7 Sykos

by Marsheila Rockwell

  Warga didn’t answer, and the pained expression on his face didn’t budge. Fallon looked at Lilith, who spoke up again. “It was Gino! He shot Randy.”

  “Gino?”

  “Yeah, I did.” Antonetti admitted. “He wouldn’t shut up about Lilith. He was saying the nastiest things.”

  “Dude!” Lilith said. “You killed, like, fourteen ­people or whatever, and you get all whacked out if someone mentions my tits?”

  “It was a lot more than that,” Antonetti argued.

  “It was,” Pybus confirmed. “Randy was way out of line.”

  “Randy’s an idiot,” Fallon said. “But shooting him’s out of line, too.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” Antonetti said. “I could have. It was just a nine, through-­and-­through. Didn’t hit anything vital.”

  “Thank God for small favors.”

  “Hurts like a motherfucker, though,” Warga said between gritted teeth.

  “Serves you right,” Antonetti said.

  “Go to hell—­”

  “We kind of need all of us,” Fallon said. “Undamaged would have been nice.”

  She heard the truck’s engine shut off, Bull jumping down from the cab, and his door slamming. He was coming their way, and in a hurry from the sound of it.

  But when he came around the corner, he wasn’t Bull anymore. Not completely.

  His face, already red from laughing, was even redder, almost glowing. His eyes were bloodshot. His mouth hung open, saliva glistening at the corners. In his left hand he held his keys; his right arm was extended, hand open as if to grab the first person who came in range.

  “He’s infected!” Pybus shouted.

  He was right. Fallon took a step back, grabbed for her Glock. Light, Antonetti, and Sansome were faster, though. Light and Sansome were using their long guns. Rounds stitched up Bull’s torso, driving him back, then pulverizing his skull. As he fell backward, the keys flew from his hand, over the barrier and down to the road far below.

  “They heard that,” Pybus said.

  “Who?” Fallon asked, before his meaning sank in.

  Pybus looked behind her. She spun around.

  The Infecteds from the roadblock—­those Bull hadn’t run over—­were coming their way. She wasn’t sure how many. A little less than forty, she gauged.

  She wasn’t sure she’d be able to get the truck started, didn’t know if there was another key, but she had to try. She ran around toward the cab, then stopped in her tracks.

  Another group was coming from that direction. A bigger group, more than fifty Infecteds, she thought.

  They were pinned between a hundred of them. “Guys?” she called, racing for the cab and the two rifles inside. “You might want to grab your guns. Somebody wants to have us for brunch.”

  CHAPTER 24

  39 hours

  “Start shooting, try to maintain a buffer, and head south!” Fallon shouted, suiting word to deed as she took aim and fired at some of the Infecteds approaching from the roadblock. Light fired at the other group, and the rest of the psychos needed no further urging, opening up on the two swarming mobs with abandon.

  Well, most of them, anyway. Lilith still had her M4, but as far as Fallon could tell, the girl had yet to pull the trigger. Her claims of multiple murders by her own hand seemed less and less credible the farther the psychos went into the city. A few more encounters like this, and Lilith might even start recanting. Fallon was pleased to see that Pybus and Sansome both fired their weapons, though—­although Pybus wearing a silly grin the whole time was slightly unnerving.

  Still not as bad as a hundred Infecteds looking to swallow you whole.

  The suppressing fire kept a gap between them and the Infecteds until the two groups of brain hunters converged by the QT truck. Seeing an opportunity, Light stopped firing and grabbed a grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin and lobbed it toward the Infecteds. It hit the pavement, bounced twice, and rolled under the truck.

  Great, Fallon thought, he couldn’t even land it in the middle of a mob of—­

  Then it exploded, a clap of metallic thunder in an echoing valley, reverberating off the cars, the buildings, the road. The explosion flipped the truck and ignited its gas tank, creating a smoky conflagration worthy of any Michael Bay movie. Bits of metal, rubber, and flaming upholstery rained down like some dark parody of a child’s snow globe. Some of the Infecteds were torn apart in the blast; others, crushed by the truck. Still others were on fire—­walking, wailing torches tearing at their own skin and hair. None of them were paying attention to the psychos.

