“Parkour!” Lilith exclaimed excitedly, a little girl getting that coveted dollhouse at Christmas. Only in her case, Light decided, it had probably been a toy gun.
“Whatever it takes,” Fallon replied. “Let’s go!”
She sprinted toward the house she’d indicated—its roof was starting to smolder—and Light was right on her heels, with Lilith and Sansome on his. They darted in between the house and its neighbor, shoving through a gate to the backyard. As they ran through, he and Sansome paused to pull the black trash and blue recycling bins over to block the gate. It wouldn’t hold the Infecteds back for long, but every little bit helped.
They skirted the pool and reached the back wall, the ubiquitous cinder-block property divider that could be found everywhere in the Valley, like some sort of uniting force. Different races, different socioeconomic statuses, same walls. Light thought there was probably something profound about that, but right now all he cared about was scaling the damned thing.
Fallon bent and made a basket with her hands that Lilith stepped into. The girl scrambled up the wall, where she waited, grasping on to the overhanging branches of the neighbor’s orange tree. Sansome boosted Fallon up the same way, then did the same for Light, with the two women helping to pull him up.
Then it was Sansome’s turn. But even with the three other Sykos pulling from the top of the wall, they couldn’t get him up. As they were trying to figure out some way to lift him, a crash across the yard made them all look.
The Infecteds were at the gate, pushing their way through the bins.
“Shit!” Fallon said.
Light agreed, looking down into the next yard. Then he let go of Sansome’s arm and jumped down.
“What the hell are you doing?” Fallon’s voice was surprised and suspicious. She probably thought he was going to cut and run. She was partially right, though that running wouldn’t occur until a more auspicious opportunity presented itself.
He pulled out his knife and crossed over to a large sycamore tree that boasted a tire swing. He climbed up into the tree—a feat made easy by the board ladder nailed into its trunk, leading to a wooden platform from which a small hand dangled—and shimmied out onto the branch the swing was tied to. He cut the rope, put the knife in his teeth, and grabbed the branch, lowering himself until his arms were fully extended and he was hanging there like a piece of ripe fruit ready to be plucked. Then he let go of the branch, landing badly on his left ankle.
Dammit!
He could immediately tell it was a sprain, not a break, but it couldn’t have come at a worse time. Still, he powered through the pain, slicing the other end of the rope where it was attached to the tire, sticking the knife through a loop on his pants, then hurrying back to the tree where the others waited as fast as his injured ankle would allow.
“Here!”
He threw one end of the rope up, and Fallon caught it, immediately understanding his intent. She leaned over and tied it to the trunk of the orange tree, then pulled the other end up and flipped it over the wall so Sansome could use it to climb.
Light could hear the other man grunting and the women urging him on. He heard a small cry of pain, then Sansome was on top of the wall, and Fallon was pulling the rope up and over to their side. Sansome went down first, stepping away from the rope gingerly. Light saw a gash along the back of his right calf and realized one of the Infecteds must have tried to stab the big man.
Damn but those fuckers are getting smart, he thought as he moved over to examine Sansome’s wound. Lilith was on the ground now, and Fallon was just starting down the rope when a sharp crack echoed between the houses. Light looked up, expecting one of his companions to have fired on an Infected in this yard. Instead, Fallon climbed awkwardly down the rope, one hand clutched to the opposite forearm. She looked at the others grimly, showing her own wound.
“They have guns, and these ones know how to use them.”
“We’re fucked up the—” Lilith began, but Fallon cut her off.
“We are if we don’t keep moving. Come on.”
Light had determined that Sansome’s cut was mostly superficial and didn’t need treatment, but Fallon waved him away when he tried to examine her.
“Through-and-through. I’ll be fine.”
Light shrugged. No skin off his nose.
She started off toward the front of the house, dodging small cactuses and other overgrown pokey things Light couldn’t identify.
“The next house over backs up to the Sutter place,” she said, pointing to the left. She was headed to the right of the house, though, because that’s where the gate was. “If we can come in from the back, maybe we’ll have a better chance of getting close to the meteor.”
