The Night Sweeper: Assassin: A Zombie Conspiracy Novel (The Sweeper Chronicles Book 2) (10 page)

I'm not sure how long I've been lying on the cot, or
for that matter, how long I've even been awake. What I do know is that
I'm hurting. A lot. Archer's crony worked on me for fifteen minutes
before I lost consciousness, but he did his job well.

He concentrated his blows on soft tissue areas, stomach,
lower back, the meat of my thighs. No place where bones could be easily
broken. He also didn't use enough force to rupture internal organs.

This tells me several things. Archer doesn't want
me dead or crippled – yet. That most likely means we're just getting
started. I like to think I'm a tough guy, but only a fool wouldn't feel
the nauseating dread churning inside me at the thought of what's to come, but I
bite back the fear, determined to do what it takes not to be around for round two.

My mouth is dry, my tongue sticking to the roof of
it. I try to sit up in hopes of finding some water in the room, but
collapse again as a fresh wave of torture ripples through my midsection.
My insides feel warm and mushy, a sure sign of internal bleeding.

I think of Ming and wonder what brutality she's being
subjected to. It's all my fault. And after she's suffered so much
already at Archer's hands. I hope she's not dead, but a part of me knows
that would be more merciful.

The man on the train. That must be it. He
must have recognized me and alerted the authorities. Archer was ready for
me. How could I have been so stupid?

I turn my head to the side. The cell is tiny.
The walls are unpainted concrete blocks, no toilet, no sink, no
chairs. The only things in here are me and the cot. The door is
thick-looking steel. There are no windows.

A picture of Mira lying in stasis in a tube flashes
through my mind, and I groan. I close my eyes and take stock of my
situation. I'm in pain, but functional. I'm not sure where in the
complex I am. It could be one of a number of storage rooms on the
schematics. There were no prison cells before.

I hear a rustling sound outside my door followed by the
jangling of keys.

Crap. I’m too late. I guess they’re back for more. The
door opens with a creak and I don’t even bother to open my eyes.

“You’re friendly neighborhood piñata reporting for
duty,” I say.

“Sheesh, you’re pathetic,” a female voice says. “Get up
you pansy. Do you want out of here or not?”

My eyes flash open to see Ming standing in the doorway,
the limp form of a guard crumpled on the floor behind her, the guard's gun in
her hand. A small trail of dried blood runs from her mouth to her chin, but
otherwise, she looks okay. A lot better than me. I sit up quickly, painfully,
and she comes over to help me up.

“How did you get away?” I say.

“Girl power,” she says. “And what the heck were
you
doing, trying to daydream your way out?”

She pulls me quickly to the doorway, scanning both
sides of the hall as she moves us down and into the stairwell.

“For your information, I’ve had a rough day,” I say.

She laughs quietly. “You’re a Sweeper. We eat rough
days for breakfast.” She reaches behind her back and produces another gun
from her waistband. “Here, I brought you a gift.”

I take it. “Now you're just showing off.”

We move up two flights of stairs and peek through the
small window in the door to make sure no one’s on the other side. So far, we’ve
been lucky. I recognize now that we’re in part of the training barracks, and
I’m hoping all the recruits are otherwise occupied at this time of day, not
that I know what time of day it actually is. Ming moves through the door and
turns right. I know where she’s headed. There’s a parking garage directly in
front of us. It’s a fifty yard straight shot down the hallway and we’re almost
to the door when footsteps round the corner behind us.

I see a glimpse of the armed men raising their weapons
and Ming hits the door headlong, me right behind her. There's movement ahead,
and I immediately know something's wrong. My awareness shifts into hyper mode
instinctively and I throw out my left arm, shoving Ming violently to the side a
fraction of a second before machine gun fire rips through the space her head
just occupied, and into the wall behind us. The soldiers that had been
following us in the hallway scramble for cover as the door slams shut. To
my left, Ming crawls behind an SUV and I roll behind a support pillar.
Just once I'd like to catch a break.

The gunfire dies down after a few seconds.

“You're not getting out of here alive,” a voice shouts.
“Give it up. There're four of us and two of you, and we got the tactical
advantage.”

Thanks for the info you buffoon. His voice gives
me his exact location. I steal a quick peek around the pillar, and a bullet
smacks the concrete dangerously close to my face. I pull back, but now I have
what I need to know.

My back still pressed to the pillar, I calculate the
precise angle without thought and swing my arm backwards and out to the side of
the pillar, my gun upside down. One quick shot and I smirk with
satisfaction as I hear the large industrial light that was right above the man
who shouted at us shatter into a million pieces, raining sparks and shards of
glass down on top of him as he swears in irritation. Not lethal, but enough of
a distraction that I can steal another glance to place the other three men.

