“What are you doing?” one of the gate guards yelled at him.
“What you apparently won’t,” he replied without bothering to look at his questioner.
“You’re wasting ammunition! The snipers could have taken out five Red-eyes with as many shots as you took.”
“Snipers aren’t here, are they? And while you hold off, waiting for them, they”—he nodded toward the Infecteds—“are getting closer.” He moved the barrel of his machine gun a few inches to the left, and fired. The side of another Infected’s head exploded in a crimson shower. “Making sure they don’t keep doing that is worth a couple of extra bullets in my book.”
“He’s right.” Fallon’s voice was a welcome intrusion. He’d let the doctor talk sense into the guard while he kept sending the sick to their much-deserved rest. But before she could, another Klaxon sounded, at a slightly less annoying pitch than the last one. “What’s that?” Fallon asked.
“The east side. Infecteds are attacking there, too!”
This time Light did look at the gate guard, who’d gone white with fear. The gate guard looked back at him, seemed to take some strength from the Syko’s continued calm, and took a deep breath.
“Waste all the ammo you need to. Just take those bastards out!”
He turned and started giving orders to the others assembled, which now included all the Sykos aside from Light and Fallon, who were already at the wall.
“Attacking on two fronts at once?” Fallon asked, shaking her head worriedly. “This isn’t good.”
“None of it is,” Light replied with a shrug, “but it doesn’t change anything. Smart or dumb, we kill ’em if they get in our way.”
Fallon nodded.
“You’re right. Again.” Then she smiled. “Let’s do what the man said and take some of those bastards out.”
A third, different alarm sounded while the Sykos and the others at the gate played Shooting Gallery with the Infecteds, and Light glanced over at the gate guard, who’d taken up position next to him.
“Another front?”
The guard nodded, not taking his eyes off the scope of his rifle. On the other side of him, one of the much-vaunted snipers had arrived to bat cleanup. There were only a few Infecteds left now, at least at this gate, and it had become a matter of figuring out how to entice them out from behind their cover so fifty people could shoot at them at once. Light was surprised they hadn’t yet learned the concept of “retreat” from this battle, but he suspected the next batch would probably have it down pat.
The last Infected shifted out of the cover of another car. Light had taken the guard’s words to heart and shifted the weapon out of the single-shot mode. He fired a burst, and his rounds hit it first, followed by two dozen more. By the time the gunfire stopped, all that was left was what looked like dress blues, stuffed and flopped over the hood of the car. Everything else was shredded flesh and splattered blood. He turned to Fallon, whose own bullet had been one of the twenty-five, but who looked sick because of it. Whereas he felt nothing but satisfaction.
“You okay, Fallon?” he asked.
“Just thinking about Gino.”
Ah. Light had finally figured out that the object the Italian had given her before throwing himself into the volcano had been Paolo’s dog tags. The uniform had no doubt brought him to mind. He was the first Syko to be lost—though probably not the last—and Light figured Fallon must be taking it as a personal failure. She was the one who’d agreed to use him when she’d learned Paolo—her first choice—was dead. She probably felt guilty, and maybe sad, though seeing as the brain structure she shared with him tended to decrease—or obliterate—empathy, he wasn’t sure of anything beyond the failure bit. Brains were tricky things, after all.
“Who’s Gino?”
It was the gate guard. Fallon had been unconsciously touching the metal chain she wore around her neck—Paolo’s dog tags—as she spoke, but now she pulled her hand away, maybe a little too quickly.
“One of our guys. We lost him just before we met Kayleigh and Danny.”
The guard’s eyes lingered on Fallon’s neck so long, Light began to wonder if he had some sort of vampire fetish. Then he spoke.
“Reedley gave you guys a pass because you stole those uniforms, but that guy out there?” He indicated the dead Infected, who Light was sure now had been a Marine, probably home on leave, glad to be somewhere safe, never realizing he was in far more danger here than he’d ever been in over in the sandbox. “Reedley would have shot him first. He hates the government—is convinced that they’re the ones behind this apocalypse. So if he thought you guys were actually military—even just reservists—he’d wrap you all up and throw you out as bait for the Red-eyes.”