  Which meant it was time to exercise the better part of valor.

  Fallon looked at the others. They’d stopped firing once the grenade went off and, to a person, were just standing there, seemingly mesmerized by the flames.

  That lasted until the chain reaction started. First, the nearest vehicle—­a sedan—­burst into flames, then the next several in line, working all the way down to join the fiery wrecks at the roadblock by the entrance to the tunnel. The next to explode was one of those, followed by one closer to the psychos, by the QT truck. The explosions hopscotched around, probably depending on how much fuel was in their tanks, or how dried out their interiors were, or something. The heat caused its own whirlwind effect, hurling metal shards and more all around them.

  “Hey!” Fallon barked at them. “You need an invitation? Run!”

  After a few blocks—­including some judicious twists and turns—­with no sign of being followed, Fallon called for a stop. Though some of the psychos were in decent-­to-­good shape and managed the run without effort, others were lab rats and bookworms, more likely to participate in Netflix marathons than real ones. She herself was out of breath and struggling not to show it. And Warga, paler than ever, was still bleeding from his gunshot wound, though now that they’d stopped, Light examined him and looked at Fallon, frowning.

  “Can you bandage him up?”

  Light looked around, spotted a car with a headless body half-­in and half-­out of the passenger seat. He walked over to the vehicle and divested the corpse of what was left of a long, bohemian skirt.

  “Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing,” Warga said with a weak grin as Light returned with the cloth, which he ripped into long strips.

  “I’m not,” the EMT replied shortly. “Dying is kind of a turn-­on, but I’ve got no use for them once they’re dead. Now shut the fuck up and let me do my work, or I’ll just let you bleed to death. Mox nix to me.”

  Warga wisely closed his mouth and allowed Light to wrap up his shoulder and chest. When he was done, Warga looked like a cross between a peacock and a mummy, from the waist up. Which pleased Lilith to no end, judging by the girl’s snort of laughter when Light stepped back to examine his handiwork.

  “It’ll do for now,” Light announced, “but he’s going to need stitches at some point.”

  “That’s why we’re headed this way,” Fallon said, secretly grateful for the opening. The psychos had been too busy running to ask why they were going south instead of east, and she had no intention of revealing her true purpose in selecting the Hyatt Regency as their destination. When they’d come off the freeway, she had recognized where they were—­just blocks from where Elliott had last been seen. But the less the psychos knew about him and the prototype, the better. “We’re going to the Hyatt. I’ve been there before, and had to avail myself of their medical supplies, so I know where they’re kept. And the hotel has a restaurant, so there should be food. Maybe even a shuttle we can borrow.”

  Light’s lips twisted at her words—­possibly due to her euphemistic use of the word “borrow”—­but he didn’t argue. Instead, he gave her a short, mocking bow and gestured down 7th Street with a flourish.

  “After you, O Fearless Leader.”

  Lilith giggled at that, too, and Fallon wo
ndered idly whether the girl might be in shock. Light could probably tell, but Fallon was in no hurry to bring it up if it kept Lilith quiet.

  Fallon took the lead, Light following, then Warga, Lilith, Sansome, Antonetti, and Caspar Pybus bringing up the rear. As they walked down the center of the street, Fallon was struck by the eerie quiet. It was as if they were traveling through some ancient ravine, inhabited only by dust and wind and ghosts. Nothing moved, save the occasional bit of trash sent sailing in a sudden gust. Downtown Phoenix, which was never silent and still, was now quieter than a tomb.

  Fitting, she supposed, since that’s essentially what it was.

