him as they left the clearing.
◆◆◆
“We’re going to the armory tomorrow,” Jared said as the others ate at the large table.
“When do we leave?” Anna asked.
“Bradley, Stewart, and I will leave at dawn. You all will stay here,” he said.
“What? No way! I’m not staying here while you go out there. I wouldn’t know if something happened!”
“I agree. I think I should go along as well,” Hank said from his end of the table.
Bradley raised his eyebrows at Jared. “What did I tell you,” he said with a wry smile.
“We’ll be fine,” Jared said to Anna.
“I know because I’m going too. You can’t stop me,” she said. “I’ll just find a way to follow you if you don’t take me.”
He sighed. “Men should have never given up their control over women,” he murmured to John.
She glared at him.
“Fine, you can go. Only because I think you actually would try to follow us,” he relented.
Stewart passed her a couple of pills and she took them with her water. “Better rest up. I’ll give you some clean bandages too. I don’t want you getting anything nasty on those gashes.”
“Oh and…” He rustled around in his pocket. “Here.” He passed her a tube. “Better wear sunscreen tomorrow.” She looked at the label. Aloe gel with lidocaine.
“Thanks.”
“Okay, so we’re taking Anna, Hank, Jared, myself, and Stewart,” Bradley counted. “We can’t fit anymore in the truck. Juan, I want you and Violet to stay here and keep watch. I think you guys should be okay here but stay inside just in case.”
Juan nodded and Maria looked relieved that he wasn’t going along.
“There is something else I want to do before we go to the armory,” she told the men.
They stopped eating and looked at her.
“I think we should go take care of Gina.” She hoped they got it without having to spell it out in front of the boys. Juan and Jared looked at each other, but the rest were confused.
“We probably should. I never felt right leaving her like that,” Jared said.
“You guys left her in the closet?” Juan asked, and Maria looked upset. She wasn’t surprised he had shared the experience with his wife.
“Uh yeah. We were kind of busy after you left,” Jared said.
“What are you guys talking about?” Bradley asked. He sipped his drink and looked at each of them in turn.
“We taped up Gina and stuck her in a closet. That was at the very beginning. We didn’t know what else to do,” Juan told him.
“In town?” Bradley asked.
Juan nodded. “At our office.”
“If it’s still there,” Anna said.
“It should be, unless Jimmy Don’s been busy over there too,” Jared said.
“Jimmy Don? That guy from last night?” Stewart asked. “What does he have to do with it?”
“He blew up Main Street. Set the gas lines to explode with an incendiary 'deeeevice' of some sort. Took out a whole crowd of crazies too…after Anna lured them up there in a badass Caddy,” Jared explained.
“That was about an hour or two before we ended up on your stairwell,” Anna told them.
Bradley raised an eyebrow at Stewart. "You guys sure do get around. I guess the office should be our first stop tomorrow. We’ll have to take precautions, stay vigilant. Remember there’s at least one sniper out there that shoots indiscriminately.”
The whole group shared his concern.
Chapter Twenty
On The Road Again
“So, this is where you guys worked?” Bradley asked from the passenger seat. Jared drove. Anna, Hank, and Stewart shared the back.
“Yep, pretty exciting huh?” Jared said. "Never knew what you would be getting into at the ol' GFI..."
“What is office work like, anyway?” he wanted to know.
“Jared built trash structures at his desk…when he was at his desk. I’m not even sure he realized that he was supposed to be working here,” Anna teased. “You should’ve seen the Taj Mahal replica he did using toilet paper rolls, Styrofoam, and sporks. It was a masterpiece of garbage engineering.”
Stewart stared hard at Jared. His look was inscrutable.
“Thanks Babe,” Jared said wryly. “She’s always praising my accomplishments. Sometime you should take a look at her scrapbook,” he offered.
“We should go in now,” she said quickly.
“Let’s do it as planned. No stragglers.”
They pulled into the parking lot, as close to the building as they could. She was happy to have made it past the Dollar Store without any potshots being taken at them. She could happily live her life without any more sniping incidents.
Anna didn’t even remember her car was parked here until she saw it again. She pulled her keys from her bag. She was taking it when they left. They might need an extra car. She waited until Bradley gave the signal before she got out
of the vehicle.
