The other four zombies, having watched their comrades die, begin to regroup, their neon green eyes focused on the clouds of black dust dissipating into the night. A low moan resonates from one of them, haunting, eerie; it vibrates through my bones and emerges from my skin in a cold sweat. Then the four zombies raise their rusty scythes, Naomi’s injured team in their sights, and slowly drift apart from each other, forming a semi-circle, a battle formation.
Whatever these things are, they can learn from their mistakes.
Ella hits her mic. “Team Sing, this is Team Riker. We’re coming up on you from the north side for combat support.” She peers back at Desmond, Amy, and me through her mask now streaked with dust, anger and determination etched into her frown. “Top priority is to extract Naomi’s teammates,” she says, switching to our private com feed. “Desmond and Amy, get the injured Adelman brothers off the field. Cal, you and I will relieve Detectives Newman and Li.”
Amy and I reply, “Understood.”
But Desmond responds with, “I don’t see Captain Sing anywhere. She might need additional support.”
Ella quickly scans the area. “Shit, you’re right.” She taps the button on her mic to access the general feed. “Newman, do you know where your captain is?”
The black woman, Newman, looks over her shoulder at Ella, fear on her sweaty face. “We lost track of her,” she says over the feed. “After the captain decapitated two of the…zombies, they marked her as a threat. Three of them broke off from the main group and ganged up on her. Last I saw, she was running off toward the south wing with the hostiles in pursuit. She hasn’t come in over the com in five or six minutes. I don’t know if she took off her mask, or…”
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
No one wants her to.
Ella drums her fingers against her thigh, focused on the zombies who are still spreading farther apart in the air, two of them hovering high, about ten feet off the ground, two of them hovering low, moving into starting positions for their coordinated attack.
I can see the war raging in Ella’s mind. We need three people to hold off the zombies and relieve Naomi’s teammates. Desmond, Amy, and Ella herself are the obvious choices for those roles, because they have years’ worth of experience fighting side by side in combat and relief scenarios, and they know each other’s favored fighting styles and strategies. But, if Ella makes the best choice for rescuing Naomi’s people, that’ll leave me, Cal Kinsey, team baby, to track down and support Captain Sing, who’s fighting multiple zombies on her own. I’ll be in the most precarious position out of everyone on Team Riker, which, as I mentioned before, is something Ella has steadfastly avoided doing since I nearly got my head bitten off by Ammit.
She doesn’t want to make the decision to risk my life that way again.
And really, she shouldn’t have to. That’s Riker’s responsibility.
But he’s not here.
So I make the decision for her.
“You guys relieve Naomi’s team,” I say. “I’ll go find the captain.”
“Cal…” Ella starts.
But Amy cuts her off. “That’s the best tactic here, Ella. We all know it. Accept it, and let’s get this party started.” She eyes the levitating monstrosities as they creep forward, dust fluttering up beneath their feet.
Desmond throws in his support. “Amy’s right. Captain Sing is a formidable fighter. I’m sure with Calvin backing her up, she can handle the rest of these creatures.”
“You mean if Naomi’s still in fighting shape,” Ella snaps, before her frustration abruptly collapses into resignation. She runs her dirty hands through her short hair and sighs. “Yeah, I know you guys are…Okay. Cal, go track down Naomi. Radio in as soon as you find her and report her status, along with that of any hostiles you encounter. Clear?”
I nod solemnly, aware of how hard it must be for her to agree to send me into the bear’s cage again. “Yes, ma’am.”
“We’ll clear a hole for you, Kinsey, so you can head down to the south side.” Amy jabs Desmond in the gut with her elbow. “You remember that trick we pulled in Denver? With that werewolf on the roof?”
“Indeed I do. You want to revisit that strategy, Major?”
“You bet.”
Ella groans. “Oh, not this again.”
Amy chuckles. “You know you love it, sister.”
Ella whispers inaudibly, and I sense her beggar rings charging. “Fine. Go for it.”
