Affliction

by Amy Miles

  “Flynn, get over here and tell me what I should be looking for.”

  He groans and slowly rolls to his feet and then crawls into the office. He sinks down and presses his forehead against the glass.

  “Look for tall fences. They need a way of sectioning it off. The Safe Zone in Charleston was pretty much just carved out of a neighborhood.”

  “So there’s no good way of knowing where it is apart from the fences?”

  This feels hopeless.

  “Well, this is only the first side of the building. We can check the others,” but even I can hear doubt starting to creep in. Atlanta is such a large city. We could spend days searching and never locate it.

  “Maybe we should just sleep tonight and try again in the morning,” I suggest. I can’t bear to admit to them my desperation to find the Safe Zone has less and less to do with finding Wiemann now that discovering Nox’s fate has everything to do with me reaching those fences.

  “Um, guys,” Liam calls from the hallway. “I think I found something.”

  Flynn and I hurry as fast as we can manage out into the hall and see Liam pointing down the hall. There, at the very end, is a meeting room filled with a long table and twelve swivel chairs that right about now look like a little slice of heaven.

  But beyond that, far off into the distance I see a tower. “What is that?”

  “It’s a light.” All of us rush toward the end of the hall. I beat the two boys as I leap over the table and use the glass on the other side as a brake. “That is a light, right? I’m not dreaming this.”

  “If you are we are all sharing the same dream.” Flynn tugs on my arm as Liam bounces on his toes.

  There, clear as day, in the distance, I can see not just one light but multiple spot lights spread around a long rectangle.

  “That’s the place you two want to break into? What the heck are you thinking?” Liam blurts out next to my ear. “That place looks big enough to be a fortress. There’s no way you’ll be able to find that doctor guy you’re looking for!”

  “I would agree with you if not for the fact that I know exactly where he will be.”

  “Oh yeah? And where’s that?”

  “In the medical wing. If I find that I will be sure to find him there.”

  “Is that some sort of airstrip?” Flynn asks, pressing so hard against the glass that I’m sure he will leave prints.

  “The airport! Of course, it makes perfect sense. They must have had so many people stranded that it was the most logical place to start setting up a base of operations.”

  I sink back into one of the spinning chairs and breathe out a sigh of relief. “Nox, you’d better find a way to meet me there tomorrow.”

  TWENTY

  When I wake the next morning, stretched out between two chairs, I have a nasty ache in my back and a killer headache. I would have thought sleeping on a soft chair would make me feel good but I guess after roughing it for so long my body had adapted.

  “I would kill for a cup of coffee right now,” I mutter, but only silence is returned to me. I pop my head up and squint against the beams of light shooting straight into the room, bouncing off a slightly taller building across the way. “Flynn? Liam? You guys still sleeping?”

  Rubbing sleep for my eyes, I hobble down the hallway and stop when I see a bathroom sign. “Oh sweet mother of Jesus. This one might actually be clean!”

  I push the door open and embrace the faded scent of cleaning chemicals that lingers on the tile floor. The door doesn’t feel grimy when I push on it and the lock actually latches. Moments later I push down on the handle and am rewarded with a hearty gurgling flush.

  “We need to make sure we take some of this toilet paper with us,” I call back through the open door. “It’s the softest stuff I’ve felt in ages.”

  I wash my hands and splash my face with water then head back into the hallway, pausing to listen but I hear nothing. “Guys? Please tell me you aren’t playing hide and go seek? You’re a bit old for that now, don’t you think?”

  As I pass by each office, I pause to peer inside but find them empty. “Okay guys, this isn’t funny anymore. Where are you?”

  I search all of the offices and start to head back toward the stairwell when I catch a glimpse of white through a narrow door window. Pushing the door open, I see Liam and Flynn just standing and staring out of the window.

  “Didn’t you guys hear me calling for you? I’ve walked this whole office and you guys were in here the whole time.”

