With her finger, Sam drew a small square on the wall with a gap in the top. Then she drew a corridor that ran in either direction. In her mind’s eye, she pictured the route she took to get to the shower rooms and the corridors that wound out from it. She shut her eyes and focused. The base had been built in a series of repeating patterns, one set of corridors running perpendicular to another, a huge spider’s web of interlocking hallways. She didn’t know the exact location of his rooms, but she pictured the hallways she would have to traverse if she wanted to locate them.
Somewhere down there lay the object of their escape. The key wrapped around his neck with a silver chain. She wished he would choke on it.
Sam tapped on the wall. “If you could leave this place, would you?”
Felix hesitated with his response. “I’m not sure it does much good to think of such things. It’s nothing more than pipedreams.”
Sam licked her lips. “But if it wasn’t, if it was something you could genuinely achieve, would you leave?”
Felix’s reply didn’t come as fast as Sam had expected. Who would want to stay in this place?
“I’d be too afraid of failure to try.”
That made Sam blink. How downtrodden and beaten did you have to be to accept your fate inside a place such as this? “I’ll let you get back to your nap.”
“Fat chance of that.”
“Sorry.”
“Why did you want to know about the Architect anyway?”
“Just an idea I had.”
“I hope it was worth me losing forty winks.”
Sam paced the room and kept a running total of the number of seconds ticking by. Three thousand six hundred in an hour and fifteen hundred of those had already passed. Added to the conversation with Felix, and she guesstimated around three thousand seconds were gone.
She got down under her bed and collected the few items she’d collected and fashioned into a makeshift weapon. She clutched it between the fingers of her fist, stood in the middle of the room and waited.
The hour came and went. Sam reduced the seconds she assumed she and Felix had spent talking, cutting them to the bone, until it became an absurdity.
Greg was late.
Sam yawned, bone tired. She climbed into bed and got comfortable. Still, she could not sleep. She shook her head and swung her legs over the side of the bed.
She waited and waited.
And then she waited some more.
25.
HAWK
Hawk was six years old again. Whatever he did wasn’t good enough. He drew the best pictures he could at school and brought them home every day. He gazed upon those shiny fridge magnets with wonder. His first real goal in life: to get one of his pictures pinned to the fridge. His brother had managed to get a picture immortalized at the age of four, and Hawk was still trying—and failing—to make his mark.
“The legs are too long,” his mother said. “The hair isn’t right.” “The grass isn’t green enough.” Or, his personal favorite, “The skin tone is off.” The picture ended up in the bin alongside the other trash. Only now, the test was one he was desperate not to pass.
Dr. Archer dumped the latest test result in the bin with a growing refuse pile. “You have to do better than this, Hawk. Don’t make me come down here for this.”
With that stirring pep talk, she turned and marched out of the lab.
Every time she came in, she expected him to dig deeper and perform the same trick over and over. So far, he’d managed to resist, but he had no idea how much deeper his reserves of will would last. He faced a harsh truth. He couldn’t keep fighting forever. Eventually, she would win. Unless he did something about it.
He wracked his brains for a new idea, for something he hadn’t done before. But what?
He gasped, sensing that same familiar pain behind his eyes. The incessant sharp stabbing, accompanied by powerful bouts of nausea. He was certain it would eventually drive him insane. No wonder people used to drill holes in their skulls to let the demons out. If he had no access to modern medicine, he might well do the same.
Except I’m not going to be here forever. I’m not going to die here either.
He stood a little taller, his new hydraulic limbs taking his weight. He looked over at the shiny machinery in his arm. A new thought occurred to him, one that strangely hadn’t come to him before. With his Six Million Dollar arm, was he strong enough to break the chains?
The thought had never occurred to him before because he’d never wanted to tear his flesh beyond all repair. Was he willing to lose another part of himself to get free?
If he didn’t do something, there might not be much left of him to salvage before long.
He flexed his arm. The piston burbled as he flexed it toward his muscular chest. The restraints pulled against his wrist and the metal clinked as it pulled taut. The bed groaned, and the chains sang in duet. He curled his wrist tighter, his muscles growing firmer.
His arm crept further from the bed than it had before. The chain extended fully, the links straining beneath the pressure. Out the corner of his eye, he spied the bolted strut begin to inch off the bed’s surface.
It’s working!
He maintained the pressure, the strut shifting in its holdfast.
A jolt accompanied by a sharp metallic snap. He did it, he thought. He’d finally freed himself from his prison. A grin spread across his face, and he allowed himself a moment to savor the sweet aroma of success.
Then the chain caught, holding his arm in place.
Confused, Hawk pulled again. The chain about his wrist rattled, kissing the metal sheeting of his bed.
But. . . I felt the jolt, heard the snap. . .
Glancing back, he realized his error. The jolt had issued from the newly-installed hydraulics in his arm. The piston had snapped under the pressure. Gas hissed through a hole in the device’s side. He tugged on his arm again but what strength he’d possessed had already left him. He was a broken man once more.
I was so close.
