The feeling of dread had been with her with every move, every decision, and every waffling non-decision. Sometimes it grew and shook her to the core and at other times it faded into the background. Death was now almost a foregone conclusion, but she felt that as long as she kept the darkness to a minimum, she’d be able to put off her fate for another day.
“Or another hour.” She thought it strange that she felt so little danger. Why send a warning when nothing was happening?
She glanced around. Plinkett was huddled in his coat next to Griff, who was tucked into a sadly pathetic ball. On the other side of the room, the three women were sitting in a single clump, crushed into each other for warmth. Billy had joined them and was barely visible between Nichola and Victoria. Maddy thought it odd that none of them were sleeping.
“How long was I out?” Maddy asked Tomika, the only one of them with a watch.
“Forty minutes. You mumble in your sleep, you know.”
Maddy did not know. She had slept in her own bed in her own room—alone—since she had left the hospital, the day after she’d been born.
“Forty minutes? It felt longer.” She felt both refreshed as well as antsy. They are coming for you, ghosted through her mind.
Bryce’s brilliant blue eyes came open then. “What time is it?” he asked, sitting up and grabbing the sandwich Billy had made for him. He had it in his mouth before Tomika could answer that it was a few minutes after eleven. “In the morning?” came out as Im ma mormun? A great swallowing and then, “It seems later and…crap! I just realized something.”
He paused for effect, showing the old Bryce again with his flair for bad timing. Maddy was barely paying attention and no one was in the mood to play guessing games. Bryce let what felt like precious seconds slip away. Time was suddenly heavy on Maddy. They are coming for you. What did that mean? And what would happen when they got there?
“Griff hasn’t turned!” Bryce said, triumphantly. He alone smiled.
“You sure?” Tomika asked, a twist to her full lips. Griffin was grey and sweating, and when awake he moaned too much like one of them for her liking.
Bryce paused to answer as he rapidly chewed the last of his sandwich. As the sandwich slowly went down, Maddy felt an uptick in the darkness. It still wasn’t over-powering, it was worrying, nonetheless. She stood as Bryce began explaining how the virus appeared to have a four-hour incubation cycle—his explanation of the science concerning viral reproduction threatened to take that long as well, and Maddy was getting antsier with each passing second.
“They are coming for us,” she blurted in the middle of his lecture.
“Who is?” Plinkett asked. He had been droopy-eyed and torpid from lack of sleep, and with Bryce threatening to put him in a coma, he had been watching Maddy pace. His puffy eyes were constantly being drawn to her and he had been doing his best to limit the creep factor by not staring at how beautiful she was becoming.
Maddy struggled with the simple question. It was true that she hated the concept of the conspiratorial “They”, but in this case it was all she had. “I don’t know. All I know is that we don’t have a lot of time.”
Bryce the geek disappeared in a wink, replaced by a focused and resolute man. The forty-minute nap had done wonders and with only a hint of exhaustion, he hopped up and went to the door. He had just cracked it when Griff croaked, “Me. They’re after me.”
It was likely true. He seemed to be in a perpetual state of just about to fully turn. Though Maddy had felt like this for hours after being injected, neither she nor Bryce had looked this bad. “They’ll kill him,” Maddy declared.
“Possibly,” Bryce replied. “We don’t know what’s happening. Just in case, Plinkett and I will move him. While we do, I’m going to need someone to find out what’s going on.”
His eyes swept the three women, all of whom glanced away. Before he could make a choice, Maddy said, “Billy will go.” She guessed that Victoria would refuse, making excuses. Nichola was more likely to blend in with the larger crowd and forget she knew them, and Tomika didn’t owe them anything and would probably lead “They” right to them.
Bryce, who was looking forward to another sandwich, gave Maddy an uncertain look. “Yes, I’m sure,” she said. “He’s smart and capable. I trust him.” Billy beamed up at her. “I’ll wait here for him and then we’ll catch up.”
