If in fact they didn’t know where the Sykos were, she sure didn’t want to tip them off. Instead of firing, she lowered the pistol and raced back to the others. Lilith was already down the slide and headed toward the others—probably with friction burns, since she had refused to slide down on an inner tube.
They gathered around Fallon when she got back. “Infecteds,” Fallon said. “Tons of them.” She pointed toward the west. “They have a way in, over there somewhere, and more are coming over the fence between us and the motel. We should have checked the perimeter before we started playing.” She shot Lilith a steely look and held it until she knew the girl had seen it. There wasn’t anything she could do to punish the Sykos; they had been removed from punishment and given a mission, and she had to try to hold them together until it was done. Disapproval was, at this point, her strongest weapon. And these were people who spent their lives engaging in acts that others disapproved of, so you could guess where that got her.
“What do we do?” Antonetti asked. “Shoot our way through?”
“They’re between us and the truck,” Fallon said. “We could try that, but there are an awful lot of them, and we’re not exactly ammo-rich here. I’d rather save that until we absolutely need it if we can.”
“What, then?” Lilith asked. “We can’t just wait here.”
“No. We can’t wait here, and there’s nowhere safe to run. The fence around us isn’t keeping them out, but it might make it hard to get away.”
“Hide in the slides?” Sansome offered.
“I’m thinking!” Fallon snapped. “I’m sorry, just let me—”
Pybus cleared his throat, loudly enough to signal that it wasn’t an accident. Everybody looked at him. “I might,” he said, “have a viable solution. We’re in a water park, so . . .”
“So what?” Fallon asked impatiently.
“So let’s use what we have in most abundance.” They all looked at him, perplexed. He sighed.
“Water.”
CHAPTER 34
22 hours
Sansome, who had worked as a carny on a few occasions—or, as he said, been “with the show”—took the lead and managed to find steps leading down into the park’s control center. Warga, Antonetti, Sansome, and Fallon took some tools, mostly at Sansome’s suggestion, wrenches of various sizes, and went back up into the day. Light, Lilith, and Pybus stayed underground.
Fortunately, the Master Blaster water coaster was near the park’s northeast corner and in the back, where there were fewer Infecteds to worry about. Then again, there were still the ones ringing the rest of the park—and coming inside—so Fallon pretty much worried constantly anyway.
Once Light’s group shut off the water, Fallon’s went to work. The water coaster didn’t rely only on gravity to propel riders from top to bottom. Instead, it contained multiple high-pressure water jets, pushing them over a course that included uphills as well as downs. All the coaster’s high-pressure jets were fed by the same pair of master pipes, reaching up from underground, with branches to the actual jets along the way. The water pressure had to be such that the highest jets had as much force as the lower ones, which were gauged down to limit their outflow.
Fallon and Antonetti went to work on one of the master pipes while Sansome and Warga tackled the other. Sansome would put in the most effort, Fallon was sure; there were times she wondered whether Warga had intentionally goaded Antonetti into shooting him, just so he could get out of chores. They used their wrenches to remove the bolts at the lowest pipe joints, which Sansome said were flanged connections. There seemed to be no sort of manual labor he hadn’t done at some point, and she was glad that included pipefitting.
The bolts were tight, some rusted in place. Fallon tugged on the wrench until her palms ached. A couple of times, it slipped out of place, and she rammed her own knee, drawing blood. She was already putting sweat into it, and after the second such incident, she wasn’t far from tears, so she figured spilling blood was only natural. She touched her cheek, where her scratch from yesterday was scabbing over nicely. So far we’ve been lucky, she thought. We’re all still here. Our worst injury was caused by one of our own. I hope it can hold . . . but I have my doubts.
As if reading her mind, Book’s voice sounded in her head. Fallon started. She’d forgotten that she hadn’t terminated their connection after Briggs’s suicide.
“You’ve got to hurry, Fallon. We just got a look at your location via satellite. You’re in the clear so far, but they’re getting closer all the time.”
“Working on it,” she muttered.
“Work faster. I’m not kidding.”
“I’m really not used to this kind of labor. Randy’s hurt, and—”
“Fallon, I’m on your side. I’m just telling you, you don’t have a lot of time. In a few minutes, you’ll have to start shooting them. When you do, that’ll tell the rest where you are.”
“Okay!” Frustrated, exasperated, and scared, she said it louder than she’d intended. Sansome and Antonetti looked up.
“What?” Antonetti asked.
“Nothing, Gino.” She started leaning on the wrench, cranking it with everything she had. Sweat dripped into her eyes, slicked her sides. “Just hurry!”
When they had disconnected the master pipes from the vertical plastic ones feeding the jets, they capped one with a fitting from the tool room and started pulling down the plastic. Sansome bolted on an elbow section, then connected the plastic to that, removing the jet branches as he went. When one side’s plastic piping ended, they hooked up the pipe from the other side, giving them almost two hundred feet of fairly flexible piping.
