Heading her way. Bouncing off the cold walls.
Right on top of her now.
Lucy screamed.
Big mistake. She could only garner more of the creatures’ attention that way. She brought the sword around, more out of panic than instinct.
“Woah! Lucy! You nearly took my head off!”
Lucy opened her eyes. She was so pleased to see Donny that she leapt forward and wrapped her arms around him. He was too tall for her to hug any higher than his waist. Donny put up with it but didn’t hug her back. He probably felt uncomfortable. Lucy didn’t care. He was a warm body.
“Have you seen any of the others?” Donny said after she pulled back.
“No,” Lucy said, wiping her runny eyes and nose. “But I saw them on the monitors. They’re okay.”
“Even Jamie?” Donny said. “You’re sure?”
“They were fine when they left the basement,” Lucy said. “The Rages chased after them but they got a good headstart. They should be all right.”
A huge weight off Donny’s shoulders.
“How are you doing?” he said.
“Scared,” Lucy said.
“That’s understandable,” Donny said. “Whoever thought these flashing lights during an emergency were a good idea needs to get their head checked. Let’s get out of here.”
Lucy, a lot more confident now she wasn’t alone, followed him.
64.
ARMED WITH their headstart—the greatest weapon in any survivor’s arsenal against Rages—Jamie and Donny were the first to arrive in the Weapon Research Division. A contingent of Rages on your tail tended to give you the motivation you needed to hot step it.
Jamie hadn’t had the intention of running the whole way but the idea of an elevator arriving with its sweet ding before the doors opened, revealing a gang of stowaway Rages was too much to bear. Besides, scaling stairs wasn’t so tough once you got into a good rhythm.
Three steps at a time, five strides to a flight, and you soon rose through the floors. He didn’t need to check on Fatty. He would never stop so long as those creatures were following them. Twisted ankle, broken leg, it didn’t matter. He would keep on going.
The door to the Weapon Research Division shut behind them automatically. They collapsed on the floor, weapons clattering, panting through aching, hot lungs that struggled to harvest enough oxygen to recover from their exhaustive bolt up the stairs. Black spots danced in Jamie’s vision. He covered his eyes to stop the strobing bright light from blinding him. Prostrate on the floor as they were, in their current condition, they couldn’t have stopped a fly from having its way with them.
Then the most unwelcome sound in the world: the doors opening.
A clot of much-needed oxygen caught in Jamie’s throat. He looked to the door. Made out a shadowy figure as it lumbered into the room. Jamie squirmed back on his elbows.
They’d followed them here! They’d followed them to this room! They were doomed!
“Stay. . . away!” Jamie wheezed.
Fatty coughed, terror etched on the tears that issued from his eyes. The shadowy figure hobbled into the room in Jamie’s direction, hands held out for him.
“No,” Jamie said. “No!”
“It’s all right,” Dr. Beck said. “It’s me.”
As the emergency lights began to fade up again, Jamie could see it was indeed the doctor. Jamie relaxed and let his heart rate slow to its normal speed. Let his head thud to the floor in relief.
“I can’t take much more of this,” Fatty said.
Another figured lurched into the room.
“Look out!” Fatty screamed.
Dr. Beck’s reaction was slow. He was an old man. Far too slow to protect himself.
65.
LUCKY FOR him, it wasn’t a Rage either, but Donny, followed by Lucy hot on his heels.
“Let me lock this room down before any more of us have a heart attack,” Dr. Beck said, taking out his remote control and pressing the buttons.
“Can you do us a favour and turn these damn flashing lights off?” Donny said. “They’re giving me a headache.”
“Just a moment,” Dr. Beck said, pressing more buttons.
The lights made their final bow before returning to their normal constant level.
“I don’t understand what went wrong,” Donny said, tossing his wrench in the middle of the table. “Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on here?”
“The Rages didn’t get distracted,” Dr. Beck said. “That’s your problem right there.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Donny said. “How did it happen? It was a damn simple plan.”
“The first charge went off and they started to leave,” Jamie said. “There was a Rage in the corridor that was getting close to our position. It turned around after it heard your charge go off.”
“I saw that too,” Lucy said. “On the monitors.”
“The whole lot of them were leaving,” Dr. Beck said, nodding his head.
“Then what got their attention?” Donny said.
Blank looks all around.
“Nobody saw anything?” Donny said.
He turned to Jamie and Fatty.
“You guys were the closest to these things on the ground,” he said. “Did one of you make a sound?”
“Don’t blame us,” Jamie said, offended.
“Yeah,” Fatty said. “You could have heard a mouse fart with the amount of noise we weren’t making.”
“And you didn’t hear anything in the basement?” Donny said.
“No,” Jamie said. “Nothing. No visual things either. No flashing lights.”
“How about inside the corridor?” Donny said to Lucy. “Was there anything on the monitor?”
“No,” Lucy said. “Nothing. And I was watching very closely.”
“What about a mouse?” Fatty said.
“And its farts?” Donny said, rolling his eyes.
“No,” Fatty said. “Or maybe yes. I mean, what if it was something the Rage picked up on that we couldn’t see or hear. Something like a mouse. Out of our view, and camera shot.”
