by Addison Gunn
Du Trieux had an odd look on her face. She seemed as if she were about to say something, when Morland came back into the room and waved them over.
“I found the stairwell,” he said.
The thought gone, du Trieux followed Miller toward the exit. Out the room, down the hall, up one flight of stairs to the stairwell landing.
It seemed to be some sort of campsite. Complete with a bedroll, a propane-powered hot plate, and a lantern. Whoever had been staying there hadn’t left that long ago; the rusted pan on top of the hotplate was still warm.
“Rat-things,” Doyle said, his face contorting. “Pan-fried rat-things.” A bucket sat in the corner of the landing, full of tiny cooked skeletons.
Morland grimaced. “Tasty.”
“What’s behind that?” Hsiung asked, pointing to one wall, where large panels of cardboard had been duct-taped.
Du Trieux was closest. She pulled back the panel, revealing a small dugout compartment, just big enough for a small person to hide inside. Curled up in fetal position on the floor was a short, skinny, petrified teenager.
Thick glasses, so chipped and dusty Miller wondered how anyone could see through them, sat on a large, beak-like nose. He was devoid of lichen growths, and had a shaggy mop of dark, dirty hair and large, dark eyes. The kid whimpered and curled up tighter, pressing his face into his knees.
“Nice hiding spot,” Doyle said.
“How long you been here?” du Trieux asked.
“Just kill me. I don’t want to be Infected.”
“You and me both, kid,” said Morland.
“Just make it quick,” the kid said. “Please.”
“From your lips to God’s ears,” replied Hsiung.
This seemed to catch the kid’s attention. He looked up at them and squinted through his broken lenses. “Hu-human?”
“Last time I checked,” Miller said, offering him his hand. “What about you?”
“Y-yes. I’m hu-human.” The kid took Miller’s hand with bony fingers, then pulled himself up. The kid wasn’t a kid at all, just a very short, malnourished man. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and swallowed thickly.
The sounds of gunfire and artillery urged Miller to get to the point. “Who are you?”
“I’m Nihar. Doctor Nihar Mehta. Where are you going? What are you doing here?” His eyes suddenly widened. “Can you get me out of here? Can you take me with you?”
“We can try,” Miller said. “But I’m not going to lie; it’s pretty rough out there.”
Dr. Mehta reached into his pants pocket and pulled out a rumpled, folded stack of lined notebook paper. “I have value,” he said, handing the papers to Miller with shaking fingers. “I have the formulas. The ones the Army took. You must save me. I can help.”
“The formulas?” Morland gaped.
“Well, that’s a stroke of luck,” Hsiung said.
Miller almost couldn’t believe it. He took the papers from Mehta and opened them. Scratched on both sides in smudged blue ink were mathematical equations and a diagram of a molecule. “This is the anti-parasitic formula that the doctor spoke about over the radio?”
“The same,” said Mehta, trembling on his feet. “The anti-fungal’s on the back. You must help me. Please. I can produce it again. I swear.”
“Hey, boss,” Doyle said.
Miller turned toward him. The sniper stood by the topmost stair, looking deeply sceptical. The thought had crossed Miller’s mind, too. They were never this lucky. How in the hell did they happen to find the only survivor, who just happened to have the formula they were looking for?
The coincidence was too great—but Miller couldn’t take the risk that Mehta didn’t have what he claimed.
“Fine,” Miller said. Mehta smiled widely, which only made him more suspicious. “Take him to the Foxhound.” He handed the paper to du Trieux. “Don’t let him out of your sight, and don’t wait for me.”
She looked alarmed. “Where the hell are you going?”
Miller twisted his head to one side and cracked his neck, relieving the dull throb at the base of his skull. “I made a promise.”
35
SAM PULLED THE magazine from her AR-15 and frowned. No more bullets. She blinked a few times in denial, then tossed the magazine and the rifle to the floor of the lecture hall. God, her head was pounding.
