“Someone’s found her,” Wales said, full of hope.
“Vlad,” he identified himself to his radio, impatient.
The voice was Finn’s, from the security room. “I’ve got footage of five unknowns in the tunnel. Looks like Rianne is with them. They overpowered Warren, took his shirt.”
“When?” Vlad said.
A long pause. “I’ve got a visual in the east tunnel now, but don’t know how long ago they penetrated.”
The Other had been one miracle, and perhaps Wales had just been presented with another—it wasn’t too late! Wales struggled to make his limbs work properly, climbing out of bed. He had to lean on his mattress for support, to catch his breath, but he was on his feet.
“Intercept them,” Vlad began, but Wales cut him off, hobbling to snatch the radio from his hand.
“No,” Wales said, breathless from exertion. “This is Wales. Wait.”
He flung perspiration from his brow with his palm as his thoughts raced. What to do? Without guidance from the Other, where would he find it now?
Vlad waited and wondered, staring at him with icy blue eyes. They had faced this same moment only two nights ago, when Finn radioed to say that Brownie was at the gate, demanding to see Sissy. And when Wales had given the order to do what he must, he had seen the quiet shock in the large man’s face, the same look Wales had seen from his guardian many times since the Change: I don’t know you anymore.
Until now, in Vlad’s mind, Wales’s good acts far outweighed everything else. But, of course, Vlad had never met the Other.
“They did us all a favor, Vlad,” Wales told him quietly, his radio button off. “They did what I should have done.”
“You’ll let them go?” Vlad said, intrigued. “What will they say to the town?”
“They will say …”
His evening with Sonia unfolded in his memory. What had possessed him to let the toxic truth spill from his lips? Only the whiskey, or the weight of the secret? No matter how outlandish her tales would sound to Van Peebles and the townies, she might have seen the Other. Maybe all of them had seen it, to have killed it. They had seen more than enough to destroy Wales’s influence, to vilify him.
As long as he preserved his standing, the acts of kindness he performed in the future would one day erase everything else. He would welcome the camp refugees to the town, regardless of age or infirmity. He had years to redeem himself … and perhaps salvage his legacy. But not if the terrible secret escaped with the girl and the other intruders. Could he ask his men to bloody their hands one last time?
“Mr. Wales?” Finn’s uncertain voice crackled. “Should we intercept?”
“No,” Wales said, licking his parched lips. “Open the entrance and ring the dinner bell. Flood the tunnel.”
Vlad’s eyes widened with something beyond disgust, but Wales was undeterred. In quiet moments of clarity in previous days, when the Other slept, Wales had wondered if he was insane. Perhaps he saw the answer in Vlad’s eyes.
“Sir?” Finn said, to be sure.
“You heard me, son,” Wales said. “Let the freaks take care of them.”
Darius cursed, adjusting his night-vision binoculars against the sudden burst of light. A patrol! A large white pickup truck was racing toward the tunnel entrance on a winding path, driving with an urgency that couldn’t be a coincidence.
Something had gone wrong.
Darius realized how right his cousin had been. He hadn’t pondered the idea of true losses, and now his stomach felt stuffed with bricks.
“We’re gonna have to take them out,” Dean said matter-of-factly.
“More will come,” Darius said.
“We’ll take out the first crew. Change our position. Take out the next ones.”
Darius’s heart pounded against the soil where he lay propped on his stomach in his ghillie suit, his binoculars pressed to his face so hard he was digging grooves in his skin. Was it only one truck, or was another behind it? Dean was talking about Gold Shirts like they were freaks or pirates, expendable without a thought.
Jackie’s brother, Sam, might be on that truck. These were the men who scavenged with Terry and Piranha, who built fences and shared beer with them.
Dean knew his thoughts from his silence. “Only way, man,” Dean said. “Even that probably won’t be enough. We don’t know what’s going on inside. If you can’t do it, let me know.”
“I can do it,” Darius said, gravel in his voice.
“You might have to. I don’t know if I’m ready to go there.”