My teammates march up behind Newman and Li, who now stand side by side, both of them shaking from the exhaustion of what must’ve been a brutal, lengthy battle before their backup arrived. The Adelman brothers are still near the hole in the ground, the one who nearly fell to his death trying his best to staunch the blood flow from his twin’s mangled arm. Ella breaks away from the battle line toward the fallen twins, while Desmond and Amy signal for Newman and Li to begin their retreat. The duo follow the orders of their senior agents, backing away, weapons still trained on the zombies now picture-still in the air, as if frozen in time. Not a twitch. Not a breath. No movement whatsoever.
I can feel the impending attack, a tangible electric charge in the air.
The second Ella reaches the Adelman brothers, the second Newman and Li backtrack past me, the second a distant ambulance siren cuts through the night—the zombies charge.
Desmond and Amy are ready.
Desmond darts forward, heading for one of the zombies floating ten feet high. Amy follows him at first, then breaks off at an angle, picking up speed until she pulls ahead of his position. And just as it looks as if she’s going to engage the leftmost zombie, who raises its scythe in anticipation, she makes a hard right turn, dashing back toward Desmond, who’s coming up on the high-flying zombie so fast he’s nearly a blur, black coat rippling through the air, dark skin streaked with white debris, a confusing tangle of visual cues in the bleak night filled with dust and death. Amy charges directly at Desmond, and when she’s five steps from him, he suddenly interlocks his hands, palms up, and…
Amy jumps and lands on Desmond’s outstretched hands. Desmond, with a loud grunt, hauls his hands upward, using every ounce of strength in his powerful arms. And up flies the lithe Amy Sugawara, soaring, five feet high, ten feet high—in line with the zombie who did not anticipate her attacking from this angle. The zombie tries to dodge her, but she’s coming in too fast. She curls up, knees to her chest, feet aimed outward, and slams into the zombie’s gut like a cannonball.
They both drop from the sky, Amy riding the creature down, down, down. But before she smacks into the earth along with it, she whips out both hands, points them at the zombie, and yells the Shoot command for one of her force rings. Amy bounds back up into the air while the zombie slams into the ground, propelled by the wave of force. And then Amy activates the fire ring on her opposite hand.
An inferno engulfs the zombie.
Desmond, still on the ground, slides to a stop between two other, stunned zombies, and releases dual whirlwinds of flame, one from each hand. The fire catches the zombie to his left, but the one to his right dodges—before Amy lands on its shoulders like a trained acrobat, whips out her pistol, and empties the clip into the top of its head. The zombie falls, Amy somersaults away from it, and Desmond spins on a dime and launches another barrel of fire at the creature, setting it ablaze.
A gap opens up in the enemy line, only one zombie left to defend their front.
Build, I mentally whisper, charging my own beggar rings.
I jog past three fiery, screaming pillars rapidly degrading into ash, and emerge into the open expanse of the ruins of the west wing of the Wellington Wallace Convention Center. And without glancing at my teammates—because I trust them to watch my back—I race into the night to find Naomi Sing.
Chapter Seven
Scouring the ruined expanse of the west wing, I find only dust and shifting shadows, dark phantoms fluttering in the weak night wind. Several times, I start at the sight of movement, only
to find a wavering girder sticking out of the ground, or a shuddering section of wall disturbed by the battle somewhere behind me, now a distant chorus of rumbling and roaring fire. The farther I go into the west wing, the quieter and emptier it gets. All the civilian emergency personnel must’ve cleared out when the gunfire started, and the DSI agents on search and rescue…well, I honestly don’t know where the hell they ran off to, but I’m sure they have a good reason for not coming to Sing’s aid.
There’s a flicker of motion above me, and I tense up, raising my right hand to blast a stream of fire. But when I look, all I see is a spherical object, roughly basketball-sized, tumbling through the air toward me. And like the idiot I am, I drop my defensive stance and stick my hands out to catch it.
It lands in my palms with a fleshy squelch.
Because it’s a severed zombie head.
I stare at it for two-point-three seconds—and then I squeal like a little girl and drop the head at my feet.
