“Guys,” Kyle whispered. “I hear something.”
Hughes held his breath. He heard nothing but gasoline pissing out the hoses into the gas tanks.
Then he heard Roy’s boots in the dirt behind him, heading toward Kyle at the fence line, and he didn’t like it, didn’t like Roy doing anything at all that he couldn’t see. Hughes had to keep his eyes on his sector across the road, but he briefly checked his six and saw Roy next to Kyle, his eyes off his own sector and looking intently through the fence into the trees.
“There,” Kyle whispered. “You hear that?”
Hughes still didn’t hear anything.
“I don’t think so,” Roy said in a normal tone of voice.
Hughes shushed him.
Then he heard it. Someone—or something—moving at a casual pace in the trees behind the truck yard.
“Lucas!” Hughes whispered as loud as he could. Lucas was still siphoning fuel into the RV. “Pull out that hose and get a hand weapon.”
“I’ve got a Bushmaster, man,” Lucas said, not even trying to be quiet.
The movement in the trees sounder faster now, not urgent but more deliberate than before.
Time to move.
“Everybody out of sight,” Hughes whispered and dashed toward the Suburban. Annie and Parker joined him as Kyle and Roy headed toward the RV.
Too late.
A warlike scream belted out from the trees.
“I got this,” Lucas said and raised his rifle toward the foliage.
“Hand weapons!” Hughes shouted.
He heard a surge of movement in the bush followed by another scream.
Then he saw them. First two infected, then three, two of them male, one of them female, all dressed in rotting clothes and covered in blood spatter and gore. They hadn’t turned recently. They’d been out there for some time.
Lucas, not even trying to stay out of sight, stepped toward a gap in the fence with his rifle.
“No!” Hughes shouted. No point whispering now.
“You got this?” Lucas said with a lopsided grin. “You sure?”
“Out of my way,” Hughes said and pushed past him toward the gap, shotgun and crowbar in hand.
Parker, Annie, and Kyle rushed to his side.
“Annie,” Hughes said and waved her away with the crowbar. “Stay back.” He handed her the shotgun. “And take this.” He needed his hands free.
Annie took the shotgun and backed up toward the Suburban, away from the fence and away from Lucas and Roy.
Hughes saw five infected now, rushing through the trees toward the gap in the fencing.
“Spread out!” Hughes said.
Parker backed up. Hughes and Kyle converged on the gap in the fence, Hughes to the left and Kyle to the right, as the five infected were about to funnel through it.
Parker smashed his hammer into the side of the first infected’s head with a ferocious scythe. Hughes swung his crowbar into the face of the second. Kyle swiped at the third and broke its arm. It went down screaming, and Kyle split open the top of its head.
The remaining two rushed toward Parker like juggernauts.
Parker hammered the first in the temple, then backhanded the second in the shoulder.
Six or seven more stampeded through the trees toward the fencing.
Lucas and Roy might as well have been standing there with their dicks in their hands for all the good they were doing. “Hand weapons!” Hughes bellowed at them. “Now!”
Hughes focused on the hostiles coming at them and in a quick backward glance saw Roy amble inside the RV. Annie stayed back near the Suburban. She had Hughes’s shotgun but couldn’t use it without spraying everybody with buckshot.
Roy returned from the RV with an axe in one hand and—Jesus—a gently curved sword matted with dried gore in the other. He kept the sword for himself and handed the axe over to Lucas.
The infected surged through the fence. Hughes, Parker, and Kyle felled them one after the other, with blood, sinew, and tissue spattering their clothes and their faces.
“Roy!” Hughes shouted. “Lucas!”
Hughes was tiring fast. Adrenaline be damned, the average human being couldn’t swing a weapon in a life-or-death struggle for more than a minute or two. If Lucas and Roy didn’t haul ass to the fence, Hughes and his friends would have to switch to their firearms.
Roy strode over to the fence with his sword.
Lucas stepped away from the fight toward the road. “I’ll cover the rear!”