  It wasn’t entirely silent, though. Fallon could hear something up ahead, an arrhythmic slapping against the pavement. She held her hand up in a fist—­something she’d seen in action movies but never knew the exact meaning of—­to get the others to stop so she could listen more closely. Apparently, they all watched the same movies because they halted in their tracks, like birds sensing unseen danger.

  Except this danger was no snake or raptor. Those were footsteps, not the beat of wings or the slithering of scales. And since they were the only humans dumb enough to be wandering the streets right now, the footsteps could only belong to one other group.

  Infecteds.

  Fallon cast about quickly for a place to hide. She didn’t want to confront any more Infecteds while they were still so close to the freeway—­who knew how far the noise might carry in this echoing urban canyon? Nor did she want to face two-­to-­one odds—­or worse—­and from the sound of the approaching feet, that was a conservative estimate.

  She spied a storefront with an open glass door. Some kind of art gallery.

  “This way!” she hissed, heading for it herself, not bothering to see if they followed. If they didn’t, they’d be dead, and Fallon wouldn’t lift a finger to help. With as many Infecteds as were about to spill out onto 7th from a side street, anything short of tossing a dozen more of Light’s grenades—­which she was pretty sure he didn’t have—­would be suicide. And despite depictions on popular television, that was hardly most psychopaths’ preferred endgame.

  She reached the door and swung it open, grateful that it was unlocked and careful to grab the bells hanging from it before they could make any noise. Warga came in next, followed by Light, then Lilith. Sansome and Antonetti tried to crowd through at the same time until Sansome elbowed the smaller man in the face. As Antonetti clutched at his bleeding nose, Sansome smiled and strolled into the gallery. Antonetti followed sullenly, and Pybus was the last one in.

  “They were just coming around the corner—­at least ten that I could count, with more behind,” he whispered as he passed her. Fallon nodded, carefully closed the door, and let go of the bells. Then she turned to look for a place to hide.

  Like most galleries, there were paintings on the walls, but this one also had sculptures on thick rectangular stands, glass cases displaying jewelry, and trifold dividers adorned with black-­and-­white photos in plain black frames.

  The others were already hiding. Lilith and Antonetti had both crouched behind sculpture stands, skinny enough to be completely hidden by them. Sansome was behind a divider—­Fallon could see his foot sticking out. Light, Warga, and Pybus were nowhere to be seen.

  Hoping they hadn’t found a back door and taken off, Fallon hurried over to another trifold, this one with black, white, and red photos. As she got closer, she saw that the pictures were not, in fact, partially colorized; the red was on the outside of the glass.

  Blood, long dried.

  Rounding the near end of the divider, she saw two corpses on the floor, strips of bloody scalp littering the tiles beside them, their heads broken open, their brains long gone. The photos here were mostly red, their subjects obscured by blood and bits of flesh and bone.

  Fallon pushed one of the fractured skulls aside with her foot so that she could get behind the divider. From here, she could see Caspar behind one of the glass cases. He nodded to her, then carefully raised his head to peer through the case toward the front of the gallery.

  Fallon couldn’t see what Pybus saw, but she knew someone who could.

  “What’s he seeing, Book?” she whispered.

  “Infecteds, thirty, maybe a few more. Headed north on 7th Street. I don’t think they’ll bother you, though. They’ve already been through this stretch once.”

  Fallon frowned. “What does that mean?”

  “I wanted to wait to make sure it wasn’t an isolated thing, but right before the alarm went off—­”

  “What alarm?”

  “In a minute. Right before, we saw groups of Infecteds in Tempe doing what was basically a house-­by-­house search for . . . survivors. Only not to rescue them.”

  Fallon felt ice form in her gut. If the Infecteds were displaying group intelligence—­a herd mentality—­then their mission had just become that much more dangerous.

  And their odds of surviving—­not all that high to begin with—­had decreased considerably.

  “I hoped it was an anomaly, but I saw it over and over again in different parts of the city, though it’s definitely more prominent the farther east you go.”

