. . . but not break.
The van came to an uneasy rest, perched on the edge of the overpass like a diver with her toes over the end of the board. “Everybody out!” she shouted, afraid its weight might still snap the rail. “Now!”
She couldn’t open her door; it was wedged against the guardrail. She had to wait for Lilith to get out, and the girl was moving slowly. As she pushed open the door, Lilith glanced back at Fallon. Blood streamed from her nose, and she looked like she would have a pretty good bruise on her forehead. She’d hit the dash, or her window, or both, Fallon guessed.
I wonder if I look any better.
She took a quick self-inventory: ribs aching from where the seat belt had cut into her, panic ebbing but leaving her drained, otherwise undamaged.
Not everyone was so lucky. When she had both feet firmly on the pavement, she saw that while there were no life-threatening injuries, no visibly broken bones, everyone was shaken up, and there would be plenty of sore muscles. Sansome’s nose was bleeding, too, but he seemed unaware of the fact until Pybus pointed it out.
Fallon braved a peek over the guardrail, to see what they’d been saved from. Instead of an empty street below, though, there was a group of people, thirty or forty of them.
No, not people.
Infecteds.
She couldn’t afford to think of them as human. They were looking up at her, and at the same time starting up the ramp. From here, she could see visible wounds on some. One dragged a broken leg, bone jutting out through flesh and torn work pants. But they were all on the move, almost as a single body. Probably why that truck had come up the wrong way—the driver had seen the size of the mob and panicked.
“We’re going to have company,” she said. “Let’s get ready.”
“You mean guns?” Pybus asked, with a fearful quaver in his voice.
“Yes, Caspar. I’m going to trust you all with guns. Call me crazy. On second thought—”
She broke off her own sentence. Something about the general quiet had been nagging at her, and she had just realized, with a jolt of fear, what it was.
The truck’s engine noise had stopped.
It hadn’t faded away into the distance. It had just stopped, sometime while the van had been spinning, or immediately afterward.
The morning sunlight reflected off the nondescript silver trailer. The truck had traveled a short distance up the freeway before stopping dead.
The driver’s side door flew open and a man climbed unsteadily from the cab. As he made his lurching way toward Fallon, she could see that he was at the same stage of infection as the teenagers had been—same red face and eyes, same ability to drive and talk and control the urge for grey matter, but for who knew how much longer?
“¿Qué coño ha pasado aquí?” the man asked with a heavy Mexican accent. “What kind of idiot parks in the middle of the road? You damaged my boss’s truck; you’re going to have to pay.”
Except, of course, she’d been on the shoulder, and he’d been coming the wrong way up the ramp. His cognitive function seemed further deteriorated than the teenagers’ had been. Fallon imagined he was on the precipice between human and Infected. And there was nothing she could do to keep him from falling.
She was trying to figure out how to placate him while signaling to the others to get ready to take him out when there was a huge boom from inside the truck trailer. The doors shuddered once, then burst open, and people spilled from the back.
Again, several had suffered what looked like pretty serious injuries, but that didn’t seem to slow them down. This group was closer than the ones below, and with the sun beaming at them, she could make out the redness of their faces, like bad sunburns. Their eyes were so red, she wouldn’t have been surprised to see blood leaking from them. There were six of them, different ages, all Hispanic, but wearing different types of clothing. One kid wore low-hanging pants, a long T-shirt, and chains around his neck; a man had on a business suit that looked like he’d been dragged behind a truck in it; a silver-haired woman wore only a housecoat and sandals with two mismatched socks. They hadn’t been together before, but they were now, with only their infection in common.
Correction. As the last one cleared the back of the trailer, Fallon saw the piles of bloody corpses and body parts left behind. Señor Road Rage was a coyote—probably en route from some East Valley drop house—and his cargo had two things in common. First, they’d all paid money to be smuggled over the border. Second, none of them cared about that anymore. All they wanted was brains.