“Or getting killed faster,” Lilith said, but everyone ignored her this time.
As Fallon unlatched the gate and started to pull it open, several bloody hands reached through.
“Shit! Help me get this closed!”
Sansome and Light shoved their shoulders up against the gate so she could relatch it. Then Sansome boosted Lilith up so she could tell them how many were over there. A shot rang out, narrowly missing her head. When Sansome lowered her back to the ground, she was pale.
“That gate’s not going to hold. There’s easily a hundred of them, and more coming.”
“Climb the wall into the yard by the Sutter place?” Light asked.
Fallon nodded. “Let’s go.”
But when they turned back, they saw that the Infecteds on the other side of the wall they’d scaled had figured out how to get over it—from watching the Sykos do it?—and were starting to pour over the cinder-block divider.
“Plan B?” Light asked.
Fallon looked around, saw a door.
“The garage! If we can get in, maybe we can get a vehicle started and get out that way.”
She hurried over to it, tried the door.
Locked.
“Dammit!”
“Here, let me.”
It was the first thing Sansome had said in a while, and everyone looked at him questioningly. He motioned for Fallon to step aside.
“Give me a jolt with that ‘My-Ad’ thing.”
“What? I—”
Whatever Fallon had been going to say was drowned out by the sound of wood cracking. The gate was about to give.
Without another word, she pulled the device out, adjusted some setting or other, and zapped Sansome with it. He face got red, and he bared his teeth like a rabid honey badger. Then he turned to the door and rammed it as hard as he could with his shoulder.
Nothing.
Again, with a growl this time, denting the door.
A third time, with a primal scream, and the door flew off its hinges, striking the vehicle in the garage and bouncing off it to land at Sansome’s feet. Then he stepped aside and waved them in, a strained smile on his face. Light recognized that look—it was the expression you made when you really wanted to kill someone but couldn’t.
The vehicle was a white Cadillac Escalade, backed into the garage and big enough to hold all of them.
And to act as an Infected bulldozer.
“Keys?”
They look around for a key rack, but saw nothing.
Fallon looked at Sansome.
“Can you hotwire it?”
Sansome’s hands trembled uncontrollably, like a Parkinson’s patient’s. “I could’ve before, but not now. Your thing has me too juiced up.” Not just that, Light speculated. Multiple serious injuries to his face, then the accident, that slash in his calf—it’s a wonder the guy can still function at all.
Light walked over to the driver’s side door, intending to try to hotwire it himself. How hard could it be? And what other option did they have? He didn’t want to make his last stand with a rake and trowel.
The windows were tinted, so he was as surprised as anyone when he opened the door and a body and a gun tumbled out. A woman, dressed in an upscale business suit and wearing enough bling on her fingers to finance a small Central American country. With a hole in the center of her forehead.
“Well, that’s one way to go,” Light commented, reaching over her and quickly rummaging through the purse sitting on the passenger seat. He found the keys, turned around to display them triumphantly to the others. “Lilith! Behind you!”
An Infected was standing in the doorway—an old man with a long white beard, bad teeth, and an ancient revolver pointed straight at the girl.
Lilith reacted first, squeezing the trigger of her M4 and filling the old-timer full of holes. When he fell, another appeared behind him, and Lilith shot that one, too. Then they all piled into the Escalade, shutting and locking the doors as more Infecteds appeared in the doorway.
Light looked at Fallon, and she nodded. He started the SUV, put it in gear, and hit the gas—heading straight for the garage door.
CHAPTER 48
6 hours
The door exploded in a shower of splinters.
Most Infecteds still had slow reaction times; the Caddy plowed through them like a bowling ball scoring a strike. Its wheels humped over bodies in the driveway, and then it was in the street, running smooth.
Fallon was glad to have a vehicle again, even though the Escalade smelled like death. To be fair, outside, the odor was nearly omnipresent now; on every block, there were bodies, and the stink from each one rose and joined the others in an invisible, choking cloud. She wished there was an air freshener in the Caddy, maybe one of those paper pine trees hanging from the mirror, like her father had always kept in his Grand Prix.
