“Where did they drop it?” she said. “Why did they drop it?”
“They dropped it next to the car!” Parker shouted.
Annie did not understand. “Are we supposed to climb on top of it?”
“Beats me!” Parker said.
Annie squinted at Roy. “Let him go,” she said, no longer bothering to shout over the racket. She could barely hear her own voice, but Roy knew what she said.
“And why should I do that?” Roy shouted.
This time she did shout. “Because I’ll shoot your balls off if you don’t!”
Roy didn’t move. She didn’t want to break eye contact, but she flicked her eyes toward Hughes. His head was in Roy’s lap. She couldn’t shoot Roy’s balls off without first shooting Hughes through the face.
Roy smiled.
The look on Hughes’s face almost killed her. He was stoic, resigned, as if he no longer even cared if he made it out of this.
“I’ll blow your kneecaps off!” Annie shouted.
“Go ahead,” Roy said and shrugged.
Roy couldn’t stop her. He’d kill Hughes, though, for sure. Which might have been fine five minutes ago, but not now. She couldn’t for the life of her figure why a helicopter had dropped a shipping container next to the car, but she’d understand soon enough. Hughes’s life mattered now more than ever.
The infected were a little bit quieter now than before, their attention diverted by the helicopter and the shipping container randomly dropped onto the road.
“How can we end this?” Roy said.
Annie jabbed the barrel of her weapon toward his face. “You have two options.” He wasn’t stupid. She did not have to tell him. He could die instantly or he could die painfully. The good news for him was that he got to decide.
“I want a third,” Roy said.
“There is no third,” Annie said.
“There has to be,” Roy said.
Annie shook her head. “There doesn’t. And there isn’t.”
“You want to shoot me in the head or shoot me in the balls,” Roy said. “I respect that. I do. But I want to go with you.”
“Impossible,” Annie said.
“Your whole mission’s impossible,” Roy said. “Yet here y’are. About to be rescued. You can drop that gun and take me with you. Just tell me what you want.”
“I want Kyle back,” Annie said. “And that woman on Lucas’s phone with the rat in her mouth. Can you do that for me?”
Roy didn’t answer.
“No?” Annie said. “Head or balls then.”
“I won’t hurt anyone else,” Roy said.
“And I’m supposed to believe that,” Annie said.
“Think of it from my side,” Roy said. “Better to be good and live than to die if those are my options.”
“Too bad those aren’t your options,” Annie said.
“They could be.”
“You might even mean it, sitting there with a gun in your face. But you’ll change your mind the minute you’re loose again with no one to stop you.”
“I never hurt anybody before this,” Roy said.
“Before what?” Annie said.
“All of this.” Roy gestured with his free hand toward the mayhem outside the car. “It messed me up. Messed Lucas up too. Until we met you and could finally hope again.”
Annie wanted to believe him. Wanted desperately to believe him. Everything would be so much easier if she believed him. She could let him go and trust that she’d been doing the right thing all along, that she could save the world and human nature at the same time. But she didn’t believe that.
She didn’t know much about psychopathic killers, but she knew this much at least: they felt very little emotion. Some of them could hardly feel anything. They might appear perfectly normal and even charming from the outside, but inside they were nothing but ashes. A healthy person would practically die from stress after slitting an innocent woman’s throat, but a psychopath could finally feel something.
“You and Lucas were going to kill us in Iowa,” Annie said.
Roy said nothing.
“Go on,” she said. “Deny it.”
“I won’t insult your intelligence,” Roy said. “But we didn’t. We helped you. And I saved Hughes.”
“You’re holding a knife to his throat.”
“You’re holding a gun in my face.”
Annie couldn’t blame Roy for trying to talk his way out of this. He never wanted to kill himself. He wanted to live and to kill other people.
“Head or balls,” Annie said.
“You take my balls,” Roy said, “and I take his head.”
“For what? One last thrill before you bleed out in agony?”
“I don’t want to kill him.”
“Then don’t.”
“I want to go with you.”
Annie cocked her head to the side. “How do you think that would work, exactly? We’re supposed to pretend we don’t know what you did? We’re supposed to let it go because you didn’t slit our friend’s throat? You know that’s impossible.”
“You don’t care more about strangers I might hurt in the future than you care about your friend here. You won’t sacrifice Hughes to save the lives of people you’ve never met.”
Annie felt a chill. The minute Roy said it, she knew it was true.
He’d checkmated her. She couldn’t let Roy murder Hughes so that she could save the lives of random strangers in Georgia. Not when she’d risked her own life, and the lives of her friends, to make it this far so that she could save everybody.
Roy was right. But he didn’t know he was right. He seemed to understand empathy even though it was alien to him, but he only understood it intellectually. He had no idea what empathy felt like. That was his blind spot.
Annie thought hard. Whatever she said next could determine if Hughes lived or died. How could she use Roy’s blind spot against him? What could she say that he would believe?
She almost gave up but then found the answer.
