Desolation, p.36
Desolation, page 36
Yeah, sure—because zombie mechanics made any sense whatsoever.
I almost let out the hysterical laugh that was bubbling up inside of me.
Instead, I tried to take inventory.
“Osprey? Jared? Still with me, or did you get really hungry all of a sudden?”
“Even if you feed him brains, he’s not getting any smarter,” Jared taunted.
I thought I heard him try to sit up, but his restraints also held fast.
“Still here,” Osprey offered. “Still can’t believe you let that asshole—”
“Yeah, well, that’s not important now,” I ground out, almost happy about my annoyance cutting through the twin dread and grief that was threatening to choke me up. “And doesn’t change the fact that we’re helpless like damn newborn kittens.”
Just how true that was I realized when none of the guys had any wisecracks ready—or a solution.
Motion near the door made a new spike of fear drive my ire away.
Were the soldiers back? Or worse—Kas?
Something popped, immediately followed by plastic, metal, and glass exploding somewhere overhead. When I craned my neck, looking around frantically, my eyes fell on a dark lump of something in the corner. A camera.
A destroyed camera, bits and pieces still falling to the ground.
What the—
A single, slight figure stepped into the room, taking a quick look around. A woman wearing the same camouflage fatigues as the soldiers, her dark hair in a tight bun peeking out from underneath a beret. I immediately recognized her, although I’d only seen her once in my life—atop a warehouse in a burning city.
Jared’s team’s sniper, from Charlotte.
I’d assumed she must have died in the firebombing, possibly to buy the others a few seconds so they could escape the burning hell.
Apparently not.
While I was still debating what to make of this, she put her gun down, the barrel obscenely long with a silencer screwed on.
“Seriously?” I heard her whisper-hiss as she got out a knife—and started slicing through Jared’s restraints, working as quickly and efficiently as vitriol was dripping from her scathing words. “I’m used to a lot of bullshit from you, but this level of incompetence is beyond what I thought even an asshat like you capable of!”
As soon as his hand was free, Jared ripped the needle out of his neck.
“Nice to see you, too, Neve.”
She clearly would have none of that, continuing to free him.
“I fucking told you to check for trackers! What else do you need? You got the GPS coordinates of the crates. I told you exactly how to get there and even where to find cars to carry them off! Do you really need someone to babysit you every single step of the way?”
His laugh held a definite edge. His upper body free now, he sat up, waiting impatiently for her to finish with the last restraints.
Instead, she flipped him off, leaving him to fumble with the clasps while she quickly stepped over to Osprey, starting on his hands.
“Yeah, well, you forgot to tell me that your boss had even more trackers in the magazines,” Jared griped as he finished freeing himself. “Just so you know, intel that gets me killed in the end is still shitty intel.”
The sniper hesitated for a moment, then quickly continued sawing away on Osprey’s other side.
Like me, Osprey listened intently to their exchange, quite bewildered but not protesting the impromptu rescue effort—if it was one, and not just the next stage in someone’s fucked-up mind games.
Oh, it would take me weeks to shake off this new level of paranoia!
“Didn’t know about that,” Neve admitted. “You have no clue how insanely hard it was to get even that much information, and find a way to get it to you without getting caught. If you think these assholes are anal about their security measures, you’ve seen nothing yet. They’re almost worse with their own personnel than with their prisoners.”
Jared grimaced as he rubbed the side of his neck, his hands coming away bloody. “Somehow I doubt that.” I saw him glance somewhere toward the back of the room—presumably at the bled-out zombie. At least I guessed there couldn’t be much juice left in her. Judging from how quickly he looked away, he must have decided that was shit to sort through for another day.
Done with Osprey’s arms, Neve finally moved over to me, attacking my restraints with renewed vigor.
“Whatever,” she ground out. “I have maybe twenty seconds left. If anyone comes through that door before you can leave, you have to knock me out, or else I’m as good as dead. Follow the corridor, then turn left, left, straight, and right. You need to get through two security doors. The codes are—”
She continued prattling off the instructions, never missing a beat as she stepped around the bed to work on freeing my other arm. Jared joined her, unbuckling the restraints around my feet while Osprey about got done with his own.
Jared repeated the codes back to the sniper.
She paused for a second after slicing through the last of my restraints, the two of them briefly locking gazes. Then, she was gone, as quickly as she had appeared, not another word said between them.
Jared glanced after her, then looked back at me.
“I’ll explain—”
“Don’t fucking care,” I rasped. “Grab a gun. We need to get the fuck out of here.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
While I crawled off the bed, Jared and Osprey got busy searching the dead soldiers on the ground. I would have loved to claim that they were simply unconscious, but with necks bent like that, I didn’t need to search for a pulse. When I saw Jared liberate a knife from one of them, I was tempted to tell him to make sure to cut their brain stems to literally cut down on the danger potential for if they turned but then thought better of it.
Leave the fuckers to deal with the issues they’d created themselves.
Shit, but Kas the zombie was a million times more deadly than Kas had ever been.
My heart seized up at the very thought of him, but I quickly pushed all that away.
