Remy would be damned if she let it pull that off.
“Remy, what is it?” Brandt hissed.
“One of the infected, just to my right,” she answered calmly. “I’m going to put the mother fucker down. Don’t panic.”
“Would be way fucking awesome if you’d stop pissing around and do it already,” he hissed. “Cade’s about five seconds away from passing out over here, and I will not hesitate to slap the shit out of you again if I have to.”
Remy nodded and lifted her gun, taking a careful step forward. That seemed to be the cue for the infected man in the shadows to dart out and go on the attack. She didn’t hesitate. She brought her gun up and around, slamming it forcefully against the side of the man’s head. She grabbed him by his dirty, decaying shirt and hauled him fully onto the stairs. She hit the man one more time with the gun then shoved the barrel underneath his chin. She pressed it hard into the fleshy underside of his jaw and squeezed the trigger.
The top of the man’s head exploded with the force of the bullet’s impact. She grimaced at the spray of blood illuminated in the beam of her flashlight, and she tightened her grip on him long enough to push him against the railing. It wasn’t hard to lift the man up; he’d been infected long enough that he was borderline skin and bones. Using the railing as a lever, she heaved him up and over. The man’s body plummeted through the air to land with a thud three floors below.
“We’ve got to move,” Remy said without further hesitation. She glanced at Cade to make sure she was still conscious. She was—somewhat—but she looked even closer to passing out than she had earlier. Her face was drawn and pale with pain. “We should go fast,” she added.
“You’re telling me,” Brandt said. He checked his grip on Cade’s waist and began descending the stairs again. “I’ll fucking carry Cade if I have to.”
“No the fuck you won’t,” Cade slurred woozily.
Remy snorted and led the way down the stairs, her eyes moving through the darkness, scanning every shadow, shining her light into every corner. Thankfully, she needn’t have worried; five minutes later, they reached the ground floor without further problems, save for Cade’s increasing exhaustion, made worse by her still-bleeding injury. Once there, though, her instincts screamed for her to be more cautious—not for her own sake, because she didn’t care about herself anymore, but for the sake of her companions. They at least deserved the chance to live, even if she felt she no longer wanted the chance for herself.
The street was free of infected. Remy had the sobering thought that it was so clear because all the infected in the area were still busy with Ethan. Tears threatened her eyes again, but she banished them once more. There wasn’t time for crying right now, if ever. She wouldn’t allow herself that weakness.
“Brandt, which way?” Remy asked. She fell back to draw even with him. “I don’t know the way.”
Brandt dislodged Cade’s arm from his shoulders and, with Remy’s help, managed to transfer her weight over to her. “I’ll lead from here, okay?” he offered. “Just stick close. All three of you.”
Remy nodded and, as Brandt moved ahead to take the lead, glanced back at Gray. He managed to meet her eyes, and she swallowed hard as she saw the hurt and sadness in his gaze. She still felt the hurt herself; just thinking of the rapid succession of deaths they’d met with after being together for so long was enough to make her want to break apart. She swallowed down the feeling and faced forward once more, locking her eyes onto Brandt’s shoulders and walking on silently.
Chapter Nineteen
Brandt let out a sigh of relief as he saw the green foliage ahead of them. Trees lined the sides of a concrete-and-brick path that led through a large park, and the rapidly failing sunlight filtered through their branches to land in patches along the walkway. It’d taken nearly an hour to reach the park, an hour longer than he was happy with, but it couldn’t be helped. He ran his fingers through his dark hair and glanced around cautiously. He didn’t see any potential threats nearby; a few squirrels scrounged through the grass, but otherwise, everything was still. He hoped the four of them had reached the end of any trouble that might threaten. At least, for the moment.
He motioned for the others to follow him as he began the trek across the street to Centennial Olympic Park, pausing before he reached the outer edge of trees and dropping back to allow Cade, Remy, and Gray to catch up with him. He took Cade off of Remy’s hands, and she gave him a grateful smile, even as she managed to look concerned.
