Authors: Joe McKinney
Mutated - 04 (27 page)
He didn’t argue. He got down on his back and wriggled his way underneath the wooden bridge.
When he was completely under he gestured for her to follow.
She wedged herself under the bridge and got close to him.
“You have enough room?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” he said, like they were divvying up bedsheets.
They waited. They heard men yelling orders and boats dragging bottom as they came ashore.
Then everything went silent.
Jimmy got scared for a second. Something was wrong. The only thing visible from where he and Gabi lay were a few bands of overcast summer sky through the slits between the boards, but he couldn’t shake the image of a handful of troops rounding the edges of the bridge with their weapons raised, a look of smug satisfaction on their faces.
But then the first zombies came ashore. He could tell who they were by the slow, shuffling slide their feet made as they climbed the bridge.
And they kept coming. Dozens. Hundreds. Their combined weight shook the bridge and rained bits of dirt down on their faces.
It went on and on.
He felt Gabi grab his hand and squeeze.
He looked at her, saw the fear and worry there.
“We’re okay,” he whispered.
A thin band of light illuminated her face. A shifting patchwork of shadows from the zombies passing overhead moved across her features, but they couldn’t disguise the worry he saw there.
Jimmy was uncertain how long it took the zombies to offload, but he guessed it was the better part of an hour. His back was aching and his mouth hurt from clenching his teeth for so long.
But at last it ended.
The final zombie passed overhead, and then the sky was clear again.
Gabi let out a sigh that sounded like a mountain of fear collapsing in on itself. Even Jimmy allowed himself a moment of thanks.
But all that went away when he heard footsteps on the bridge. It was a man this time. Jimmy could tell from the deliberate step, the control. The man was coming down from the hotel side of the compound, and he stopped directly above Jimmy, so that they had a clear view of the bare chested Red Man coming up from the river.
“I got your transmission, sir, but we haven’t found any signs they’ve been here.”
“They’re here.”
There was a pause. The guard sounded like a man unwilling to point out the obvious to his superior.
Finally, he said, “I ordered my men to search the hotel.”
“Have they searched the holding cell?”
“I have guards standing by in front of her cell, sir.”
“Have you talked with them?”
“Me? No. But they’re two of my best men.”
“Call them. Right now.”
The guard paused, then pulled a radio from his belt and keyed up. “Parker,” he said. “You monitoring?”
A pause.
“Parker?”
Nothing but silence.
“McCullers, you listening?”
Again, nothing.
“Shit,” the man said. He keyed up his radio again. “Stevenson, Lardner, Wharton, you guys head inside and check on Parker and McCullers. I want a report as soon as possible.”
“That won’t be necessary,” the Red Man said. “They’ve already made their way ashore and found their way to Niki Booth.”
“Sir, with all due respect . . .”
“What?” the Red Man asked.
Jimmy had missed something, some exchange between the two, but he recognized the threatening tone in the Red Man’s voice. The tone of menace and implied contempt in the Red Man’s voice was unmistakable.
“Sir,” the guard said, “I’m sure we’ll get them to answer up.”
“Me too,” the Red Man said.
He had been drawing near the guard as he spoke, and he suddenly lashed out and bit the man’s ear. There was a momentary struggle, two bodies shifting on the bridge’s wooden planks, and then the Red Man came away with a piece of the guard’s ear in his teeth.
Blood dripped onto the bridge and through the gaps in the boards, landing on Jimmy’s chest.
He did his best to ignore the hot wetness that spread across his shirt.
And also the pathetic screams of the wounded guard as he writhed in pain, his face soaked in blood.
The Red Man wiped the blood from his lips and licked his fingers clean. “I want Niki Booth,” he said. “And as many of the others as you can find. They’re here somewhere. Find them.”
From somewhere close by, Jimmy heard a man say, “Yes, sir. We’ll find them.”
But his eyes were glued to the black shirt facedown on the bridge. Jimmy shifted his gaze until he too was looking right at the injured man, right in his eyes, and he could see everything that ever mattered about the man ebbing away into nothingness.
C
HAPTER
21
HAPTER
21
Three zombies stumbled out of the darkened doorway. The first two were women who had been reduced to walking wrecks—bloody, open sores on their faces and arms, dried blood caked in their hair, hands trembling as they clutched the empty air in front of them. It was their hands that Nate noticed. The fingernails were too long, three inches at least. They were cracked and filthy, the knuckles swollen. He had seen a group of people in New Mexico years earlier, dying of starvation in the desert. Their hands had looked like that, trembling and fragile and horrible.
But without the long fingernails.
Behind the women was a young black man pulling himself along on half a leg. He hobbled badly. It slowed him down, but he looked far stronger than the two women, like maybe he had fed recently.
He would be trouble if Nate let him get too close.
One of the women reached for him, slashing her nails across his face with surprising force for someone so rickety looking. Nate flinched from the pain. He touched his face and his hand came away bloody.