Frantically rubbing my hands on my pants to scrub off flecks of dead skin, I scrutinize the head. Its hood is missing, probably still attached to the cloak on the rest of its body, and the strips of cloth tied around the lower half of its face have shifted down, revealing those grotesque features I witnessed a few minutes earlier.
Jesus, these things are ugly.
They really do look like zombies. You could have pulled them straight off the set of The Walking Dead.
The head stares lifelessly up at me, the neon green eyes now dulled in death…or re-death? Was it actually resurrected from the dead, as a result of some sketchy sorcery, or does it only appear to be a corpse? It could be an Eververse creature, but if so, did it (and its friends) come here of its own volition, or was it summoned by a practitioner? If these creatures are indeed in league—or subservient to—the people responsible for the convention center attack, it could be that…
I suddenly realize I’m forgetting an important detail: Why did this severed zombie head just fall from the sky?
A glint of steel. And out of the wall of darkness before me charges a fast-moving form. Too quick to dodge. Too quick to parry. I open my mouth to scream, and the tip of a sword jabs into the delicate skin of my neck but abruptly stops the instant it nicks me. Hot blood wells around the sharp edge of the blade and trickles in a thin stream down to my collarbone, soaking into my coat.
Wide-eyed and terrified, I trace the blade back to the hilt, the hilt to the gloved hands holding it, the hands to the arms, the arms to the shoulders, and the shoulders up to the haggard face of one Naomi Sing.
Her mask, though still strapped to her head, has been damaged, the right side of the outer rim violently cracked. Her right ear, and the right side of her neck, are drenched in blood, a long laceration trailing down in a sharp arc toward her shoulder. As if it was made by a curved blade. Like a scythe.
Naomi’s hair has started to unravel from its normally neat bun, thick, black locks hanging over her mask and sticking to her sweaty, blood-streaked skin. Her face, cheeks red, eyelids heavy, lips pulled into a tight line, speaks of exhaustion. She’s been fighting on her own for too long, against too many enemies, and the exertion is quickly catching up to her.
She gulps in deep breaths as she looks me over, recognition slowly flooding her expression. “Cal Kinsey?” she says, muffled through her mask. “Oh! I’m so sorry. I saw a dark figure moving toward me and thought it was one of them. Are you all right?” She retracts her sword, and I feel a sharp sting where the tip of the blade tugs at my skin as it pulls away.
Fingers trembling, I probe my neck to check the wound but find it’s minor. Naomi has an insanely impressive amount of control over her sword strikes. If our positions had been reversed, I probably would have killed her, unable to restrain the blow in time.
I wipe the blood off my neck and muster a weak smile, speaking through my mask as well. “Yeah, I’m cool. It was an accident. I understand. I’ve seen those freaky zombie things too.” I point at the head on the ground. “Honest mistake.”
Naomi drops her sword to her side and flexes her empty left hand. She usually carries two swords, I recall, as she favors a dual-sword technique called daab song mue, a branch of the Thai martial art Krabi-Krabong. I don’t know if she picked up the sword bias before or after she emigrated from Thailand, but in her extensive tenure as a DSI agent, she’s become notorious for defeating enemies with only blades, when other agents can’t beat them with guns and beggar rings. Reportedly, she can kill anything with any blade, even if it’s a flimsy plastic butter knife from the DSI cafeteria.
Or at least that’s what the water-cooler gossip says.
I know exactly squat about Thai martial arts. And I haven’t talked to Naomi Sing enough to learn all the details behind her Master of Blades moniker.
She’s good with sharp objects. Let’s leave it at that.
Naomi looks over my shoulder, in the direction I came from. The sounds of battle have faded into echoes over the past couple minutes. “My team,” she says, “are they okay? I lost track of them when those things…” She touches the broken rim of her mask. “I took a hit, and it broke my com.”
