7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Light aimed his barrel right in the middle of that sanguine gaze and pulled the trigger. Her face exploded in a shower of blood and bone. Light closed his eyes briefly against the barrage, and when he opened them, another Infected was about to take her place.

  Time to go.

  He blew this one’s head off, too, then turned and hopped out of the truck.

  “Let’s move!”

  They had three more rows to fight through until they were in the clear, and the Infecteds near the roadblock were almost on them. The Sykos formed up in a circle, backs to its interior, a moving ring of death. They pushed unevenly toward the west, back toward Country Club Drive, gaining a few feet at a time, until finally Lilith and Pybus broke through.

  As they turned and started picking off the Infecteds still plaguing the others, Sansome and Warga made it out. Light was next, leaving only Fallon and Antonetti still surrounded.

  But the Infecteds coming from the east had arrived, and the two Sykos were quickly cut off from the rest. Without a word that Light could hear, they moved together so they were back-­to-­back. They were still making progress toward the open road and freedom, but it was halting and slow and becoming ever slower.

  “I’m going back,” Light said before he could think too closely about it. “Cover me.”

  Trusting the others to do as he said, Light started blazing a trail of gunfire toward the trapped duo. He was coming in at an angle, so that his shots and those of the other Sykos wouldn’t inadvertently hit Fallon or Antonetti. The suppressing fire created a little bubble around him as he moved, and soon his small circle of safety merged with Fallon and Antonetti’s slightly larger one.

  “This way! Come on!”

  Fallon shook her head.

  “We’ll never make it! You go, take the others and get out of here. Gino and I will hold them off as long as we can.”

  “They won’t follow me,” Light said, knowing it was true. “It’s you or no one, Fallon.”

  “He’s right,” Antonetti yelled, his voice hoarse with the effort to be heard over the cacophony of gunfire and the subvocal moaning and animal sounds of the Infecteds. The gunpowder and smoke were so thick that he sneezed before continuing, allowing an Infected to dart inside his reach and leave a Wolverine-­style claw mark down his arm. The young Italian grabbed the Infected, pulled her close, rammed his pistol against her head, and fired. He shoved her corpse back into the crowd of Infecteds before continuing.

  “Get out of here, Doc. Without you, the mission fails.”

  “Then we all need to get out!”

  Antonetti shook his head even though she couldn’t see him.

  “Not happening, Doc. You and Light go. I’ll keep these fuckers busy. Show ’em how shootin’s really done.”

  The good doctor looked like she was about to argue, but Light grabbed her arm.

  “Now, Fallon.”

  After a moment of hesitation, she nodded.

  “Good luck, Gino. And thank you.”

  The Syko handed her something Light couldn’t see but didn’t reply. He moved forward into the fray, toward the truck, yelling something in Italian that Light was pretty sure was a particularly vile insult.

  Fallon slipped whatever he had given her into one of the many pockets their uniforms sported, then Light and Fallon went in the other direction, working their way back to where the other Sykos’ gunfire gave them a wide enough berth to run out of the crowd and into the open street.

  They continued to fire into the swarm of Infecteds as they backed away, but fewer and fewer paid attention as Antonetti’s screams drew them like moths to a Roman candle.

  Light had no idea how accurate that simile was as Antonetti somehow got a final burst of shots off. The next thing the Sykos knew, a concussive wave threw them all to the ground as the UPS truck exploded in a ball of fire.

  “Damn,” Warga muttered, as they all scrambled back to their feet.

  They watched the fire in silence for a moment, each of them, perhaps, saying goodbye in their own way to the first Syko to fall.

  Then Fallon spoke.

  “Let’s not waste his sacrifice. We need to go.”

  They needed no further urging to turn and follow her north into a copse of trees separating the residential neighborhood from the commercial area.

  Light was the last to disappear into the foliage, and he couldn’t resist a look back.

  The Infecteds seemed to have forgotten their existence—­those that hadn’t been killed in the blast or weren’t stumbling around like living torches just milled aimlessly, as if the destruction of the truck and the loss of their prey left them without purpose.