Fucker was useless. Lucas and Parker should take point in these fights. They were both immune now, thanks to Annie. She was the only one who should hang back. She could handle herself well enough and survive a bite, but she was the most precious person alive, and no one was immune to bleeding to death.
The infected were thinning at least. Just a handful remained. Hughes and Parker took care of most of them.
Roy dropped just one, decapitating it with a ferocious swing of his sword, spinning his entire body halfway around in the process until he faced Lucas and the road. He squinted and dropped his mouth open slightly. He saw something.
Hughes turned around and saw it. An infected converging on Lucas from behind, from the road, somehow making almost no sound.
“Look out!” Hughes shouted.
Too late.
The infected tackled Lucas and sank his teeth into his neck.
Lucas went down screaming.
Hughes rushed forward, kicked the diseased thing off Lucas, and broke its neck with a furious stomp of his boot.
One last infected made it through the fence. Parker dispatched it, and the truck yard went quiet.
Roy approached Lucas as his friend squirmed on the ground with his hand over the wound on his neck. “Well,” he said.
“You motherfucker,” Hughes said.
“We got a first-aid kit,” Roy said and jerked his thumb toward his RV.
“Go get it!” Hughes said.
Roy ambled toward his vehicle.
Hughes was covered in blood. Everybody but Roy was covered in blood. And there were infected bodies all over the place, almost two dozen of them. The air smelled of sweat, copper pennies, and shit.
Parker stood next to Hughes and gasped for air.
“He did that on purpose,” Hughes said in a low voice.
“Did what on purpose?” Annie said.
Hughes hadn’t heard her come up behind and didn’t mean for her to hear that. “He let Lucas get bit.”
Lucas kicked the ground hard with the flat of his feet, back and forth, one after the other, and winced through the pain, seemingly trying as hard as he could not to yell out.
They had to patch him up and move him. Right now. Into one of the warehouses with some rope and something to tie him to.
“Kyle!” Hughes said. “Get the duct tape and rope out of the truck!”
“Why would Roy do that?” Parker said, astonishment in his voice.
“He’s testing us,” Annie said. “Isn’t he? He wants to know if Lucas is really immune. If I’m really immune, then Lucas is too, and if Lucas isn’t, then I’m not.”
“Son of a bitch,” Parker said.
Lucas had a nasty wound in his neck that bled down into his shirt, but it probably wouldn’t be fatal. The bite missed the jugular. Lucas was going to turn, though, possibly within minutes.
Roy jogged back from the RV with a red pouch in his hand. “Got it.”
Parker snatched the first-aid kit out of his hands as Kyle returned from the Suburban with a long length of rope.
“What’s the rope for?” Roy said.
“You idiot,” Hughes said.
“What?” Roy said.
“I saw what you did,” Hughes said.
Roy said nothing.
“He’s going to turn,” Hughes said.
“He turns,” Roy said, an edge in his voice, “we aren’t going to Atlanta.”
Hughes closed his eyes and took a deep breath. This was his fault.
In his aversion to wasting any more time talking to Roy than he had to, he’d neglected to fully explain what immunity meant in this world. Parker had spent three days as one of those things before returning—sort of—to normal. Annie herself turned too before coming back in a temporary state of amnesia. He’d found her wandering around the ruined Pacific Northwest, forgetting not only that she’d been infected but that the world had ended at all. Parker suffered post-traumatic stress for weeks after he came back. God only knew how fucked up Lucas would be when he came out of it.
“Lucas is going to turn before he gets better,” Hughes told Roy. “He’ll recover, but he’s going to be infected for days.”
Roy said nothing.
“We need to move him,” Parker said softly.
“Into that warehouse,” Hughes said. “Roy, help us carry him.”
“Just drag him,” Roy said.
“Carry him!” Hughes said. “Kyle, shoot anything you see that isn’t us.”
Hughes and Roy each grabbed one of Lucas’s arms, Kyle and Annie took one of Lucas’s legs, and they hoisted him off the ground. Blood pulsed gently from the wound in his neck.
“He’s going to bleed out,” Roy said and grunted as they hauled him toward the warehouse.
