One of the larger Hounds jumped to one of the walls and hung there like a spider, gaze surveying the crowd to determine our location. We were still fifty yards from it, but it made a guttural bark and leapt towards us, covering a third of the distance. Blood sprayed over and over where it landed. The other Hounds followed the first one’s lead and made their own leaps into the masses of students. Dozens were already dead. Hundreds would follow unless they got out.
And it was because they were searching for us.
For me.
We were only ten feet from the exit, but the crowd had slowed to a near stop. A smaller Hound punched up to the wall a few feet to our left. Alex freed her arms enough to bring her gun up. She punched a boy in front of her with her other hand so he would stoop down in pain, then quickly shot twice over him. Her rounds caught the Hound in the head, and the creature dropped lifeless to the floor. A student next to her cried out in pain as the burning hot shell casing ejected from Alex’s gun hit him in the face.
Five feet to the door.
The screams behind us grew louder and closer.
Three feet.
I felt a spray of blood from some unlucky kid hit me across the back of my head and neck.
One foot.
Then we were in the parking lot.
Alex shoved me forward into a run as she blew past me. The Insider ran past on the other side, quick for a guy his age.
We sprinted through the spaces between cars. I held my jacket closed as tightly as I could manage so it didn’t get caught on the side-mirrors of cars.
The screams behind us were coming less frequent, which either meant there weren’t very many people left alive, or the Hounds had left the survivors alone to chase us.
I heard a crash right behind me. I cut right between an old pickup and a Kia as the Insider turned and shot three times, his gun sounding in a continuous roar.
I didn’t look back.
Ahead I saw the lights flash on Alex’s Civic. In her paranoia she’d parked faced so she could pull straight out.
“Sprint!” the Insider screamed. He planted himself ten yards ahead of me and the muzzle of his gun flashed in repeated two-shot bursts. From farther ahead—I’d never been the fastest runner—I could see Alex steadying a gun on the top edge of her car door.
And by gun I mean a matte-black rifle straight out of an action film.
Only she knew what she was doing with it.
The end of the lit up in a giant orange flash each time it shot. I’m sure if I’d had time to turn and see what she was shooting at I would be equally horrified by how quickly the Hounds moved, and impressed by her accuracy.
I wisely focused on willing my legs to take one running stride after another. My lungs burned and my legs felt like jelly. I wasn’t going to be able to last much longer at this sprint. I held the Insider’s gun in my hand with a death-grip. I hadn’t fired a shot.
Alex stopped shooting and ducked inside her car to open one of the back doors. She slid over to the passenger side and leaned out the window with her rifle and began shooting again. I reached the car four steps later and practically dove into the driver’s seat. Our informant was only a step behind me, and he jumped into the back seat.
I still held the gun, so I shoved it in a jacket pocket. It was bulkier than the one I’d practiced with. Her car was a stick-shift, and I mentally thanked my father for the painful lessons that summer.
The vehicle’s tires spun as the car shot forward. The front headlight on my side of the car scraped against the rear bumper of the car across from us. We were doing fifty by the time we rocketed onto the road in front of the school. I looked in the rear-view and saw at least six of the Hounds, including both of the larger ones, loping after us. On flat ground they moved quicker than they had any right to. They were actually keeping pace with our Civic as I hit sixty.
I swerved, narrowly missing a girl in a pink dress as she ran in front of the car. In the rearview I saw one of the large Hounds casually toss her twenty feet through the air when she froze in front of it.
A Hound appeared on the road in front of me.
“Crap!”
Alex turned and saw the monster on the road, then grabbed my right knee without hesitation and shoved my leg down. The car’s engine revved at the sudden jump in speed. She held my leg down, keeping the gas pedal floored under my foot.
The speedometer jumped to seventy miles per hour, then seventy-five.
I thought I caught a quick expression of shock on the Hound’s face as the car plowed right into its mutated body. The Hound put a solid dent in the hood, then hit the windshield hard. The glass cracked, shattering inward. It was a miracle my face wasn’t cut to ribbons. I watched in the side-view mirror as the Hound hit the street behind us, and lay unmoving.
Steam began to spill out from the hood of the Civic. I kept the gas pedal floored. This car wasn’t going to last more than a few more miles at this pace.
There was only one place close enough that came to my mind.
Behind us, the remaining Hounds slowly lost ground, then gained it all back as I slowed down for turns. All the while Alex leaned out the window and shot controlled bursts from her rifle. The Insider leaned out his own window and did the.
“Hold on!” I yelled, then stomped on the brakes.
The Civic came to a halt at the first place my panicked brain had taken us.
My house.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Hounds were several hundred yards behind them, but gaining fast. Alex looked up to where Jack had stopped the car.
His own freaking house.
Unbelievable.
“Open the trunk, Jack!” she yelled.
It popped open and she ran around to it, pulling out a duffle bag. It contained enough ammunition for her rifle to last twenty minutes in a siege-like scenario.
Sirens wailed in the distance. They wouldn’t be able to do anything more than help those injured at the school.
Alex and her small group were on their own.