  Flynn slowly turns to face me and I feel my stomach clench with fear. His eyes are wide and his mouth is frozen in a thin line of worry. Liam doesn’t even turn to look at me.

  “Flynn? What’s wrong?” He swallows hard and then points to the window.

  “Your ex has arrived.”

  My gaze instantly lifts to the window and when he steps aside I feel my knees go weak. There, coming across the land at great speeds from the direction of the foothills, are thousands of moving specks. “Oh, my God. There are so many of them.”

  My hands begin to shake as I collapse to the floor. “They couldn’t have survived that. There’s no earthly way. Those Flesh Bags would have run right through them.”

  Flynn rushes to my side as a wail rises from me. He rocks with me as tears flood down my face. “I’ve lost him. Oh, God, Flynn. I’ve lost him, too.”

  “You don’t know that. Nox is smart. He wouldn’t have stayed to fight against odds like that.”

  “Yes, he would.” My gaze is unfocused when I look away from the window to glimpse at Flynn. “He would for me. He would have fought to his last dying breath to give us a chance to get away. You know he would.”

  Flynn winces and looks away, unable to deny the truth. “We need to get moving. It will do you some good to have something to focus on.”

  “I did this.” I stare blankly at the window again. “Cable is my fault. I could have killed him, could have stopped all of this before it even began.”

  “No,” Flynn barks at me and shakes my shoulders. “This isn’t going to happen. You are not going to start blaming yourself for things out of your control. You couldn’t have known Cable would live, that he would lead this army and come for you. And you will not blame yourself if Nox does not show up at that Safe Zone.”

  When I don’t look at him, he smacks me across the face. My head rocks back and I feel a slight sting, but it is not enough to break me out of my stupor so he hits me again. When he tries for a third I grab a hold of his hand. “I’m back, Flynn. You can stop hitting me now.”

  “Good, because your face is really hard.” He cradles his hand in his lap.

  “Liam grab your stuff. We’re leaving.”

  The trip back down the stairs is a far sight easier than going up. In order to keep up with our pace, Liam uses the rails to slide but we still beat him to the bottom. When we reach the street I can feel the thundering of footsteps that ripples through the ground.

  “Are they almost here?” Liam asks.

  “No. There are just that many of them. We should reach the airport before they hit the city but that will only give us a short window.” I turn my back to Liam and hunch down. “We don’t have time to argue and I can’t drag you along.”

  “Screw my pride. I like living.” He hops on and instantly hooks his legs around my arms. Flynn takes the lead, guiding us through the concrete maze. All around us glass windows vibrate from the force of the approaching army but I try not to think about it.

  One thing at a time. I need to get to the Safe Zone, find Nox and then kill Wiemann. Whatever happens after that will happen.

  Although the lights we saw the night before did not seem all that far, it feels like we run for nearly twenty or thirty miles to reach the first of the airport fences. We skirt along its rusted chain link, searching for an entrance to gain access. Nearly
five hundred feet inside we spy the towering fences that have been erected to create one side of the Safe Zone.

  “This place is way more secure than Charleston ever was. If we’d had massive solid walls like this I bet we wouldn’t have fallen so easily. Do I you think they did this before or after the CDC was overrun.”

  I stare at the section of fencing before me and know that I can easily scale up and over without detection. Flynn might be able to make it as well but Liam doesn’t stand a chance. With Cable’s horde on our tail, Liam can no longer run. He has to go over the wall with us and then fight.

  “My guess would be that they did this before. It would take a great deal of time and manpower to make something like this. Atlanta is a big city and tons of people were sent here. I would bet that this became a main source of intel. It’s probably why Wiemann kept his wife here.”

  “His wife?” Flynn glances over at me as he and I work together to scout out the guard patrols while Liam stays hidden. From the other side of the fence we can hear movement but can’t see anything through the solid wooden wall. There are tall support beams on this side and I would wager there are more on the other, driven deep into the ground to help prevent against a full onslaught.

