Lincoln rolled his eyes. “Really? Gonna pull out this boxed Bible nonsense again? Can’t you come up with your own lines?”
Talon had no intention of responding to that, but even if he’d wanted to, Will didn’t give him the chance.
“What part of ‘under arrest’ do you crazy assholes not understand?” the detective yelled, physically forcing his way between them. “Sword down, hands up, now.” He glanced over his shoulder at the two hospital security guards who were standing in shock by the doors. “Little help here?”
“They can’t help you,” Lincoln said, lowering his arms. “No one can. Not anymore.”
“Dammit, I said hands up!” Will barked, moving his gun off Talon to point the barrel in Lincoln’s face. As always, though, the threat fell flat. Talon knew from experience that Black feared nothing, least of all death. All that was human and fearful in him had withered and died years ago, leaving a grinning shell who lived only to tear others down. If there was a chance the detective would listen, Talon could have explained this and saved him the trouble, but there was no time. Black’s smile was already growing, and Talon had the horrible creeping sensation that he’d missed something vital.
“You sure you want to be pointing that thing at me, hot shot?” Black asked, his voice mocking. “Not to spoil your fun, but you might want to save your bullets, because you’re about to have a lot more to shoot at.”
Will gritted his teeth, but before he could yell whatever he was clearly about to yell, Lauryn screamed.
“Shit!”
Talon whirled at once, turning just in time to see Lauryn grab the patient in front of her. The man was convulsing on the gurney, his mouth opening in a scream of pain as he clutched his hands to his face where three drops of the emerald liquid from the vial Talon had cut out of Black’s hand had missed the floor and landed on his flesh.
“Oh, dear.” Black tsked as the smell of burning flesh filled the room. “Should have been paying more attention.”
Will shouted something back at him, but Talon couldn’t hear it over the chaos exploding around them. Up to this point, everyone in the room—staff and the patients cognizant enough of their surroundings to understand something exciting was happening—had been watching the unfolding police drama with absolute attention. Now that Lauryn’s shout had broken the spell, everyone started moving at once. Especially the code team, who practically knocked Will over in their rush to get to Lauryn’s patient.
A mistake Talon didn’t realize until too late.
“No!” he shouted, grabbing for the closest nurse. “Don’t touch—”
A roar drowned out his voice as the man on the gurney sat bolt upright and wrapped his arms around the burly tech who’d been trying to slide the cardiac board under his back. The moment he had the man in his grips, he lurched up and bit down hard, sinking his teeth—his long, yellow, no longer human teeth—into the man’s shoulder. He was still gnawing when the other techs yanked him off, ripping his teeth out of the screaming man with a sickening sound. It wasn’t until the bitten man’s skin started to change color, though, that Talon realized just how badly they’d been set up.
“Black!” he roared, whirling around, but his enemy was already gone. In the split second Talon had been distracted, Lincoln Black had made it all the way to the giant fire doors that separated the burn ward from the rest of the hospital. He was out of the ward entirely by the time Talon finally caught up, snatching him by the collar and slamming him into the hallway’s cement wall. But when he put his sword to Black’s neck, the wiry man went limp in his grasp, laughing like this was all a big joke.
“Shut up,” Talon said, pressing harder as he jerked his head toward the chaos exploding through the ward behind them. “How do I stop this?”
“You can’t,” Lincoln giggled. “That’s what’s so funny.”
“I don’t believe you,” Talon said. “You might not value your life, but your masters are too selfish to create a weapon with no counter. There has to be a way to shut this down, and you’re going to tell me what that is, or I’ll do what I should have done years ago.”