No time for grieving now. We were a long shot from safe, and it was still entirely possible that we’d be dead five minutes down the road.
I wordlessly accepted the carbine Osprey pushed at me, same as a spare magazine. Jared went as far as to pull off the uniform jacket of one of the soldiers, ignoring the blood that had soaked into the collar. After a moment’s hesitation, Osprey did the same. Jared eyed me askance, but I shook my head. All of them would have dwarfed me, and the last thing I needed was for my weapon to get tangled up in what was only flimsy protection at best. I would have gone for a plate carrier, but none of them had worn one. Made sense since in here, teeth, claws, brute strength, and fucking bacteria were what would likely do them in. Or, in their case, had.
I saw Jared hesitate by the door as he considered what to do about the drained zombie. All three of us seemed unanimously reluctant to even look at her, let alone consider what to do with her. The mere thought of what they’d done—to us—was enough to make my skin crawl, my fingers spasming as I forced myself to keep from reaching up to scratch my neck.
“Everyone doing okay so far?” I asked, simply to put a lid on my niggling paranoia that as soon as I turned away from them, they’d instantly convert and come after me.
Let’s be real for a moment. If Kas was capable of this much carnage in an instant, Osprey or Jared would be beyond a fucking menace.
“A little off but I think that’s mostly the adrenaline,” Osprey offered up, his fingers tightening around his newly liberated weapon. “Ready if you are.”
I caught Jared’s gaze across the room. He didn’t say anything, just jerked his head toward the corridor. His expression wasn’t quite unreadable, but more closed off than I was sure I could have managed. Except that, very likely, my brain had defaulted to push-through-suppressed-trauma mode and gave me that vacant stare I’d really fucking hoped to never have to see again when I looked into a mirror.
No mirrors present in this hellhole that I could see, so I was safe for now.
Jared cautiously glanced outside, then stepped into the corridor to do a more thorough check. I fully expected him to take the lead now, but he gestured for us to precede him. Since I was closer to the door than Osprey, I went first. He seemed oddly content to just follow along, a little shellshocked himself.
Well, boohoo. Get in fucking line and draw a number. Being scared shitless and overwhelmed was no fucking excuse for anything.
I told myself that it kind of made sense for me to take point. I was smaller, lighter, and my sneakers were less prone to make some noise than their boots. I was also convinced that, if push came to shove, Osprey would be hesitant to shoot at another human being, even if they were about to shoot him themselves. I felt no such qualms, at least not until I got the fuck out of here and had a chance to decompress and roll around in old and fresh trauma alike.
Yeah, it made a lot of sense to keep Osprey between Jared and me, who I doubted had similar qualms as my friend.
The corridor was empty, but a series of bloody smears on the walls made it obvious which way the party we were inadvertently following had gone. I didn’t even try to sift through the mess inside of me that was one twisted ball of fear for Kas that was now irrational and obsolete but at the same time impossible to suppress—and very reasonable panic at the very idea of running into him. Would I put an end to him, even if it killed me inside? Yes, but in a cold, calculating way, it made a lot more sense not to. The longer he was running amok in this facility, the more distraction he was, and the higher our chances of escaping unscathed.
Or as unscathed as you could consider yourself to be, pumped full of fucking zombie goo—
I forced my thoughts into a momentary hard stop. Right now was not the time for this, damnit!
A corridor crossed ours ahead. I couldn’t yet see where it led, but off to the left, I could hear shouts—and gunfire.
Just our luck that the sniper had instructed us to turn left.
I understood why when I finally reached the intersection. Ahead and to the right, I could see doors that seemed to lead into a rabbit warren of maintenance rooms and nothing more. To the left, the corridor extended for another thirty feet before it opened up into a large hall. I saw pallets stacked high with crates and what looked like the back of an armored vehicle standing every which way in the badly lit open space.
I waited until Jared had caught up with us before I made my way to that door, my pulse speeding up once more.
More shouts and more gunfire, but none of them coming from close to the door.
Once I got there, I listened intently. Only when I didn’t hear anything from my immediate vicinity did I chance a quick look outside.
My assessment of the hall had been right, although on closer inspection, it looked more like the loading dock of a large cargo terminal—which it might just have been. There was no artificial lighting in there, the dim illumination coming from a handful of small windows high up toward the ceiling. Dust tickled my nose and almost made me sneeze, but I managed to suppress giving away our position just yet.
A second, longer look revealed that we were in luck. Whatever was going on out there was happening in the far right corner of the hall—and our instructions were to turn left once more.
I hesitated for another moment. When the next round of guns got discharged, I stepped through the door and started down alongside the wall, trying where possible to keep crates and shelves between me and whatever was going on down there.
Even though I was out of sight—or hoped that was the case—I winced and jerked with every shout and shot.
And then it got quiet, before a loud, guttural howl reverberated through the entire hall.
Somewhere deeper into the building, it got picked up by several more voices.
It was about time we got out of here!
At the back of the hall, there was a door, standing slightly ajar. The room behind was well lit—or rather, another hallway, still set in a minimalist style but now more office building vibes than industrial setting. Several doors led away to the left but only a single one to the right, at the very end of the hallway—and it had a number pad next to it.