“No,” Lucy said. “I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” Fatty said. “It would make the Rage turn in our direction and we wouldn’t even know what had done it.”
“An intelligent thought from fatso for once,” Donny said.
“The Rage would have fallen to its knees to scrabble around for it,” Lucy said. “More than that, it wasn’t only one Rage that heard something.”
“These things are like sheep,” Jamie said. “If one starts heading in a given direction, the others automatically follow.”
“That’s true,” Lucy said. “Except the other Rages turned at the same time and in the same direction. Whatever it was, it was strong enough to get all their attention.”
They were silent a moment. No one could come up with anything.
“There is another explanation,” Dr. Beck said, turning to address them, looking each in the eye. “The Bugs. We know they have a weapon that directs the Rages to attack a given location. They created the damn virus. They are the ones most likely to have some way to manipulate it.”
“Then why didn’t the Rages attack the City earlier?” Donny said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Unless the Bugs sent the signal right then, at that moment,” Lucy said.
“You think they were watching us?” Fatty said, placing a hand on his stomach, suddenly feeling ill.
Jamie could certainly understand that. His stomach felt like it was turning too.
“Anything is possible,” Dr. Beck said.
“That’s what bothers me about these kinds of explanations,” Donny said. “If anything is possible, it means we’ll never discover what really happened here today. And who knows when something like this might happen again.”
“What about what happens right now?” Fatty said. “What are we going to do? We’re in a City infested with Rages. What action are we going to take?”
&
nbsp; “We’ll clear them out,” Donny said with conviction. “We’ll slay every last one of them.”
“I don’t like it,” Fatty said. “But I don’t see any other way. If we want to keep living here we have to make it safe.”
“Just how many of these things got in?” Donny said. “Can’t be more than a few dozen, right?”
“Hundreds,” Lucy said. “Maybe thousands.”
“It can’t be that many,” Donny said, suddenly becoming less sure of his plan.
“I’m afraid it is,” Dr. Beck said. “There was a very large concentration of them outside before we even started. It’s my fault. I should have done this days ago. There wouldn’t have been as many then. I thought they would move further away. ”
“We can’t worry about that now,” Jamie said. “We have to deal with the problem we have in front of us.”
He was repeating his father’s own words of wise leadership. He turned to Donny.
“How do you want to go about it?” he said.
Donny thought a moment, then turned to Dr. Beck.
“Can we access the security system from here?” he said. “We want to know where the Rages are, how many of them there are, where to avoid.”
Dr. Beck moved to a terminal and brought up the video feed. He transferred it to a portable tablet.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
“Are any of them near Dad’s private hospital room?” Jamie said.
A moment as Dr. Beck checked.
“Yes,” he said. “Close, but a safe distance away.”
For now.
“Here’s what we do,” Donny said. “We get Dad and then get the hell out of here. That’s the plan. We’ll take as many weapons as we can carry and blow these things away if they attack us.”
“What if we get cornered by them?” Fatty said.
“Then we’ll blow another hole to get out of here,” Donny said. “Everybody suit up.”
“How is wearing a suit going to help?” Fatty said.
“Figure of speech,” Donny said. “It means grab your weapons. We’ll cut down any Rage we come to.”
Their hopes and dreams of relocating to the City were up in smoke. Was nowhere safe?
66.
“THERE’S A small group of them this way,” Dr. Beck said, using the tablet to guide him. “We’ll begin in the basement and work our way up.”
The first thing they’d done was check if any of the monsters were directly outside their room, then in their immediate vicinity, in case they got set upon the moment they stepped outside the room.
They were fully locked and loaded. Mini-Rambos looking for trouble. They stocked themselves with automatic weapons and ancient weapons alike. Jamie had finally gotten his hands on his very own pistol. His father couldn’t stop him now!
They applied silencers to every weapon they could. The last thing they needed was to open fire on a gang of Rages, only for an unknown horde to descend upon them from behind.
With Dr. Beck at their head, they travelled slowly, quietly. Every few minutes, Dr. Beck said, “Stop.” Then he proceeded to watch the security monitors on his tablet before resuming their course. They took a very strange course through the corridors, often heading in the opposite direction to the one they wanted in an effort to avoid the beasts in their path.
A lot of it was down to timing. The Rages, now with nothing to chase and nothing to stimulate them, meandered first in one direction, then another. The ones with good eyes—although all Rages had questionable sight and preferred to rely on their other senses such as smell—occasionally drifted more than the others, which caused their group to follow them. That was how a Rage stampede occurred, often without any real catalyst at its heart. Then there were the times the Rages stimulated each other and ended up only really chasing their shadows.
Dr. Beck occasionally stopped and stomped his feet, causing a shriek from the end of the corridor, before leading the others up a staircase and across, then back down another set of stairs.
“Sorry,” Dr. Beck said. “Needed to dislodge a Rage blockage.”
They continued that way, the journey never seeming to come to an end. Occasionally, they came across small pools of thick blood on the floor, hastily made footprints and dragged limbs, clutches of hair, even a misplaced eyeball in a pile of congealed blood.