Darius raised his rifle, tracking the truck’s motion through the scope. High brush and the truck’s speed would make it impossible to make a shot until the truck got closer to the tunnel. But by then, his accuracy window would be next to nothing.
Maybe Darius had just lied. Maybe he couldn’t do it.
The truck lurched to a sudden stop and two men hopped out, moving like lightning. Damn! The tunnel entrance was on the far side, and the truck blocked his shot.
“Relax,” Dean said. “Once they pull that tunnel door open, they’ll be clear.”
Darius sucked air through his mouth, his finger sweating on the trigger. He saw flashes of the yellow shirts as they tugged on the door, was ready to fire …
But instead of running inside the tunnel, the men were climbing back into the truck, doors quickly slamming. The white Reverse lights flared as the truck backed up.
“What?” Dean said, confused. “They’re not going in.”
“Are they trying to let our guys out?”
Maybe they were Jackie’s brother and Sonia’s friend, or other rogue Gold Shirts enlisted into their mission somehow. Whatever they were up to, they were in a hurry.
While the truck turned around, Dean had a clear shot at the driver. “Take it?”
“No,” Dean said. “No threat, as long as they keep driving.”
The truck raced away on the path, its lights clouded by rising dust. Darius felt dizzy and sick. He might have almost killed those men for nothing—or he soon might regret sparing them.
A high-pitched, deafening horn sounded, so loud that it seemed to come from everywhere. An alarm! The tone was steady at first, then it came in bursts at intervals. That was followed by the clear sound of an old-fashioned bell. The sound was hard to pinpoint, but it might be coming from the tunnel.
“We should’ve shot them,” Dean said.
But at least the door was open and unguarded, and the truck was gone. If Terry and the others were in the tunnel, they still had a chance to escape.
Premonition tickled the back of Darius’s mind. Before a coherent thought could surface, he saw movement in the shadows beyond the tunnel entrance, from the woods.
“D?” Darius said.
“Yeah, D?”
“When does it make sense to raise a racket so close to nests of freaks?”
“Doesn’t,” Dean said, “unless you’re calling them.”
As soon as Dean spoke, a male runner flew out of the darkness, racing straight for the open tunnel door. Then another, a female. Also fast.
If Darius had blinked, he might have missed the shot that sent the lead freak flying face-first to the ground only ten yards from the tunnel entrance. Dean spun the female freak with his first shot and smashed her head with his second. Almost immediately, a half-dozen other runners followed.
As if they’d been waiting.
As if they’d been trained.
Dry leaves crackled and hissed, betraying motion far too close to them from another hidden nest. Ghillie suits would do only so much good if freaks overran them.
“We’re gonna have to switch positions,” Dean said. “Too much noise.”
As he spoke, his shot went wild, and Darius had to take out the bare-chested runner leading the pack to the tunnel entrance. It took six rapid shots to take down three of them. Then he could answer. “Gotta take the runners first.”
“Too many,” Dean said.
Their co
nversation was punctuated by rifle shots in quick succession while the woods vomited freaks. Runners led the charge, but a mass of shamblers would follow.
“Too many for us is way too many if you’re in that tunnel,” Darius said.
Somewhere behind them, a low moan floated on the wind. “Told you before,” Dean said. “We’re not all gonna make it.”
“Says you.” Darius fired again, and an overweight freak teetered and fell. “Take the runners. Can’t be much more fresh meat around here. Then we go.” He’d taken out two more runners while he spoke, although the second needed two shots. Damn. He didn’t have ammo to waste. No more distractions.
While seconds passed as hours, the cousins littered the ground with freaks of all shapes, sizes, and ages. Darius shut out his awareness of movement close to them, focusing only on making his shots. Any freak he missed might make it into the tunnel, and any freak who made it into the tunnel could kill his friends.
As he’d feared, the shamblers were coming next. He’d only seen three so far, approaching from different points, but they traveled in packs.
But none of them seemed to be running now.
Dean was already on his feet. “Let’s move!” he said.