“You’re wrong,” she said and shook her head. “This is not about saving strangers. This is revenge. It’s about Kyle. I’ll shoot your balls off because I want to. More than anything else in this world, I want to watch you die screaming.”
She knew that she convinced him because she realized, as soon as the words came out of her mouth, that those words were true. Roy knew exactly what that felt like, so he had no trouble believing that Annie could feel that way too.
Roy swallowed hard.
“But I’ll let it go if you let him go,” she said.
Roy raised his eyebrows.
“I won’t even shoot you. I’ll let you swallow that entire bottle of Oxy if you let him go and stay out of our way.”
Roy flexed his fingers around the knife handle.
Annie sensed another disturbance outside.
“Chopper’s coming back,” Parker said. “Carrying another shipping container.”
Roy tensed, but he didn’t move or say anything.
Annie felt the pulse of the rotors chopping the air.
Parker had to shout to be heard over the machine noise. “It’s setting the container down on the other side of the car this time!”
Annie understood now what was happening. “They’re boxing us in!” she yelled. “If they drop one in front of us and another behind us, we’ll be surrounded on all sides and sealed off from the horde.”
“Goddammit, woman!” Roy said. He pressed the blade more tightly against Hughes’s throat as the helicopter receded again. He was thinking about stabbing Hughes in the throat just to spite her. That was clear.
She aimed her Glock right in the center of his face and looked down the sights. She could take him out right now. He’d probably die instantly, too quickly to hurt Hughes, and it would be over. But she could be wrong. Roy might not go instantly limp the moment the bullet entered his head. He could murder Hughes in his last nanosecond.
“Take the Oxy, Roy,” Annie said. �
�It’s your best bet.”
Roy was sweating now. He was getting desperate. “Me taking the Oxy is your best bet. I’ll cut his throat. I’ll fucking do it. I don’t mind a little pain. I won’t care anymore after I’m dead.”
“Bleeding out through your balls isn’t a little pain,” Annie said. “I’ll also blowtorch your face, and I’ll start with your eyes.” Her hand shook the Glock.
Roy’s left eye twitched. “You’re bluffing.”
“I killed people with my teeth,” she said. “Ripped their jugulars right out of their throats.”
“When you were infected,” Roy said.
“Yeah, when I was infected. But it was still me. It was me doing it.”
She wasn’t bluffing. Not anymore. If Roy murdered Hughes, Annie would torture him to death.
“I’ll cut you up into cubes,” she said.
She took a deep breath and held the gun steady. One of them was going to yield to the other, and it wouldn’t be her.
“You are a bitch,” Roy said.
23
Two more helicopters came with two more shipping containers, just as Annie had predicted. They dropped one in front of the car and another behind it, walling off a near-perfect box around the car. The containers were too high to scale. The infected might eventually climb on top of each other and get themselves up and over, but it would take them some time. They still swarmed around and on top of the vehicle, but the pandemonium outside was quieter now, hushed by the blockade and reduced nearly by half.
Annie could almost relax. Roy had finally given up, as she knew he would, and he let Parker climb into the back and hog-tie his wrists to his ankles. Hughes dragged himself to the very back of the cargo hold and pointed Annie’s Glock at Roy’s knees.
Now that she could finally take her eyes off Roy, she had something equally unsettling to look at: the faces of the infected peering into the armored car through the slit on the windshield, maniacal, ravenous, delirious with rage, a force as seemingly unstoppable as a tsunami.
And yet it had been stopped, dammed by metal containers. The infected contained inside the box weren’t going to last very much longer. Surely the men in the helicopter didn’t expect her and her friends to climb out of the car and clear the area with hammers and crowbars.
“Hughes,” Annie said. “You okay back there?”
“Peachy,” Hughes said.
“So what are you gonna do,” Roy said to no one in particular, “after this?”
“What do you care?” Annie said.
“Just making conversation,” Roy said and shrugged.
Annie turned away from him in disgust. She couldn’t answer that question anyway. She didn’t expect to be a free agent once she got inside the walls. The authorities might not chain her to a hospital bed, but she didn’t expect that whoever governed Atlanta would be any more interested in letting her wander around freely than the mayor of Lander, Wyoming, had been. But why would she even want to? The center of Atlanta was one of the safest places in the world. That was obvious now. Whatever else was going on in there, they had electricity and helicopters. They had some kind of surveillance and a competent security force willing and able to rescue her and her friends after all. Life might be dismal inside, but it wouldn’t have to be dismal forever, especially if they could make a vaccine and open the gates to the outside.
Nothing had happened, though, since the shipping containers were dropped.
“Where are they?” she said.
“Just sit tight,” Hughes said. “They’ll be back.”
Annie knew they’d be back. They weren’t going to barricade the car from the horde and leave it at that. She was just antsy to get on with it, antsy to finally get away from Roy as she was to reach safety.
A fifth helicopter came a few minutes later. This time, with the roar of the horde greatly diminished, Annie heard the whop whop whop of the blades from a farther distance than she had heard it before. She couldn’t be sure, but this helicopter sounded beefier than the others.