There were only a handful of Infected left. The explosion from the flamethrower’s tank had given Sam and the others just enough time to get down the hallway and barricade themselves inside a lecture hall, but the building was on fire on all sides and the flames were coming fast.
For whatever reason, the Army had stalled their advance, content to let Sam and her commune die of smoke inhalation, if they didn’t burn to death first. Just as well; she’d done what she set out to do. Hopefully, Alex had the formulas and was long gone, on his way to Washington to set the President straight and save the world.
She hadn’t figured he’d come back to get her anyway. She’d only said that so he’d leave and find the formulas. She’d figured on being dead by the time he returned, if he did. The one thing she hadn’t figured was getting stuck in a burning building and dying by inches—but if Sam had learned anything in life, it was that you never got what you expected. Or wanted, for that matter.
What were the chances of Alex coming back for her now, truthfully? She couldn’t blame him. Only a fool would risk entering an inferno, with no idea of where to find her. Alex was no fool. He was many things, but not that.
Her last few followers coughed and wheezed. The air was gray—thick with ash and hot in her rough throat. Fighting the urge to lie down and fall asleep, Sam plopped herself into a desk and swung it around to watch the only door. In the back of the room, Binh and a handful of others were fashioning face masks to cover their mouths and noses, but she saw no point in it.
Her eyelids grew heavy. It hurt to breathe, and her head pulsed with every slow heartbeat. The room turned fuzzy. Coughing, she tried to force air into her lungs, but only tasted ash.
Electrical conduits and lighting fixtures overhead popped and sparked as the fire spread across the ceiling. Outside, she heard more popping, more cracks as the building buckled.
Were those gunshots? There was another explosion, followed by eerie silence. Then more crackling fire and popping conduits.
The door burst open and she couldn’t move. The smoke billowed around the lecture hall and a single shadow appeared in the doorway.
“Sam, get up!” Alex shouted at her. He held a grenade launcher in his hands. “This whole building is coming down!”
How cliché, she thought. Alex to the rescue like some knight in shining armor. She hadn’t considered herself a romantic, but here she was, hallucinating her rescue like some little girl.
The shadow passed by her and wrangled the rest of the group from their huddle in the back of the lecture room. Finally, a hand grabbed her upper arm and she was pulled to her feet. Alex—or, at least, a man who looked like him. He was limping, favouring his left leg, but he still managed to drag her out of the room, her feet moving like boulders.
They scuttled down the hallway and back out the way they’d come. Stepping over bodies and dashing through the fire, they came out the crumbled foyer and into the alleyway, just in time to see the backside of the tank as it rolled down the boulevard away from them, surrounded by an entire squadron of soldiers.
Binh coughed beside her. Sam wondered what they hell he was doing away from the dairy farm before her mind cleared and she realized where she was. God, her head was pounding.
“Where are they going?” Binh asked, watching the tank leave and coughing again.
Alex spat sooty saliva onto the pavement and wiped his mouth with the back of his glove. “We’ve got a battalion fighting south of here. My bet is they’re the reinforcements.”
“You came back for me,” Sam said, surprising even herself with her sentimentality.
Alex didn’t even have th
e good sense to look sheepish. He squinted at her like she was talking crazy and then coughed into his fist. “Yeah, well. This is where I leave you. Good luck to you. As always, it’s been a pleasure.”
“Hold on. Did you get the samples?”
He frowned and shot a quick glance at the Army troops as they departed a few blocks south. “Not exactly.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do you have them or not?”
“We have the formulas. No samples.”
Samantha’s mind was suddenly rushing. She’d figured he’d find the solutions and take them to be reproduced, but this could still work. If she played this right, there was hope yet for her to get what she wanted.
Freedom.
“I’m not leaving your side until I have what you promised me,” she said.
“I don’t have it, Sam,” Alex snapped. “And I don’t have time to stand here and debate with you. I’m sorry. I got you out. That’s the best I can do.”
“Take me with you, then,” Samantha said. “You wouldn’t have those formulas if it wasn’t for us.”