“Like you could,” Black taunted, grinning wider than ever. “I know you, Talon. You believe everyone can be saved. Even me. That’s why you’ve never been able to kill me despite all the times we’ve done this. Because you know if you do, your God loses. But that’s the joke, isn’t it? ’Cause I ain’t ever going to repent, and I’m never going to stop. So what’s it going to be, holy man? Are you finally going to accept that your God has no power over me and cut off my head? Or are you going to let me live and keep our little dance going for one more round? Either way, I win. But you’d better decide fast, or your little doctor’s going to end up just like that other girl you thought you could—”
Talon slammed him into the wall hard enough to crack the cement. Black was still wheezing when Talon dropped him and turned away, striding without a word back into the chaos in the ward behind them. He’d just made it to the doors when he heard Black’s laughter chasing him down the hall.
“You’re too late, you know!” he yelled. “The green stuff’s just the catalyst. The match to the kindling. They’re all already damned, and you know it.”
“No one is damned who cannot also be saved,” Talon replied quietly, taking a deep breath before he pushed through the crowd of increasingly panicked nurses and EMTs and made his way back to where he was most needed.
At Lauryn’s side.
The moment Lauryn saw the green goo on her patient’s face, she knew it was going to be bad. She might not have understood the rest of it—like why a man dressed as a doctor would try to punch her in the face with an unknown drug or how he knew Talon—but when it came to her patients, things got very simple: do what had to be done to save the life. It was the part of being a physician Lauryn had always understood, and it was what she clung to now, shutting the rest of the craziness out to focus on the emergency in front of her.
“Get him tied down,” she ordered, dropping to the floor where the bitten tech was rolling around in a panic, getting blood everywhere. She put a stop to that by locking her hand on his shoulder, pushing him gently but firmly onto the floor. Above them, the nurses managed to get the patient lashed back down to the bed. Surprisingly, he went down without a fight, rolling and crying and rubbing his bloody mouth on the sheets. But when the nurses tried to approach him again, Lauryn stopped them.
“He’ll be fine,” she lied. “Just leave him be, and stay away from that green stuff.” She pointed at the splatter of emerald-green goo that was lying on the floor between the beds a few feet away. “That’s the hallucinogen that started this mess, and it’s absorbed through the skin. I need everyone to stay away until the biohazard team can come handle it. I don’t want anyone else going nuts on me.”
After what they’d just seen, it didn’t take much convincing to get the nurses to back down. She’d barely finished her warning before the whole team cleared out, putting five feet minimum between themselves and the spilled green liquid. When Lauryn was satisfied no one else was going to be accidentally exposed, she turned her attention back to the downed tech, who was looking worryingly ashen despite the pressure Lauryn was applying to his wound. A few seconds later, though, she realized the man’s skin wasn’t turning ashen from lack of blood. He was changing color, his face slowly shifting from flushed tan to a very familiar shade of sickly bluish gray.
“Damn,” she muttered, prying open his clamped-tight eyes. Sure enough, they were already going, the blood vessels popping right in front of her.
“What’s wrong?”
The question made her jump, and Lauryn looked up to see Will crouching beside her with his gun still in his hands.
“Put that away!”
“No,” he snapped. “Not until I’m sure he’s not going to Hulk out on us again.” He shot a poisonous glare at the druggie who was still lashed down to the gurney before returning his attention to the ashen-faced tech Lauryn was holding
down. “Please tell me that’s not what it looks like.”
“It can’t be,” Lauryn said, letting go just long enough to catch the roll of wound tape one of the nurses tossed at her. “I don’t care what he’s on, no drug is strong enough to be passed in functional doses through a bite. We’re humans, not cobras.” She peeled off a strip of tape one-handed, motioning for Will to hold the man down as she began binding his wound. “It couldn’t have been the bite. He must have gotten the green stuff on him another way. Stepped in it or—”
Another scream cut her off. It was a woman’s voice this time, high-pitched and in pain. Down on the ground, Lauryn couldn’t even see where it had come from, but Will shot up off the floor like a gopher, his face pale and serious as he looked around. “Crap.”
“What?” she demanded.
“Someone else just got bit,” he said, dropping back down. “A nurse this time. Bastard just grabbed her arm and dug in.”