“We need to get in the house now,” The Insider said, his manner calm and collected. He was a professional.
Jack was already running to the door. He was much calmer than he should be, likely due to the larger than normal amount of adrenaline pulsing through him. His driving had been surprisingly good. She tucked that observation away for the future. If there was a future. Jack unlocked the door on the first try.
She left her car running and rushed into the house after Jack and their informant. The Insider went to the back of the house and she heard the scrape of the kitchen table, presumably being pushed against the back door.
“Couch!” she yelled at Jack. He responded without question and helped her shove it against the front door. Suburban homes were never good places to repel an attack, but better than being caught in the open. Her silver lining was the relatively few windows the home contained. On the other hand, the Hounds only needed a few. Alex ripped open the black bag and yanked out a stack of magazines for her gun and two sets of noise-dampening ear-muffs. They had microphones in them to amplify normal sounds, but still cut out the loud report of most of the gunshots. She shoved one into Jack’s hands and pulled a pair over her own ears.
Gunfire from the back told her the Hounds had already made it to the house. A loud thump, and then another from the roof made Jack look up.
Glass exploded in through the living room window and one of the two larger ones appeared three feet in front of her. Alex brought the weapon up on instinct and held the trigger down. Bullet after bullet stitched a line of carnage from belly to neck on the monster. Blood exploded with each shot. A haze of burnt gunpowder hung in the air.
Shots from behind made her swing her rifle. Jack fired up the stairs. His eyes were opened as wide as they would go. His face was completely pale, and he was pulling the trigger as fast as he could. The slide on his gun locked empty, and he kept pulling the trigger while he screamed unintelligibly at the top of his lungs.
A normal Hound slowly rolled down the stairs, a single bullet wound in its head. One shot of his twelve wild ones had been a winner.
More gunfire from the back of the house. The Insider was still alive.
She never saw the Hound that hit her from the side. It must have lunged through the already broken window, tackling her like a linebacker. The air whooshed from her lungs, and she was sure some ribs cracked with the impact. Her rifle flew from her hands. She shoved her left forearm into the monster’s neck, and drew the knife sheathed on her leg with her right hand. Her dress had ridden up to her waist making the draw fast. She brought the blade down, stabbing as fast as she could pump her arm into the Hound’s neck. She lost count of her strikes. The Hound clawed at her side weakly with its right arm. It couldn’t move its left.
Alex shoved it away with her left arm to let her bring the knife around to the front of the creature’s face, and buried the knife in its left eye. It jerked, then collapsed.
Another Hound appeared over the top of it, teeth bared.
The unmistakable sound of her rifle, and the Hound flew to the side in a fountain of gore.
She pushed the Hound the rest of the way off her. Silence hung heavy in the room, mingled with the odors of blood and gunpowder.
The Insider leaned against the doorframe leading into the kitchen, holding the assault rifle. He appeared completely at ease and uninjured. That’d he’d made it through all of this without a scratch was amazing. But he’d held the backdoor, which was all that mattered.
Jack slumped on the floor, unmoving.
Covered in the blood of the Hound, Alex rushed to his side. The entire left side of Jack’s face was a giant, already-forming bruise. It looked like he’d been hit by one of the Hounds, which likely planned to take him away after killing Alex and the Insider.
He opened his eyes almost instantly.
“What the heck happened?” he asked. “I feel like I got hit by a sledgehammer.”
“A Hound was planning on taking you away,” their informant said.
“Did we get them all?” Jack asked.
Alex gazed around at the massacre. “Four in this room, how many in the kitchen?”
“Three,” the Insider said.
“We took two down in the gym.” Alex counted on her fingers. “And I got one in the parking lot.”
“Same,” the Insider added.
“That’s eleven. The one I hit with the car makes twelve,” Jack said, pushing himself up. “There were thirteen. Did we get both the ones on the roof? The one on the stairs is from me…holy crap, Alex, you are covered in blood! Are you OK?”
“I’m completely fine, by the way,” the Insider smirked.
Alex ignored his comment. “I’m fine. It’s not my blood. Is there still one more?”
“Unless you killed another one from up there,” Jack pointed.
“The last one I killed was one that passed me,” their informant said. “So I think we still have one in the house.” He glanced around at the disaster. “Or what is left of your house.”
Alex stood and reached for her rifle. After the Insider handed it over she checked the rounds left in the magazine, then replaced it with a fresh one. She also reached into the bag and pulled out her Sig and handed it to Jack. “You’re better with this gun.”
He took the weapon with a grimace. “I guess you want to hunt it down, yeah?”
“Most definitely.”
“I’ll be here,” The Insider said. “Think I’ll put a bullet in each of these Hounds. Just in case. Can’t have any of these alive. Who knows what kind of trouble that could cause. I think I’ll also place an anonymous call to Helix mentioning some keywords that will get one of their…special…teams here to make this mess go away before the local police arrive.”
“How much time do we have?” Jack asked.
“Helix’s standard response time is fifteen minutes in a situation like this,” Alex replied. “And we shouldn’t be here when they get here.”