They were admiring their handiwork—Fallon wondering if it would actually function as intended—when Antonetti snatched up his machine gun and opened fire. Fallon whirled around to see seven or eight Infecteds who had somehow gotten to within twenty feet of them without being detected. She yanked out her Glock and joined Antonetti. In less than a minute, all the Infecteds were down.
But that didn’t mean the others hadn’t heard. This was what Book had warned her about. They could be overrun any minute now. She wondered how the Sykos in the pump room were doing because so far, nothing was even trickling from the pipe. She was about to step away and ask Book for an update when Lilith came racing toward them. “He says cap it!”
Sansome drew on a cap, closing off the pipe, and secured it with a couple of screws that he tightened by hand.
“Should be any second now,” Lilith said. “They gave me ninety seconds to get here before they started it up. We heard shooting.”
“Just a few Infecteds,” Fallon said. “But I’m sure the rest heard. Help us with this thing.”
Everybody got a grip on the long pipe, and they carried the capped end back toward where they’d come in, near the activity pool. They were almost there—could see Infecteds against the fence, massing between them and the UPS truck. The pipe bucked in their arms, and started wriggling like the world’s biggest snake, trying to break their grips. Fallon felt it and held on tighter, but she knew Sansome’s presence was the only thing keeping it under control. At the long pipe’s end, he had the hardest job of all.
Light came dashing up from the pump room and grabbed onto the pipe, helping to steady it. Pybus was a little behind him, not moving as fast as the fit EMT.
“It’s time!” Sansome shouted. Past time, Fallon thought—the thing wanted to knock her over. The big man pulled one of the screws and swiveled the cap out of the way, and water shot out the end like it was a cannon.
And with Sansome controlling the aim, miraculously, it worked.
The Infecteds around the fence were blown off their feet. Some went skidding a dozen feet or more back into the parking lot. Sansome shifted the stream and blasted some more, opening a pathway. Infecteds tried to regain their footing, but the pavement
was so slippery now, they fell more often than not.
“Now for the hard part!” Sansome called over the deafening blast of water. He had scouted a place in the ticket booth where he thought he could wedge it, but that was before he knew just how powerfully it wanted to break free. Light released his section and ran up to help him, and Warga—to Fallon’s surprise—did the same. Between the three of them, they got it in place—shooting a heavy stream of water at full force right into the Infecteds gathered near the gap Sansome had made.
When they were satisfied it would hold, they released it, and so did the others.
Then the shooting started.
The water couldn’t blast directly at the gap, or across the path the Sykos would have to take to the truck. It would be hard enough to keep their footing on the wet pavement as it was; add shooting at moving targets into the mix, and it’d be downright treacherous. Light, Warga, and Antonetti went first, using their machine guns to part the sea of Infecteds, slipping and sliding as they went. The others came behind, Sansome bringing up the rear.
Fallon reached the truck and spun around to see where the rest were. Just as she did, Sansome’s feet lost their grip on the pavement. They flew back and he hit the ground, hard.
As soon as he was down, Infecteds swarmed him.
“Joe!” she cried. She opened fire on the Infecteds tearing at him. Antonetti was still holding the machine gun, and he used it to keep more Infecteds from joining the first batch. He seemed reluctant to fire at the ones on Sansome. Afraid of hitting him, Fallon figured.
She saw blood. Flesh. Sansome was fighting back, and he was strong, but he was facedown on wet pavement now, which didn’t give him much leverage.
“Come on!” she said, wading back into the current. “We’ve got to get him out of there!”
“Let him go, Fallon,” Book said. “Get out of there.”
“Not a chance.”
“Fallon . . .”
She ejected a magazine from her gun, slammed in a new one, and tried to blink “Off” at the same moment. She was pretty sure she screwed that up, but Book got the message anyway. She heard a heavy sigh, then silence.
But only on the inside.
On the outside, where her attention was, the sound of gunfire, the scuff of hundreds of feet on wet pavement, the shouts of humans, and the guttural, near-animal noises of the Infecteds all battered her ears. The odors of gun smoke and water bringing out the oils on streets that hadn’t seen a serious rain in months filled her nostrils.
She felt like she had been almost blinded by fear and rage. When she blinked, she saw that she had charged all the way to Sansome’s position. He was trying to get to his knees, but he had the weight of three Infecteds on his back and legs, and more clawing at his head, tearing the flesh.
Looking for uninfected brains.
Fallon held her gun against the skull of the nearest one and squeezed the trigger. The gun bucked in her hands, the Infected’s head blew apart, and blood and diseased brain splattered her. She ignored it and turned to the next one. It—she—must have been pretty, once. She had long blond hair and a big green eye—the other one had been torn from her head, probably when she’d become infected—and plump lips, twisted into a ferocious scowl.
Fallon put a round in the remaining eye.
She was starting to get pretty good at that part.
Around her, the guys with machine guns were carving a swath. She and Pybus, who still handled a gun with an air of distaste, finished off the Infecteds on Sansome and helped the big man to his feet. Together, holding Sansome between them—his head drooping, blood splashing into the water on the road—they ran to the waiting truck.