“Ella, Desmond, and Amy are extracting them now. One of the twins has a serious arm injury, but the rest were still up and about when I left.” I swallow thickly, hoping the silence of the battlefield is a sign that my team wiped the floor with the last zombie and victoriously escorted Naomi’s agents to safety. “They sent me to find you, Captain, and back you up if you were still under attack. In fact…”
I tap my mic, coming in on my team’s feed. “Ella, can you hear me? I’ve found Captain Sing. She has some minor injuries but is otherwise in good shape. We should be rounding back toward the north wing any minute now.” I let off the mic and wait for a response.
A few tense seconds pass, and Ella’s voice responds, “Good to hear, Cal. Please tell Naomi her teammates are safe. We’re halfway back to the perimeter line.”
“Your team’s fine,” I relay to Naomi. “Ella reports they’re almost off the field.”
Naomi tightens her grip on the hilt of her sword and looks much less pleased than I thought she’d be. “Inform Detective Dean to be vigilant and avoid walking near any of the intact pockets leading to the basement level.” She points her sword toward a dark hole in the ground nearby. “That’s where they’re hiding. Or, well, not hiding exactly…”
“Hold up,” I say, thinking of the opening that nearly swallowed the Adelman brother. “The way you said that makes it sound like there are a lot more of these zombie creatures than we’ve encountered so far.”
Her dark eyes meet mine, swimming in worry. “When I was separated from my team, there were three of those monsters on my tail. Since then, I’ve encountered seven more and dispatched them all.”
“Seven more?”
She nods.
Holy hell, she took down ten of them by herself? What kind of badass…?
She ignores my stupid slack-jawed expression and continues, “And they all emerged from the intact basement sections, in groups of two or three. I didn’t see any descend from the sky, or approach from some place beyond the disaster zone.”
I snap my jaw shut. “Shit. Given how big the Wellington Center is, and how many of those intact pockets open to the surface, there could be a verifiable zombie army surrounding us right now.”
“Yes,” Naomi says. “I know. And more than that, I think they’re searching for something.”
“What?”
“The reason they attacked us in the first place is because we accidentally disturbed them. We were searching any intact portion of the west wing for evidence. Newman leveled her flashlight into one of the holes, and there they were, the…levitating zombies, or whatever we’re calling them. They were hovering inside the space, moving back and forth, slowly, like they were looking for an object of interest, or perhaps a person. I don’t know what they were after, but they weren’t simply lying in wait for an ambush. My team running i
nto these creatures was a coincidence. They didn’t know we’d be here.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. If these creatures are on the same team as the people responsible for the convention center attack…unless…” An idea tickles the back of my brain. “A target.”
Naomi checks the still-weeping wound on her neck, and eyes me curiously. “What do you mean, a target?”
“The Wellington Center hosts a lot of large business events, but you can also book out single, small rooms for important meetings.” The idea blooms, roots growing deeper into my mind. “And if I’m not mistaken, these smaller business rooms are—or were—largely segmented out of the west wing, while the other three wings sported the traditional convention-style halls and lecture rooms for speaking engagements. So, if the west wing was the epicenter of the attack, it stands to reason that the attackers were targeting a specific small group, or even a particular person.”
Naomi wrinkles her nose, considering. “Makes sense, but what does that have to do with these creatures searching the ruins?”
“Maybe one of the targets, or the target, had something the attackers want. Maybe they sent these zombie monsters, their minions, to retrieve it. Maybe—”
“Watch out!” Naomi grabs the front of my coat and yanks me forward—as a scythe cuts through the air, right where my neck was.
I stagger around, falling into a fighting stance next to Naomi, beggar rings up and ready to belch fire. The zombie that tried to decapitate me floats silently down to the earth, its feet coming to hover a few inches above the severed head of its own fallen comrade. The zombie stares down at the head, then tracks its vacant neon stare up toward Naomi and me. A low, wordless moan emerges from behind the rags covering its mouth. And from the shifting shadows, to our left, to our right, behind us, six more zombies fly into view.
We’re surrounded.
Naomi swears and raises her single sword.
I slam my fist against my mic button. “Ella, get Naomi’s team off the field as soon as possible. There’s a cubic shit-ton of these zombie monsters lurking in the basement.”
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