“OK then,” Jack said. Every thought in his head was laced with exhaustion. His face hurt more than he let on. Just seeing his house in this condition was painful. He had a memory associated with each little piece of the home.
But overriding all those thoughts was concern for her. Jack felt woefully inadequate in his ability to help or protect Alex or anybody.
How was she supposed to feel about that? No one had ever shown that kind of concern for her since her mother had died when she was little. Frowning, she realized it felt…good. Good to have someone genuinely care.
Zip it, Alex, she told herself. Monster first. Boy later.
Walking up those stairs was about as far from Alex’s best case scenario as possible. She didn’t want to leave Jack with the Insider—regardless of his help so far—she had absolutely no trust in him. His thoughts were legitimately directed on making sure Jack stayed safe. But she hadn’t had enough time with him to determine if those were thoughts he forced himself to think, or if they were natural.
Besides, everyone’s definition of “safe” was different. Alex was pretty sure her father thought he was making the world a safer place by performing inhumane tests.
The worst part about that was she realized she could do nothing about it. For all her power and skill, she was just a spit in the ocean as far as her father was concerned.
So she either left Jack with a man she didn’t trust completely, or she took him with her upstairs to hunt a monster hell-bent on taking him away. Not to mention Alex had given him a gun. She hoped she hadn’t made a terrible mistake.
#
Part of Alex’s mind focused on Jack’s thoughts, picking out the latent thought patterns tied to the home. How he stepped only on certain steps because they didn’t creak. Where his childhood fears were buried because of places he couldn’t see clearly in the house. She used the thought relays in his mind to essentially see where he looked when his gaze went to a different place than her, or to pick out something he recognized as different that she wouldn’t have any idea about.
The entire process was incredibly more taxing on her own mind than just reading someone else’s. It wasn’t a method she employed often, because of the mental fatigue involved, and because she would learn more than she ever wanted to about another person’s way of perceiving things. That perception could be damaging or misleading.
But here she didn’t have much choice.
A wide spray of bullet holes marked the wall at the top of the stairs. Jack saw them, and Alex heard his embarrassed thoughts. A pattern of blood and brain-matter on the wall marked where his one good shot had taken the Hound down. He was numb towards that at the moment, but once things had calmed down a bit—the next time he went to sleep—he would feel it. Monster or not, a person still had to deal with causing a death.
She heard light chuffing sounds from downstairs as the Insider put an insurance bullet in each of the Hounds. Apparently he’d been concealing a suppressor on him. Weird. Why was he bothering keeping the sound down? She made a mental note to ask him later.
She passed Jack on the stairs, motioning him to stay behind her. Upstairs there was no sound. Aside from the bullet holes at the top of the stairs, this level of the house was like a different world than below. She turned right, passing Jack’s room on the left and the bathroom on the right. The door to the spare bedroom on the left where Martha—thankfully absent tonight—stayed stood closed. Ahead was Jack’s father’s room. The door moved just enough, and she swore she heard wind coming from behind it. She edged forward. From Jack’s mind she kept track on the space behind them. He too was focused on his father’s door. It shouldn’t have been open. The window shouldn’t have been—
His thoughts cut off in a panicked half-yell.
Alex spun, rifle ready. Behind her stood the other Hound, one of the two that had been larger than the rest. It held Jack in front of it, elongated arm wrapped around Jack’s throat. His face was turning red. His gun lay on the floor, somehow removed from
his hand without making a sound. Above the Hound was an open hatch leading to the home’s attic. She felt stupid for not having noticed it.
A window sat at the end of the hallway behind them, and the Hound was edging towards it, dragging Jack. Jack wasn’t a scrawny kid, which made it impossible to get a clear shot without risking hitting him. Her aim was almost always perfect, but she couldn’t account for the Hound’s unpredictability or intelligence. A small feeling of panic wormed its way into her consciousness, but she shoved it down. This wasn’t the time. Alex focused her mind.
Options flew through her head. She couldn’t read the monster, its thought process too alien to get an accurate picture. She could shoot through Jack and into the Hound. No. There weren’t many places where that would be able to work, and again, the need to be absolutely perfect made her reject the idea.
The Hound was only a dozen feet from the window, and no way would she be able to catch the Hound once it left the home. There were too many places it could go. It would be too fast. It would—
Alex, came the clear thought from Jack’s mind. On the count of three, I am going to jerk my head to my left. You’re going to shoot it in the face when I move.
All of Alex’s plans evaporated. Jack made the choice for her, taking any control from her hands. She wanted to shake her head, but that would have given their communication away, or made the monster suspicious enough to tighten its grip enough to make the plan worthless.
The Hound backed away another step, then another. It made a huffing sound like an animal laughing.
You’ve got this Alex, Jack thought to her. Three.
She steadied her rifle, but tried to keep an expression of helplessness on her face to keep the monster unaware of her intention. She had one chance at this.
Two.
Alex slowly let out a breath. Please let this work, the thought floated in her head. She wasn’t sure if it was hers or his.
Residue Page 20