“We’re not,” Fallon said—too quickly again, in Light’s opinion. “What we said about the uniforms is the truth. We’re no more government agents than you are.”
The guard didn’t look entirely convinced, but he also didn’t look like he was about to tattle, so Light decided he could probably let the guy live. For now.
“For your sakes, I hope it is the truth. No skin off my back either way though I did have a sister in the Corps.”
“Did?” Fallon asked. “What happened to her?”
“Reedley.”
“Oh.”
“So if you were actually grunts, you’d probably want to take care to hide that fact. Just saying.”
“Understood,” Fallon said. “And I’m sorry about your sister.”
The guard shrugged, but Light noticed his eyes had gone hard, like frozen flint. “She pushed our grandmother down when we were running from some Red-eyes, before we got here. They stopped chasing us to eat her. Nana, I mean—the woman who gave up everything to raise us. So much for ‘honor, courage, commitment.’ ” His lips twisted, and he laughed bitterly. “Selfish bitch got what she deserved even if she was my sister. I only wish it would have lasted longer.”
One of Reedley’s lieutenants called him away then, and he nodded to Light and Fallon before he left. Fallon turned to look at Light.
“Warning, or threat?”
Light laughed.
“Fallon, we’re psychopaths. We face nothing but threats—you know that. They’re just a little more likely to actually kill us in the zone.”
CHAPTER 39
17 hours
Heading back inside after the shooting stopped, Fallon ran into Al. “Everything go okay?” he asked.
“We got to shoot some Infec—Red-eyes,” she said. “So yeah, everything was fine.”
“Good,” he said. “Ben said you’re gonna stay for a while.”
“Looks that way. Thanks for putting in a good word.”
“Thank you for deserving it.”
She drew him aside, out of the main flow of people coming in, all of them smelling like gun smoke. On a shelf above her head was some kind of stuffed, dead animal, but all she caught was a glimpse of brown fur, so she didn’t know what it was. “Have you ever seen that kind of behavior before, Al? Infecteds using weapons, hiding behind cover?”
“Or attacking on multiple fronts at once?” he added. “Hell, no. I would have told you it was impossible.”
“That’s what I thought, too. So what do you think it is? They’re getting smarter?”
“They used to be people,” he said. “Maybe they’re just getting less stupid. Or someone’s training them, I don’t know.”
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Neither do I.”
Al excused himself, and Fallon stood there for another couple of minutes, trying to puzzle out what this change in tactics might mean. Before, there had been some degree of safety in the fact that although the Infecteds tended to mass together, at least they hadn’t really displayed anything like complex planning or forethoug
ht. Shooting a mass of people who won’t run or hide was pretty easy work, really. The Sykos were getting closer and closer to the meteor’s probable location, but as they did, the Infecteds were getting harder to deal with.
Maybe the Raiders could help, though. If she could come up with a reason for them to stage a heavy assault on the neighborhood where the meteor was, maybe they could clear a path. Time was getting short, too, so finding it and getting out of the zone again was growing ever more important. And, unfortunately, the less time they had, the more difficult it would be to locate Elliott or to justify the effort.
The ground floor was crowded with Raiders, talking over their victory, sharing horror stories about the changes in Red-eye behavior, or generally shooting the shit the way Fallon imagined soldiers did after a win. In at least one case, literally—she walked past a youngish man who looked like he could have been a high school football coach, who was saying, “ . . . came outta my ass like it was jet-propelled, man. You shoulda heard the splash . . .”
Fallon picked up her pace, not wanting to know the rest of that story.
She saw Sansome—almost always the tallest guy in any crowd, except that Reedley, though not as massive, was a little bit taller—leaning tiredly against a fake-rock outcropping on which a pair of elk or deer grazed. Behind him was the store’s giant aquarium.