“You’d better hope not,” Hughes said. “We’ll clean him and bandage him properly . . . after we tie him up.”
The warehouse was an industrial behemoth, effectively three stories high, fronted by a loading dock with a metal roll gate, accessible on foot by only a single visible door and topped with an exterior ladder leading up to the roof. Hughes liked the idea of spending three days on top of the building, but they didn’t have time to haul Lucas up there, and he wasn’t sure there’d be anything suitable to tie him to anyway. Besides, the ladder didn’t reach ground level. The bottom dangled twelve feet up and would only slide down if somebody released some mechanism that Hughes couldn’t see.
The loading dock was closed and probably locked, but the solitary door leading into the warehouse had been busted open already. Looters must have kicked it in. That door wouldn’t lock or even close properly. It would have to be barricaded.
When they hauled Lucas inside, though, Hughes saw at once that there was nothing in there worth stealing. The place was a textile warehouse. Rolled carpets the size of living room couches covered the first half acre of the warehouse floor. Shelves a dozen feet high stocked with smaller rolled carpets took up the back half.
There was a mezzanine level at the far end with doors leading into a couple of offices.
“Take him upstairs!” Hughes said, hoping they could find a desk or something to tie Lucas to so they wouldn’t have to hog-tie him on the floor.
Lucas’s eyes rolled back in his head. The bleeding from the wound on his neck was slowing down now, though. He’d be okay. Probably.
They carried him past the giant rolls of carpets on the floor, through the rows of shelves in the back, and up a flight of metal stairs into one of the offices, a spare and utilitarian place, dark and windowless, with a battered wooden desk, a high-backed office chair, and a set of mismatched filing cabinets.
“Sorry, man,” Parker said as they dumped Lucas into the chair.
Lucas slouched to the side, his mouth open.
Kyle handed Parker the duct tape and rope.
“We can’t tie him to that,” Annie said.
Hughes sighed. The chair had wheels on its feet. Lucas would thrash back and forth and bounce himself off the walls in there like a damn bumper car.
“Kyle,” Hughes said. “See if there’s a chair in the other office.”
Kyle headed out.
Parker tore off a strip of duct tape and stretched it across Lucas’s mouth.
“Make sure he can breathe,” Hughes said.
Parker held his hand in front of Lucas’s nose. “He’s breathing.”
Roy just stood there. “What should I do?”
“You can start by fucking yourself,” Hughes said. “When you’re finished with that, go downstairs and move some carpets in front of that door so nothing else can get in.”
Roy ignored the insult and went downstairs.
Lucas slumped over one of the chair’s arms, and his cell phone fell out of his jacket. Hughes picked it up and turned it on. It opened right up without a passcode or biometric ID. Not much point worrying about a stolen phone anymore, he supposed, except that he was now stealing it. He turned it off to conserve the battery and placed it in his pocket.
Kyle returned. “No chairs without wheels.”
“Fine,” Hughes said and looked around. “Who has the hammer?”
Parker had it and handed it over. Hughes used it to smash the wheels off the chair’s feet. “Now tie him.”
“I got it, I got it,” Parker said, seemingly impatient with Hughes barking obvious orders.
Parker uncoiled the rope and lashed Lucas’s ankles to the now disabled chair feet, his hands to the armrests, and his torso to the chair back. He wasn’t going anywhere. He wouldn’t be the least bit comfortable, but so what?
Annie produced a piece of gauze from the first-aid kit, wiped Lucas’s neck clean, then affixed a fresh piece over the wound with medical tape.
Hughes heard footsteps on the metal stairway. Roy was coming back up. “Can’t move the carpets in front of the door by myself,” he said, out of breath.
“I’ll help,” Kyle said. “Come on.”
Hughes groaned to himself and wished the warehouse were stocked with machine parts instead of carpets. Would be a whole lot easier to barricade the door.
“We’re not going to be able to lock him in here,” Parker said, examining the knob on the door.
“Don’t need to lock it,” Hughes said. “He won’t be able to open it.”