The truck had been splashed but not a lot. Light jumped into the driver’s seat. Fallon helped Sansome onto the floor in back, then flopped down in the jump seat, firing through the open door. The rest lined up in the gap between the shelving units, Antonetti and Warga laying down fire out the back doors until the Infecteds stopped chasing them.
Pybus’s idea had worked. They’d reached the truck, and though it had cost ammunition, it wasn’t as much as it might have been. Still, Fallon was starting to be concerned about how much they were going through and how much more they might yet need. One more thing to worry about, she thought as she glanced back at Sansome.
Of those, there never seemed to be a shortage.
CHAPTER 35
21 hours
Light sped north up Country Club Drive, then took a right on Southern, ignoring the traffic signal and the camera that snapped a picture of what was left of his back license plate for running a red. He didn’t get far down Southern, though, because just past the Fiesta Village Mobile Home Park, a red Dodge Charger, an Xterra, and a couple of landscaping trucks were blocking the road.
But it wasn’t like on the freeway, where the cars had been abandoned where they were—crashed or parked—as drivers fled, or tried to. These vehicles didn’t look like they’d just randomly stopped. They looked like they’d been pushed into place to form an impassable wall.
“It’s a trap!” Antonetti muttered. When Fallon looked at him, he shrugged. “Sorry. Star Wars fan. Couldn’t resist.”
“Geek or not, he’s right,” Light said. “Something’s off. I’m turning around.”
He slowed, then braked. He cranked the wheel hard to the left and moved his foot from the brake to the gas pedal. The truck made a clumsy U-turn, and they were facing back the way they’d come, looking at what should have been an empty street.
Except it wasn’t.
Of course it isn’t, he thought.
Infecteds filled the road in front of them, more than they’d ever seen in one place before. Light tried to do a quick count and gave up at forty. There were easily three times that number of Infecteds, pouring in from the trailer park to the south and the residential area to the north.
“This isn’t good,” Fallon said in her new role as Captain Obvious. “First the building-to-building searches, now a serious ambush.” She shook her head. “This is much more elaborate than the one with a handful of burning cars. They’re getting smarter.”
“Well, last I checked, being smart didn’t make you invulnerable to Detroit steel. Hold on!”
He threw the truck in reverse and backed up toward the blockade, where even more Infecteds were gathering. When he’d gone as far back as he could without running into the rapidly advancing wall of virus-tainted flesh, he put the truck back in drive and gunned it.
The UPS truck lurched forward, gaining speed. It wasn’t a brown bullet—it was too beat-up for that—but it was as fast as the ambulance he’d used to plow down Infected a bare handful of days ago. Remembering that drive, Light couldn’t suppress a grin.
“That’s right, you bastards. Come to papa.”
Spurred on by Light’s lead foot, the truck slammed into the wave of Infecteds, a rectangular metal-and-rubber cutter trying to climb to the crest before being swamped. Light shot out of his window with one hand and steered with the other. Fallon and Antonetti fired out the other side, and the others waited anxiously in the back for their turn to shoot, holding on for dear life.
They almost made it.
The problem was, the Infecteds were ten deep. And even as they plowed a path through the first three rows with little resistance, there were just too many. By the fourth row, bodies were starting to pile up under the wheels, and the truck was beginning to slow. By the fifth, the Infecteds were reaching in to the front of the truck, hands grasping air, but sometimes hair or clothing or skin that was subsequently ripped away with a curse. By the sixth, the truck was so bogged down that the Infecteds were starting to climb on the roof. By the seventh, the Sykos knew it was time to bail.
“We have to get out of here!” Fallon shouted. Light could barely hear her over the sound of gunfire ringing in h
is ears, but he was pretty sure it was yet again something blatantly apparent. Warga and a still-bleeding Sansome were crowding up behind them now, also shooting. Light was momentarily amazed at the man’s ability to keep going despite his injuries; it was almost like Sansome was an Infected himself, except he preferred heads over their contents. Still, it was an unsettling thought, and Light quickly pushed it away, replacing it with another equally amazing one—somehow none of the Sykos had been a victim of friendly fire yet—Warga’s little through-and-through notwithstanding.
“My door or yours?”
“Mine!” Fallon yelled, elbowing an Infected that had gotten through their barrage of bullets square in the face.
“Count of three?”
“Okay!”
“One, two . . .”
“Three!”
Fallon and Antonetti jumped out into the buffer zone created by their suppressing fire, parting so Warga and Sansome could come out next, then Lilith and Pybus. Light was the last to leave. With no one else shooting out his side of the truck now, the buffer zone on that side was much smaller, and Infecteds were encroaching closer by the second. He didn’t want to turn his back on them, so he eased himself backward out of the truck, still firing at the Infecteds as they started to crawl in from the other side.
The nearest one was a red-haired woman in a low-cut blouse, breasts straining against the thin material as she reached for him. Under other circumstances, Light might have found her sexy. Then again, under other circumstances, her face wouldn’t be as red as her hair, her breath wouldn’t stink of brains, and her crimson eyes wouldn’t be weeping blood.
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