“We’re sending you in as bait,” She told him, her face poker straight.
“What?” He asked, eyes shooting wide open.
“Yeah. What?” Lucy hissed.
“It was a joke,” Xin smirked. “Although, if you call me Stan again I might actually consider it.”
“You’re so mean!” Frank joked, a relieved smile stretching across his heavy features.
“Don’t do that to me,” Lucy scolded her playfully.
“You guys really pick you’re moments to joke around,” Andy shook his head in disbelief. “Really, what is the plan?”
“We could crack out my explosives...” Frank began.
“No!” Lucy cut him short. “I think I’d like to hear an idea that doesn’t end with death by fiery inferno.”
“I’ve got nothing,” Pete shrugged. “We go in, head for the first thing that looks like a door and take out anything in-between?”
“You make it sound so easy.” Lucy shivered as a breeze tugged at her hair.
“Well, the only thing that’s gotten us this far is luck. I don’t see why it would fail us now,” Pete shrugged. “We’re smarter than them and I have to believe that that is enough.”
“Whatever has kept us safe this long, whether it’s God, your alien, or something else, I hope that they will this time too...” Andy sighed. “Come on, let’s get this party started.”
Pete led the charge, creeping around the corner with his machete ready.
“That way, do you see?” Pete whispered, pointing to a section of road that stretched right up to a protrusion in the stone building.
Somehow, they were spotted before anyone could reply. Heads whipped around and chaos broke out. A volley of machine gun fire tore into the bodies that propelled themselves forward. Andy was behind the gun, sweeping it from side to side. Frank quickly took aim with the rifle picking off any that showed signs of getting back up. Lucy let out hesitant blasts with her own gun, whilst Pete met the first zombie to reach them with a deadly hack. Xin was hesitant to add to the gun fire so she pulled out a blade of her own and hurried to Pete’s side.
“That one!” Pete yelled to her. He indicated at one that was approaching from her side, as he cleaved his blade through the neck of an anonymous soldier.
Xin held up her lethal looking knife as the figure hurtled towards her. She lashed out too quickly and missed, a hand latched to her shoulder. With her other hand Xin shoved at the figure’s chest, she created just enough room to pull her knife back and jab it sharply upwards. The weapon glided through the skin under the zombies jaw and the body crumpled against her. Xin pulled the blade back out and pushed the body away.
“More are coming from the right!” Andy yelled. “Run for the doors!”
With their guns raised and bullets still meeting any hostile attackers, they ran towards what they hoped was The Pentagon’s entrance. It was no surprise that when they sprinted up the steps and ducked between the square pillars, the doors were all closed. Xin shouldered one set futilely. Finding them unyielding, she hammered out her frustration on them.
“Any ideas? She turned around and yelled over the noise. The others had their backs to her, firing and slashing mercilessly.
“Explosives?” Frank shouted over the machine gun fire.
“I don’t like it,” Pete called in reply.
“It’s the best we’ve got!” Xin screamed desperately.
All of a sudden, she felt a hand on her shoulder and spun around. Her knife flew up in terror and lodged into the abdomen of a startled looking woman.
“OH MY GOD!” Xin screeched. “No, no, no... I didn’t...”
Blood was pumping from the wound and she could see now, that this woman wasn’t a zombie.
“HELP!” Xin shouted desperately. Pete glanced quickly over his shoulder then back at the oncoming horde. He did a double take and cursed.
“Fall back everyone!” Pete shouted to be heard. “Doors are open, get inside!” He lowered his gun and hurried over to Xin.
“We need to get her inside,” Xin said feebly.
“Help me carry her,” Pete ordered, looping an arm under the girl’s shoulder. Xin didn’t move, she just stared at the spreading blood in disbelief.
“Come on, man. I got her!” Frank said urgently, rushing over from behind and taking the woman’s other side. Lucy followed closely and dragged Xin along with her. Andy came up last, sporadically firing back into the crowd.
Once Andy was through the door, he slammed it hard behind them.
