Moment of truth. If she’s gonna do it, now’s the moment. I guess I trust her… or maybe I’m more afraid of zombies.
Tris stared at him, seeming more innocent and vulnerable than ever before. He released the weapon and resumed heading toward the city. Tris walked alongside him, patting herself down in search of somewhere to put the pistol. She tried a few pockets, but didn’t seem to like the way it wobbled about with her stride. The jumpsuit had no belt in which to tuck a handgun, so she wound up holding it. It took around a half hour for them to reach the outskirts of the city. They moved among old, burned cars and broken glass, peering into the vacant maws of dozens of abandoned buildings. Old newspaper machines littered the road as if a great housecat had swatted them around until it got bored. A few of the vehicles looked up-modded, electric motors and all, but the vast majority dated from before the war.
“Something doesn’t feel right,” she whispered.
“No shit. You’re just realizing that now?” Kevin led her out of the open, into a narrow alley. “Where exactly are we going? Your thingee in range yet?”
“Yeah, I’m close enough now. I have no idea what the safe house looks like, but the implant is letting me see a yellow line.” She pointed. “That way. It’s feeding a signal to my optic nerve.”
“So your eyes aren’t electronic?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t have any major parts. A couple small implants and some wiring.”
Kevin studied her face. “They look too blue to be natural. Like gems.”
Tris blushed.
“Okay, lead on.” He gestured forward. “Be careful.”
She leaned around the corner, pistol first, and crept out along the sidewalk. Two blocks over, she crossed the street and entered another alley. Kevin followed, head on a swivel, certain Infected would come out of everywhere.
An echoing metallic clatter from the right made them both twitch. At the end of the alley, a fallen basketball hoop shifted. Four people in tattered clothing, three men in police uniforms and a young woman in a torn sundress, climbed out of a rubble pile, sniffing the air. All had manic bloodshot eyes and dark patches of necrosis scattered about their bodies. The woman’s toes had reduced to black stubs. Kevin’s throat closed up from fear. As fast as an eye blink, Tris shot the woman in the forehead and the nearest ‘cop’ in the heart one after the next. The female Infected stood in place for a few seconds, gazing into the sky as if confused. She collapsed over backward, leaving the shot cop staring at his chest as if he couldn’t figure out what happened. A black tendril symbiote forced its way out of his lips, fleeing the now-useless body.
Tris shot it.
The wormlike creature exploded in a shower of black ichor.
Kevin cringed as the remaining pair zeroed in on the gunfire and charged. Tris fired again, striking a dark-skinned cop in the left cheek. A spritz of brain flew out of his head, spattering on the last one’s face. Kevin got his .45 out and pumped two rounds into the last shambler’s chest.
The two former cops slumped to the street at the same time, moaning. Alleys and cross streets filled with the echoes of scraping and scratching.
“Great, now everything in town’s heard us,” said Kevin
“Oops.” Tris bit her lip. “Sorry.”
He grabbed her by the left wrist and ran ahead, dragging her across the small courtyard and down another street.
He’s panicking.
Moaning and breaking glass came from behind as dozens of Infected swarmed out of buildings and windows. She glanced back over her shoulder at the echoing boom of a body striking an empty dumpster. Some were so determined to pursue the untainted that they jumped out of windows at fatal heights. The wet splats of their deaths upon the pavement made her gag.
“Sorry,” she said, choking back vomit while trying to keep her feet underneath her.
Tris raised the Beretta to the rear, but he hauled her around a corner, too fast for her to get a clear shot.
“Don’t bother. Shooting will only tell them where we are. You’ll run out of ammo before you kill half of that swarm.”
Dammit. Her heart raced. The dancing yellow line streaking off into the distance in her vision snaked around a parking garage four blocks ahead. “There. That weird looking building full of cars. Turn left once we pass it.”
He followed her direction, but skidded to a stop by a half-open manhole. “Down here.”
“No, the line goes that way.” Tris pointed at the glowing streamer fed to her optic nerve on wires thinner than a human hair. “It’s dark down there. We have no idea what―”
“Yeah, and take a good goddamned look that way.” He shoved the manhole cover aside.
