by Duncan, Ian
Trudy slowly straightened. For a moment, at least, the coughing seemed to have stopped.
Cole took another step. He held the flashlight at his feet and clicked it on, bright enough that it illumined Trudy’s face.
Emily’s voice behind him: “Cole, what’s wrong?”
Trudy’s eyes came up and locked on Cole’s, dark and shot through with burst vessels. Her face was smeared with bled rivulets of mascara and her eye sockets darkened with smudges of shadow. For a moment her eyes held Cole’s, and he saw, in place of keenness, an animal blankness. They could have been the eyes of either a cow or a shark. No kindness came over her face.
Cole’s thumb rested on the knurled edge of the fire selector, ready to flick the lever from safe to fire.
“Cole, what are you doing?” Emily called out, louder now.
Trudy wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “If the Cord doesn’t get me, these damn cigarettes sure as hell are gonna.” She pulled an open pack from her hip pocket, her fingers visibly shaking at the foil before she withdrew a slender cigarette and planted it on her lips, searching her pockets for the lighter.
Cole was still watching Trudy’s movements closely when Emily appeared at his side. Her voice echoed hollowly inside the respirator. “Where’s Miguel?” Not a casual question, it rose at the end toward an uncertain panic, as though her throat had constricted as she had spoken the words.
They all glanced around them, Cole risking the use of the flashlight to see the furthest corners of the rooftop. Behind them, Brandon was struggling to drag himself into a sitting position against the parapet wall.
“Isn’t that his gun?” Trudy pointed, cigarette between her fingers, to a dark shape on the roof beside the hatch.
Cole retrieved the AR pistol, turning it over in his hands as though some lingering forensic trace might tell the tale. He ejected the magazine. Empty.
Trudy circled the big air handler, yelling, between nervous drags on her cigarette, “Mig-U-El!”
As soon as Trudy was out of earshot, Emily stepped in front of him, her eyes intent on his face. “What were you going to do back there?”
Cole watched her pale eyes searching his face, flitting from one feature to the next, as though the violence necessary to survive the zone were nothing more than a nervous tick or a paranoia visible in the aperture of the pupils. She still had no idea how bad this could get, Cole realized.
“Were you—” Emily lowered her voice and began again, barely audible inside the respirator. “Were you going to shoot her? Were you going to shoot Trudy?”
“Not unless I had to,” Cole said.
The respirator cast strange shadows over Emily’s face, but Cole could see tears shining in her eyes.
“Not unless I had to,” Cole said again, no less earnestly.
Emily turned and walked away. Cole watched her go, knowing there was nothing he could say and hoping to God they could somehow escape the zone before the change came over her, too, like the knowledge of good and evil itself, the terrible hardening that came with it, that part of a survivor’s psyche that was not so much intact as it was cauterized.
“Cole.” Brandon motioned to him from the shadow of the parapet wall.
Cole went to him, laying the flashlight between them, still burning, and taking off his pack momentarily so he could slide the AR pistol barrel-first into one of the zippered pockets.
“How are you holding up?” Cole asked.
Brandon squinted painfully. “I’d have to get better to die.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t die, ‘cause I’d lose my mind by myself here with these two women.”
Brandon seemed too tired to follow what Cole was saying. “Let me see that flashlight.”
Cole handed it to him.
Brandon aimed it toward the far side of the roof, several football fields away, the row of air handlers diminishing, one by one, until, from that distance, they were no more than tiny silver shapes glinting in the powerful beam.
“I thought I heard something a minute ago,” Brandon said.
At first Cole saw nothing. Then he saw something dark, no bigger than a bird or perhaps a bat but for the strange way it flew, rising and falling. Hovering.
“The drone,” Cole said.
The flashlight trembled in Brandon upraised hand. “Look beside it.”
Cole looked again. A thin, nearly vertical line rose from the top of an air handler, widening into a shape as big as a football at the top when Brandon raised the flashlight beam. It seemed, if his eyes were not mistaken, that the drone attended the thing like a bee at a flower.