The moonlight and high grass came back into focus, and Darius realized that a half-dozen shadowed shamblers were approaching from a knoll twenty yards west of them. If the nearby freaks had blocked their way to the bikes, they might have had to waste precious ammo on them.
“We won’t get them all,” Dean panted as they raced for the bikes, running awkwardly in the heavy ghillie suits. “But we can cut the numbers.”
“Drive fast, and we still might keep them out,” Darius said, straddling his bike.
Dean fired his engine, casting Darius a pitying gaze. “Don’t look back, cuz,” he said. “They’re already in.”
Thirty-four
The rifle shots had stopped, but the sound of the ringing bell filled the tunnel, sending the caged freaks around them into a riot. Cell doors rattled, ready to fly from their hinges. Terry was jogging so quickly that he tripped over a freak’s forearm. Only Ursalina’s quick reflexes kept him from falling to the floor, where a freak might have scratched his face.
“Terry?” Kendra said, frightened, grabbing his other arm.
“I’m fine,” Terry said. “Everybody keep moving.”
“What if they get out?” Sonia said.
“Take a look,” Piranha said. “Can’t walk, see? Legs are broken. We just have to get to the door. The Twins should have our backs after that.”
“How do we know the Twins were the ones shooting?” Kendra said.
“I know their rifles,” Ursalina said. “It was them. They probably took off to draw Wales’s men away.”
Terry hadn’t been able to hear every shot over the tunnel’s noise, but he was sure he had heard at least ten, probably far more. Maybe Ursalina was right, or maybe the Twins had changed their firing position, but that didn’t mean the Twins had taken out every Gold Shirt who might be waiting at the other end.
But so far, no one had challenged them. Did that mean Wales’s men were waiting to ambush them, or was the way clear? Forging ahead into the tunnel didn’t feel smart, but they couldn’t go back after the way Rianne had been screaming. Stick to the plan.
Terry had just worked up his nerve to run faster when the bright image in his flashlight’s beam made them pile into one another and take a collective gasp. How?
At least three freaks, maybe more, stood tall and ominously uncaged in their path. Their bent posture and shuffling feet identified them as shamblers, but how the hell had they gotten out? And why weren’t their legs broken?
Hippy barked valiantly, but he didn’t charge. Somehow, he knew better, which Terry took as a very bad sign. Hippy yelped as if he were facing an army.
“Aw, damn,” Piranha said. “We didn’t lock the gates when we came in.”
“You said their legs were broken!” Sonia said. Instinctively, they all drew closer together. Thank God the freaks were shamblers, but how many were there? How long would their ammo last?
Three guns chambered, ready to shoot. Terry held the light steady with one hand and aimed his Glock with the other.
“Nobody fire,” Ursalina said. “Not till we see how many there are.”
“Maybe we missed a few,” Terry said. “Maybe a cell door broke …”
They could handle three or four shamblers, easy. They might not even have to backtrack to the last freakproof gate they’d passed, which would cost them progress and might trap them in the tunnel. The shamblers were moving forward, leaning over eagerly as they dragged their near-dead legs, but they were still twenty feet away, which might as well be a mile, in shambler distance. So far, the three shamblers were alone.
“Okay,” Terry said, slowing his breathing. “I say we take them down and—”
Then the shambler on the far left was pushed aside, and a runner broke his way through at full speed. He’d been an old man before he was bitten, but freak juice had given him new legs. “Tax time!” the freak growled, leaping at them.
Three of them fired at him at once, an explosion, and the freaks jerked, spun, and fell against the walls, scrabbling at the air as they collapsed.
“Hold your fire!” Ursalina yelled, but at least eight rounds had been spent before Terry realized she’d spoken. The discipline they’d had at the Barracks, and then with the Yreka pirates, had dissolved in the darkness.
Please let that be the end of it, Terry prayed.
But even if he’d imagined the mass movement in his flashlight’s beam, he recognized the sound of freaks’ moans and countless feet shuffling toward them. It couldn’t be, and yet …
Sonia cursed, the first to understand. “The bell! Wales did this! The bastard called them.”