  As he watched the truck burning, Light’s eyes narrowed.

  “Fucking copycat,” he said with grudging admiration, and spat on the ground, the only benediction he was willing to give the other man. Then he turned his back on Antonetti’s pyre and slipped into the green.

  CHAPTER 36

  21 hours

  They ran from copse to copse, making sure at each that there were no Infecteds following them before sprinting to the next. By the time they ran out of trees, they were all physically and emotionally exhausted. Add thirsty, hungry, and hurting to that, and Fallon knew tempers would be flaring soon—­hers among them.

  She at least knew the cause of her anger, beyond the physical stress.

  She shouldn’t have let Antonetti sacrifice himself. It should have been her.

  Fallon suspected that he and Light had been correct when they said the mission would fail without her, but that knowledge wasn’t what had deterred her. At the last moment, contemplating going to her death, she imagined Jason growing up without her. With only Mark to raise him.

  The thought was enough to make her turn tail and run. She’d have run back to PIR if she could have, mission be damned. She’d let the whole Valley be nuked rather than let her son grow up with only Mark’s influence. He’d wind up as one of those kids who lived in his parents’ basement until he was thirty, playing video games and subsisting entirely off Mountain Dew and pizza. And given his genetics, that could lead to places she never wanted her child to go.

  So she’d let Antonetti go to his death even though that was arguably her job as the leader of this merry band of Sykos. All because she didn’t want her son to turn out to be like him.

  Or like her.

  But she couldn’t run back to the racetrack; she’d never make it. So the only other option to get back to Jason was to make sure she survived this mission, with as many of her Sykos as it took to get her home in one piece. Well, her and the meteor.

  Fallon’s bitter reverie was interrupted by a woman’s scream. It wasn’t Lilith—­too far away for that.

  She hadn’t been in the lead; Lilith and Light were stopped in front of her, and she pushed her way between them to see what had caused them to halt.

  In front of them was a large greenbelt, bounded by evenly spaced poles painted sunshine yellow, with chains of the same hue strung between them that would keep no one out except perhaps faeries with a distaste for cold iron. A pavilion with several picnic tables took up the west end. To the north, a large, squat Mormon church shaded by immense palm trees held court over a vast, empty parking lot.

  That was where the scream had come from.

  A man and woman were fleeing across the parking lot, followed by a small herd of Infecteds—­five, so far. Fallon couldn’t tell if the ­couple had come from inside the church or from behind it; she supposed it didn’t matter, unless there were supplies her ­people could use inside.

  As the Sykos watched, more Infecteds began to converge on the ­couple—­three from the pavilion, four from between two houses across the street. Soon the two were surrounded, the woman—­still screaming—­armed with only a butcher knife; the man, with a shovel.

  “We have to help th
em,” Fallon said decisively. She’d just watched one human fall to the Infecteds. She wasn’t about to watch two more without doing something about it.

  “Why?” Light asked. “Why not sneak past while they keep the Infecteds busy? We’ve already wasted enough time fighting them.”

  “Sometimes running is the more noble option,” Pybus agreed, surprising her. Of all of them, she’d come to think of him as a calm and logical presence, but also one who—­paradoxically, after the crimes he’d committed—­would do the right thing, given the choice. But she supposed that sometimes practicality had to supersede morality, especially when two lives were weighed against millions.

  Fallon knew that, understood the rationale behind it. In any other situation, she’d probably have been the one making that argument. But not this time. Now, she didn’t care about reason or common sense. She couldn’t just walk away and leave the ­couple to die. Not so soon after Antonetti—­Gino. She felt like she owed it to him, to give his sacrifice meaning. Anything less cheapened what was, at its core, the act of a hero.

  “Fuck nobility,” she said, loading a fresh clip into her Glock. “I’m going to help them. You can come along, or you can watch, I don’t care.” Warga and Sansome had moved up while she spoke, so the Sykos were all in a ragged line as they stood in the shadow of the last trees. “I’m going.”