“I don’t think she’s doing that great, Brandt,” Remy warned. “She’s dragging her feet, and she can barely keep her head up.”
Brandt took Cade’s face in his hands, lifting her head so he could see her eyes. Her lids were heavy, and her skin was pale and clammy, cool to the touch. She breathed shallowly, and he shook his head as he gently jostled her. “Come on, babe, we don’t have much farther to go,” he murmured. “Just through this park and out the other side, and we’ll be right on top of the Tabernacle, okay? Just stick with me.”
“And when we get there?” Gray spoke up, breaking his contemplation of a large, oddly shaped building less than a block away. It jutted out at an angle over the street, and a massive mural of sea life was emblazoned on its side. Brandt frowned at the building, taking a second to realize he was staring at the side of the aquarium. He blinked and focused back on Cade, scooping her right off her feet and settling her against his chest.
“Then we get inside and see what we can do about rousing some help on the radio,” he said.
“And if help won’t come?” Gray prompted.
“Help will come,” Brandt said, confident.
“But if it won’t?” Gray persisted.
Brandt rolled his eyes and started down the sidewalk again, stepping into the shade of the trees, his grip on Cade secure. Gray and Remy scrambled to keep up with the ground-eating pace he set. “Gray, it will, okay? They’re not going to leave me out here in this cesspool of a city; they’re going to want to track me down.”
“You’re assuming an awful lot, if you ask me,” Gray muttered. He wrinkled his nose doubtfully and gripped his gun in both hands, doing his best to help Remy guard Brandt and Cade, since they were the two most vulnerable members of their little group.
“Well, I’m not asking you, so you can shove it up your ass,” Brandt grumbled. “Now shut it. The more noise you make, the more likely you’ll draw attention right onto us, and we’re not in a position to deal with that right now.”
Silence fell among them after his order. Remy once more slipped into the lead, her gun in one hand and her bolo knife in the other. Brandt was always reasonably impressed with how well she handled the blade; seeing it in her hand made him feel slightly better about being out in the open. If anything got the jump on them, he was sure she could hold off the problem long enough for him to set Cade down to assist her.
When the four of them emerged from under the trees, they found themselves in the open, in a large concrete and brick plaza commemorating the city that had once hosted the Olympic Games. The fountain that now occupied the space no longer sprayed jets of water toward the sky, and the entire plaza was littered with trash and debris and the remains of several bodies. Brandt saw the camouflage in which one of the bodies was dressed, and he swallowed hard, averting his eyes. The sight didn’t do much to boost his confidence about what he’d find in the Tabernacle.
Then he looked just beyond the dead bodies, and his stomach dropped.
There were infected, a lot of them, a massive crowd, milling about like a group that had just gotten out of a concert venue. If he had to put a number to it, he’d guess there were somewhere around a hundred of them, though it was more likely that there were even more that he couldn’t see. Either way, he knew immediately that there were far and away too many infected for the four of them to handle, especially with one of them being mostly impaired.
“Stop, stop, stop,” he hissed to the other two, stopping short and backing up
a few steps, ducking back into the shadow of the trees. Remy and Gray, thankfully, did the same. “We’ve got to find a way around,” he told them, pitching his voice low so his words wouldn’t carry. “There’s too many of them for us to just plow through. And I can’t fight if Cade stays like this.”
Remy gave him a short nod and said, “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“Where the hell are you going?” Brandt demanded, but she didn’t answer, just slipped off into the shadows, leaving him, Gray, and Cade standing on the sidewalk without a clue what was going on. In what felt like the blink of an eye, though, she was back, her face creased with worry, almost fear. She shook her head. “We can’t go that way,” she said, pointing in the direction that would have let them circle around the infected by going a few blocks over. “They’re all over the place that way. We need to try the other way.”
Brandt gestured with his head to go in that direction, which unfortunately took them back the way they’d come. He tried to remember the layout of the area of the city and the best way to get around to the Tabernacle from that direction. Not that it ended up mattering, anyway; as soon as they stepped back out onto the street, he realized there were infected on the street, a large gaggle of them, and they were already headed in their direction. Remy lifted her pistol to fire, but he hissed out, “No! No guns! Just run!”