Now everyone was looking at her like she had lost her mind. Maybe she had, she could hardly tell anymore.
Binh’s mouth had fallen open and he was gawking at her. “Sam, no.”
“We can finally farm without the threat of fungus ruining entire crops,” she said to him. “Don’t you see? It could change everything.”
Binh looked even more confused. “Enough for us to be taken prisoner? No!”
“Not prisoner.” She pointed at Alex. “He’s different. He’s a man of his word. If he said he’s going to give us the anti-fungal solution, he will.” She turned to him. “Right, Alex?”
He didn’t answer. He just stared at her. He was probably trying—and failing—to figure out what game she was playing.
“Take us with you,” she said again. “We had a deal.” She gave him a look, laced with a thousand unspoken words and tinged with years of personal history.
Alex’s face fell. “I can’t guarantee your safety,” he said.
“I trust you.”
He squinted at her, then looked south, running his tongue along the edge of his lower lip. “Okay. It’s your funeral.”
THEY’D STASHED THEIR transport truck less than a mile from the Rutland Avenue underpass, in a parking lot beside a boarded-up brick building with a mural cityscape painted on one wall. It was a ten-minute walk, and could have been half that, if the Infected had been in any condition to run.
When they arrived, huffing, puffing, scratching, and wheezing, the rest of Alex’s team was waiting.
In the back of the transport, on the floor, lay the man with the electrical knee brace. He looked pale and gripped the sides of the brace with both hands, pulling and snapping and twisting the contraption, trying to get it comfortable. He was getting help with this from a dark-skinned scrawny man in a tattered lab coat and ridiculously thick cracked glasses. Another man, tall and lanky, and two women sat on seats on either side of the compartment. None of them looked happy to see Sam and her kind.
One of the women got up from her seat and jumped out of the truck. “No,” she said. “We don’t have the time—or the room. Whatever you’re thinking, Miller, the answer is no.”
“We never would have gotten out of there if it weren’t for them,” Alex argued. “We owe them.”
“I never would have busted my knee again,” the man on the floor said, in an English accent, “if they hadn’t triggered the bloody explosives.”
“We can’t leave them here,” Alex pressed. “They’ll be killed by the Army in a matter of minutes.”
The dark woman glowered at Sam. “We didn’t get the solutions. It was a trap. I’m sorry about your people, but we have nothing to offer you.”
Alex squinted at his team individually. “Actually, we do.”
The scrawny man in the lab coat look alarmed. “We do?”
“I’m not giving you guys a choice on this,” Alex said, rounding the back of the transport. He waved his arm at the door. “They’re coming with us. Get in.”
They folded up the seats and crowded into the back of the transport, filling every square inch of the interior. Even with the wounded man sitting between the passenger and driver’s seat, and the scrawny lab coat guy curled cross-legged beside him, there still wasn’t enough room.
Eventually, two of Alex’s team—the lanky white guy and the Chinese woman—opted to ride on the outside of the vehicle, holding onto the side bars with their feet wedged onto metal steps.
They were finally on their way. Sam grabbed hold of a bar on the ceiling and tried to keep her balance. The interior grew particularly ripe once the doors closed, stinking of bodies and sweat. The ride was rough.
As in NYC, thug behemoths had dug up many of the streets, especially to the south, where they were headed. The highways weren’t as bad, but the city streets were in many places no more than rutted tracks, piled high with asphalt and concrete rubble.
When Sam had driven the truck to Johns Hopkins from the electrical plant during her scouting mission, the roads hadn’t seemed this bad, but now, standing in the middle of a British military transport vehicle, her body pressed against Binh on one side, another Infected on her other, it felt like at any moment another pothole would send them flying, or her knees would buckle, or she’d hit her head against the ceiling and knock herself out cold. It wasn’t an unwelcome thought, but she couldn’t afford to lose herself now.