“He’ll make a hell of a racket, though,” Parker said.
Hughes opened his eyes wide and nodded. Lucas would indeed make a terrible racket. Hughes would never forget the unspeakable sounds Parker had made when the infection turned his own nervous system and mind into a furnace. They hadn’t gagged Parker. Didn’t strictly need to since they’d been sheltering on a tiny island without any infected on it. They’d have to gag Lucas, though. In a world gone quiet, anyone or any thing immediately outside the warehouse might hear him even with tape over his mouth.
Kyle and Roy came back up the stairs.
“Door’s barricaded,” Kyle said, catching his breath. “And the loading gate is locked. There’s a back door just below us, and that one’s locked too.”
Hughes nodded.
“Good,” Annie said.
“So, now what?” Roy said.
“We wait for your friend here to turn,” Hughes said. “Then we wait for him to recover. I strongly advise you to wait outside this room.”
7
Annie would rather have been just about anywhere on earth except in that warehouse. The best she could do was move as far from Lucas and the others as possible, all the way to the far side of the building in a corner by herself amid rolls of carpets. Kyle tried to follow, but she waved him off.
Lucas turned moments later. If Hughes hadn’t gagged him, his furious cries would have echoed off the walls and the looming ceiling above.
Annie sat on a roll of beige carpet as high as her waist and buried her face in her hands. God, these people. She didn’t want to wait for Lucas to recover. She wanted out of there, to leave this place with her friends, to head north into Canada and keep on going until the shattering cold killed all but the Inuit. The infected would leave her alone then, and so would everyone else.
Her friends wanted to save the world. What world? She’d transferred her immunity to that creep up there in the office, and for what? The bastard emphatically didn’t deserve it, and now she and her friends were stuck there because a monster who should have been dead wasn’t.
She loved Kyle, Parker, and Hughes. The world shined with them in it. But what about everyone else she’d met since Seattle?
There’d been Lane, Bobby, and Roland in Washington who’d taken her and her friends prisoner and stripped them of their weapons. All dead now, and the rest of the world better off.
Then there was Joseph Steele and his goon squad in Wyoming. All dead, and the rest of the world better off. Only one person in a town of thousands, Doc Nash, had redeemed himself, but he was dead too.
And finally, Lucas and Roy, both of them meatheads and probably rapists, and one a deranged idiot who let the other get bit to see what would happen.
She closed her eyes. Were she and her friends any better? Were they really? She, Kyle, and Hughes didn’t “let” Parker get bit to see what would happen. They arranged it. They planned it. And nobody had told them that he would recover.
Annie would go to Atlanta. And she’d go there with Lucas and Roy. She wanted to wrest the sword from Roy’s hands and slice off his head with it. She’d be doing the world a favor. No question about it. And she knew, because she believed that, that the person she used to be was gone and was not coming back.
Hughes, Parker, and Roy hauled all their supplies from the Suburban and the RV into the warehouse. They couldn’t go in and out the front door since it was broken in and barricaded already, so they used the back door, secured with a simple dead bolt, as Kyle stood watch with a pistol in one hand and a crowbar in the other. Annie sulked somewhere by herself.
On the off chance that the main floor might be breached, they brought everything into the second office on the mezzanine level and emptied it onto the desks: canned food, jugs of filtered water, sleeping bags, blankets, pillows, first-aid kits, the set of lockpicks Lucas had given to Annie, a box of medicines including antibiotics and narcotic painkillers, rope, duct tape, a battered toolbox that was heavier than it looked, bottles of beer and cold brew, night vision monocles, a flint firestarter, five cigarette lighters, six camping chairs, two Leatherman multitools, knives, binoculars, a hatchet, eight flashlights, a box full of batteries, two portable solar charging kits, a couple of hammers, six handguns, two hunting rifles, a Bushmaster assault rifle, Hughes’s Mossberg pump-action Persuader, a half dozen boxes of ammunition, and a supposedly unbreakable Brooklyn Smasher Cold Steel baseball bat.
Resurrection (Book 3): The Last City Page 8
