Sam grasped his free arm to help him, his hand encountering clammy skin. Keeping hold of Sean, he edged to the door and looked out. The main lobby was littered with dead eaters. Across the room, Tracey and Matt were pushing the large double doors closed. Rick and Will were picking their way through the carnage.
“Help,” Sam called. “We need help.”
At the sound of his voice all four of them looked towards the lift.
“Sam?” Rick reached them first, took one look at Sean and beckoned the others over.
“He’s been bitten a lot,” Sam said. “The lobby downstairs is full of eaters, but we need to get him to the doctors for the cure.”
Tracey took charge, like she always did. “Hartley, Sam, stay with Hud until we’re clear. Collins and Porter, with me.”
As Tracey, Matt and Will headed for the stairs, Rick and Sam tried to help Sean from the lift. He waved them away, mumbling, “I’m not an invalid.” But when he almost fell after a few steps, he reluctantly allowed them to support him on either side.
The sound of rapid gunfire echoed up the stairs as the three of them slowly made their way in that direction. A few seconds later, Tracey, Matt and Will ran back into the lobby.
“Stay back,” Tracey said.
Sam was about to ask why when a massive blast shook the floor beneath his feet, almost immediately followed by another.
“I hope that worked,” Matt said, taking his hands from his ears, “because those were my last two grenades.”
The three soldiers trudged back down the stairs. A minute passed, punctuated with sporadic gunfire.
“You can come down now,” Will called.
When they reached the lower lobby the remaining eaters had all been dispatched, many of them into very small pieces. Much of the room had been redecorated in a predominantly red, gooey theme. Sam tried to find something not covered in blood to look at. When he couldn’t, he concentrated on his shoes and not tripping over any bits of... well, any bits. He was feeling slightly nauseated.
The discrepancy in height between Sam and Rick was making things awkward in helping Sean to walk, so Will took over from Sam as they headed back into the facility. Tracey called Larry on her radio and after half a minute of walking the four doctors joined them. They stopped briefly so that Hannah could inject something into Sean’s arm.
“I may have got blood on me,” Will said to Hannah when she’d finished. “I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but I feel a bit off.”
She smiled and produced another syringe. “I come prepared.” She injected Will then said, “Anyone else feeling ill?” When no one else said anything, she pretended to be disappointed. “Darn. I love sticking needles in people.”
Sam grinned and wished she’d been his doctor when he was a kid.
As they headed for the infirmary Sean’s feet began to drag and Rick and Will were forced to almost carry him.
“He’ll be okay, won’t he?” Sam whispered to Dave as they walked behind them.
“Oh yes, he’ll be fine,” Dave replied. “Don’t worry, the cure works. We used it on Micah and he was much further along. Sean will be perfectly okay.”
Sam nodded and watched Sean’s back, trying not to worry.
“How are you feeling?” Dave said.
“Not sick. Would I be feeling it by now if I was infected?”
“Most likely. Your response would be slower than Sean’s because the virus has gone directly into his bloodstream through the bites, but I should think you’d be feeling something by now. You tell me if you start to feel ill though. I’ll take everyone’s blood once we get to the infirmary and check for the virus.”
Sam nodded again, without enthusiasm. He hated needles. Funny that he’d just been almost killed by a horde of eaters and a needle bothered him.
By the time they reached the infirmary, Will and Rick were supporting almost all of Sean’s weight.
“Sam, thank goodness,” Patrice said as they walked in.
Leon gave him a weak wave and lay back on his bed, his arms wrapped around Emma and Katie. Claire looked at Sam from where she sat beside Adam’s bed. He smiled at her, hoping to see her relieved he was unharmed, but she simply looked away.
Rick and Will got Sean onto a vacant bed and Hannah gave him another injection.
“You’re going to be okay, I promise,” she said. “As a doctor, I’m not supposed to make promises because things are rarely certain in medicine, but this is good stuff.” She held up the empty syringe and smiled.
Sean gave a weak nod and closed his eyes.
Larry and Pauline went to work on Adam who was looking pale, but more alert than he had been when Sam left to lead the horde away. Hannah began cleaning Sean’s bite wounds. Dave took a sample of Sam’s blood, which barely hurt at all, and took it away to analyse. A minute later he walked back in, staring at a tablet and looking confused.
“Sam, have you been ill recently?” he said.
“No, why?” Sam started to worry. “Is something wrong? Am I sick? Am I infected?”
Dave continued to stare at the screen on his tablet. “Oh, no. No, you’re fine. Your white blood count is unusually high, that’s all.”
“What does that mean?”
“Probably nothing. You may have had a mild infection recently that you weren’t even aware of. Forget I mentioned it.” He finally looked up at Sam and smiled. “Considering how close you were to all those eaters when you shot them, I’d say you are a very lucky young man indeed.”
Sam breathed out in relief. “I’d have died if it wasn’t for Sean though.” He looked at the group of soldiers clustered around Sean and Adam’s adjacent beds. “You should have seen it. He fought through all those eaters and he didn’t even stop when he got bitten. He should get a medal or something.”
Tracey smiled. “We’ll see what we can do.”