“Alright,” Bryce agreed reluctantly. He grabbed his disappointingly light bag of sandwich fixings, glanced at Victoria, and smartly decided against asking her to make him a sandwich. He could sense a backlash in the very thought. “Can you carry this?” he asked, hoping that she would spontaneously make one as they went. Victoria took it daintily, holding it away from her.
Tomika’s head was spinning. “Is this the prophecy shit you guys were talking about? They are coming? That’s it? That’s all you know?”
“There was a dream, too,” Maddy answered without much conviction. Had their roles been reversed, she wouldn’t have believed it either.
Bryce was just starting to get an inkling of danger. The thought was so subtle he might not have picked up on it if Maddy hadn’t said anything. “No one’s forcing you to come with us,” he told Tomika. “Just know that Maddy hasn’t been wrong yet.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t coming for me. Right? Why would they? I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“None of us have.” Bryce helped Plinkett heft Griff to his feet. He immediately started to collapse so they slung his arms over their shoulders and grabbed hold of his belt. “Stay or go,” he told Tomika and then headed out the door. They went left, while Maddy propelled Billy to the right towards the center of the building.
When the boy was gone, this left Maddy and Tomika. The two women stared at each other for a long minute. “Do you see anything now? Like who’s coming?” Tomika asked when she couldn’t stand it any longer.
Maddy sighed. “That’s not how it works. I usually just get hunches.” She also “saw” things right before they were going to happen, but she didn’t really want to share that with this stranger.
“And you have premonitions in your dreams.”
The elegant, wispy figure of Wha-de appeared in Maddy’s mind. Like you, I am one of the chosen. She had been beautiful and far greater in every regard than Maddy ever hoped to be. That too wasn’t something she was going to share. “I guess I do,” Maddy answered, curtly.
Tomika was torn between staying and going with them. She had seen the two fight. They were fearless, a trait that had deserted, not just the city, but as far as she could tell, all of humanity. As much as fearlessness was fine and getting hints at the future was even better, what good would they do Tomika if the people after them were part of the government? Having enemies within the building, as well as without would only lead to certain death.
“Do you at least know if we’ll be safe here?”
Maddy sighed again, regretting ever mentioning the dream, at least in front of others. Next, she’ll be asking me to read her aura. “I told you, I can’t answer questions like that. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the smart thing is. The building is sturdier than most and the doors leading in are solid metal. Even better, they have some way to contact the authorities in Washington. Whoever’s in charge might be calling for backup right now.”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right.” She had seen the Ambassador’s helicopter take off hours before and heard a dozen rumors about their impending rescue. A strong hope of that at sunrise had become a fleeting one as the day wore on, and yet it was some hope, which was better than none.
She was still up in the air when Billy came hurrying back, nervous and looking back over his shoulder. “They’re searching the building for people who got bit or…” His eyes shifted away. “Scratched.”
Maddy’s hand went to the back of her neck and felt the scabs as she asked, “Who are they, exactly?”
“People with guns,” he answered, darkly. “They’re taking people to some storage ro
om and locking them inside.”
Now Maddy understood. For the average person, being locked in a storage room with a bunch of infected people would be a death sentence; if Bryce was with her there would be little danger. Even unarmed, he was a force to be reckoned with and she was, well, a better fighter than she had been. She was stronger, though not as strong as a man, and certainly nowhere near as strong as a zombie and yet with her second sight and new-found quickness, she was no longer only bluster.
There was danger to being locked away; however, it lay further into the future than she could see or feel. She could guess easily though. Perhaps the dead would break through the stairwell doors and run rampant through the building. Or maybe a fire would break out. Or maybe the guards would just shoot everyone in the store room when they felt enough had turned.
One thing was certain: they couldn’t stay. “Coming or going?” Maddy asked. Tomika sucked in a breath, but instead of saying anything, her eyes dropped and she shook her head. Maddy was a little disappointed. She would’ve traded Tomika for Victoria in a heartbeat. “Good luck,” Maddy said and slipped out into the hall. Just as she did there was an angry shout from somewhere back the way Billy had come from.