Thankfully, she obeyed, and the three of them sprinted as fast as they could for the opposite side of the street, searching for a gap in the infected that were converging on their position. Gray waved an arm frantically and said, “This way! Hurry!” and led them into the sidewalked and landscaped area between the World of Coca-Cola and the Georgia Aquarium. Brandt followed, trailing behind the two younger people, slowed by the weight of the virtually unconscious Cade in his arms. Which was why, when Gray and Remy cut left toward the aquarium instead of the soft drink museum to their right, he wasn’t exactly in a position to stop them.
They went up a set of concrete steps, then down into a plaza in front of the doors that was littered with metal barricades that were, at one point, used to herd the massive amounts of tourists that visited the aquarium on a daily basis. Brandt could hear, somewhere behind him, the infected giving chase as he dodged around the end of one of the barricades. He ran past Gray, who’d stopped to wait on him while Remy waited at the front doors, her pistol up and aimed in the general direction of the infected coming their way. Gray grabbed one of the barricades and flung it down on the ground in the gap Brandt had just run through, and Brandt hoped it would help slow down their pursuers. He and Gray caught up to Remy, Brandt breathing heavily from the additional weight he carried.
Remy flung one of the aquarium’s entrance doors open, and a wave of fishy rot and stagnation rolled out of the building on a wave, slapping them in the face and sending them reeling. Remy visibly gagged at the stench, but she ushered them in anyway, urging Gray and then Brandt on ahead of her before coming in behind them and pulling the door closed behind her.
Brandt did his best to ignore the stench permeating the air and instead made a beeline for one of the benches near the guest information desk, setting Cade down onto it as gently as he could and kneeling in front of her. He patted her cheeks with gentle hands, trying to get her to stir. “Come on, Cade, I need you to wake up, okay?” he urged, increasing the strength of the pats against her face.
Cade groaned, and her eyes fluttered open, though she didn’t look much more alert than she had when she’d been laying mostly limp in his arms just moments before. “I feel like shit,” she mumbled, the words slurred and almost incoherent. “What’s that smell?”
“Dead fish,” he said shortly, running a hand through her hair to push it back from her face.
“Dead fish?” she repeated, trying to sit up straighter. She wobbled and tipped forward, nearly upending herself onto Brandt. He caught her, righting her as she slid off the bench to sit on his lap. He wrapped an arm around her to hold her steady as she mumbled, “Where the hell are we?”
“We’re in the Georgia Aquarium,” he answered.
“‘Splains the dead fish,” she said before resting her head against his shoulder.
“No, Cade, I need you to stay awake,” Brandt urged. “I need you to stay with us. I’ve got to help get us out of here, and I can’t do that if I have to carry you, too.”
There was a slamming noise from near the front entrance, loud enough to make Brandt, Cade, and Remy all jump, then Gray sprinted up to them, dragging on his inhaler as he moved. “I got the doors barricaded,” he told them breathlessly, jamming the inhaler into his front pocket and pulling out a flashlight, flicking it on, “but I don’t think they’re going to hold very long. We need to move. They know we’re in here.”
Brandt stood, swinging Cade gently upright onto her feet and hooking one of her arms over his shoulders. She staggered but managed to mostly stay on her feet. He adjusted the two rifles on his back so they were more balanced then looked to Remy, who was studying a large map of the aquarium on the information desk. “Which way to get out of here?”
Remy shone her flashlight on the map again then nodded and aimed it in the direction they needed to go, pointing for emphasis. “That way,” she said. “There’s an emergency exit. If the infected are piling on at the front doors, then the side of the building should be clear—or at least clear enough for us to make an escape.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Brandt agreed. “You two lead the way. We’re right behind you.”