“Bitch,” he said.
He made a fist and was about to lay her out with a haymaker when a hand grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled him out of the way.
“What the hell are you doing?” Niki said. “We don’t have time for this.”
She had put herself between him and the approaching zombies, and stood coiled, perfectly balanced, like a professional fighter. The same woman who had scratched Nate’s face tried it on Niki, but this time she didn’t connect. Instead, Niki grabbed the woman’s wrist with her left hand, pulled the zombie’s arm straight, and with the heel of her right hand struck hard on the back of the zombie’s elbow.
The arm broke with a sickening crunch, but the zombie didn’t cry out. She didn’t even grunt. Her expression didn’t even change. The lips were still pulled back, exposing cracked and broken teeth. The eyes never blinked. Niki spun her around and planted her boot into the back of the woman’s leg, driving her to her knees. Then she kicked her into the other two zombies, knocking them all to the floor.
Niki turned on Nate. “Get moving! I’ve got this.”
Nate backed away, amazed at how Niki moved. She had the grace of a featherweight boxer.
The young black man had gone down with the two women, but he didn’t stay down. He threw them to the side, rose up on his one good leg, and reached for Niki. He looked strong enough that he might have been able to snap her neck if he’d been able to get close enough, but Niki was faster. She grabbed his wrist, much as she’d done with the other zombie, but rather than pull his arm straight, she twisted the wrist over backward, doubling the man’s arm up on top of his shoulder. At the same time she spun him around so that he was facing away from her. She didn’t give him a chance to readjust. She grabbed his chin in one hand and his hair in the other and gave his head a brutal twist. There was an audible crack, and then his body sagged to the floor.
Nate’s mind was still trying to catch up with what she’d done when she started shoving him down the hallway.
“Come on,” she said. “Move it.”
Niki and Sylvia took the lead. Nate and Avery fell back a few steps, following them down one darkened hallway after another. He could hear the zombies behind them, moaning in the dark.
“I thought we would have lost them by now,” Avery said in a low whisper.
Nate nodded. “Ben’s back there.”
It was finally catching up with him, the fact that they’d left Ben back there to die. Nate felt sick to his stomach.
“Oh, Nate, I’m so sorry.”
She took his hand in hers and gave it a light squeeze. Nate looked down at her hand in surprise. He didn’t know what to say so he just gritted his teeth and nodded again. He had never been any good at things like this. He had no skill at describing how badly he was hurting inside. Nate wished he could tell her that having her here, next to him, even in this place, somehow made the pain a little easier to bear, but he didn’t have the words for that either.
They rounded another corner and the hallway opened up onto a landing. Beyond the landing was a railing that looked down over the hotel’s main lobby.
Outside, lightning flashed, brightening the windows. Already they could see drops of water speckling the glass.
But they could hear something else moving down below. They went over to the railing to investigate. Light was filtering in through the front door and long shadows stretched across the parquet floor and the marble fountain in the middle of the room. And then zombies poured in through the front door.
They kept coming and coming, tracking vast quantities of mud across the floor.
“There are hundreds of them,” Nate said.
Niki tried to shush him by grabbing his arm, but the damage was already done. A few of the zombies had heard him, and one by one the zombies all looked up.
The next instant, the moans started.
“Nice move, jackass,” Niki said.
Niki stared over the railing toward the landing on the opposite side of the lobby. There was a staircase there, and a few of the zombies were already mounting it.
“Well, we’re not going out the front door,” she said. “Avery, got any ideas?”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Can you get us to the convention center part of the hotel? When they brought me in I remember seeing a loading bay over there. They have trucks. Maybe they have one there we could take. Might be an easy way to get us out of here.”
A stuttering moan behind them caused Niki to turn toward the stairs. A man was staggering toward them on a broken leg, his bare feet leaving a smear of blood on the wood floors.
A large crowd was massing behind him, their eyes glinting in the dark.
“Which way, Avery?” Niki said.
Avery pointed to the far side of the balcony, opposite the stairs. “Through that hallway over there.”
“Is there a stairwell that way?”
“I think so. There are elevators over there. The stairs are probably next to those.”
“Good.”
“I don’t understand,” Nate said. “I thought you were looking for the convention center.”
“Don’t you ever shut up?” Niki said.
“I’m just asking.”
“Look, we’ve got zombies behind us, and zombies in front of us, but none above us.” She waited for him to say something, one eyebrow arched. “You understand? Any of this sinking in?” She paused. “Oh, forget it.”
She turned to Sylvia.
“This is turning into a hell of a rescue.”
They got to the stairs and went up to the third floor.
A few zombies managed to climb the stairs behind them, but they weren’t able to keep up, and soon Niki was leading them through darkened hallways, past rooms that hadn’t been occupied in at least eight years, probably longer.