“I hate it when I misplace things,” Fatty said when he saw the eye. “That guy’s going to kick himself when he realizes he lost it.”
Donny sidled up to Dr. Beck.
“How much longer before we get to the hospital?” he said. “We can kill some of these things if it speeds up the journey time.”
“Not if we don’t need to initiate them,” Dr. Beck said. “We can control the level of noise we make but not what they make. Best to avoid them completely if we can.”
Donny was disappointed. He wanted to unload his rage into these things. Dr. Beck was preventing him from doing that.
“You can kill as many Rages as you like once we’re outside,” Dr. Beck said. “Not in here. It’s too risky. Okay. Down here.”
They entered a room none of them had seen before. It was pitch dark. Jamie caught sight of an odd bump in the middle of the floor before Dr. Beck shut the door behind them, extinguishing the light.
“There’s a hatch right there in the floor,” he said. “Donny, can you lift it open? Be careful. I can’t see what’s down there. There are no cameras.”
“Where are we?” Jamie said.
“In the belly of the City unless I missed my guess,” Fatty said, shuffling from one foot to the other.
Jamie covered his brother as he turned a wheel and lifted the hatch, aiming at the hole with the business end of his rifle. Once it was open, Donny switched on the torch and swung it around, checking beneath the hatch.
“There’s a ladder,” he said. “But no Rages, so far as I can tell.”
“Good,” Dr. Beck said. “Climb down. We’ll be coming up under your father’s hospital room soon, don’t worry. This will give us not only the safest route but our way out afterwards.”
“All right,” Donny said. “It’s your party.”
The City was Dr. Beck’s domain. He knew more about it than anyone else alive. Who knew what shortcuts and secret passageways there were.
Donny headed down the ladder first. At the bottom was another dark room. He scanned it with his torch.
“Okay?” Jamie said, calling down the ladder.
“Yes,” Donny said. “It’s just a room. Chairs. Nothing exciting.”
“You go first,” Jamie said to Lucy.
She climbed down. Then Fatty.
“Do you want help getting down?” Jamie said to Dr. Beck.
“I’ll be fine,” Dr. Beck said. “After you.”
Jamie hesitated.
“Listen,” he said. “I wanted to thank you. For everything you did for us. Trying to give us a new home, somewhere safe to live. I want to apologize for the way I treated you. You never did anything wrong. You did what you thought was right for everyone.”
“You have nothing to apologize for,” Dr. Beck said. “We do what we think is best at the time. Right now, the best thing for you to do is go down that ladder.”
Jamie smiled, glad the conversation hadn’t turned awkward. The doctor reflected his own smile back at him. It didn’t convey the same warmth Jamie deliberately injected into his. It was warped somehow. . . By worry? Concern? Difficult to say.
The hair stood up on the back of Jamie’s neck. He couldn’t explain why. Then again, they should be concerned right now. Who knew what was going to happen from one moment to the next.
He climbed the ladder rung by rung to the bottom. The moment his foot touched the floor, the hatch above slammed shut. A grinding noise as the wheel was spun shut. Locked.
67.
“DR. BECK?” Donny said, calling up.
“Something’s wrong,” Jamie said. “Maybe the Rages got in the room or—”
The lights
blinked on. Bright, fluorescent. The group formed a circle, guns aiming out for any surprise attack. Used to the darkness, they had to shield their eyes. It took a moment to grow accustomed to the light, the interior of the room exposed. Two dozen chairs in a pair of organized rows faced the same direction. The walls were large windows, made from some kind of thick plastic material.
“What’s going on?” Fatty said.
A TV monitor at the front blinked on. Dr. Beck’s face on the flat screen.
“Can you hear me?” Dr. Beck said. “See me?”
“Dr. Beck?” Jamie said.
“Ah, good,” Dr. Beck said. “There’s nothing to worry about. The Rages have overrun the City. There can be no going back now. The City’s had its day.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Fatty said, looking at the others in confusion.
“You need to get to Denver City,” Dr. Beck said. “Get there, and speak with Dr. Vassal. He’s in charge. Tell him to fire the cannon at the Bug ship. It’s our only hope now.”
“What are you doing?” Donny said. “We need to get Dad. In the hospital.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Dr. Beck said. “He’ll never survive if you try to move him.”
“He’ll die for sure if the Rages get to him!” Jamie said. “Let us grab him.”
“I’ll ensure he has an easy passing,” Dr. Beck said. “It’s the most any of us can hope for in this day and age.”
“No!” Donny said.
He cocked his rifle and aimed it at the screen.
“Let us out!” he said. “Right now. Or I swear, I’ll blow the whole damn City to hell.”
His eyes were fierce, raging pits. He meant it. Jamie knew he was more than capable of it.
“I can’t,” Dr. Beck said. “You’re too important to perish now. For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I fear things may get worse for you before they get better.”
“We never should have trusted you,” Jamie said, venom dripping from his lips.
“You were right to trust me,” Dr. Beck said. “Please know I do this for the right reasons, even if they’re not immediately clear to you now. Good luck on your journey. Oh, and I’d take a seat if I were you.”
After The Fall (Book 2): The City Page 12