Claire was across the room, still sitting on the chair close to Adam’s bed. She’d barely even looked at him since they got back and when he’d spoken about what happened in the lobby, she seemed to tense up. He wondered if she was angry at him for what he’d done. She’d told him not to be a hero. Did leading the eaters away count?
As he watched her, she stood abruptly, walked past him, and left the room.
The soldiers had begun to discuss making the back door more secure and clearing up the mess at both ends of the building and all four doctors were occupied with their patients. Sam slipped out unnoticed.
He found Claire in the lounge. The horde’s progress through the room had shifted some of the furniture around and left an unpleasant odour which the air filtration system hadn’t yet managed to remove completely, but otherwise it had come through relatively unscathed.
He walked up to Claire where she stood at the kitchenette counter with her back to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to...”
She spun around and threw herself against him, hugging his waist and pressing her face into his shoulder. Sam’s heart almost burst from his chest. He could feel her trembling and he tentatively wrapped his arms around her.
Her body heaved in a sob.
Sam panicked.
Eater’s attacking him was nothing compared to Claire crying. He had no idea what to do. He didn’t know how long he stood there, hugging her as she wept and desperately trying to think of a way to help her. He’d never felt as useless as he did at that moment. In the end, he settled on simply holding her and willing her to feel better.
To his shame, he didn’t hate the experience. She was soft and warm and her hair smelled like flowers.
“I was so scared,” she whispered into his shoulder when her sobs had petered into sniffles. “I was terrified I’d lose you.”
He tightened his hold on her, partly to reassure her and partly to convey that in no way, shape or form did he want her to let go of him. Ever. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to do to save you. I didn’t mean to be a hero or anything.”
She lifted her head, sniffe
d, and looked up at him. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just didn’t want you to get hurt. You’re the bravest person I know.”
“I... I am?”
“You’re my hero. I don’t know what I’d have done these last couple of weeks without you.”
For possibly the first time in his life, Sam was speechless. He stared into her beautiful pale eyes, unable to think of anything other than how close she was. Before he could stop it, his gaze dropped to her mouth.
A small smile curved her lips and, pushing up onto her toes, she touched her mouth to his. Sam’s heart, which up to now had been thudding against his ribcage, momentarily stopped dead.
At first he felt sure it was simply a thank you kiss, but when it didn’t stop he began to consider that maybe he’d been wrong about Logan.
And when he mustered the courage to kiss her back, she slipped her arms around his neck and pressed closer.
It was the best moment of Sam’s life.
49
“Are you sure you can make it?”
Micah huffed an indignant breath. “Of course I can make it. Are you sure you can make it?”
“Please,” Alex said, “I won’t even need a run up.” He was lying.
Micah narrowed his eyes. “Take one.”
Alex shrugged. “If it will make you feel happier.” He was going to anyway.
They both stared at the ten foot gap between the roof of their building and the roof of the next block along. Ten feet wasn’t especially far to jump at ground level, but five storeys up, it might as well have been fifty.
“What are you waiting for?” Bates yelled from the far end of the roof behind them. “A goodbye kiss?”
Alex waved a hand without looking back and shouted, “We’re going.”
“You ready?” Micah said.
“Of course. You?”
“Born that way.”
Neither of them moved.
“It’s a long way down,” Micah said.
“If it makes you feel any better, if you don’t make it all the eaters at the bottom will probably cushion your fall. That’s what happened when Kerry pulled me off the roof that time.”
“Please stop trying to make me feel better.”
There were another few seconds of silence.
“Okay,” Micah said. “Okay.” He bounced on his toes a few times. “Okay.”
Launching himself forwards, he ran for the edge of the roof and leaped into the air.
Alex held his breath.
Two seconds later Micah landed on the far side, took several steps to stop, then turned around and punched both arms into the air. “Yes!”
“Well, if he can do it, so can I,” Alex muttered, and sprinted for the gap.
Reaching the low parapet at the edge, he planted his right foot on the top and pushed off as hard as he could. For a second he was flying over the heads of the dozens of eaters crammed into the alley below, and then he was sailing past the edge of the building on the other side, overshooting it by more than twenty feet. When he hit the ground he managed to remain upright only through sheer force of will, coming to a stumbling halt thirty feet from the gap.
“I may have overdone that a bit,” he said as Micah walked up to him.
“Next time, don’t bother with the run up. It would have looked cooler with less flailing too.”
Alex waved at those gathered on the other roof and yelled, “Give us a minute to get downstairs.”
He and Micah headed for the door leading from the roof.
“What do you mean less flailing?” Alex said. “I wasn’t flailing.”
Micah tried the door. It was locked.
“All yours,” he said, standing back. “Try not to rip the handle off this time. And your arms and legs were all over the place.”
Alex gripped the metal handle and pulled slowly, gradually increasing the pressure. “I don’t need a critique of my form. You weren’t exactly Rudolf Nureyev yourself.” He stumbled back as the latch ripped through the frame and the door jolted open.
Both of them listened for any sounds of moaning inside the building. Hearing nothing, they ventured inside.
. . .