“I think they’ve found our Hispanic friend,” Brandon said.
Something in Cole’s gut turned over.
“We’ve all been exposed,” Brandon said, resignation in his voice. “You haven’t been wearing a mask, either.” He handed the flashlight back to Cole.
“Only because I’ve had it before,” Cole said, knowing how crazy that sounded, as though the Cord were nothing more than another strain of chicken pox.
“You’ve had the Cord before?” Brandon repeated, his eyes widening in the darkness.
“Long story.” Cole swept the flashlight across the rooftop looking for Emily, who saw him spotlighting her and began walking toward him. Trudy stood at the far parapet wall, her back to them, stock still. Cole wondered what she saw below.
“You’re going to have to leave me behind,” Brandon began.
“The hell we are,” Cole said. He looked across the rooftop at Trudy’s silhouette, impatiently. Why was she just standing there like that?
“Make sure you have all your stuff,” Cole told Emily. “We’re getting out of here.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’ve got to find a way off this roof.”
“Is that really any safer?”
“Probably not, but we can’t stay here. We’ve been here way too long already.” Cole ripped open the mag carrier on his load bearing vest to confirm his last spare mag was still there. It was. Sixty rounds left. That meant he could kill sixty Cord zombies at best—out of what, a million within the city limits?
“Cole, listen to what you’re saying,” Emily argued from inside her respirator. “It’s probably not safer or any better, but we’re going to do it anyway?”
Cole gave her a look that said please just trust me on this.
Emily seemed to relent.
“I’ll get Trudy,” Cole said. “See if you can get Brandon ready to move.” He hurried across the roof with the AR in his hands, the membrane roof sponging slightly under his boots, and the logistics of everything that needed to happen building like a physical pressure in his mind. His little team of survivors now consisted of a man with some kind of torn ligament or compound fracture, a woman that could give birth or at least go into labor at any moment, and a chain-smoker seemingly in the advanced stages of emphysema. Terrific.
“Trudy.” Cole approached the parapet wall warily and scanned the parking lot below with the flashlight. “See anything?”
The armored vehicle was gone. No milling crowd of coughers.
Trudy coughed.
Cole looked at her, shining the flashlight on her at waist-level. Her shoulders were slumped and she made no move to raise a fist to her mouth, having become, by all appearances, completely surrendered to the spasm, letting it shake her.
“We need to move,” Cole said. “You alright?”
Her face was shadowed and hideous. Only her eyes moved, cut hard to the side to see Cole. The eyes of a predator.
The instant before she lunged, Cole stumbled backward, and only the fact that the AR barrel had already been pointed, somewhat carelessly, at her feet, saved him. He moved the hand holding the flashlight to steady the rifle rather than throwing it out to catch himself, his reflexes proving, in that moment,
almost prescient. His thumb swept the fire selector. He found the trigger.
Three rounds blew through Trudy’s chest but she kept coming, ramming the barrel with the full force of her weight, knocking the rifle from Cole’s hands. They tumbled onto the rooftop together, Trudy falling over his shoulder, limp as a doll, and rolling away on the rooftop until she stopped, face to the sky.
Cole clambered for the AR, pointing it at her and scooting away on the seat of his pants before he even attempted to stand. A muffled scream came from the far side of the roof. Cole found the flashlight and kept it trained on Trudy, the AR ready. The cords in her neck stood out from her leathery skin, straining to lift her head, and just as Cole shouldered the rifle, blood erupted from her mouth and her eyes went wide.
A hysterical voice came out of the darkness behind him. “NO! No! What did you do?” Emily dropped to her knees beside Trudy, reaching for her.
“Get away from her!” Cole had his feet under him.
One of Trudy’s hands clapped onto Emily’s wrist like a manacle, her eyes afire and her streaked face turned on Emily with the sudden fury of bloodlust. Cole leapt forward, stomping Trudy’s forearm flat and bringing the butt of the rifle down in a hammer blow to her skull. The flashlight fell to the rooftop.