As she approached, she heard Warga’s voice, then one she didn’t recognize. She slowed her stride a little, hoping to hear some of the conversation. “ . . . did you all meet up?” the other voice asked. “You friends before this all started?”
“Friends?” Warga sounded like the idea—maybe the whole concept of “friends”—was offensive to him. “Shit, no. We were—”
“Randy!” Fallon called, moving in fast. “Joe. I’ve been looking for you guys.”
She rounded a store display that had been blocking her view of everyone but the towering Sansome. They were all there, to her surprise—Pybus, Warga, and Lilith sitting on collapsible camp chairs, Sansome standing, Light on the floor with his back against the aquarium glass. Two of the Raiders were crouched there. Everybody still had his or her long gun nearby.
“Oh, hi,” she said, acting surprised to see the Raiders there. “Am I interrupting?
“Just gettin’ to know your crew,” one of the Raiders said. He had dark, greasy hair and a mustache that drooped over the corners of his mouth. If he’d waxed it and twirled it into points, he could have been a silent-movie villain, ready to tie poor Nell to the tracks. When he said “crew,” Fallon remembered where she had seen him—he’d been one of the unremarkable men sitting in with Ben Reedley when Al had taken them in, and where she had introduced the Sykos as her crew. The other one might have been there, too, but there was nothing noteworthy about him, so she wasn’t certain.
She still wasn’t sure of the outfit’s org chart, but if these guys were officers, or what passed for it in what Al had described as a pretty flexible command structure, she didn’t want them asking a lot of questions. Or any questions. Psychopaths could be skilled liars, but they typically lied in their own self-interest. They might not know they needed to lie now.
Putting on the dog tags Gino had given her was a mistake. She should have left them in her pocket. Or tossed them altogether. She’d wanted to honor Gino in some way, but she’d come close to exposing their government ties. Now that she knew how antigovernment Reedley was, she didn’t want to take any more such chances.
“They’re a good bunch, aren’t they?” she asked, forcing a smile. “Guys, I think we need a quick debriefing.”
“You want to join ours?” the guy with the mustache asked. “After an engagement like that, Ben’s going to want to have a command staff briefing up in the classroom.”
“Okay if we get there in about ten minutes?” Fallon asked.
The other guy offered a noncommittal shrug. “Whenever you can, I guess.” He and his comrade got to their feet and picked up their weapons. “Good meeting you all,” he said.
Fallon waited until they were out of earshot, then looked around to make sure no one else could overhear. “What kind of questions did they ask?”
Lilith answered first. “Where we were from, if we lived inside the zone, what kind of jobs we had before. Shit like that.”
“What did you tell them?”
“As little as possible, Doc,” Warga said.
“Like he says,” Light added. “I told them I was an EMT, which is true. But the rest of these folks didn’t say they were in prison before this.”
“We’re not stupid,” Lilith said.
Fallon chose not to address that. “Did they believe you?”
“I don’t believe so,” Pybus said.
“Why not, Caspar?”
“You don’t get to be my age without knowing how to read people.”
“Or people cookbooks,” Light tossed out, drawing snickers from Warga and Lilith.
Pybus shot him a hurt look but didn’t respond. “Anyway, I don’t think they bought any of the lies they were told. They were trying to tease something out of us. Testing a hypothesis.”
“Could you tell what the hypothesis was?”
“They can look at most of us and see that we’re not really military, Fallon—they’re not really worried about that,” Light said. “But you could be. And you’re obviously in charge. I think they believe you’re with the Feds.”
“Oh, yes,” Pybus said. “That was unmistakably the impression I got.”
Fallon hoped her expression didn’t give away her concern. “We need to get out of here,” she said. “Right now.”
“How?” Warga asked. “The place is crawling with them. They’re watching every approach—they’d see us leaving.”
“Grab your things,” she said. “We’ll figure it out on the way.”