His head flopped back and smacked the bed. He’d been certain he would succeed. That was the worst thing about hope—the darkness and terrifying icy cold it left in its wake once it left you.
Sometimes you’re better off not hoping at all.
Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
“You agree, Joe? What do you have to feel so hopeless about? You don’t have anything left to lose.”
Joe smacked his lips. That was the height of verbal sophistication from a zombie, especially one who’d lost the majority of his teeth. Hawk had changed Joe, as much as Joe had changed Hawk.
He was the only company Hawk had, the only real company he had since he awoke in his place. Hawk raised his injured arm and waved. The gas hissed in sharp bursts.
Hawk focused on the bundle of agony in the cage opposite and exerted what influence he could upon it. Joe raised his hand and waved back.
It was only then Hawk noticed how close Joe was to the area the good doctor used as a cloakroom.
Fresh kindling sparked and brought the fires of hope back to life once more.
26.
TOMMY
How had it come to this?
Tommy drew another circle, adding to the growing mosaic in the dirt. The image made no sense. They were idle scribblings, his state of mind on display for all to see.
He could barely fit his arms between the bars of his cage. A single centimeter of wiggle room on either side. The cage pressed firmly against his back. His legs were folded underneath him, his head bowed forward.
The thought came to him once again: How had it come to this?
“It could be worse,” Guy said.
He was less fortunate than Tommy. The locals had helpfully gone out to find a nice pair of stocks to trap him in. He waved his hands as he spoke.
“Oh?” Tommy said. “How could it possibly be worse than this?”
“Well. . .” Guy said, peering at their dire situation. “It’s not raining.”
&n
bsp; Tommy listened for the inevitable crack of thunder and downpour of rain. None came. They didn’t even have humor to keep them from their wits’ end.
“I hate to say it—” Guy said.
“Then don’t,” Emin said.
“—but I prefer the zombie reception than this.”
“I think I’m with you there.” Emin sat with a pair of clamps around her ankles. “I’m usually the positive one of the group. I can’t see a bright side. Is this what people usually feel like?”
Tommy drew another circle. “Welcome to my world.”
“I prefer my own bright and sunny world of boundless optimism, thank you very much. I wonder where it went.”
Guy arched his neck to glance at the fourth member of their group. “How are you doing over there, bud?”
Jimmy sat in what looked to be a small dog’s cage. His head remained bowed low. He hadn’t looked up since the locals had brought them here. Their one stroke of luck was that the inhabitants of this town hadn’t heard of Walkers and took them for regular people. Still, they had not held back in their accusations.
“It’s because of you the creatures fell upon us,” Angus had said as he locked Tommy’s cage. “If you hadn’t come here, they couldn’t have followed you.”
“We tried to save you,” Tommy said.
Angus’s lip curled into a striking python. “That’s what you said. It’s not what you meant.”
They were looking for someone else to hang this on. And without law and order, we’ll be the ones to hang.
Tommy reached through the bars of his cage and softened his tone. If they thought of them as human, maybe they wouldn’t go through with this. “I told you your defenses weren’t good enough.”
“They would have been if we hadn’t listened to your advice.” Angus wiped his sweaty palm on his pants. “They came at us. We fought back. Our weapons didn’t work. We’re not trained with swords and knives. They ran over us and breached our defenses.”
“They were always going to breach your defenses. You should have run.”
Angus’s reverie burst. “Liar! You made us put down our guns so they could overpower us easier! You wanted them to kill us! You wanted them to overwhelm us!”
Angus cracked Tommy over the head with the heel of his pistol and marched away. He placed ragtag members of his fighters on one corner of the town square to watch over them.
And now they were trapped inside their cages.
Tommy’s eyes flicked toward his mosaic and away again. In that moment, he saw what he previously could not. It was rough and unkempt and failed to catch her inner beauty. But the key attributes of her face were there. The soft curve of her eyes above high smiling cheekbones. The twist of her lips she so often wore, ready to release and set loose booming laughter at a moment’s notice. His heart ached to see her again, to steal wasted minutes he hadn’t made the most of. His fuzzy emotion dwindled, turning in on itself. The fear he might never get to see her this way again.
“I’m sure she’s fine.”
The interruption jarred Tommy awake. His eyes darted from Emin to his mud drawing and back again. He reached out a hand to wipe it from existence.
Emin raised a hand. She had no chance of reaching him. “Don’t. Let it be.”
Tommy just stared at the face in the dirt. “I left her. I had a chance to go into the city after the crash, but instead, I left her.”
“You didn’t leave anybody. You had a mission.”
Guy waved his hands. “Yeah. Don’t be so hard on yourself, dude. You didn’t have much of a choice. Stop the Architect, or Sam was lost anyway. And so will millions of other people.”
Tommy tore his eyes from the image of Sam. Staring at her only scrambled his brains. “None of it matters while we’re trapped in here and the Architect is out there. There must be a way out of here.”
Guy threw up his hands. “How? Does anyone happen to have a skeleton key on them?”
“Skeleton key. . .” Emin’s voice was fuzzy with thought.