Emily fell back on her heels, clutching fistfuls her own hair, and the scream that came from inside her mask was as much a cry of alarm as it was an attempt to negate all reality, to expel, by displacement from her mind, the evil she had seen.
Cole dropped beside her, laying down the AR and seizing her by the arms. He pulled her up to a sitting position, shaking her and telling her to stop before he quite realized what he was doing. “You’re fine. You’re fine. Emily, look at me. LOOK at me!”
Her breath came in short, hyperventilating puffs through the valves of her respirator and her eyes were shocked impossibly wide. Cole held on to her. Emily went limp and began to noiselessly sob. Cole relaxed his grip and drew her in and encircled her with his arms. He glanced back at Trudy, the beam of the fallen flashlight bright on the side of her pants. She lay perfectly still, the gathering blood beneath her head dark and thick as oil on the white membrane surface of the roof.
Thirty-Four
“YOUR MONEY NOT YOUR LIFE?” Cuban said over the coms. “What was that, a line from Scarface?”
“I think it’s from a Cage the Elephant song,” Sam admitted, thumbing shells into the shotgun magazine and hearing the chuckles of the other two operators in his ear.
“Hey, fuck off, alright?” Sam said good-naturedly. “I was going through an angsty faze.”
“Your girlfriend was going through an angsty faze,” Cuban retorted.
Sam fell silent as they passed what appeared to be an entire apartment complex on fire, ash and burning pieces of paper drifting across the road like fiery snow in the beams of the Excursion’s headlights.
“Uh, we may be having an issue with the locals on our route,” Cuban said over the coms.
In their earpieces Trubilinski and Sam could faintly hear tires squealing and the rattle of automatic gunfire.
“Time to second target?” Trubilinski prompted.
“T minus ten,” came Wes’s voice, still steady. “Hold on.” Another burst of gunfire. “Damn things are everywhere. Okay, I’m back. This one may be an entourage. They’ve had a consistent second blip behind them for ten minutes now. Riding close.”
“Security?” Sam said.
“That’d be my guess,” Cuban said. “Who in their right mind would drive across the city on a night like tonight without it?”
Sam looked at Trubilinski. “Your call, General.”
Trubilinski drove in silence for several moments, waiting while a police cruiser came out of nowhere and passed them, blue lights flashing, traveling at least eighty miles per hour, nearly losing control as it fishtailed through an intersection and accelerated in the opposite direction.
“Can we predict their route?” Trubilinski asked.
“Unless they suddenly change course,” Wes said, “it looks like they’re headed downtown, and there’s only one major thoroughfare still open in that area. Several others are clogged with wrecks and abandoned cars. Be advised, there is a major horde of coughers less that two blocks from your position.”
“We proceed,” Trubilinski decided. “Team One is closer to the X, so we’ll position Sam as a sniper. Both teams hit the chase car while Sam attempts to immobilize or otherwise slow the lead. Once the security team is neutralized, we’ll overtake the lead.”
The coms fell quiet for a moment after the word neutralized. Even Sam seemed sobered by the General’s order. “You heard the man,” he said finally.
“Roger that,” said Wes.
“Copy,” said Cuban.
Sam passed the tablet PC to Trubilinski and climbed over the center console into the back of the Excursion. He popped open the clasps of a long Pelican case and opened the lid, revealing his fifty-caliber M107 cushioned between layers of eggshell foam. He hefted the thirty-pound rifle, locked open the bolt, and inserted a loaded magazine the size of a hardback book. “I’m going to take out a tire on the lead car, then go for the engine block on the second,” he said, thinking aloud.
“If you can, Samwise, stay in position and provide some overwatch for us,” Cuban suggested.
“Copy.”
“Eight minutes,” Trubilinski said.
Sam slipped into the straps of a small tactical backpack, slung an M4 over his neck, and scooted toward the side door, lugging the sniper rifle with him. “I’m ready, sir,” he said.