  “Then so am I,” Sansome said simply, pulling his own pistol out. His face was still bleeding in spots. Much of it was hamburger, and there were worse wounds—­a ragged flap of skin under his left eye had been clawed almost off, hanging on only by its bottom edge; the far right side of his forehead sparkled with bits of glass smashed into it from being ground into the street.

  Fallon looked at the others. None of them seem ready to man up and join her and Joe.

  Okay, then.

  “Let’s go,” she said to him, and set out running from the cover of the trees into the greenbelt, the grievously damaged Sansome her unlikely partner.

  “Well, shit,” she heard Light say behind her, then they were all around her, sprinting toward the Infecteds.

  The man was swinging his shovel in a wide arc, while the woman darted forward and back, stabbing and slicing rather ineffectually at the circle of Infecteds. Fallon noted how the Infecteds appeared to be holding back a little now, not quite as hunger-­mad as they had been before. Almost as if—­as they’d seemed to become smarter and more organized the farther the Sykos traveled—­they’d also rediscovered the idea of self-­preservation. She’d noticed it in the Sykos’ own most recent encounter, but hadn’t had time to process it, being busy running for her life. Now she did, and she wondered what it meant.

  And how the Sykos could use it to their advantage.

  As they ran, her team picked the Infecteds off one by one, selecting their shots carefully in order to preserve their ever-­more-­precious ammo. Head shots, because not even Infecteds who had the strength of The Rock in a ’roid rage could keep coming after their skulls had become airborne jigsaw puzzles.

  The gunfire drew Infecteds in a way the woman’s screams had not, and soon more began trickling into the greenbelt, heading for the Sykos. Which sort of discredited Fallon’s self-­preservation theory, since a shovel and a knife were a lot easier to defend against than a gun.

  The Sykos took them out, too, with a few more well-­placed shots. And then there were no more targets. The ­couple stood, staring at them with slack jaws, inside a circle of corpses.

  The woman recovered first.

  “What the fuck did you do that for?”

  Fallon’s own jaw dropped, but before she could find words for an appropriate response—­one that was likely to include the words “ungrateful bitch”—­she heard the sudden sound of engines roaring to life. Two groups of pickups and ATVs rounded the church, one on either side, racing toward the Sykos and across the browning grass like twin bats out of hell.

  As the lead vehicles stopped a few feet away from them, Fallon could see that the riders were seemingly uninfected and armed with serious firepower—­M4s, M240B SAWs, RPGs, the works—­most of which they were pointing straight at the Sykos. They were an odd mix—­tattooed biker types, men and women who could have been suburban soccer moms and dads, young black and Hispanic men. Each vehicle had RR painted crudely on the hood.

  “What happened, Kayleigh?” The driver of the nearest ATV stood, a Hispanic man wearing a dress shirt with the sleeves torn off to reveal a Ranger tattoo.

  “They happened,” she said, gesturing toward Fallon and her ­people. “Danny and I had a small group around us and were just starting to attract more when they showed up, guns blazing, like some sort of freaking cavalry riding to our rescue.” She directed her next comments toward Fallon. “Except we didn’t need rescuing. We were trying to lure more in—­the more we attract, the more we can kill.” She looked at the bodies on the ground. “A lousy fifteen, thanks to you guys. Not even a drop in the blood bucket.”

  The former Ranger looked over at Fallon.

  “Looks like you guys acquitted yourselves pretty well. Reedley’s always looking for more survivors who know how to handle themselves in a fight. We’ve fortified the Bass Pro Shop up by the Red Mountain Freeway, northwest of here. You come with us, Reedley might agree to make you all Raiders. Interested?”

  Just then, a woman in the back of one of the pickups let out a sharp whistle. She was pointing behind the Sykos, to the south. Turning, Fallon saw the Infecteds who’d survived Antonetti’s swan song start streaming out of the trees into the greenbelt. They seemed to have gathered reinforcements along the way, because where before they’d faced somewhere north of a hundred, there were easily three times that many now.