  “That’s why he’s here. He’s come for her.”

  “Well, that’s...romantic, I guess.” He follows me as we hurry back to a small airplane hangar where we left Liam. “So what’s the plan?”

  “We need to see over that way. Feel like tossing me up onto the roof?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Nope. Lace your hands. I’ll put my foot in and you can toss me. I’ll just grab on to the edge of the roof and pull myself up. When I’m done you can catch me.”

  “Um...sure. Because that sounds super easy.”

  I tap him on the arm. “Did you forget you’ve got super strength now?”

  He grins and laces his fingers. “What are we waiting for? One sky high toss coming right now!”

  Liam watches as I place my hands on Flynn’s shoulders and before he reaches the count of three I feet a gust of wind and then I’m dangling from the roof.

  “I thought you said that you are going to pull yourself up,” he hisses.

  “There’s someone over there,” I jerk my head toward the fence and both boys instinctively drop down low. When I see the top of a head bob away I hoist my leg up and over and then belly crawl across the hot metal roof.

  “It is a good thing I can heal,” I mutter as I peel my sunburned skin off the metal sheeting and wiggle toward the far edge, taking my time to move across an access hatch that proves to have some sharp edges on it.

  The Atlanta Safe Zone seems to stretch on for miles when I reach the top of the slanted rise. Metal fences reaching heights of no less than twelve feet run a second perimeter inside the wooden walls with mobile guard stands lifted high at regular intervals. Large wide-beam spotlights are situated to swivel from their platforms.

  “Those must be what we saw last night.”

  From where I lay, I can see multiple guards patrolling the grounds, each one fully armed and on alert. Tents stretch out as far as I can see, some appear to be large family sized with flapping sides not tied down and others small and narrow like single person pup tents, but I do not see any movement at all.

  The entire compound appears to have been erected around a series of long and low buildings, each one attached to the next with a breezeway made of thick white canvas stretched over steel frames that we obviously added after the outbreak. Near the center of each passage a large red cross stands out against the dull white.

  At the end of all of the long plastic corridors I spot an offshoot that leads directly into the main cargo bay. Memories of rows upon rows of testing chairs and semi unconscious patients surrounding me back in St Louis float to the surface and I shiver despite the heat beating down on me from above.

  “That is where they should be performing their tests.”

  Lifting my nose to the air, I close my eyes and inhale deeply. My head moves to the left and then to the right as I work to narrow in on Dr. Wiemann’s scent. My eyes pop open when I catch an undeniable whiff of him. He passed by this exact shed no less than a day ago.

  I drop a hand of warning over the side when I spot a jeep approaching from the south. Heat ripples across the tarmac as I roll onto my back and think thin thoughts in the hopes that I won’t be seen as they pass by, but I hear the engine gears downshift and then the brakes squeak as the vehicle begins to slow.

  Damn it. They are coming here.

  As the jeep pulls off the road, the tires kick up spare bits of gravel before parking in front. When the car door opens and closes I hold my breath, praying that Liam and Flynn have found a decent hiding place.

  “What are we doing out here, Jax? I thought we were making a fuel run,” a nasally voice whines from below.

  As I hear the two men shuffling around, I can’t decide if this is pure providence that one of the bastards that I’m most looking forward to seeing during my visit here just happens to be standing below me or I’ve got just about the worst luck known to man.

  “I left a pack of smokes out here the other day. I can’t be expected to go on an eight hour shift without something to occupy my time.”

  “It’s not safe out here.”

  “Don’t be a pussy. We’ve got guns, shit for brains. What do you think could possibly happen that we can’t handle.”

  I can’t imagine a better cue than that. Rolling on my side, I plummet to the ground below and land on someone’s back. He sprawls to the ground and smacks his chin so hard against the ground that it knocks him clean out.

  “Stanton? What are you messing around at over there?” Jax pops his head back around a stack of boxes and freezes. “You!”