Since they only had five people, Bradley had explained that it would be best if they didn’t have an outside watch. Stewart covered the main door. Bradley and Jared took the front and would deal with Gina. Anna and Hank were to keep watch in the office in case anything lurked.
She felt both safer, and in more danger now that she carried a pistol. She still had her bat. The habit of keeping it close was hard to break, even if the pistol was better. Bats didn’t run out of ammo.
“Who’s the smartass?” she heard Bradley murmur from the breakroom.
“I thought people deserved a warning,” Jared defended.
“Nobody is going to take that warning seriously,” Bradley replied.
She remembered now what Jared had scribbled onto the closet door. She was going to have to put up with a lot of crap surviving this…. thing…with him. She sighed an extra-long sigh.
She glanced back to the open door where Stewart watched the parking lot and the road beyond through the glass foyer. At least the glass was somewhat tinted. She faced her assigned direction again.
The cubicle forest that led to the accounting section spread out before her. It was eerie being back here after they had such a traumatic last day at work. The computers were black. Supplies still rested on desks. Darla’s sweater still hung on the back of her chair. A few cat hairs clung desperately to the navy-blue fabric. She hoped the poor things could get outside. There was no way she could get the guys to go for a cat rescue mission. She yawned and shifted on her feet.
She heard a sudden crash from the breakroom and shot Hank a horrified look before dashing off to check on Jared. The ringing still echoed through the room as she crossed the threshold. She took in the scene quickly. The crashing sound had been a table flipping.
She watched, horrified, as Bradley wrestled with the Gina-thing on the floor. Jared was grasping at its shoulders, trying to pry it away.
But it wasn’t the same Gina thing they had locked in the closet. Shock rippled through her and she froze as she studied it. This was bad.
Gina’s skin had changed. Her skin had become tougher and more fluid somehow, but that wasn’t the worst part. It was taking on the texture and colors of the surface she was near; it rippled, almost imperceptibly. It was like seeing John wrestle with a breakroom-colored person…with very jagged teeth. Gina’s lower jaw gaped open, wider than humanly possible. Her teeth had elongated a little, and sharpened. The hair that still clung to her scalp had lost its golden luster. It hung, limp and faded.
She didn't look human anymore.
“What the hell happened to her?!” she yelled, finally unfreezing.
Its teeth inched closer to John's face and she watched as Jared strained to lift the feral, snapping thing.
"Kill it!" he ground out.
She acted before she thought. She brought her booted foot back, before releasing the hardest kick she could muster. Her toe caught the thing squarely in the hinge of the jaw and it shrieked in fury as she distracted it from its kill.
Its head whipped toward her and the look of malevolent rage on its strangely colored face was fascinating. And chilling. There was nothing left of Gina; she was gone.
It growled low in its throat and she was sure it was about to lunge. Anna backed up and pulled her bat up. Would a bat even phase the thing?
A loud shot rang out and blood, black and viscous, splattered them. Her ears rang and she couldn’t hear for a moment. She saw the thing collapse and John scuttled quickly out from under the corpse. As they watched, its body changed rapidly. It lost its strange color-shifting ability and turned black, pitch black and velvety. It almost looked like it had been burned.
They stood there for several moments in complete silence. She trembled with all the emotions that she felt.
Disbelief, horror, confusion, fear, fascination.
“What. The. Hell. Was. That!?” Jared said.
“You mean she wasn’t always like that?” Bradley asked.
Anna looked at him incredulously. How could he crack jokes at a time like this?
Even more incredible was Jared's lack of retort. No one-liner? It was unlike him.
“You aren’t supposed to make the jokes. I’m supposed to make the jokes,” Jared said, still staring at the remains.
Her heart raced and she tasted the sour metallic tang of adrenaline as it flooded her veins. She could have used it a little sooner. Perhaps her body was still tired from the excessive adrenaline dumps on Thursday.
She took a deep purposeful breath and tried to calm herself. She didn’t want to use up her daily allotment of adrenaline just yet. They still had work ahead of them. Dangerous work.
“I’m not sure what the hell is going on, but I think we should leave,” she told them.
“Yeah, well. Gina’s been put out of her misery now, so we can go any time,” Jared said.
Bradley glared at him.
“She didn’t look very miserable,” Anna said. “What happened in there?”