“The... chain,” The woman moaned weakly and pointed to the floor. A heavy padlock and length of thick chain lay discarded. Lucy scrambled to help Andy secure it.
“What happened?” Frank asked, utterly bewildered. His hand was covering the wound, applying pressure.
“I... She...” Xin stuttered. “I thought she was one of them. I should have thought first!”
“Nowadays we don’t have a lot of time to think,” Pete hastily reassured her. “Now, grab the medical bag, let’s see what we can use to patch her up.”
“It’s alright...” The girl’s eyes rolled as she spoke and then she passed out. As her body slumped, one of her arms flopped forward revealing dozens of bite marks in various stages of healing.
“What the...?” Frank leapt back in surprise.
“Not right now!” Pete reminded him. “Keep the pressure up or she’s going to bleed to death.” He was tearing open packets of bandages and gauze. Frank pressed his hand back onto the wound, still staring at the scars and marks.
Lucy dropped to her knees beside the girl as Andy rattled the padlock to make sure it was secure.
“We need to pull her shirt up so that we can see how bad it is,” She told Frank. “You’ll have to let go for a minute.”
“You sure?” Frank asked apprehensively.
“It could need stitches,” Lucy nodded. “Let go.”
When Frank lifted his hand from the sopping red fabric, Lucy peeled it away.
“Huh,” she frowned in confusion as she examined the wound. “It’s... stopped bleeding.”
“What?” Xin spluttered. “That’s not possible. I felt it. I felt the knife, it went... right in.” She scrunched her eyes shut at the thought but then shook her head and crawled to Lucy’s side.
“Maybe it just wasn’t as bad as you thought?” Lucy asked. Xin didn’t reply immediately, her eyes had caught the girls arm. She reached out gingerly and took it in her hands.
“Amazing,” Xin whispered. “The redness and swelling of some of these bite marks indicates that they are no more than a few days old, maybe a week at most. But... the scars could be from years ago.”
“Are you saying that she’s infected?” Frank asked.
“She was certainly bitten and the healing definitely has to be related to the infection, but she obviously isn’t one of them, which leads me to believe that she probably isn’t going to be. I think she must have had the same reaction as Patient X,” Xin explained.
“We can find out more if she wakes up,” Pete said, adding a final strip of tape to the dressing he had applied.
Andy stood staring down at the girl. She looked to be around his age, give or take a year. Her hair was long and such a dark shade of brown that it was almost black.
“We can’t just leave her to recover here, on the floor,” he thought, without realising he had spoken it.
“There must be some kind of office or waiting area that has a sofa or something,” Frank suggested, looking around and seeing only marble everywhere.
“Fan out and look around,” Pete proposed. “Be careful, it might not be safe.”
A few moments later, Lucy returned having found a small reception area.
“Here, I’ll help you carry her,” Pete offered, but Andy had already scooped the girl up and had her draped in his arms.
“It’s alright, I’ve got her,” He said easily, reminding Pete that he was much stronger than he looked.
39.
> ‘I didn’t get a chance to tell them my name before I blacked out. I remember coming around whilst I was being carried and trying to tell them, ‘My name is Rebel’, but when my eyes squinted open, I could see an angel, so I guess I was still out of it. He was beautiful, though. The most beautiful person I ever saw. His eyes were the kind of blue that people write poetry about, pale like ice. It made me feel so safe and warm that I drifted back out of consciousness.’
“Hey, Rebel. Welcome back.” Lucy greeted the girl when she finally woke up properly. Xin was sat a distance away with her head in her hands. Rebel struggled to sit up and Lucy gently pushed her back down. “Don’t get up just yet. Try to relax. Does it hurt?”
“A little,” Rebel spoke quietly. “How do you know my name?”
“You came around just long enough to tell us before you were gone again,” Lucy smiled kindly.
“The angel?” She asked, still groggy and confused.
“What angel?” Lucy asked.
“He carried me...” Rebel blinked slowly up at her and watched her smile widen.