I see fabric visible underneath a car thirty feet
away. Fifty feet down to the left, a man’s head peeks over a trunk, his
machine gun trained on Ming's position. About halfway to the exit, another
gunner crouches in the open. Really? Okay, he's just an idiot. Last but not
least, the man I peppered with glass is behind the nearest car, his face
distorted by the glass, but visible through the windshield and drivers' side
window. This is going to be tricky.

"Ming," I say. She looks over at me, still
crouched behind the vehicle. I notice in passing that she at least has the
common sense to crouch behind the tire providing additional coverage for her
legs. That's what makes us professionals and these other guys amateurs. I mouth
the word gun, and imitate a motion of throwing it. She catches on and tosses
the gun across the expanse. I catch it and double check it to make sure a round
is chambered.

The commanding officer says something low when he sees
the gun arcing through the air to me. I look back at Ming, judging the distance
between us, and hope it's enough for her to hear and not the others. I whisper
harshly in her direction. "On the count of three, poke your head out and
back as fast as possible."

"What?! Are you crazy?"

"Just trust me, okay?"

Ming rolls her eyes like I've lost my mind and mouths
the word "fine". She also gives me the finger.

I hold up my hand and start the countdown with my
fingers. One…Ming sits a little taller, bracing herself. Two…I can see her take
a deep breath. Three…She quickly raises her head above the hood of the vehicle
as fast as possible and right back down. I move a fraction of a second after
her, my senses at full capacity, spinning from behind the pillar into the open,
my guns trained, praying the men are still in the positions they were a few
moments before.

As I had hoped, all of their eyes are drawn to Ming's quick
movement, the man crouching in the open already beginning to squeeze the
trigger to unleash a hail of bullets where Ming sprang up. In a flash, I
squeeze off a shot with each hand. To my left, a bullet plows through the
commanding officer's head through the windows of the car. Straight ahead, my
other shot smacks into the eye of the crouching gunman. With no loss of
movement, I fire two more rounds simultaneously. One hits the gunman peeking
over the hood of the car squarely between the eyes, a cloud of blood puffing
out from behind him.

The other shot is the hardest, but my angle is perfect
and the bullet ricochets off the concrete under a car and hits the knee of the
last soldier behind it. He screams and falls onto his back, cradling his
shattered knee in his hands. I squeeze off a last shot that nearly follows the
path of the first, only this one blasts into his temple, and his body goes
limp.

I stand there a moment to make sure no one else has
sneaked in. When I feel assured we're in the clear, I look over at Ming who is
standing now, gazing with a dumbfounded expression at the bodies littering the
parking garage. She gives me an incredulous look, and I shrug.

Without further ado, she kicks out the window of the
SUV. I pop off a couple of shots at the door to the hallway just to make sure
the others don't come rushing out anytime soon. After several seconds, Ming has
successfully hot-wired the SUV and the engine roars to life. I run around to
the passenger door, fling it open to jump inside, but I don't quite make it.

My left shoulder is suddenly on fire with pain and I'm
thrown violently into the open door, blood flying everywhere and drenching my
shirt almost instantly. Ming leans over and grabs me, hauling me bodily into
the SUV at the same time she kicks the accelerator and swings the vehicle
towards the entrance of the parking garage. I manage to get my door shut and
catch a glimpse of armed men piling out of the door behind us, multiple shuts
pinging on the body of the SUV.

Ming crashes through the locked gate of the parking
garage and we're out into the night, accelerating wildly.

Slow realization sinks in. My attempt to keep the men
behind the door obviously failed, and I have the gaping bullet hole to show for
it. It passed cleanly through, but it was a high-powered rifle, and I'm
bleeding profusely.

I dumbly reach up with my right hand, try to grip both
sides of the wound, and scream at the increase of agony. But I press down as
hard as I can, hoping to stanch the bleeding.

Beside me, Ming shouts something, and reaches her free
hand over to help me put pressure on the wound. I don't know how long we drive
because my consciousness is fuzzy, but it feels like a long time. It doesn't
appear than anyone is giving chase, and for that I'm thankful. Back to the
matter at hand, I've had more injuries than I care to remember, but we can't
get the bleeding to stop on this one, and I'm getting dangerously close to
blacking out from blood loss.

Time becomes relative as I struggle to overcome the
pain, wavering in and out of consciousness. My head swims and I think of Mira,
the fact that I could die. If I die, she's dead, and since I missed the hit on
Archer, she may end up being dead anyway. Ming keeps telling me to hang on,
and suddenly swings the heavy SUV off the interstate and up an exit ramp.