Lauryn swore under her breath. As if things weren’t bad enough. The staff was already pushed to their limits from having to deal with so many unstable patients. Add in biting and even the veterans were going to start panicking.
That realization must have been prophetic, because no sooner had the worry crossed Lauryn’s mind than another scream rang across the ward. This one was followed by several other terrified shouts and the loud bang of a bed being knocked over. Cursing under her breath, Lauryn handed Will the tape to finish tying off the patient’s wound and shot to her feet, sucking a breath to yell for everyone to just calm the hell down and remember they were professionals. But the angry words died on her tongue, because when she spun around to look at the far corner of the ward where the shout had come from, all she could see were beds.
Empty beds, with no one around them.
“Wait,” she said, looking around in confusion. “Where did—”
Her words were cut short as one of the wheeled beds in the corner rattled and slid sideways. That was all the warning Lauryn got before a man exploded toward her, leaping off the floor between the beds like a tiger. It happened so fast, she didn’t even have time to scream. She just dove sideways, knocking Will out of the way as the man flew past where they’d been to land in the cluster of terrified staff behind them.
What happened after was a maelstrom of bodies and blood and screams. All around the room, bloody-eyed patients were ripping themselves out of their beds and turning on the hospital staff like ravenous lions. The nurses tried to run, but the room was too crowded, and the panic slowed them down, making them easy prey for the gray-skinned monsters their patients had become. By the time Lauryn had pushed herself off Will, the screams were competing with the unmistakable sound of tearing flesh. The sound alone was enough to make even Lauryn want to vomit. That was what she was concentrating on when something grabbed her and yanked her off the floor.
The moment the hand closed around her arm, she began to fight, flailing wildly in an effort to keep whatever it was away.
“Stop,” commanded a familiar voice. “It’s me.”
Lauryn blinked at the sound and looked up to see Talon standing over her, sword in hand.
It was a sign of just how messed up this whole situation was that the sight of a crazy man with a gleaming blade was almost enough to make her cry with relief. If things had been less dire, she would have, but Lauryn was too busy to break down right now.
“We have to get out of here!” she cried, grabbing his sleeve. “They’re changing like Lenny!”
“They are,” Talon agreed. “But we can’t run.”
“Why do you always say that?” she hissed as Talon reached down to grab Will next. “This isn’t like under the bridge. Running is the only plan. We’re facing a full-blown outbreak!”
She didn’t realize how true those words were until she said them. All around the room, the bitten victims, including the tech she’d bandaged less than a minute earlier, were pulling themselves up from where they’d fallen. They rose like marionettes, their bodies cracking and bending at unnatural angles.
“You know, running is starting to sound like a great idea,” Will said, glancing backwards at the heavy fire doors where all the medical staff lucky enough to be away from the beds when the situation had gone to hell were currently fighting each other to get out. “Let’s—”
“We have to stay here,” Talon said, his voice firm. “Look at them. They’re hunters. If we run, they’ll chase, and then there’ll be nothing to stop them from infecting the whole hospital.”
“Oh, come on!” Will yelled. “That’s ridiculous. They’re druggies, not zombies.”
Lauryn wasn’t so sure about that. By this point, most of the hospital staff who could run had done so, fleeing through the fire doors down the hall that led to the elevators. Behind them, the patients were in hot pursuit, their crooked bodies becoming more graceful—more predatory—with every step they took. It was like seeing the birth of a new kind of hunter in fast forward, and as she watched it go down, Lauryn realized that—in one way at least—Talon was absolutely right. Whatever happened, whatever was actually going on here, they could not let those things get up to the rest of the patients in the main hospital. She was still trying to figure out how to do that when a fresh chorus of screams rang out from the hall as the fleeing workers were taken down. This was followed by a few seconds of eerie silence, and then the creatures reappeared, stalking back inside the ward toward Lauryn, Will, and Talon.
The only prey left.