As if privy to Fallon’s thoughts, they suddenly rushed toward her and her team, trampling the hapless coyote in the process.
Fallon lunged for the gun locker. The truck’s impact had wedged the rear doors shut, though—and, she saw now, bent one rear wheel almost parallel to the ground; this van was toast. At least she still had her pistol. She drew it from her waistband and fired twice, over the heads of the oncoming Infecteds. Warning shots.
They didn’t slow. Before she could shoot again, Antonetti snatched the weapon from her hand. “If you’re not gonna use it right, give it to someone who will,” he said. “Any time you shoot, make it count.”
She was angry but intrigued. This was the first time she had seen him show any initiative. He’d been willing to go with the flow, do whatever the others wanted, without argument. Completely passive, until now.
He aimed the gun, lower than she had, and squeezed the trigger twice in rapid succession. The older woman staggered back as both bullets found their mark, center mass, but she kept coming. Bloody flowers bloomed on her housecoat. The six were almost on them now, snarling and snapping, the old woman in the lead. She seemed to have Lilith—closest to the truck, having given the van a wide berth after jumping out—in her sights. Antonetti fired again, and again the woman lost half a step. The bullet tore her housecoat, right between her breasts. She didn’t go down. One more shot tore through her forehead and blew out the back, taking chunks of brains and skull with it, and she finally fell, just feet from Lilith.
Fallon had seen before, on video and with Warga, how hard it was to stop an Infected. But this one—an elderly woman—had taken four rounds before she went down.
And there were five more behind her.
Light snatched up a chunk of the van’s fender, torn almost all the way off by the collision, and turned to face the Infecteds with it. Warga wrenched off the exhaust pipe, though it must have burned his already-damaged hands. Lilith scampered back to relative safety behind Fallon and Antonetti. He still had Fallon’s gun, but she hadn’t originally thought to grab ammunition for it, and figured it must be getting low. Pybus had picked up some good-sized rocks from around the guardrail and held them in his hands, as if weighing them before deciding which to throw first. Sansome, unarmed, stepped forward to meet the charge.
The next to reach them was the healthiest-looking of them all. In his twenties, Fallon guessed, his torn T-shirt revealing a solid build, toned and muscular. He came with hands outstretched, his mouth opening and closing, spittle flying from it like rain. Sansome moved into his path, a fleshy wall. The man stopped abruptly, and Sansome grabbed him by his right shoulder and left rib cage. Without apparent effort, he lifted the man from the ground—his feet kicking wildly at the air—and hurled him over the guardrail. The man let out a cry as he fell, but it was cut short with a sickening thump.
She barely had time to take it all in when everything started happening at once. The Infecteds reached the psychopaths, with no weapons other than their own hands and their nearly unstoppable, raging hunger. Light slashed with his steel shard, Antonetti fired at their heads. Pybus hurled his rocks, then scooped up more. Warga swung his pipe like a major-league ballplayer aiming for the fences. One of the Infecteds got his hands on Fallon’s head, digging his nails into her left cheek, but Warga took him o
ut with a well-aimed swing of the exhaust pipe.
The Infecteds had momentum on their side, and rage-induced strength. But they were disorganized, without strategic thinking, and in less than a minute, they had all fallen to the psychos, their heads bashed in or sliced open, brains destroyed. Fallon, Light, and Warga had been clawed, scratched—Light had a bloody gash across his neck—but not mortally wounded.
Seven against six, Fallon thought. And we just barely beat them.
She was looking at the bodies, trying to replay it all in her head, when a shout from Pybus made her look up.
The other Infecteds had reached the top of the ramp and were coming their way.
At the same moment, she realized that she didn’t know where Sansome was. Seven against six had been tough—against thirty or more, they’d need all hands, and then some.
The shattering of the van’s rear window glass gave her an answer. The big man had gone back in through the open door and retrieved the lockbox with the weapons in it. He shoved it out through the broken window. It landed on a corner, and the steel buckled.