Bingo.
It might have been smart to keep moving forward as silently as possible, but the screaming behind us got louder and louder, and I so wasn’t going to stick around to find out whether it was the opening call for a feeding frenzy or whether we were still possibly on the menu. So I sprinted down the hallway, already reciting the numbers of the first code in my head so that when I reached the door, I was ready to punch them in.
The lock disengaged with a beep and the door opened, sunlight blinding me.
Blinking furiously, I stuck my head out, just waiting for a shout followed by a bullet slamming right into my temple or between my eyes.
Neither happened. When my eyes finally focused, I found myself in what looked like a private parking lot, only completely abandoned. A road led off to the right, following the outline of the building, but I ignored it in favor of the door set into the concrete wall to the left.
While everything inside me screamed for me to keep running, I was careful as I crossed the lot, looking everywhere to see if I could catch a glimpse of any guards. I thought I saw someone cross the road at the other end of the huge hall, but between the bushes planted to the side and my vision still swimming with tears, I couldn’t be sure. Even if, I was certain I was far enough away that I wouldn’t have looked any different from any of the personnel that was supposed to be out here.
The second code worked just as well as the first, although this door I had to pull inward, needing almost all my strength with how heavy it was. Osprey was right there to help me, pulling it the rest of the way open while I already slipped outside.
There were no guards in sight, but I quickly ran across the strip of grass and into the trees nearby, waiting anxiously for the guys to join me.
We were still somewhere up in the mountains, forested hills spreading out on all sides. Not much of a surprise, seeing as we hadn’t spent that much time in transit. Judging from the heat, it was early afternoon—also in accordance with everything else. From the outside, the compound looked even more like some kind of cargo terminal, although from my current position, I didn’t see any large roads leading away.
Jared was the last to step through the door. He took his time casting around, then aimed for something off to the side rather than join Osprey and me. Vexed, I strode toward where he stepped into the trees, ready to confront him—only to find him standing next to two dirt bikes, half-hidden in the underbrush.
Well. What a pleasant surprise.
“Is anything about your perceived competence even your merit, or has it always been someone else’s work that you’re just claiming for yourself?”
Jared didn’t pause for a second as he grabbed one of the bikes, checked that the key was in the ignition, and pulled it onto the dirt track leading away into the trees.
“Still takes skill to make other people’s fucked-up theoretical plans work out in real life,” he offered, then gave us both an annoyed look as if to ask why we were still standing there, doing nothing.
My annoyance went up another notch when Osprey pushed past me to take possession of the other dirt bike—and simply from the way he approached the vehicle, I already knew that he didn’t know the first thing about motorcycles.
“Can you drive that?” I asked, not caring to keep my ire out of my tone.
Osprey paused and looked up. “I’m sure it’s not that hard—”
I cursed under my breath and pushed him away, grabbing the handlebars so I could push it onto the trek behind Jared’s bike.
“I’m driving,” I told Osprey. “You get on behind me and hold on for dear life. Try to just let yourself move as one with me and the bike. Maybe that way we stand a chance of not dying three seconds in.”
Osprey scoffed at my obvious disregard for his non-existent skills.
“And you know how to ride that thing?”
I gave him a deadpan stare. Did I really have to spell this out after everything we’d been through? Judging from Jared’s resurfacing smirk, he was having a field day watching us. If not for the fact that the two men together on a bike were obviously too heavy for the relatively weak engines these things came with, I would have left them standing here in the dirt. Because I, on my own, without extra weight or baggage? They’d have never stood a chance in hell of catching up to me.
“I’m a backwater Montana country girl! I knew how to ride dirt bikes and quads before I could run.”
Jared snorted. “And here I thought it was shooting a rifle before you could run.”
I gave him my best smile. “Turns out, I learned a lot early on, or was really way too lazy about moving quickly on my own two legs.” I paused for effect, if only for a second. “Can we go now? I’d really like to fucking leave this shithole behind, if you don’t mind.”
“Yes,” Osprey interjected. “We need to warn the others.”
Momentary silence answered him as Jared and I shared a glance.
Yes, that was definitely the right thing to do. The good thing. Warn our friends and community that they had a fucking homicidal spy sitting in their very midst, like a spider in the center of her web.
And no, there shouldn’t have been a hint of doubt in my mind about what to do.
Fuck.
I was surprised when Jared agreed.
“Those three guns we have won’t make a difference in the long run,” he suggested. “But good, capable people by your side will.”
I had a very good idea who he was referring to—and I wasn’t sure whether Osprey and Dharma made the cut.
I was pretty sure that I did.
That left me way more conflicted than reassured.
Rather than dwell on that, I climbed onto the bike, not surprised that it was just a little too high to perfectly fit my frame. How the much smaller sniper had even gotten them here I didn’t know, but then when you had to, many things worked well enough. Not having a helmet, goggles, gloves, or even a jacket wasn’t too bad, although the lack of that would get annoying if I managed to send us tumbling onto the road somewhere along the way.