Bradley didn’t look back as he answered. “I opened the door, and she wasn’t there. The chair was there, but she wasn’t. I turned a little to ask Jared if she could have gotten loose. That’s when I heard the breathing. I looked up and there she was in the corner of the ceiling. She was camouflaged. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“She lunged and took John down before we even really realized what happened,” Jared said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t budge her at all.”
“Stewart’s not going to believe this,” Bradley said.
◆◆◆
They were back in the truck and on their way out of town a few moments later. Mercifully, they hadn’t encountered any crazies, new variety or not. She would rather deal with a sniper than another one of those things.
“Dang it, I forgot my car!” she huffed.
“I don’t think it’s going anywhere. We can come back sometime. Maybe,” Jared said.
She didn’t reply. She watched the buildings on the side of the road as they gradually spaced out and they were once again on the cursed highway. It always seemed to lead them to some screwed up stuff.
“What do you think happened to her?” Anna asked, breaking the tense silence.
“I don’t know, but I hope it was an aberration,” Bradley said, voicing exactly what she was thinking.
“She was a fucking mutant, John. A mutant! Some fucked up government scientist was obviously screwing around with shit that should never have been screwed around with! Oh, they did a damn good job, with their freakish fucking experimental virus. It didn’t just make the global population sick and insane, its fucking turning them into monsters now too!” Jared shouted.
His tirade silenced any further comments that she, or any of them, might have made. Honestly, she had never heard Jared curse so much and it kind of scared her. He was usually so mild-mannered and easygoing. This was a completely different side of him.
She bit her lip nervously.
A moment later he reached a hand back and she took it. He squeezed gently and released it. “I’m sorry,” he told them and sighed. “I just wasn’t prepared to go all Van Helsing and shit today.”
“It’s alright man. Stress gets us all sometimes. You should have seen Stewart over in Afghanistan. Every Taliban offensive sent him directly to the gym afterward to burn off the stress. He almost reached Schwarzenegger proportions before the deployment was over. We all deal differently, and I could think of worse ways than yelling,” he said with a smile.
Anna glanced at Stewart. Yeah, she could see him bulking up. He was well-muscled already.
“Maybe silver will work against those new things,” Hank joked.
“Or a wooden stake to the heart,” Stewart added.
“Lead to the face seems to work fine,” Bradley said. “We should probably stick with that for now...Occam’s Razor, and all that.”
The atmosphere in the truck lightened a little with the jokes and it helped calm her nerves. If a simple run
to their office could turn deadly so fast, what was it going to be like at the armory?
“You guys understand that what happened at the office is going to complicate things, right. Everything changes now. We aren’t just dealing with simple sick people anymore. If that was more than just a freak mutation, and I hope to hell it isn’t, then we’ll need to be doubly alert,” Bradley said.
“Thanks, John. You really know how to lighten the mood,” Anna said.
“I’m just trying to be real. Knowing is half the battle and expecting more of those things could save our lives.”
“I feel like a ticking time bomb,” she said.
He furrowed his brow.
“Because I was sick. We don’t know how long after having that virus that people can still turn.”
He glanced at Stewart. She didn’t know how to read his look. It was too enigmatic.
“You aren’t going to turn,” Jared said definitively. His voice was hard, resolute.
Too bad it was out of his control.
◆◆◆
They passed Rolling Hills and Jared gave the sentry a wave out the window. Harry was probably a bit miffed about the incident Thursday night. She hoped the CDL didn’t write them off. It would be good to remain allies of a sort. People were hard to come by these days, and she was afraid they would get even more scarce as time went on. They needed each other.
She gazed out the window as they drove. She was feeling a bit carsick, something that she rarely had to deal with since she was single and always drove herself around. It wasn’t a good feeling. The busted back window let in some fresh air and that helped, but there was blood and brain matter dried into the upholstery where Hank sat, and that kind of ruined whatever relief the fresh air gave her.
Jared had tried to Febreze out the smell of the dried bodily fluids, but it wasn’t working very well. It just smelled like a blooming forest in springtime that contained a corpse and rotting bodily fluids.
Warm saliva flooded her tongue, and she covered her nose and breathed deeply through her mouth. She finally regained some control over herself.
The Salvation Plague | Book 1 |The Turning Page 19