The boy looked over his shoulder and saw the men with guns—Wha-de’s warning had come just in time.
Maddy didn’t need to look back to know they were there. The smell of fear had risen sharply. “In here,” she whispered, ducking into a suite of dark offices. Like the last, these were mostly barren with nowhere to hide. She had no intention of hiding just yet, not when Bryce’s scent was receding from her.
She marched along through what was essentially a blacked-out maze, at least to Billy it was. The inner portion of the building was windowless and thus basically a dungeon in his young mind. Maddy’s eyesight had sharpened amazingly and she had no problem weaving in and out of the connecting rooms. What was strange to her was that it almost felt like she had been there before, many times, and with unerring precision, she headed right for Bryce and the others.
They were stopped near a stairwell at the east side of the building. Griff on his hands and knees on the floor, looked up blearily. Maddy opened her mouth to tell them what Billy had seen; however, Griff said, “I know.”
And he did. He had seen what she had seen and heard what she had heard. There seemed to be an echo between them, as if she were projecting her thoughts into him. Or he is stealing them. The two locked eyes and the feeling intensified.
Bryce stepped between them, cutting off the sensation. Griff turned away in confusion, while Maddy put her hand to her throat, feeling like she had just been violated. It hadn’t just been theft, either. He had opened her up in way that was akin to rape.
“What is it?” Bryce demanded. She knew well and good that he was asking what had happened between the two, but she was suddenly filled with unaccountable shame, and she chose to answer a different question. “They’re after people who were bit or scratched,” she confirmed, doing her best not to make eye contact with either Bryce or Griff. “They’re being locked in a storage room.”
“What about us?” Nichola asked. “What are they gonna do if they catch us with you guys?”
Billy shrugged, and answered in a tiny voice, “No one talked about that. They just said I should sit really still and try not to look agitated, which is like being angry.”
Silence pervaded the hall then. Bryce guessed it wouldn’t be good for any of them to be caught with him in the state he was in, and if he were in their shoes, he wouldn’t have chanced it. Nichola must have been thinking the same thing because she went to lean against the wall and nonchalantly took two steps away. Plinkett looked stoic but tired. Victoria had a pickled cast to her. All at once she was sick, frightened, heartbroken and desperate.
As bad off as Victoria was, Maddy was worse. It was as if she had become unmoored from reality and was drifting into a frightening realm where her mind was not her own. The ramifications of what had happened between her and Griff kept building on her. Was she not the sum of her thoughts and memories? And if anyone could pick over them, what did that make her? Community owned? And what if Griff could do more than steal her thoughts? What if he could implant them as well?
“Maddy?” Bryce asked.
Her eyes went to Griff’s. He stared for just a second, then glanced away, a little too casually for Maddy’s opinion. Does he know about the 7th grade music class? The thought brought a chill down her back.
“Maddy?” Bryce asked again. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she answered, realizing that if Griff had seen what had happened to her fifteen years before, he wouldn’t be glaring at the wall. I just won’t think about it—so of course the most embarrassing thing that had ever happened to her was all that was stuck in her head.
Bryce sighed, seeing that she was dealing with something beyond him. He turned and looked upward as if he could peer through the intervening floors and up to the roof. “Is there any chance at a rescue?” he asked. It was somewhere between a rhetorical question, a general one, and wishful thinking spoken aloud. He hoped that either Plinkett had an answer or Maddy a premonition.
“The Ambassador said that the President was giving us an extra two hours to see if you guys would turn, and that was what? Six hours ago? With the battle and the quarantine, I haven’t heard anything since.”
“Who’s the highest ranking person here?” Bryce asked. “They might know.”
Plinkett’s face sagged. “A guy named Bowers. He’s political, you know what I mean? He brown-nosed his way up the ranks and now…” The last Plinkett had seen of him, the man had been half drunk.