“Where are we going?” I say groggily.

“I'm following the signs from the interstate for a
hospital.”

“That doesn't make sense,” I stammer. At least, I think
I say it out loud, but I'm not really sure. “There are no working hospitals out
here.”

“I know,” she says, “but that doesn't mean an abandoned
hospital might not still have some medical supplies inside that were left
behind.”

When I don't respond, she gives my shoulder a hard
squeeze, I guess to keep me alert, so I tell her what I think of her ancestors
and lack of gentleness, but the pain does help clear my mind, and I shake
myself in an effort to keep my awareness high.

We streak through what used to be a medium-sized city,
the restaurants and hotels lining the street darkened and dilapidated from
disuse. I notice the periodic blue and white “H” signs that Ming follows until
we pull up in a semicircular drive that was once the ER entrance of a
decent-sized hospital.

Ming jumps out of the door and runs around to my side
where I'm slumping against the dashboard. She throws open the door, leans me
back, and slaps me in the face.

“Snap out of it, Cray!”

She helps me out of the car, and moving helps clear my
head a little more.

We approach the entrance to the emergency department.
Chains hold the sliding doors closed from the inside, a massive padlock hanging
from them. Ming releases her grip on me and pauses to make sure I don't
collapse. I wobble, but stay up, and she turns, walks forward, and kicks the
glass panel beside the door. It trembles from her kick, but otherwise does
nothing. She looks back at me and I manage to roll my eyes at her.

“It's tempered,” I slur. “You can't break it.”

She just stares at me a moment and turns back to the
glass. Her eyes close, and she breathes deeply for a couple of seconds like
she's meditating. Then, in a lightning flash, her eyes pop open and she
releases another massive kick to the panel. This time, the glass gives with a
pop, and shatters inward in large chunks.

I just look at her. That was impressive, but there's
another problem.

“I'm impressed,” I murmur with a tongue that feels like
it's not totally in my control. “But you probably attracted every Fester
within earshot. If you wanted to make that much noise you could have just shot
it.”

She smirks at me. “Which is why we need to go inside,
fathead. So if you can stop gawking and move, we can get out of the open.”

I get a fleeting impression of the differences between
Mira and Ming. Mira is playful, sarcastic, flirty. Ming is just a butt. A
relatively nice person underneath, but still a butt. In fact, she reminds me of
myself.

I stumble forward, the motion causing a fresh streak of
fire through my shoulder, and causing me to stop again.

“Think you can walk unassisted?” she asks with a smart
aleck tone.

“Let me shoot you and see how you feel after bleeding
out.” She doesn't seem to think my joke is funny. “I think...I can manage,” I
say. “Lead the way.”

Despite my affirmation, she walks over and puts my arm
around her shoulders again and gingerly helps me across the threshold.

We move deeper into the hospital, Ming leading us past
an array of desks and chairs, all covered with a thick film of dust. I
worry about leaving the broken window behind us. Festers aren't trackers,
but they're drawn to movement and noise. Ming made a lot of the latter and I
don't like taking chances.

“They could follow us in,” I say through a pain-induced
haze.

“I'll keep my ears open,” Ming snaps, “but right now
keeping you alive is my biggest worry.”

We move through the double doors of what used to be the
ER treatment wing. It's pretty dark inside, but there's a panel of huge windows
to our right providing enough moonlight to move about and see a little. I try
to help Ming rummage through the place looking for any surgical supplies that
might have been left behind, but end up tripping and falling to my knees. I
feel like all of the energy has left my body, but she quickly runs back and
powerfully lifts me from the ground, helping me to one of the beds in one of
the treatment cubicles.

“Stay here and don’t move again,” she says sternly, and
then she’s gone. It takes about ten minutes before she returns, and I’m seeing
spots in front of my eyes and my vision blurs in and out of focus. She has her
hand behind her back and gives me a funny look. “Okay, I’ve got some stuff to
fix you up, but I need your help.”

“Medical supplies? I ask.

“Not exactly,” she says with slight hesitation. I’m not
liking where this is headed.

“Ming? What are you planning to do?”

“Don’t worry,” she says, “you won’t be awake for it. I
found something that will put you out. Some anesthetic.”

There's something about the way she says “anesthetic”
that sends off warning bells in my head. She sets something on the floor that I
can’t see, and leans over me, ripping off my shirt and examining the wound in
the sparse light. I’m about to ask a question when she speaks again.

“Cray, I need you to clench your teeth together.”

“Okay,” I say now with no small amount of trepidation.
I’m not trusting this one bit, but I do as she says. If we can’t get the
bleeding to stop, it won’t matter anyway. She stands over me and sudden
realization hits me. I know what her “anesthetic” is. “Don’t you dare…” I start
to say through clenched teeth right as her fist slams into my jaw and
everything goes dark.