“I think you must mean Andy,” Lucy giggled. “He’s the one who carried you.
“Yeah, sorry. It was just me,” Andy said, moving so that he was in her line of sight and giving her a little wave. Rebel’s eyes fell on him and she mouthed a response that didn’t make it through her lips.
“And I’m Lucy,” Lucy injected into the ensuing silence. “There’s Frank and Pete too, and Xin who’s just over there.”
Xin’s head lifted at the mention of her name but she bowed it again when Rebel looked around.
“It’s alright,” Rebel said with a sense of déjà vu. “Xin.”
Xin looked up again. “It’s not alright, I could have killed you.”
“Well... I don’t know about that.” Rebel struggled to find the words, “I’m not normal... anymore.”
Xin lapsed back into silence. Rebel’s words didn’t ease the guilt that was clutching at her insides and pulling at her thoughts. She had been so determined to get here. She should be desperate to seek the answers that she came for. She should be curious about the girl who just happened to be here. Instead, she let the others do the talking.
“I think we have a lot to talk about,” Pete was saying. “We obviously noticed something... intriguing, about your injuries. We might even be able to explain a little bit of it to you.”
“Oh, I don’t need you to explain it,” Rebel simmered as flashes of memory ran through her aching head. “They did enough of that in Nevada.”
The others met her revelation with inaudible surprise. Even Xin looked around, her eyebrows climbing her forehead.
“You’re Patient X?” Xin blurted, “You were at the base?”
“Base?” Rebel asked. “I don’t know. I don’t even know how I got there, but I never got to see anything other than the inside of a glass room. Even the doctors all wore hazmat suits. I just remember an endless stream of injections and clipboards.”
“That fits. The bio labs all had glass incubation cells and that’s the same part of the compound they would have been holding her in,” Lucy said, looking around at the others.
“It sounds like you know the place well?” Rebel asked carefully. Her voice betrayed the suspicion she felt.
“Yeah, we were all there just days ago. I... I used to work there,” Lucy replied apologetically.
“Oh, I see.” Rebel seemed to tense up at the news. “So, did you help them when they were making homeless people ‘go missing’? Were you in on their bargaining for fit young prisoners?” Rebel’s face was contorting with anger and contempt, “Was it your job to just find anyone who wouldn’t be missed? Who nobody would even NOTICE was gone?”
“No,” Lucy flinched away, her eyes glistening. “I didn’t... I wouldn’t... I was just an engineer! I didn’t even know that was happening!”
“Am I supposed to believe you?” Rebel asked cynically. “Nobody I came into contact with at that place ever proved themselves trustworthy. Well, besides the other test subjects of course, but even they wanted at me in the end. So, did you come for me then? Are there more tests that you think I’ll be useful for?”
“Lucy isn’t like that,” Xin said in her friends defence. “If you want someone to hate, then hate me. Not only did I accidentally stab you, but also I’m a doctor. I was working in the same fields of research as the people who did those things to you. I was travelling to the country for the purpose of coming to see their research... Coming to see you...”
“What?” Rebel’s words were no more than a hiss of thinly controlled fury.
“You cannot hate me more than I hate myself right now.” Xin unconsciously dragged her fingernails down her arm, the flesh turned red beneath the pressure. Pete placed his hand over hers to stop her. “And, though it will mean absolutely nothing at all to you, I am sorry.”
“We’re trying to make things better,” Frank chirped up. “That’s why we’re here. Xin knows some stuff. She could fix all of this.”
“Oh, really?” Rebel yelled, shooting up from where she sat. “Can Xin fix me? Can she fix this?” She yanked her shirt up and tore away the dressings that covered her wound. Her pearly white skin was marred with deep purple bruising, but the place where the knife had entered her had already knitted back together with thick pink scar tissue.
“If she could you’d likely be dead,” Andy pointed out, calmly stepping forward. He subtly placed himself between Rebel and the others. “I get why you’re angry and why you’re upset. Hell, I would be too, but nobody here is to blame for what’s happened.”