They rode south for a few kilometers, then hooked to the east. They drove on for five more minutes in uncomfortable silence. Eventually, the transport slowed and Miller grabbed up the CB radio.
“Cobalt to Major Clark, we have reached rendezvous location. What is your ETA, over?”
Sam squinted out the windscreen and tried to make out where they were. It was a freeway exit of some sort, an actual fork in the road.
Miller tapped his ear. “You two see anything out there...? All right, copy that.”
“Merde,” the black woman said. “What’s the play?”
“We follow orders,” Miller said, snapping the CB pack onto its clip with a sharp swipe of his hand. He tapped his ear again. “Hang on, you two. I’m gunning it back to the Mk 10.” He chuckled and pressed his foot on the accelerator. “I’ll be sure to register your complaints with my superior officer.”
They drove under the freeway and down a two-lane highway. Evidence of a past animal attack zipped by as the transport’s automatic transmission shifted and Alex stepped on the accelerator.
They passed a church and turned right down a single lane road, surrounded by overgrowth and shrubbery. At the end of the flooded peninsula sat a large military boat, with a ramp lowered, like a ferry. Miller drove the truck through the watery shore and straight onto the ship.
“Alex?” Sam asked. “Where are you taking us?”
“Get down!” he barked.
Several soldiers wearing desert camouflage closed the ramp behind them, and in moments they were out on the river.
“Our headquarters is on a ship,” Miller said to Sam. “They can’t know you’re here.”
Sam nodded, then motioned for the rest of her people to crouch down.
Binh frowned and whispered, “This isn’t what we agreed to! I thought they had a base nearby or something.”
“I did, too,” Sam confessed.
The wounded guy with the knee brace nudged Alex with his head. “Get me out of here, boss. I’m suffocating.”
“Can’t get you out without opening up the back,” Alex told him. “Sit tight. It’ll just be a few minutes.”
The man didn’t look pleased with the answer but remained silent the rest of the way.
Across the choppy waters, the ferry took them out to sea. There were two ships around the bend: a cruise liner and a military battleship. To Sam’s dismay, they were sailing directly toward the battleship. In the back of the enormous vessel was a large hanger filled with water. The ferry p
ulled straight in, then docked. Another ramp opened at the front, and Alex popped the truck into gear and drove it up the ramp and onto a platform.
“How are we going to...?” asked the woman beside him.
“I’m working that out,” Alex said. He tapped his ear. “I need the three of you who can walk to surround the Infected and get them onto the lifeboat. Meanwhile, Doyle’s about to have a seizure.”
“I am?” said the man with the knee brace.
Alex opened the driver’s door and stepped outside. “Hey! We need some help in here!” He reached back and tapped the wounded man’s shoulder.
The man rolled his eyes, hung his tongue out the corner of his mouth, and shook himself like a maraca.
The back door of the transport opened.
“With me,” the tall one said, another Brit. Binh was the first one out, the rest followed.
Lumped together and moving at a rush, Alex’s soldiers surrounded Sam and the others and herded them into a large two-level boat bobbing in the water further down the dock. With orange canvas stretched across the top and benches lining the center of the vessel, it seemed to be some sort of extra-large lifeboat.
Outside and back at the transport truck, a crowd had crawled inside the vehicle and appeared to be tending the wounded soldier.
“Get down,” one of Miller’s soldiers barked at her.
Sam dropped below the window and hugged her knees to her chest. The boat’s floor was made of finely honed wood planks, but was in desperate need of a scrubbing.
“No, really.” Doyle’s voice carried from behind the lifeboat. “I’m feeling much better! I’ve always been one to recover quickly.” Then, in a hoarse whisper, he added, “My leg’s about to give out. Help me aboard, but don’t make it look like you’re helping me, or they’ll never let me leave.”
The three men appeared at the boat entry. Alex had his hands on Doyle’s ribs while the scrawny doctor tossed the soldier’s arm over his shoulders. He hopped on one leg over the boat’s threshold, then immediately sat on one of the benches. “Get us out of here.”