Light reached it first. Straining, he hoisted it waist high and dropped it against the pavement again. This time it burst open, spilling guns into the street, along with some hand grenades and other implements of destruction. Light took up an M249 light machine gun with a two-hundred-round ammo box. Antonetti and Warga went for M240Ls, only slightly heavier but firing a bigger round. Lilith grabbed an M4. Antonetti still had Fallon’s Glock, so she chose another one.
Pybus and Sansome, she noted, didn’t take guns. Instead, Pybus picked up the length of pipe that Warga had abandoned. Sansome waited, his hands still empty.
Antonetti opened fire first. Only he and Warga had ever used guns in their killings, Fallon remembered. Maybe Lilith—her aunt and uncle had been killed with their own shotgun—but there was still some question about who had done that. Fallon had thought the Infecteds were still too far away, and maybe they were for her pistol, but not for the machine guns. Antonetti fired in short bursts, raking across the oncoming mob.
As if he had set off a chain reaction, Warga and Light started shooting, too. Fallon let them get a little closer, then she joined in. Her aim was lousy. Studying psychopaths had put her in touch with enough law enforcement personnel that she had been invited to shooting ranges a few times, but she’d never taken to it, never mastered the skill. The mob was thick enough, though, that she was pretty sure she was hitting something.
Somewhat to her surprise, she didn’t feel bad about it. Those were people. Infected, yes, but still, despite her earlier resolution not to think about it, they were living human beings. But this was truly a case of kill or be killed. They wouldn’t negotiate, wouldn’t stop to chat. If they could reach her, they would do everything they could to kill her and eat her brains for breakfast. She fired until the magazine was empty, then dropped the gun and picked up another. Time enough to reload later, she hoped.
After a few minutes, the gunfire tapered off to a couple of random bursts, then nothing. Fallon’s ears rang, and she tasted bitter smoke. Her hands and arms were sore—from the gun’s recoil, she guessed, though some of it could also be from the truck’s initial impact. Some of the Infecteds were still twitching, but all were down; the threat had been eliminated. It had been, all in all, easier than she’d expected.
Lilith, Pybus, and Sansome hadn’t fired a shot. The latter two hadn’t in their murders, either. Sansome had used his powerful hands and a bow saw. Pybus had rendered his victims unconscious with roofies, strangled them with clothesline, and cut them up with a chainsaw, then used an electric carving knife to prepare them for the table.
But Light had never used a gun, either, and Warga just once, when one of his victims had pulled it on him. He’d taken it away from her and shot her six times, in a fit of rage. Those two were looking at the devastation they had wrought with their high-powered weapons and grinning like little boys who’d just won favors at a birthday party. What was it about them that made them take so eagerly to a different method of killing? Or about the others that kept them from it?
And her? She hadn’t minded shooting—killing, she corrected— either, although she had never killed anyone or shot at a living thing before. Kill or be killed, she reminded herself. But it wasn’t just that. It couldn’t be.
Not for the first time, she wondered just what the hell she had gotten herself into. And how she would ever keep her promise to Book and get herself out.
CHAPTER 21
46 hours
Book sat staring at a video screen and wished he’d been allowed to give all the psychopaths cameras, because with just Fallon’s view, it was sometimes hard to tell exactly what was going on. Which, right now, was utter carnage. This had been a deadly free-for-all, one that even Fallon had played a part in. The bowling ball guy—Sansome—had thrown one of the people from the truck right over the guardrail, for Pete’s sake!
He wasn’t naive, though. He knew some of the Infecteds—maybe a lot of them—would die before the mission was complete. He just wanted to minimize the number of those deaths that were needless.
“You okay, Fallon?”
She didn’t speak, but opened and closed her eyes in a staccato pattern.
F-I-N-E.
Looked like she hadn’t needed his primer on Morse code, after all.
“The road is clear up ahead. Any of the cars look drivable?”