Watching the eaters milling outside from where he and Alex were hiding behind the stairs in the lobby, Micah wondered why they were there.
Not what their purpose was for being there, but why it was them down there when on the roof there were plenty of physically fit, strong, capable men and women who could have been there instead.
Lately, and by lately he knew it was since he’d met Alex, he seemed to volunteer automatically for anything stupidly dangerous there was going. Alex clearly had a hero complex, which was probably what had got him infected in the first place, and now Micah was slightly concerned it was rubbing off on him. Alex was definitely a bad influence.
Micah had been arrested several times since the age of nineteen and had even spent a couple of months in jail a few years back after he broke a man’s jaw in a fight which he didn’t start, but was happy to end. And yet the upstanding police detective was the bad influence. The thought made him smile.
“What are you smiling at?” Alex whispered.
“Just thinking about how you are a bad influence on me.”
Alex stared at him in disbelief. “I’m a...” He stopped, glancing at the eaters outside the door, and lowered his voice. “I’m a bad influence on you?”
“As soon as anyone suggests anything remotely dangerous, you’re volunteering. And I’m going right along with you.”
“I would call that being a good influence. You want to go back up? I can do this by myself.”
“Please,” Micah said, “we both know you’d be dead within ten minutes without me.”
“Whatever you need to tell yourself. Admit it, you like being the hero. Why else would you have been leading mobs into East Town before this all began?”
By now Micah was pretty sure he’d got the hang of how Alex’s mind worked, but that one had him flummoxed. “Attacking Survivors was heroic?”
“No, but you were doing what you thought was right. You thought we were dangerous and you did something about it. You tried to help. Most people wouldn’t have. That’s what makes a hero. You may have been completely, embarrassingly, and stupidly wrong, but you were still trying to save people.”
Micah considered the possibility. “I never thought of it like that.”
“Yeah, so don’t go blaming me for your heroic tendencies.” Alex waved a dismissive hand as he checked the eaters outside again. “You got yourself into this all by yourself. You could have walked away at any time.”
Micah hid his smile. “I could have, but then who would have saved your life all those many, many times?”
“It’s not that many.”
The distant sound of shouting joined the sporadic moans. A few eaters raised their heads, looking to the left from where Alex and Micah were standing. The rest of them stopped shuffling and followed their gaze. As one, they all began to move in that direction.
Micah’s heart rate spiked. “Here we go.”
It took a couple of minutes for the crowd to thin and then clear between them and the helicopter where it lay in a mangled heap a hundred yards away. Micah followed Alex from beneath the stairs and pressed his face to the cold glass of the door, peering along the road to the left. The eaters were gathering beneath where Bates, Janie, Brian and the others were shouting and waving from the farthest roof they could reach.
Micah withdrew a skull-spiker from his pocket. Alex did the same. They glanced at each other for a moment, but there was no discussion of what they would do once out there. After a month of fighting side by side, it was unnecessary. Even though they frequently bickered and disagreed, Micah knew that when they fought together they would always be perfectly in sync. It was a good feeling knowing whatever danger he faced, Alex would have his back. It was what gave him the courage to do ridiculously dangerous things like stepping out onto a street filled with thousands of eate
rs.
He opened the door and moved out onto the pavement, almost colliding with an eater hampered by a badly broken leg struggling to catch up with the horde. It opened its mouth to moan. Micah dispatched it before it could alert the others and carried on into the road.
Bodies littered the ground from the earlier battle, forcing them to pick their way towards the downed helicopter rather than run. Micah threw frequent glances at the horde along the street. The huge crowd of eaters were all looking up to where those on the roof were shouting and waving, reaching up their hands and moaning like they were the audience at a very strange rock concert. Even the former members of Boot’s security were joining in with the distraction, their large, black-suited forms towering over the others.
After an uncomfortably long half a minute during which Micah was convinced they’d be spotted at any moment, they reached the helicopter and pressed against the side facing away from the horde. Even though they hadn’t been moving very fast, his heart was pounding.
“I’ll go inside and find it,” he whispered. “You keep watch.”
Alex peered around the front end of the helicopter as Micah circled round him and climbed in through the shattered front window. Inside was a mess, broken glass and detritus everywhere. The sides of the helicopter were crumpled, buckled inwards. Micah felt a moment of guilt. It was a miracle anyone had survived the crash, much less walked away from it. They’d had no choice, but if anyone had died he would have felt horrible.
The pheromone gun was lying halfway under the pilot’s chair. Micah pulled it out and checked the barrel. Empty. He handed it out to Alex.
“It’s empty,” Alex whispered.
“I know. I’m looking.” He moved a chunk of tortured metal, dislodging a large piece of glass that shattered on the floor. Micah winced. “Sorry.”
He didn’t waste any time looking out the window. If any of the horde had heard, Alex would let him know. Instead, he continued searching for ammunition for the gun.
Something red caught his eye and he bent to pick up a two inch long cartridge. Slipping it into his pocket, he continued his search, now focused on finding anything red. He almost missed the green cartridge on the floor in the back.
Twenty-Five Percent (Book 3): Vengeance Page 29