“That’s it,” Will said, raising his gun. “We need to run now. Stick close to me. We’ll take the fire escape up to the street and—”
“No!” Lauryn said, grabbing his arm. “Talon’s right. We can’t run.”
Will’s face went blank in disbelief. Lauryn couldn’t blame him. They were now the only unchanged people left in the giant ward filled with . . . she didn’t even know what to call them. “Monsters” felt wrong, but they were definitely no longer human.
She scanned the room once more. At this point, every one of the original patients who’d been brought in had torn themselves off their gurneys. The rest of the medical staff—both the ones who’d run and those who’d been caught before they could—were down on the ground, but a few of the bodies were already twitching, their bloody eyes flying open in that horrified expression Lauryn had come to dread. The first ones were starting to rise, their gray, corpse-colored bodies slowly taking on the terrifying and oddly inhuman predator movement she’d seen before. Soon enough, they’d realize they didn’t need to chase these three, and then the attack would come.
Under any other circumstances, that would have been cause for panic. Now, though, with seven floors of vulnerable patients waiting above them, it gave Lauryn an idea.
“We can’t let them get upstairs,” she whispered, gripping Will’s arm as hard as she could. “We have to keep them down here somehow.”
“Are you crazy?” Will hissed. “We can’t stay here!”
“They haven’t attacked us yet,” she pointed out. An observation that made no sense now that she thought about it. “I wonder—”
“It’s the sword,” Talon said quietly, gripping the bright blade in his hands. “Demons are cowardly by nature. They only attack when they think they can win.”
“Yeah, well, you might want to check the odds on that,” Will muttered, clutching his gun. “’Cause they seem to be getting less afraid by the second.”
He was right. The longer they stood without attacking, the bolder the changed patients became. Already, they were inching forward, surrounding the three of them in a ring of red eyes and long teeth. If they didn’t move soon, they’d be cornered completely. The problem was if running upstairs wasn’t an option, Lauryn didn’t know where to go. Other than the fire doors, the burn ward didn’t even have other rooms save for the bathrooms in the hall and the pharmaceutical closet at the room’s far end. The one with a reinforced, key-locked door designed to protect hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of
prescription medication . . .
Right.
“Follow me!” she cried, pushing off the wall.
“Follow you where?” Will yelled as Talon ran after her. “Lauryn!”
But Lauryn didn’t slow down. She couldn’t. She could already feel the things’ eyes on her as she broke into a run, sprinting around the toppled gurneys as she snatched the ID badge off her coat with her free hand. The moment she was in range, she slammed the plastic card against the black ID reader on the wall beside the door, frantically shoving the RFID chip against the pad until, after what felt like years, the light on the locked closet turned green, and the heavy deadbolt retracted with a click.
Lauryn shouldered the door, holding it open to let Talon and Will—who thankfully did follow her—run in before kicking the weighted door shut. It slammed closed seconds before the first of the pursuing transformed patients crashed into the wood. The second one hit the door hard enough to crack the reinforced security glass panel, but the door had been built to guard the hospital’s investment from even the most determined pill addicts, and it held. When she was sure it would stay that way, Lauryn stepped back with a sigh of relief. “We should be safe in here.”
“You mean trapped,” Will said, looking around at the tiny space packed with plastic medicine dispensers. “There’s only one way out, and if these guys are anything like the ones we dealt with yesterday, that door won’t mean a damned thing in a few minutes. We had one rip open a patrol car, remember?”
“I don’t think these are at that stage,” Talon said quietly, peering through the tiny window at the top of the door. “At least, not yet.”
“That’s not really comforting,” Lauryn said, looking around the safe room that was feeling more like a prison with every passing second. “What do we do now?”
Talon didn’t answer. A lapse Will seemed to take personally. “Okay, that’s it,” he said, turning on Talon. “You and that other asshole, the one you called Black, seem to know a lot about this for a couple of random bystanders. Talk.”
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