Guy arched his neck. “What, do you have something like that on you? I know girls like to carry some weird-ass shit around with them.”
Emin frowned at Guy’s flailing arms. “What’s up with your finger, Guy? Looks a bit ratty.”
Guy twisted his wrist to peer at the little finger on his left hand. “You mean this? I must have caught it on something. Don’t ask me where or when. I’m falling to pieces these days. I mean, at what point does it become normal to lose half a finger without even realizing it?”
“You haven’t lost half of it.”
“Almost. Look at it.”
He extended his hand. Emin leaned forward.
“Oh yes,” she said. “It looks pretty bad.” Emin held it. “Mind if I borrow it?”
Guy barely grunted a discernible sound—“Huh?”—before Emin twisted his finger and snapped it off like a twig. He screamed and pulled his hand back, grasping at the newly-fashioned knob on his palm. He clutched it to his chest and glared at the woman across the way. “As if I didn’t already have enough problems, now I have issues buying gloves. What is wrong with you?”
“Quit your whining. The pinkie finger is useless anyway. Nobody ever misses their pinkie. And you didn’t even have a whole one. Only half.”
Guy extended a full-fingered hand. “Give it back.”
“Look! I have six fingers on one hand! I’d make a terrific pianist.”
Guy stared at her, horrified. “I thought we were friends.”
“We are. That means what’s yours is mine. Your semi-pinkie was exactly what I was looking for.”
She stripped the rest of the flesh off the bone. Guy turned green. Then Emin sharpened it on the side of her cage.
Even Tommy had no idea what she was up to. “Emin, what are you doing?”
“I’m fashioning an ivory lock pick.”
Tommy looked at Emin in a new light. “You can pick locks?”
“No, but I’m betting you can.” She extended the severed finger to him.
* * *
Tommy couldn’t reach it from where he was. She would have to toss it to him. But first, he had to get the idea straight in his head. “You want me to pick my lock with Guy’s finger?”
“The finger she tore from its socket!” Guy whined.
“Why not?” Emin said. “The lock on your cage doesn’t look the strongest.”
Appraising it now, Tommy understood what she meant. It was rickety, bent and buckled. Someone had pried it open at some point and given it a few solid bashes for good measure too.
The two men on watch duty stood as far from the prisoners as they could get, only bringing themselves to glance in their direction between every three or four puffs of their cigarettes.
Tommy cupped his hands and held them outside his cage. He gave Emin the nod to say she could toss it.
“Careful with it!” Guy said. “I’ve got a lot of happy memories with that finger.”
“Who has happy memories with their pinkie?”
“They weren’t using it right,” Guy said stoutly. “If you drop it, you’re not having another.”
Emin pulled her hand back and released it. The finger sailed end over end. Guy might have been watching the closing seconds of the final inning.
Tommy clamped his hands tight around the tiny digit. He knew immediately he’d mistimed it. The finger bounced out of his grip and twirled in a horizontal pirouette.
“No!” Guy screeched in slow motion.
Tommy opened his hands and instinctively snapped at the air again. By the look of wonderment on Guy’s face, he had managed to snag it, but it wasn’t entirely within his grasp. He turned his hand to one side until the finger protruded upwards from the fleshy part of his hand. He retracted his arm with the poise of a crane operator and didn’t breathe a sigh of relief until it was safely within his possession.
Guy made a face at Emin. “Why didn’t you ask me for it?”
“Because you’d have pulled the
same dumb expression you’re wearing now. And then there would be the endless pitiless whining.”
“I don’t whine!” He was too late to prevent the whine in his tone. “You’ve got no respect for other people’s things.”
“You wanted to be a part of the team. Now you’re an integral part.”
“I would have preferred to choose what my part would be.”
“I was looking for a widget less than an inch in length. You should consider yourself lucky. I could have chosen it from a more. . . sensitive area.”
Tommy faded their voices out and focused on the lock. It’d been some time since he’d gone through basic training. First, he had to ascertain the type of lock he was dealing with. He held Guy’s finger—just the thought of it sent shivers up his spine—and poked at the lock’s inside. He pressed and pulled at it to get a feel for how it was built. It was a cylinder lock, standard pin-and-tumbler fare. It shouldn’t be too difficult to open.
He glanced at the two young men on watch duty. They were engrossed in the conversation they were having with an older man. They cast occasional glances in the captives’ direction but it was cursory at best. The older man finished off his tale, resulting in gales of laughter from the younger men. One slapped his knee, the other bent over and almost spilled his lunch.
Click. The sound of freedom.
Tommy was careful to pull the lock apart, for fear he might accidentally press the lock back in place.
“You did it?” Guy whooped for joy. “I can’t believe my pinkie picked a lock! I must be related to Houdini somewhere along the line.”
“It wasn’t you that did it. It was Tommy.”
Tommy reached for the padlock to pull it free, then hesitated. He left it in place. At least it looked like it was holding him in place.
“You’re going to have to open your own locks,” he said. “Catch.”
He tossed it to Emin. She missed it. It landed in the dirt beside her.
Death Squad (Book 3): Zombie Nation Page 15