  Wonderful.

  “They’re gone now. Made a right at the corner. You’re good to go to that hotel.” A pause. “You’re a little off course, you know.”

  “Warga’s hurt,” she whispered. She turned to face a wall, fully aware that she was showing her back to six convicted killers. “We need—­”

  “I know, Fallon. He might be milking it a little, though.”

  “I can’t take that chance.” She didn’t like lying to Book, but she found it easy enough to do. That was one of the traits she shared with psychopathic killers. She preferred to tell the truth when she could, but when she needed a lie, it was right there.

  “Anyway,” he said, giving no indication of whether he believed her, “it looks like it’s safe to get back on the road.”

  Fallon looked over at Pybus questioningly. “How’s it look out there?”

  Pybus opened the door, looked outside, then came back in and nodded. “Coast is clear,” he said in a low voice.

  Fallon moved out from behind the trifold divider.

  “Then let’s get to the Hyatt and get Warga patched up.”

  “And get something to eat,” Lilith added as she stood and stretched. Antonetti was watching her, so the girl took her time, raising her arms over her head languorously and sticking her chest out. “I’m hungry,” she said, winking at Antonetti, who blushed and looked away.

  Fallon thought of Elliott and the prototype.

  “We’re all hungry for something,” she murmured, but she was pretty sure Book was the only one who heard.

  The Hyatt Regency was on 2nd Street, between Monroe and Adams. Fallon led her team down 7th until they passed the University of Arizona’s College of Medicine, a satellite campus to the main one down in Tucson. “What about that place?” Warga asked. “Got to be better medical supplies there than in some hotel.”

  She couldn’t stand the thought of being so close to Elliott—­to the prototype—­and not making it all the way. “We can’t go there,” she said. She paused, not sure what came next.

  “Too many Infecteds,” Book said.

  It took a moment to understand his meaning, but when it became clear, she said, “Infecteds went to medical facilities when they started getting sick, or were attacked and injured. Right, Hank?”

  “That’s where I first saw them,” Light agreed. “In the ER.”

  “That place might be crawling with them,” Fallon said. “The hotel is safer.”

  “Whatever the fuck,” Warga said. “Let’s just go.”

  They went. They made a right on Monroe, traveling past Heritage Square, the Convention Center, and St. Mary’s Basilica. Though Fallon wasn’t religious,
she felt an almost primal urge to run to the sanctuary of the church. The bodies spilling out the doors and onto the sidewalk were enough to convince her she was better off trusting in more secular means of salvation.

  Once at the hotel, they found that the automatic doors wouldn’t work, and metal security gates had been drawn across every entrance. Someone inside had had the presence of mind to close the place off, but whether they themselves were now dead, alive, or otherwise was anyone’s guess.

  “Now what?” Light asked.

  Fallon surveyed the doors. There had to be a way in. Bend the metal, break the glass? No . . .

  Break the wood.

  “Joe. The valet window. The cover is just wood. You can break through it, can’t you?”

  Sansome looked where she indicated, a small window in a curved section of wall.

  “Yeah, I can break it, but what good is that going to do? I can’t fit through it.”

  “You can’t, but Lilith can.” Fallon turned to the girl. “Once you climb through, you can open the door to the valet station for us. There’s a door on the other side that opens up into the lobby. We get in without damaging their defenses or creating a path the Infecteds can follow.”

  Lilith actually looked impressed.

  “Okay, I’m game.”

  It only took Sansome two blows to crack the wooden cover enough to tear it off. He boosted Lilith through the small opening, and a moment later, the door to the valet station swung wide.

  “I feel like I should be getting a tip,” the girl said, as Fallon and the others entered.

  “I’ll give you a tip,” Warga replied, leering.

  “And I’ll blow it off,” Lilith replied with a sweet smile, hefting the M4 Fallon had returned to her once she was inside the station.