Trubilinski glanced at him in the rearview mirror. “We’re approaching the X. What do you like?”
Sam leaned over the passenger’s seat long enough to scan the intersection through the windshield. Multiple abandoned cars and debris created additional obstacles and potential cover for the target if they bailed from their vehicle. Several dead bodies and a climber sprouted atop a light post in the shadows added an aspect of the surreal.
“There,” Sam pointed to a house nearly a block further down. “The brownstone.”
Trubilinski accelerated toward it and braked hard when he got there. The narrow three-story was a residential hold-out sandwiched between two commercial office towers. A faded red placard in the window read for lease. Its rooftop would provide an oblique, nearly concealed angle from which to fire on the intersection.
“Give me five to get to the top,” Sam said. He pushed open the door, hauled himself out with his burden of weaponry, and donkey-kicked the door shut behind him. He took the brownstone’s steps two at a time.
Thirty-Five
COLE BORE the full weight of Emily’s quavering upper body, one of her arms draped around his neck, as they left Trudy behind and crossed the roof to the parapet wall, the flashlight beam leading them. They found Brandon there slumped against it, one hand laid over his heart as if to quell it, or as though he had studied the posture of great generals of the past, who, when wounded in battle, were propped against the trunks of nearby trees to utter some sober prophecy and remorsefully die.
“We’ve all been exposed,” he said, shaking his head. “Could’ve been any of us.”
“We’re not going to die on this damn roof,” Cole said. “Not today.” He steadied Emily and pulled her arm from around his neck. Her eyes were squeezed shut and it seemed all her energy was being spent trying to get her breathing under control.
“Emily,” Cole said, “I need you to stand on your own. Can you do that?”
Her eyelids fluttered. “I’m not sure. I’m not sure I can do this.”
“You can,” Cole said in a low and assuring tone. “You’re strong and you’re not helpless.”
“That’s right,” Cole heard Brandon say, from below them. The man was struggling to pull himself up, his fingertips gripping the top of the cinderblock parap
et wall. “If I can do it with a busted leg, you can, too.”
Cole looked at Brandon, so stunned by the man’s sudden determination that he didn’t even think of reaching out to help him. It was because of Emily, he realized. Every one needed someone to be brave for.
Emily nodded, barely perceptible at first.
Brandon tested his bad leg and winced. “Really not as bad as I thought. I will need to lean on you, though.”
Cole stepped beside him, hip to hip, and took Brandon’s arm across his shoulders. Brandon was just as tall as Cole, and heavier, too, such that the weight that bore down on Cole’s joints seemed to set them afire. They took a few experimental steps, Emily following, and on the second stride Cole heard Brandon gasp and clear his throat, probably in an attempt to mask the involuntary cry that had nearly escaped his mouth. Cole glanced sidelong at him and saw sweat standing out on his forehead, his eyes clearly pained.
“I can’t use that leg at all,” Brandon admitted.
“We’ll make do,” Cole said.
“I’m just going to slow you down,” Brandon said under his breath, as though he didn’t want Emily to hear it.
“Don’t be dramatic,” Cole joked, though under the strain it was hard to bring humor into his voice.
“I’m not going to blame you if it comes to that,” Brandon went on quietly, as though he were dictating his last will and testament. “Just so you know. When you have to, just do it and don’t feel bad about it later. Or if I go like Trudy. Just get the girl out of here and get someplace safe.”
“Nobody’s getting left behind,” Cole lied, painfully aware how hollow the promise was when he had just shot Trudy point blank and left her corpse bleeding out on the rooftop, to be eaten by buzzards or to rot or perhaps even to sprout that very night.
They sweated and staggered on, Brandon hopping on his good leg and making every effort to keep from dragging the bad one but occasionally having to stop and rest his foot, ever so gently on the rooftop, massaging the muscles of his upper leg with his knuckles and softly cursing his weakness.