  “Well, we lured some more in for you,” she said to Kayleigh, who just glared. “Feel free to start killing them. We won’t get in your way this time.”

  “Yeah, we’re not prepared to deal with that many,” the Ranger said, shaking his head. “No point in wasting the ammo.” He gestured to the other vehicles. “Move out!”

  Then he looked back at Fallon.

  “You coming, or what?”

  CHAPTER 37

  20 hours

  From the outside, Bass Pro Shops—­every sign Fallon saw was plural, as if the building contained multitudes, and it might well have—­could have been a hunting lodge somewhere in Montana, if giants lived in Montana and had built themselves log cabin-­style dwellings. Everything about it was oversized, from the acres of parking lot to the massive timbers decorating its heights. She was sure they weren’t structural because the other descriptor that came to mind was “artificial.” Mesa, Arizona, wasn’t in the mountains, despite the implication of its name, and this looked as out of place as an undertaker at a wedding.

  She had hesitated only a moment when the Ranger invited them to get in a ­couple of the pickups. He ordered the other Raiders to redistribute themselves among the vehicles and had one of them take the ATV he’d been riding, so he could sit in the open truck bed with Fallon, Warga, and Sansome. His name was Alberto Cuaron, though everybody called him Al, and they obeyed him with a discipline that was less rigid than what Fallon had seen at PIR, but no less responsive. Al was a natural leader, and the others, ragtag though they were, treated him as such.

  Fallon had only provided her first name, and Light seemed to catch on immediately and did the same. The rest followed suit.

  It wasn’t worth the possibility that someone might recognize a full name and wonder why a convicted murderer was here in the Valley instead of in prison.

  The decision to go along with the Raiders had been made easier by imminent death at the hands of a few hundred Infecteds. But even without that incentive, she would have wanted to know more about this Reedley. She hadn’t heard about anyone mounting an organized, military-­style defense within the zone, but if such a thing existed—­and evidence pointed to “yes”—­th
en they might know something about the cartel’s presence in the city. Maybe even something about Elliott. And if she could persuade them to help, they could make finding the meteor and getting it out much easier.

  It was a long shot, but her very presence in this ravaged city was a gamble. Survival was even less certain. She should probably stop somewhere and pick up a ­couple of lottery tickets, because if she made it out alive, then luck was definitely on her side.

  “You sure about this, Fallon?” Book’s disembodied voice asked. He had been quiet for long enough that she’d begun to wonder whether he’d been called to deal with some other situation. Surely, he had other responsibilities and had to be replaced at the monitor sometimes. No one else other than Briggs had ever talked to her, though. The idea that some silent observer was looking out through her eyes was more than a little disconcerting.

  “Not at all,” she said, almost at a subvocal level. If she had dared add more, it would have been something like, It isn’t like we had a whole lot of options. Let the Raiders drive us away, or stay for dinner—­by which I mean our brains would have been dinner.

  “Just be careful,” he said.

  She nodded. He couldn’t hear that, but if he was watching through her camera, he’d see it. The way the truck was bouncing, she hoped he wasn’t prone to motion sickness.

  As soon as they exited Route 60 onto Dobson, she saw the first of the sentries. They were positioned in spots they could hold in the event of trouble, but from which they could see the road, and be seen. Al raised a hand to a ­couple sitting in the shade thrown by the street-­side monument sign for the Mesa Riverview shopping center: CINEMARK, CHILI’S, FAMOUS DAVE’S, HOWIE’S GAME SHACK (“WHERE GAMERS COME TO PLAY!”). They had what looked like RPG launchers in their hands and a tripod-­mounted machine gun standing between them. Fallon wouldn’t have wanted to come down that off-­ramp unannounced.

  After that, she saw more, all heavily armed, all watching the road and the surrounding environs. They weren’t hiding; they wanted to be seen, as long as they could also see.