Sometime later, I come awake feeling like my shoulder
is being detached from my body. I scream, and try to get my eyes to focus, but
something smacks me again, and the unconsciousness returns.

I don’t know how long I’ve been out, but when I come to
again, I would prefer to knock myself back out. I don’t know what hurts worse,
my jaw, or my shoulder. No…wait. My shoulder. Definitely my shoulder.

Ming is sitting nearby, the smell of cooking meat in
the air.

“Sorry,” she says simply. I glance on a nearby shelf
and see an acetylene torch sitting beside a small flint.

“Sonuva…”

“It was the best I could do,” she says, immediately
defensive.

I groan. “So the cooking smell?”

She breaks eye contact. “Yeah, that would be you,” she
responds wincing.

This time, I just moan. She stands up and hands me two
small white pills. Here, take two of these and call me in the morning, she
says.

I take the pills in my hand. “What are they?”

“Uh…breath mints,” she says with a twinkle in her eyes.

I pop them in my mouth and stifle an agonized laugh.
She wasn't joking.

Time passes slowly, and Ming tends to me as best she
can. I'm floundering in agony and weakness, but there's an equal amount of
mental torment as I think of Mira, and Archer, and Damian. It feels like
days, but Ming assures me it's only been a couple of hours. I ask about
the window, but nothing has followed us inside. We got lucky there.

“So what are you gonna do?” Ming asks quietly,
interrupting my reverie, and voicing the very question I don't have a good
answer for.

I lie there for a while before I answer. The
desperation I feel is overwhelming, the sense of loss and failure. It would be
nearly impossible to find Archer now. I'm sure he's hidden away in a hole so
deep the sun will never reach him. And even if I could, I'm sure he's
entrenched by so many bodyguards the Hulk wouldn't be able to get through.

“I don't know,” I say. I'm shocked at the raspy sound
of my own voice. I think of Mira, her broken body lying helplessly in Damian's
power, waiting for me to return, to save her from death. I feel nauseated.

I look at Ming in the darkness, her face obscured by
the shadows. If I use my imagination a little, I can almost see Mira sitting
there, her dark hair lit by the little moonlight filtering in, her eyes
shining, her smile breathtaking; but it's not her, and no amount of wanting can
make it so.

But then it is. I see her, whole, unharmed, her body
strong and restored. She leans in and places a cool hand on my shoulder. I
start to say her name, but as quickly as that, the image of Mira vanishes and I
shake off the hallucination.

I sigh and turn my thoughts in another direction. Try
as I may, I can't come up with a good plan. There just aren't any good options.
“I guess the only thing I can do is lie.” My words come in a slow
tumble. “Tell Damian that Archer's dead, pray he doesn't have a way to
know otherwise, or that he'll even trust me in the first place. Or maybe I'll
just try to force him to do it. I don't see any other way.”

Ming doesn't say anything. I can tell she knows as well
as I do that both options are a long shot, and her recognition only strengthens
the torture of the situation.

“She's changed you,” she says. “You used to be so insecure
around women you could barely speak. And now, look at you, able to hold a real
conversation with me. I assume it's because of her. How did it happen?”

I get the sense she's trying to distract me, to keep me
from wallowing in the mire of hopelessness and pain, but I appreciate it
nonetheless.

I clear my parched throat. “When I met her, I
thought she was the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen.” Ming makes a noise of
mocked offense as if I've slighted her. “Anyway,” I continue, “I was a mess
around her at first, but then we were so distracted by the mission, and things
happened so fast...” I search for the right words. “I guess, in a way, her
confidence in me gave me confidence in myself. Once I knew that she liked me,
it was...empowering, and then I had no reason to fear. Now that she's in my
life, there's no need to be afraid. If she loves me, it doesn't matter what
anyone else thinks.”

Suddenly, I get choked up by my own words. Love. That
was it, wasn't it? We'd never used the term, not specifically, but I just know
it, as sure as I know I'm alive, as sure as I know I'm breathing air. I love
her. I would do anything for her. No matter what it takes, I won't let her die.
My resolve strengthens, and with that, I push aside my fears. With great
effort, I squash down the pain, the uncertainty, the unknowing. Whatever I have
to do, I won't let Mira die. No matter who or what, she will live, or I'll die
in the process.

Ming doesn't say anything, but she's studying me in the
darkness. I don't know if she can see the new look of determination I'm sure
must be on my face, but after a while she speaks.

“I'll help you,” is all she says.

My reply is equally as simple. “Thanks.”