They should have retreated as soon as they heard the gunshots. The Twins had been shooting freaks, not Gold Shirts. Who knew how many biters lurked in the surrounding woods? Wales had done worse than let the freaks in—he had invited them to feast. That was a dinner bell.
Come and get it!
“Back!” Terry yelled.
Rianne had curled herself in a ball on the floor, shrieking, while Kendra tried to pull her back to her feet. Where had the last freakproof gate been? Maybe twenty-five yards back? They could make it if—
As soon as Terry turned to retreat, the thunder of approaching footsteps told him there were at least two more runners coming fast.
“Runners!” Kendra shouted, still tugging on Rianne, not giving up on her. The terror in her voice made Terry wish he weren’t so scared himself or that he knew how to protect any of them.
One runner seemed to duck Ursalina’s shot, angling its head to the side, but Sonia slammed its head with the bat. The freak didn’t fall, but its momentary misstep gave Piranha time to shoot it in the temple before it reached them. The freak had gotten so close that they smelled the sour whoof as its last breath escaped. Ursalina stopped the second runner in mid-step, before he broke past the wall of shamblers.
Terry’s heart was beating so hard that his vision blurred and the walls seemed to collapse on him. How many freaks were there?
Outside, gunshots again.
“The Twins!” Ursalina said. “They repositioned.”
“I say we keep going!” Piranha said. “They’re thinning the numbers.”
The shamblers were only fifteen feet away, lurching in a tangle of limbs.
“We can’t,” Kendra said. She sounded like she was begging.
“No, he’s right,” Ursalina agreed. “If we go back to the basement, we’ll never leave here alive. This way, we’ve got a chance. We keep going and take them down.”
Terry nodded. The plan was terrifying, but it was the only one they had. “Everybody stay together. Nobody runs ahead or back.”
“I don’t have a gun!” Rianne wailed.
“You and Kendra stick close to us,” Piranha said. “Gimme that bat, Sonia.”
“What?” Sonia protested.
Piranha offered her his gun instead. “Twelve rounds left. Don’t waste them.”
Sonia traded weapons with Piranha. She wiped away a tear.
“Where’s your extra clip?” Ursalina asked Piranha.
He tossed it to her. “We need a miracle, chica. Do what you do.”
“Give me your flashlight,” Kendra told Terry. “Rianne, take the other one. Let’s make sure they can see.”
“How far till the end?” Ursalina said, shoving the clip in her bosom.
“Almost a hundred yards. A long way. So let’s stay in a circle,” Terry said, trying to calculate his own ammo. Eight rounds in his clip, maybe, and another clip in his pocket. At an average of two shots apiece, that was ten or more dead freaks. “Keep the light where we need it. Ready, guys?”
None of them spoke. They weren’t ready. If they’d had time, they might have hugged good-bye. But even the shamblers were too close now, and another runner was surely coming.
With a war cry, Piranha lunged ahead with his bat, smashing the skull of the stick-thin female freak closest to him. Without missing a beat, he charged the next one, a man dressed in a grimy Mickey Mouse shirt. For an instant, Piranha vanished in darkness, but Kendra followed him with her light and they all waded behind him.
A wiry teenage freak turned to grab Piranha, and the tunnel flashed white with Terry’s gunshot. The kid’s head snapped back, a cratered third eye just above his nose. Ursalina’s gunfire followed, taking down two freaks in quick succession.
“You shine left, I’ll shine right,” Kendra told Rianne, and suddenly the path ahead looked clear and bright, crowded with approaching freaks. Terry was too busy shooting to try to count them.
“Watch where you step!” Terry said. “Even if they fall, they might not be dead.”
It was working! Somehow, they were bringing down enough freaks to keep moving forward at a steady pace, and no one had been touched.
“Light!” Ursalina called when Rianne’s beam faltered, and Rianne shined the light left just in time for them to see a burly runner muscling his way past his slower cousins, his bearded face a mask of rage. The sight of him was so startling that all three shooters fired at him at once.
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