Tris stared down the length of the gleaming ribbon. The entire area around where it went moved. Thousands of Infected swelled out from every alley, oozing from windows like a mudslide of flesh. Her stomach did a backflip.
“Oh… shit.”
“Yeah. Oh shit is right. Damn erudite of you.”
Tris yelped when he grabbed her under the armpits and half threw her into the hole in the street.
Kevin didn’t bother looking around. The shuffling drag of more infected than he wanted to see closed in from everywhere. He waited for her snowy head to drop in a few feet and jumped down onto the ladder. Fear boosted his strength such that the manhole cover felt like aluminum as he pulled it back into place.
Darkness.
He climbed down, not needing to see to figure out how to operate a ladder. The city had been empty so long the sewer didn’t stink like shit, only must and mold. Tris’s hand pressed into his back when he reached the bottom.
“It’s dark.”
“Yeah.” He pulled the flashlight off his belt and turned it on.
Kevin held a finger to his lips. She nodded. They stood in silence, save for the dripping of distant water. The wails and groans grew louder to a point. His heart skipped a beat whenever the manhole cover clanked from a heavy footstep. The small hand on his back became two arms threaded around his waist. Her breath blew warm over the back of his neck. After a moment, the noise overhead faded away.
Both of them exhaled. She let her weight hang on him. He found himself not minding the contact, holding her in silence until their second wind arrived.
“Still got the line?”
She pointed. “Yes. It’s going that way, down the tunnel.”
For the next hour or so, she led the way through the sewers, guided by some phantom line. Kevin didn’t have a lot of trust or faith in technology, but she chose turns and jumped sewage channels without any hesitation, as if she’d been here before. Several times, she squeezed his hand numb as she stepped in shin-deep water, reducing the urge to scream at the cold to a muted whimper.
“Almost there,” she whispered. “It’s reading under fifty meters around that corner up ahead to the right.”
He nodded and crept up to a rounded offshoot. After a brief hesitation at the corner, he whirled around, gun aimed. A pair of corpses draped over wooden crates on either side of the shaft about ten yards ahead. Their clothing, what remained of it, had a quasi-military aesthetic. Spent brass scattered around in the muck, 7.62 from the look of it. Normally, the urge to search them for valuables would be overwhelming. After the swarm, though, he wanted little to do with going near a dead body. These two were obviously rotting, but the Infected were also supposed to last only a few months… not years. He trained his .45 at the one on the left. Tris walked past them without care, as if she hadn’t even noticed them. Kevin hesitated, but neither one so much as twitched as she got close. He closed his eyes for a second and took a few deep breaths. Eyes open, he sprinted ahead.
The rapid clomp of his boots made her spin around with the Beretta raised.
“Whoa…” He held a hand up.
Tris lowered her arm and sighed. “What’s got you… Oh, the dead…” Her lip quivered. “They look like resistance.”
“You knew them?” He shifted to face her, k
eeping the corpses in sight.
“Not personally.” She backed up. “Their uniforms look like the info I received before I escaped. They won’t get up. There’s no such thing as undead… Infected are alive.”
“And they’re also supposed to drop dead in three months, right?” He guided her back another step before he stopped pointing a gun at the dead man.
“I…” She ran to a door fifteen yards past the corpses, a metal barrier that hung an inch away from closed. “They’re still alive. The heart shot kills. Maybe the increased lifespan has something to do with that symbiote?”
Kevin kept half his attention on the dead guys as he backed up to where she’d stopped.
“In there,” she whispered. “The line is going through this door.”
e swapped magazines in the .45, loading a full one, and slipped past her. At the gap, he listened for a minute. Silence. He gritted his teeth and eased the old, rusted door to the side, attempting to be as quiet as possible. Tris took a step back, clutching the Beretta in both hands, but keeping it pointed down and away.
Inside, the space appeared to have once been some manner of safe house or command center. Cots lined one wall near lockers. The air hung damp with the stagnant scent of moss and earth. Desks and tables were set up with maps covered in mold, and a handful of portable computers clustered on the other side of the room, collecting cobwebs. Additional tunnels went off to areas that looked like more sleeping space and another metal door spray-painted with the word ‘armory.’