“It’s worth a shot to talk to him,” Bryce said. “Top floor?” A sigh and a nod from Plinkett. There was nothing they could do about the climb. It had to be undertaken.
With the chance at a rescue, no one remained behind and they mounted the steps with determination. Bryce and Plinkett half-carried Griff between them, though this did not—could not—last beyond the sixth floor. Griff was dead weight by then and Plinkett thought that his heart was going to explode.
As much as Maddy didn’t want to be left behind with Griff, it was decided that only Bryce and Plinkett would go on. As far as Plinkett could tell, Bowers was not a “women and children first” sort of man. And nor was he the type of commander who’d go down with the ship. He’d elbow Billy aside for a spot on a helicopter.
“Supposedly there had been an incident when the Ambassador first mentioned a helicopter was coming,” Plinkett explained. “When Bowers heard he wasn’t going to be on it, he drew his gun. Fucking unbelievable.”
Maddy didn’t need to hear anymore. The darkness was once more growing in her mind. “Just hurry,” she told them.
They did their best, marching up and up and up. Plinkett was gasping by the time they reached the top floor. The space was dark and deserted. Or nearly so. Bryce stood, poised with his head cocked, listening, breathing softly, letting the different scents in the air wash over him. Ghosts of odors wafted on the air, including the baby-powder aroma of the Ambassador, now hours old. Ignoring the older scents, he zeroed in on rum and fear-sweat.
A clink of glass had him moving through offices that were far more complete compared to those below. In a spacious corner office, they found Bowers. Soft, saggy, rumpled, balding and grey in the face, he was sunk down in a leather chair. A near-empty bottle sat in front of him. Another was on the floor next to the desk.
“Sir?” Plinkett said.
Slowly, bloodshot eyes peered up at them. They narrowed in confusion. He had only met Plinkett twice and neither time had stuck in his memory beyond a vague impression and if asked, he would’ve pegged him as an insurance agent. Bryce was something else entirely, but what, he had no idea. His strong jaw and rugged looks clashed with the tattered clothes he wore, and his blue eyes, which seemed to glow, were something beyond healthy, while the scabbed claw marks covering him screamed disease! But that didn’t matter all that mu
ch anymore.
“What?” Bowers blared.
“We want to know the status of the rescue,” Plinkett said.
Bowers face went blank and his eyes went to the bottle. “The rescue? Oh, it’ll be any minute now. Count on it. Wanna know why? Because you’re so fucking important that the fucking government’s got nothing better to do than to fly all the way up here just for you.”
Plinkett had known his chances of making it on the chopper were slim, and yet it still felt like he had swallowed a heavy black stone. He even grabbed his stomach as he asked, “There’s no rescue?”
“There never was.”
Chapter 16
Profound silence.
Then Bower dragged the bottle across his desk and finished it off. Plinkett went light-headed and sat in a chair across from Bower. He stared down at his shoes. They had been new just a few days before, now they were scuffed and muddy. There was some sort of dark stain on them that might have been oil and, then again, it might have been zombie blood.
“What about the Ambassador and all that?” he said, still with his eyes down. “He told me that if these guys didn’t turn,” he paused to jerk his head at Bryce, “that he would send a chopper for us.”
“He lied, but hey, don’t feel bad, he lied to me, too.” Bower grinned blearily. There was not an ounce of amusement in it. He reached down and opened a drawer, looked inside and slammed it shut again. Bryce thought he was looking for another bottle, instead he eventually found an oddly large and bulky satellite phone. “It sheems,” Bower said, slurring his words. “He wouldn’t going to take his shances.”
With a sour look, he shoved the phone across at Plinkett. Bryce stepped forward and picked it up. Right away he knew there was a problem. The battery was missing. “He told people what they wanted to hear and left.” Bryce’s eyes shifted to the window.
“And yet we haven’t been nuked into glass.” Had the Ambassador said something to the President? Had Magnus? Or were there missiles in the air right then? No. He would’ve known.
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