Rebel missed a beat, distracted by Andy’s insertion into the argument. Him standing there, right in front of her, threw her briefly from what she was saying.
Then she remembered. “They’re as good as.” She cocked her head in the girls’ direction but her words were flatter. Some of the edge had dissolved from them. There was something about talking directly to Andy that made her tongue-tied. Her thoughts raced and she almost missed his response, when he reached out and touched her shoulder for a moment.
“You can trust us,” he told her sincerely. “I don’t expect that to suddenly make everything different, but it is the truth, and I think that if any of us want to see any normalcy in the world ever again, then we’re all going to have to try to get along and work together.”
“Kid’s right,” Pete agreed. He felt an admiration for Andy swell inside of him. “Now probably isn’t the time to get into the specifics, but with your knowledge and Xin’s, maybe we could actually achieve something great.” Pete left out the likely possibility that Rebel would need to become a test subject once more.
Rebel simply folded her arms and said, “Even if I do agree to help, what can we achieve here?”
“Well, that brings us to why we’re here, and likely why you’re here too,” Pete explained.
“I’m here because they brought me here. The only reason I didn’t leave was because I didn’t know where else to go.”
“They brought you here for a reason, though,” Lucy reluctantly reclaimed a place in the conversation. “There’s some kind of emergency evacuation procedure here.”
“And what’s that?” Rebel demanded.
“We don’t know,” Pete replied.
“Marvellous,” Rebel laughed humourlessly. “Alright, where is it?”
“We don’t know,” Pete repeated.
“What exactly do you know?” She asked.
“It’s in a big hall, under a metal disk with an eagle on it,” Xin recited emotionlessly.
“You know that there are quite a few of those around here, right?” Rebel informed her impatiently.
“This one would have a red eye.” Xin used the same monotone to convey this information too.
“How well do you know this place?” Pete asked Rebel.
“I know it quite well by now, I suppose,” She answered shortly. Then she sighed and continued. “When I first got here they shoved me into
a room and left me. For a while, I was guarded, but then all of the soldiers were called out to provide backup. The convoy they brought me here in had drawn a lot of attention. Masses of people had followed us and were trying to get into the city. I think that whoever was supposed to be taking me wherever it is that I was headed, just forgot about me or was killed. Nobody ever came back, and by the time I got out of the room everyone was gone. I’ve mostly kept out of the places where there are a lot of those... things. I had to kill some of them, but I’ve explored almost everywhere now. I was just to looking for food mainly, but there are some pretty neat things here.”
“Do you have any idea which hall we could be looking for?” Pete asked her.
“Yeah, I think so.” Rebel’s head bobbed up and down. “There’s only one that I remember had an eye. It was in the biggest hall, up by the president’s offices.”
“Could you take us there?” Pete asked. Rebel just nodded back at him.
“I won’t ask if you’re okay,” Lucy said quietly to Xin. “I know that you’re not, but you have to stop blaming yourself. This wasn’t your fault, just like it wasn’t mine.”
The group were preparing to set off. The two girls were refilling water bottles from a water cooler. The water had long since stopped being cold and with no power to pump it they had resorted to piercing the tank, but it would do if they ended up needing it.
“Thanks,” Xin whispered back to her. Rebel kept throwing narrow eyed glances in their direction, whilst Pete was digging through a rucksack and deciding on a gun to give her.
“She’ll come around,” Lucy suggested optimistically.
“Maybe,” Xin sighed, not convinced.
With the last bottle cap back in place, bags and gun straps hanging from their shoulders, Pete offered a grim expression.
“Let’s go find what we came for.”
40.
‘Holy shit was it not what we expected. Given all the guesses we could make, we would still never have suggested what we found. I watched Lucy’s mouth fall open when we got there, her, the engineer and still unable to expect such a thing. All I could do was let out a laugh of disbelief. My existence really had become some strange horror/sci-fi crossover. I suppose it meant that people could no longer say I hadn’t done anything with my life.’
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