“Where’s the line going?”
Tris crept forward, looking around. She stopped by one of the tables, picking up a notebook full of drawings of things that seemed medical in nature. “I-it’s gone. It… led me here.” She shot him a look filled with dread. “This…” She closed the notebook, pointing out ‘Dr. Martin Andrews’ written in ballpoint ink on the cover. The bloody handprint over the name spoke volumes.
Kevin’s eyes narrowed. “All those Infected outside. Something tells me the resistance didn’t have much resistance.”
She slouched, leaning on the desk to keep from falling over. “No… It can’t be true. We were so close to a cure.”
Close only matters with hand grenades. Kevin glanced at her shoulder, thinking about offering a comforting hand. Crap. Guess I’m not getting paid.
Tris grabbed for the piles of maps and notebooks. “There’s gotta be some kinda notes here. There’s no bodies. They can’t all be dead.”
“Maybe they got up and walked away.” He folded his arms, draping the .45 over his left elbow.
“That’s not funny.” She moved on to search the drawers, finding nothing of interest before heading to the table full of laptops. Of eight, only one responded to the power button. It came out of sleep mode on a CAD screen that looked like a schematic pointing out the different components of a human cell. “There’s got to be something here… a backup plan, an escape plan… something.”
Kevin paced around while she fiddled with the computer. A bank of lockers on the left had two folded tee shirts and a pair of briefs, which he pocketed. Guess it’s not a total loss.
“Wow,” said Tris. “This thing has a satellite feed.”
“Satellite?” Kevin hurried over. “I thought the nukes made them all fry?”
Tris nodded, making her hair dance. “They did… this must’ve been launched afterward or maybe got lucky, I dunno. I didn’t think we could still put stuff in orbit. Maybe I can get a hold of Nathan. He’ll know what to do.”
He frowned at the little computer. “The only thing I distrust more than pretty women is technology.”
She clicked on something, which opened a black window, in which she typed a series of numbers and letters. “Maybe… technology certainly helped kill the planet.”
A man’s face, blonde, early thirties, and paper-white like Tris, filled the screen. “Oh, I see you did make it.” Static crackled the voice in time with pixilation and dropouts in the image.
“Nathan!” She smiled. “Good to see you. I’m here. But, everyone’s gone. Did you hear anything from Dennis or Bill?”
The man on the screen sighed. “No, I’m afraid. All gone, you say? Pity. I’m so sorry to waste your time, my dear. It seems your services wound up not being required. Sometimes the caveman approach does work. The little package you’ve delivered for me won’t be necessary after all.” He smiled. “Not since they’re already all dead.”
“What are you talking about?” She leaned away from the terminal, shaking.
“That nonsense about a cure”―Nathan turned to the side to mock stifle a haughty laugh―“it was something to help us destroy the resistance out there for good. The Virus is doing its job nicely, but those Neanderthals had built up to a worrisome level. We felt it best to take an extra step.”
“Y-you’re not a hacker, are you?” Tris covered her mouth with both hands. “You’re… Tier Two?”
“One actually.” He examined his fingernails. “Don’t feel so glum. You think a mere hacker can let people out of Detention so easily? Poor girl, so naïve. At least you had your freedom for a little while, such as it was out there in that ghastly place.”
“L-little while?” She looked up at the moss-covered ceiling. “Are they coming?”
“Oh, heavens, Tris. You overestimate your importance. It’s a shame to waste such a marvel of technology, don’t you think? Just because the resistance is already dead doesn’t mean I can’t send you off with a bang. You know, loose end and all. Besides, you’ve got the cure in that pretty little head of yours, and we’d rather not let it get away from us. Ciao.” He winked, and the terminal went out.
Tris gulped and jumped back with a shriek. She clawed at her jumpsuit, jerking the zipper down to expose her chest and stomach. A dull red light pulsed below the surface of her skin, left of her navel by two inches.
“No! No!” She screamed, bawling as she pressed and squeezed at the area.
A golf-ball sized object shifted below the skin.
She gawked at Kevin, mouthing, “I’m sorry” as the strength faded from her legs.