They did as they were told. Either they were getting better at following orders, or she was getting better at giving them. She led them outside, not at all sure what she would do when they got there. Warga was right; running would probably get them shot. Detained, at the very least. Reedley had said they were welcome to join, but he hadn’t said anything about letting them leave.
As soon as they cleared the doorway, the sounds of many revving engines reached her ears. “What’s going on?” she asked a young Asian woman in a vest with the RR symbol painted on it in white. “Somebody going out?”
“Patrol,” the woman said. “They’re going out to see if they can mop up any Red-eyes that got away during the assault.”
“We didn’t see much action. You think it would be okay if we went along?”
“You’d have to ask Rodell—he’s leading it.” As she spoke, the woman gestured to the side of the building, out of sight from here.
“We’ll find him, thanks.”
As the Sykos hurried away, the young woman called out, “I’ll let Ben know where you’ve gone, in case he’s looking for you.”
Fallon didn’t answer, just kept walking as if she hadn’t heard a thing.
Rodell was wiry, with a long, sharp nose and sparse whiskers and bad teeth, with which he chewed on the plastic filter of an unlit cigarillo. If he wasn’t nicknamed “Rodent,” somebody wasn’t doing their job. He was dressed in tight black leathers with the RR painted in white on front and back. That five-finger discount must have come in handy in Walmart’s paint department.
He was sitting astride a trike, one wheel in front, two in back, RR adorning the gas tank. Behind him, nine or ten other vehicles, mostly pickups, were moving into position. He looked questioningly at Fallon as she approached. “Reedley said we should go out with you,” she said. “Get a feel for what patrol’s like.”
Rodent looked confused. “I’ll have to ask him.”
“He’s got the command staff in with him,” she said. “What’s-his-n
ame told us that Ben wanted us to go.” She spread her thumb and forefinger apart, pantomimed the shape of the drooping mustache. “Guy with the ’stache. I can’t remember his name.”
“Oh, Fowler?” Rodent asked.
“Yeah, that’s right. Fowler came down from the briefing and said Ben wants us out with the next patrol. I’d hate to still be standing here when the briefing’s over.”
“Okay, whatever. Hop in wherever you can find space.”
Fallon had hoped they could all ride together, but getting out before Reedley came down or sent an emissary was more important. She told the Sykos to split up. She and Sansome found seats in the bed of an aging green Jeep Comanche pickup. Lilith sweet-talked someone into letting her ride behind him on his motorcycle, her arms wrapped tight around his midsection. Light wound up inside a primer-grey Suburban, and Pybus claimed a seat in the extended cab of a Ford F-350 Super Duty.
Once they were outside the territory controlled by Reedley’s Raiders, they headed under the freeway. A few Infecteds were walking beside the road—whether late to the fight, early to retreat, or entirely unaware of it, Fallon couldn’t tell. Rodent, out in front, had an Uzi attached to his handlebars. He swiveled the weapon as he passed the Infecteds and unleashed a long burst that ripped through them. They jerked like marionettes with their strings suddenly clipped and fell. Rodent gunned his trike and continued down the road.
By the time Fallon’s truck drew up to where the Infecteds had fallen, they were already taking their feet again, torn and bloody but still hungry. That truck and the one behind it stopped. Two Raiders jumped out of the bed of the Jeep, and three from the Nissan following. The Raiders walked up to the Infecteds, pointed guns at their heads, and squeezed the triggers. Blood and bone chips and brain matter burst into a pink mist, and the Infecteds crumpled again, this time for good.
They turned around; the Salt River lay dead ahead. The patrol climbed the ramp onto the 202, headed west. The Raiders in Fallon’s truck weren’t interested in talking; they had divided up the view from the truck into near, far, and middle; north, south, east, and west, and each scanned his assigned block, looking for Infecteds, human survivors, or anyone who might be getting sick and need a bullet in the brain to shake it. Fallon didn’t push it; the less conversation, the better, as far as she was concerned.
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