* * *
As Remy led the way toward the emergency exits she’d identified on the map, Gray at her side, shining his flashlight into random corners to check for movement, she contemplated whether she’d ever get the stench of this aquarium out of her nose. It was the foulest odor she’d ever smelled, a truly gag-inducing funk that she had a feeling was going to stick to her for weeks.
Assuming, of course, they got out of this mess they were in.
This was the last place she’d expected to end up, in the middle of a stinking aquarium full of dead and rotting sea life, in the deadliest city in America, two friends and a new acquaintance gone, and Ethan…
Something tried to jam itself into her throat, and she fought to swallow it back down without drawing attention to herself from her friends or making noise that would attract any infected that happened to be in the building. Though honestly, at this point, fighting and killing a few infected would be a welcome diversion from everything spinning around in her head.
“You okay?” Gray suddenly asked from her left, eliciting a startled look from her before she could stop it. “You just suddenly looked a little…upset there.”
“Of course I’m upset,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I be? We’ve literally lost half of our friends in the span of three days. ‘Upset’ doesn’t begin to even cover it. I’m pretty sure I slid fully into ‘devastated’ today.”
“I’m sorry,” Gray mumbled.
“What do you have to be sorry about?” Remy asked. “You lost more than the rest of us. We call each other family, but Theo really was your family.” She shifted the beam of her flashlight to aim it at an entryway to an exhibit, checking for movement, and when she didn’t see any, she moved it back to the path ahead, pushing a random chair out of the way with her foot. “You know, for all our talk about being family and everything, I knew jack-all about Theo on a personal level. He didn’t really ever talk about himself much.”
“He was a very private person,” Gray said. “I think he felt like he had to be. I was still in high school when our parents died. He had to fight to get the court to grant him guardianship over me. They didn’t want to at first—I was only sixteen, and he was barely nineteen, and I think they had a lot of questions about how we were supposed to take care of ourselves. He kept a lot of his personal life private because of that; I think he was scared that the state would frown on some aspects of his personal life and tell him he couldn’t be my legal guardian. I guess it just developed into a habit th
at continued into adulthood.”
“Why would he need to keep his personal life such a secret…” Remy trailed off as the question seemed to answer itself in her mind. “He was gay, wasn’t he?”
“He was something like that,” Gray said. “He never told me either way. Not that he was obligated to.” He paused, leaning down to pick up a plastic bottle from the floor. It was a small bottle of Gatorade; he promptly tucked it into a side pocket of his backpack and continued. “He dated girls in the past. I remember him bringing a few home to meet the parents before dates and stuff. But then there was this guy, Dillon. He started hanging out with him a lot, coming home super late from work, being gone most of the night when he wasn’t working, that sort of thing. It was like he was obsessed with Dillon, and he started ignoring me a lot. It was around the same time our therapist recommended I move out because of the whole codependency thing.”
“What happened to Dillon?” Remy asked, though she didn’t really need to know. Obviously, the man was dead.
“His throat got ripped out by one of the infected in a pharmacy in Mississippi,” Gray said. “Theo was never the same after that. It was like something broke in him, and he just went on this one-man mission to keep me alive at all costs. Nothing else mattered to him after that.”
“Shit,” Remy murmured, stepping forward from the rest of them as they approached the emergency exit doors. “I feel so bad for him. That must have been awful.” She adjusted her grip on her pistol, put a hand up to stop the others, and then gently pressed a hand against the steel exit door in front of her, contemplating what might be on the other side. Then she drew in a deep breath and pushed the release handle, slowly, trying to minimize the sound of the catch releasing, and eased the door open a crack to peer outside.
“Oh, shit,” she breathed before she could stop herself as she got a good look at the environment on the other side of the door. To say there were infected beyond the exit was an understatement. It seemed that so many of the infected were piled up against the front doors, trying to get into the aquarium where their prey had retreated to, that they’d spilled over to the sidewalk and street along the side of the building—the same side the emergency exits were on. She eased the door back shut, not letting it fall closed because it might make too much noise, then turned to her friends, shaking her head. “This way is a no-go.”
Ground Zero Page 28