Something was about to happen. Hopefully it would not involve fire.
“Brace yourselves,” Hughes said.
Annie preemptively winced just seconds before a rifle shot split the air from above and the infected spun up into an even more furious frenzy.
“Are armored cars bulletproof from the air?” Parker said.
“I hope so,” Hughes said.
Roy laughed.
Annie heard a second rifle crack, and this time she saw an infected drop to the pavement as if its marionette strings had been cut, the bullet apparently piercing the top of its skull.
“How many are inside the box with us?” Hughes said, unable to see anything at all from the back.
“Hard to say,” Annie said. “Maybe sixty?”
The rifleman dropped them one at a time from above. Annie couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like he never missed. The chopper was fifty feet in the air at the most and shooting at targets that couldn’t shoot back. Like spearing fish in an aquarium. One after another, the infected fell to the ground until Annie could see only five of them, all of them on the hood of the car, pawing and kicking at the glass.
Annie couldn’t see the helicopter above, but she sensed it moving a bit toward the east.
“They leaving?” Parker said.
“Changing the angle,” Annie said. To shoot the rest from the side in case the car’s armor didn’t hold up from the air.
A gunshot dropped the infected on the left. The bullet pierced the left side of its abdomen, exploded out the right side, ricocheted at an angle off the hood of the vehicle, and smacked into the windshield with a cracking plink.
“Glass holds up,” Parker said.
“Didn’t take a direct hit,” Annie said.
“It’s okay if it does,” Hughes said from the back. “It’s built to stop incoming rounds.”
A second and third infected collapsed onto the hood, one shot through the head, the other through the thigh. The latter thrashed so hard that it knocked a fourth clean off the car and onto the pavement. A second shot into its chest cavity quieted it, and blood spattered the windshield.
Only two remained now: one on the ground where Annie could only hear it, the other on the hood bellowing at the helicopter. Both were felled from the sky.
The smell of gun smoke wafted in through the vents.
It was over.
“Nobody move,” Hughes said. “We don’t know what they’re going to do next.”
Hughes was right. For all Annie knew, the angels from Atlanta were about to torch the scene with a flamethrower.
Instead a man shouted “Clear!” into a bullhorn. “You can come out now.”
The helicopter hovered, without quite landing, just above the shipping container to the right of the car. Its appearance was distinctly military: grayish-green exterior, missile racks, a pilot wearing a bug-head helmet, doors wide open with a gunner strapped in and hanging out the side.
“How many are you?” the gunner shouted into the bullhorn.
“Three!” Annie answered. She almost slipped up and said four. Then she held up three fingers. The guy almost certainly couldn’t hear her over the rotor wash. She had to turn her face to the side to keep blowing grit out of her eyes. She couldn’t even hear the horde on the other side of the shipping containers, though she knew the infected must be clamoring to get over them.
The gunner unspooled a rope ladder. Annie would only have to climb twenty or so feet. Hughes wouldn’t be able to make it, though. Not without help. And she couldn’t have the gunner climb down to help him or he might see Roy. And he would ask questions.
Annie held up her index finger, the universal sign for one moment, and returned to the car.
“Hughes will need to go first,” she said to Parker. “You and I have to help him.”
She had two more things to do first, though. She stuck one of the Glocks in her jacket pocket and warned Roy. “Step out of this car,” she said, “and I’ll
shoot you.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Roy said.
“Don’t think I won’t.”
Then she picked up the other firearms and flung them one at a time over the shipping container to the left of the car and into the horde on the other side. The guys in the helicopter must have thought she was mad, but if she didn’t do it, Roy could come out shooting. He could still hobble out even though he was hog-tied, but he’d be unarmed, and she’d shoot him as promised. Her rescuers would understand once she showed them the pictures on Lucas’s cell phone.
Hughes was doing better. Nobody needed to carry him out of the car. He managed to hop out and walk to the rope ladder without any trouble. Climbing up was trickier, but he managed. He only had one hand, but he held himself in place as he climbed by using the elbow of his mutilated arm. The pain must have been out of this world.
Annie mostly kept her eyes on the car in case Roy came out, but he never came out. She climbed the ladder after Hughes. Parker went last.
From her elevated perch inside the helicopter, Annie could see the horde swirling around the shipping containers. It spread as far as she could see in every direction, even into the trees, until it abutted the wall, which she was still too near to see over.
“You folks really immune?” the gunner asked Parker. He wore military fatigues with a green forest camouflage pattern and a stitched nametag identifying him as Martinez.
“I am,” Parker said. “And she is.”
“You’d better be!” Martinez shouted.
The implication was clear: if Annie and Parker weren’t immune, they’d have been left to die at the hands and the teeth of the horde. No one would have bothered to save them. Atlanta either didn’t have the resources to feed and protect any more people or its authorities didn’t care enough about regular people outside the wall to even bother attempting a rescue. For all Annie knew, life could be grimmer in there than it had been in Lander, Wyoming, with more people, less space, and less food.
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