“Tris…” Kevin pulled a large combat knife from his belt and held it up. “Do you trust me?”
ynicism, for some people, is elevated to an art form.
Suspicion had kept Kevin alive, kept him profitable, and kept his dream a fingertip away from reality. But in a second that felt like minutes, staring into the panic radiating from Tris’s deep blue eyes, both left him high and dry.
The abandoned room around them, dented desks, loose wires, moldy concrete walls, froze in time. A weak flash of red light from beneath the milky white skin of her stomach failed to break his eye contact. Of all the women left in this beat up, shit-on world, it figures he’d wind up with one who was about to die―and take him along for the ride.
The tip of his combat knife came into focus as she blurred. His hair tickled the back of his neck.
“Yes,” she yelled. “Yes, I trust you.”
Kevin snapped back to real time. He grabbed her by her jumpsuit and flung her hundred-pound body over the nearest desk. Dead radio equipment and waterlogged laptops clattered to the ground. Tris seemed to know what was coming; she clamped her hands on the sides of the table and closed her eyes. Kevin pinched the skin by the red glow and dragged the knife over it as if slicing an avocado.
Tris screamed.
Blood welled around the blade as he pulled up on the skin, as careful as his haste allowed him to be. If he didn’t cut too deep, she might live. If he nicked something inside, this might all be a waste of time. She squirmed and thrashed, keeping her mouth closed to mute herself.
He sliced and squeezed for two seconds, urging a milky transparent sphere about an inch in diameter from the wound. Amid electronics and a cube of light grey material, six red LEDs flashed with increasing speed. Kevin dropped the knife and plunged his fingers into the oozing cut, grasping the detonator and wrenched it loose, grateful after the fact no wiring connected it to an
ything else inside her. Tris screamed and passed out. He baseball-pitched the explosive into a passage leading away from the cistern-turned-command center and grabbed Tris, dragging her to the floor behind the desk.
The tiny plastic sphere clicked twice on distant concrete before an explosion slammed the air from his lungs and peppered the area around him with debris. Silence, save for a high-pitched tone dominated his consciousness. Each breath sucked in dust; he choked on the taste of decades-old sewer. A cloud of pale grey silt rolled over them, obscuring everything more than an arm’s length away. He leapt on top of her and placed a hand over the laceration. Tris lay limp and unresponsive. A minute or so passed before the tinnitus tone faded with a sucking whoosh, and the raspy wheeze of his breathing flooded his ears.
Off to his right, a heavy metallic thud shook the floor when a metal door gave out. Random clicks and clangs announced falling rocks and fragments of pipe hitting the ground. Kevin sat back on his boot heels, straddling her, and peered over the desk. Beyond the shifting cloud of smoke and dust, the collapsed ceiling let in traces of sunlight. More bits of road and dirt fell in; the whole place looked ready to collapse. Along both walls, old sewage lines had twisted into modern art. Fortunately, it had been at least forty years since anything flowed in them.
Kevin blinked at a spherical absence of passage.
Damn that’s a big ass hole vaporized. He looked down at her. Holy shit. I should’ve slugged her in the head and gotten the fuck out of here. His racing heart slowed as he studied the delicate lines of her face. He thought of her kicking the ‘New’ ganger over the railing at Wayne’s. She looks so innocent when she’s out cold. Blood seeped between his fingers from the three-inch slice a touch south of her navel, near the left hip.
“Crap.” With one hand still on the wound, he leaned to the side until he got two fingers on the knife. “So much for getting paid.”
The room, him, her, the laptops, everything looked as if a madman had run amok with a can of white spray paint. She didn’t change color. Kevin chuckled. He squinted, coughed, and looked around for something to use as a bandage. The bomb had coated everything with dust, no doubt full of wonderful little microbes. Thinking about inhaling fifty-year-old shit particles made him gag. He pulled open her jumpsuit a few inches more, eyeing her plain, white panties. He smirked at his jeans and flannel shirt, covered in dust not to mention underneath an armored, long sleeved, red leather jacket.
One More Run (Roadhouse Chronicles Book 1) Page 6