Fallon relayed the question, making it sound like it was hers alone. Book realized that the others weren’t yet aware that she could communicate with him. Playing her cards close to the vest until they’d do her the most good. Smart.
Most psychopaths were.
He shook the thought away, dismissing it as unfair. Having a deficient limbic system didn’t make her a psychopath any more than having asthma made him Darth Vader. Though he had just watched her firing into a crowd of people with no apparent hesitation . . .
“The van’s out of commission,” Light replied, “and I don’t see any handy keys sticking out of any ignitions.”
“I can hotwire one,” Sansome volunteered. “I’ve stolen a buncha cars.”
“The passenger cars are all too small for seven of us and our gear. There’s a pickup—no, it’s got three flat tires. An SUV with the hood open . . . and the battery gone. Dammit! Looks like scavengers have already been through here.”
“We might be able to get something running,” Light said, but Fallon shook her head.
“I don’t want to spend that much time up here.”
Whatever else Fallon might have said was lost in the sound of the door behind Book swinging open and two people barging in. He turned away from the monitor showing the psycho feeds to find Thurman and Ramirez there.
“Can I help you?”
“How’re they doing?” Ramirez asked, honing in on the psychos’ monitor. Thurman glanced at it, but most of his attention was focused on the other monitors in Book’s array, showing video footage from drones flying over the city as well as from various traffic cams and other cameras he’d been able to tap into to get an idea of what was going on inside the quarantine zone. Nothing good, that was for sure.
“Just had their first encounter with a large group of Infecteds,” Book reported dutifully, choosing to leave out any details that weren’t specifically requested. He had a feeling that the less the top dogs knew about how Fallon was achieving her mission goals, the better.
“Any losses?” Thurman this time, finally taking an interest. He looked at the screen as he asked, answering his own question, but Book replied anyway, keeping his tone carefully neutral.
“Not so far, no.”
“Thank God,” Thurman muttered. “If they lose anyone before they reach the point Robbins’s men made it to, I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Beca
use that’s the important thing,” Ramirez said, rolling her eyes and echoing Book’s own thoughts on the matter. She looked at him. “How’s she holding up?”
The implant didn’t measure vitals, but he could guess at things like pulse rate and respiration based on what he could see and hear.
“Scared, but less so the farther they go, and doing a good job of hiding it. She’s getting her feet under her.” Or embracing her psycho side. But he wasn’t going to say that to present company. He wished he hadn’t thought it himself.
“Good,” the agent said, her tone pleased. “This whole mission hinges on her ability to control the others and get them to do what needs to be done. I’m not sure it would have had a chance of succeeding if she hadn’t been immune herself and volunteered to go along. Lucky break, that.”
“Yeah, lucky,” Book echoed, thinking the exact opposite.
“What are these ones doing?” Thurman asked, pointing to a separate monitor, divided into nine screens, showing feeds from various cameras around the city. The one that caught Thurman’s eye displayed an aerial shot from a hovering drone. Book checked the coordinates—the drone was in Tempe, near the ASU campus. He hit a few keys, and the screen showing the psychos and the one showing drone footage switched places. Once he had the Tempe feed in front of him, he tapped a few more keys, and the drone zoomed in on the scene Thurman had pointed out.
The Infecteds here weren’t some wandering mass, all traveling in a similar direction because a noise or a movement had caught their collective blood-red eye. It looked like they were testing the door of each business they passed, pulling and pushing, trying to get inside. As Book and his two guests watched, the Infecteds found one that was unlocked. Some of the Infecteds peeled off the larger group and went inside, while the rest continued on to the next business.
“What are they doing?” Thurman asked suspiciously.
“Let’s find out,” Book said. Not all the feeds were in real time since he wasn’t a robot and couldn’t keep track of everything happening on every monitor at once. Plus, Fallon and her group had taken up most of his attention since they’d entered the quarantine zone. Knowing that they—she—would, Book had put some of the other feeds on a time delay so he wouldn’t miss anything. The Tempe feed was one of them.
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