  “Small world, huh?” I pick myself up off the ground and dust the soldier’s blood off me. “Sorry about your friend. He did a great job at breaking my fall though.”

  Jax shifts his gaze a split second before he dives for his gun but I have already rolled out of sight before he has his finger on the trigger. The warehouse may be far smaller than the big hangar that is locked away inside of the walls, but it is tall enough and wide enough to hold a heck of a lot of junk to hide behind.

  “Did Nox come with you, Avery?” He calls out as I crouch behind a stack of wooden crates. I listen as Jax’s boots squeak on the slick concrete as he changes position and smile. The showboat soldier is just about as dumb as he looks.

  I am just about to leap out of my hiding place to tackle him when I heard him shout, “hold right there!”

  “Shit,” I whisper to myself when I hear a cry of pain. Glancing around the boxes, I see Liam struggling in Jax’s grasp.

  “I don’t recognize this scrawny little thing. Is he a new friend of yours? Oh wait,” he turns, looking around the room, “maybe he’s a snack. You do eat people now, don’t you, Avery? The Doc said that would probably be a side effect of your mutations.”

  “Why don’t you put the kid down and find out for yourself?”

  “Now why would I go and do a thing like that?”

  “Because we both know you’re dying to get a piece of me. You have been ever since you first found in that old farm house. I saw the way you looked at me. You would have hated me on principal alone for shooting you down but then I had the gall to shack up with your boss, the guy who you got passed over because he became Cap’s pet. Isn’t that right, Jax?”

  I dash between a stack of boxes when he turns away and nearly run face first into Flynn. He grabs onto to me to keep me from teetering backwards into an open aisle that would give Jax a clear view of my position and places a finger over his lips.

  “Nox was always half the man I was. I deserved to be Cap’s second in command.”

  “Sure,” I call out and motion for Flynn to maneuver around so t
hat we can come at Jax from both sides. “Just like you were resourceful when you rigged that truck when the Raider’s hit back on the road out of Nashville.”

  Jax falls still. “How do you know about that?”

  “Oh, come now, Jax. You didn’t think your buddies shot that well, did you? There were Flesh Bags all over your ass. If I hadn’t been there, you’d have been in pieces in some zombie’s stomach.”

  “I got us out of there!” He yells and Liam cries out as Jax yanks him around as if he weight normal more than a sack of rice.

  “Yeah, that is true. I saw the whole thing. Like how Cap left Ryker behind so he could save his own ass.”

  From his profile, I see Jax’s face goes red. “Ryker was dead. There’s wasn’t anything we could do for him.

  “Is that what they told you? I guess you couldn’t hear quite clearly over the rumble of that engine. Too bad. It didn’t end well for your friend.”

  Jax turns again a split second after Flynn dives for a new position and I breathe a sigh of relief that he remains unseen.

  “So that’s how you found us, huh? Asked old Ryker where we were headed and he spilled his guts.” Jax spits on the floor. “Pansy.”

  “No,” I call out as I weave between a different row until I am even with Jax. He stands with his back to me as I see that he’s got his gun trained on Liam. “He held out better than I thought he would. Of course most men crack under torture. Man, could he scream. In fact, he screamed just loud enough to bring a few more of those Flesh Bags over to investigate.”

  “You bitch!” The back of Jax’s neck goes red and he shoves Liam to the floor. “You’ll pay for that.”

  He brings the butt of his gun down onto Liam’s head and the kid collapses forward.

  “Now, Flynn!”

  Jax turns his head and stares into the barrel of a gun. “No one hits my friend.”

  I see the counterattack coming before I can react. Flynn’s momentary hesitation is just enough as Jax seizes his hand and twists it up behind his back. I hear the pop of bone as his wrist dislocates and Flynn howls in pain. Rising up onto his toes as Jax continues to apply pressure, tears form in Flynn’s eyes.