They reached the convention center part of the hotel a few minutes later. Though the walls were grimy with years of river rot and humidity, most of the signage was still in place, and it didn’t take long to find the loading dock, which was a large cement bay, like a subterranean parking garage, only crowded with stacks of moldering wooden pallets and fifty-five-gallon drums.
“Look at that,” Niki said. “See that truck?”
They were standing at the mouth of a hallway that gave on to the back of the bay. From their position, they could see a big black pickup truck near the overhead doors of one of the docks.
“That looks like one of the same trucks they were driving when they surprised us in St. Louis,” Sylvia said.
“Yeah,” agreed Niki. “At least we know they work.”
Sylvia asked, “So how do we do this?”
“We’ve got to get that overhead door open. After that, we’ll see what’s what. I think most of the activity’s probably gonna be down by the river, and if that’s the case, then we should be able to get a good head start in that truck. Enough that we might be able to lose whoever they send after us.”
“If that thing’s got gas, you mean.”
Niki gave Sylvia a broad smile. “Come on, Sylvia, a little confidence. We got this.”
Niki trotted across the bay. The others followed along behind her, but at a cautious distance. Nate’s head was on a swivel, looking around for signs of movement and a place to take cover if anything happened. He had never liked playing soldier like this.
“Take that side,” Niki told Sylvia. She turned to Avery. “You two are gonna have to ride in the back. That okay?”
But before either of them had a chance to answer, Sylvia let out a curse.
“What is it?” Niki asked.
She moved around to the passenger side of the truck, where Sylvia was standing, and her shoulders sagged.
“Damn it,” she said.
“What’s wrong?” Avery asked.
“No front wheel on this side. They’ve got it up on a jack.”
“Oh,” said Avery.
Nate looked from one woman to the next. “So what do we do?”
“I guess we’re back to the original plan,” Niki said. She turned to Sylvia. “You said you had a boat?”
“It was boarded out on the river. But the two people who brought us here are trying to get us a boat.”
“You brought somebody with you? Who?”
“Jimmy and Gabi Hinton. Their boat’s the
Sugar Jane
.”
Sugar Jane
.”
“The Hintons? The same ones who dumped all that beef they were transporting for our compound?”
“Yeah,” said Sylvia.
Niki shook her head. “Unbelievable. This just keeps getting better and better.”
“Right now they’re the only hope we’ve got,” Avery said.
“I know, Avery,” Niki said. She put a hand on her cousin’s shoulder. “I know. We have to get out of here first, though.”
Niki scanned the wall where the overhead doors were.
“No smaller doors,” she said. “We’re gonna have to risk cracking open one of these bigger ones. I don’t want to risk opening it up all the way, though. Everybody okay with crawling under?”
They all nodded.
“Okay.”
She went over to the nearest door and had her hand out to turn the handle when the door lurched and slowly started to rise.
Niki froze.
One by one all the doors down the line started to rise as well. Sunlight and rain poured in through the openings. Nate could see legs, and then torsos, and finally the shadowed faces of hundreds of zombies, waiting to pour through the doors. Behind them, far behind them, were the Red Man’s soldiers, riding in black pickups like the one they’d just tried to steal. Even through the rain Nate could see the startled looks on the black shirts’ faces.
“Run!” Niki screamed. She was pointing wildly toward a rusting metal staircase along a side wall. “Up there. Hurry, go!”
They ran for it, mounting the stairs just ahead of the first of the zombies. Avery was just ahead of Nate. She was taking the stairs one at a time, her legs pumping hard, her breath coming in short, shallow gasps. One of the zombies hit him hard from behind and he tumbled forward, falling into Avery, knocking her face-first into the stairs.
The zombie was on Nate’s back, clawing at him, ripping his shirt, tearing at the skin of his back. The pain was intense, like being scratched with burning wire, and he screamed.
When he opened his eyes again he could see Avery beneath him. Mangled hands were trying to reach around him to grab her, but he raised himself up to a push-up position and shielded her with his body.
“Run!” he screamed.
The staircase was shaking badly and more bodies were piling on top of him. He could feel his arms getting weak. He couldn’t hold it.
Avery was trying to crawl out from under him, but between the shaking of the stairs and Nate on top of her, she could barely move.
“Niki, help her!”
Nate saw a flash of black in front of him, then two hands locking onto Avery and pulling her clear.
He collapsed beneath the weight of the zombies on his back. One of them clamped onto his arm and bit down. He screamed and yanked it back, pulling the zombie’s bloody face toward him. One look in the thing’s eyes and he knew this was a Stage II or Stage III zombie, smarter, faster, more aggressive.
The zombie snarled at him. Its mouth was open, snapping at him like a pit bull, teeth freshly stained with Nate’s own blood.
That was enough to get Nate moving. He rolled sideways, shifting the zombie still clawing his back to one side. When he turned over Nate’s boots were almost touching the railing. He planted both feet firmly on the metal rail and pushed with everything he had.
The zombies fell down the stairs, even as more scrambled over top of them.
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