Another advantage of the MEIADD—I can tell the reek is there, but it’s not nearly as strong as it might be.
On foot, she felt more vulnerable to the Infecteds. Even the ones who could use guns now didn’t seem to know how to drive, so with a working vehicle, the Sykos could always outrun them if they needed to. Unless, of course, they ran into another ambush. The Infecteds were getting good at that.
The other thing she liked about it was the cushy leather seat that held her like a lover’s hug. She remembered those, from early days with Mark. She had liked them then, and loved him. Did she still? She couldn’t say for sure, and with an amped-up psycho brain, it was no time to make such calculations.
Still, with her thoughts traveling down such avenues, she remembered something else from those days. Not at home, though—at the lab. She had never loved Elliott, not that way, but they’d been close. Mostly, what they had shared was awe. They were exploring the human brain and doing so in ways no one else ever had. It was the ultimate inner space. Even the universe had boundaries, or so the astrophysicists said. She couldn’t quite grasp how that was possible—didn’t a boundary mean there was something on the other side?—but the brain was genuinely infinite territory. A dedicated neuroscientist could be many things, but bored was never one of them.
Still, when it came to adrenaline rushes, lab work paled compared to scrambling through a city of monsters with a license to kill. She didn’t think discovering an anomaly in a brain scan would ever again carry the thrill it once had.
The trip was short. Gary to Pasadena to Glencove to Wilbur—a tight circle in this suburban hellscape. Light took the first couple of blocks fast, to leave behind the Infecteds who had massed around the house where they’d found the car. They saw a few stragglers on the way, but the closer they came to the Sutter house, the more there were. While they drove, Sansome slammed fresh magazines into each M4—the last of their hundred-round double-drum magazines. That reminded Fallon of her Glocks, so she reloaded those.
Then they were back.
The Sutter place was on fire, as were several of its neighbors, but the flames hadn’t really taken a foothold yet. They danced around the roof, on the side opposite the two-car garage. Some shrubs flanking it on that side were ablaze, too, and possibly more problematic because they were pretty close to the wall. The house could have been any house on any street in the area, maybe any street in the Southwestern United States. It was well kept, the yard neatly landscaped and trimmed. A storybook house, if the story was set in middle-class middle America and was about a plague of brain-eaters.
Light stopped half a block away. No streetlights were working, but the glow from the flames and the Escalade’s headlights shone onto the Sutter driveway. Infecteds standing there glared at the Escalade, as if sensing fresh brains inside. Pybus’s hive-mind theory seemed sound—every Infected in sight had turned toward the Cadillac.
And the rest of them—citywide—know where we are. Someplace important to them.
“We have to get to that house,” she said.
“It’s going to be a fight,” Light replied.
“I’m ready,” Sansome said. “More than.”
Lilith yawned, stretched, and said, “Let’s get this done. I’m so tired.”
Fallon looked at the Infecteds again. They were coming down Wilbur toward the Sutter house, emerging from the yards of nearby homes. She had been thinking of herself as a scientist again, when what she needed was the heart of a warrior. A killer. She pulled the MEIADD from her pocket, placed it so the probes surrounded her paralimbic region, and turned it on.
The charge flowed through her, and she felt the effect almost immediately. Her bullet wound seemed like an insignificant detail, no more than a paper cut.
The Infecteds wanted to get between her and her goal? Let them try.
“Let’s go,” she said, throwing open her door. “I’m ready to kick some ass.”
Light stepped out of the SUV, favoring his left leg. The back passenger-side door opened, and Sansome extricated himself slowly, followed by Lilith. “I don’t see a meteor anywhere,” Light said.
“Where would you put a meteor if you had one?” Lilith asked.
Light shrugged. “Garage, maybe? Backyard?”
“Well, you can’t see either of those from the street, can you? Sometimes you psychos are fucking retarded.”
“Watch your step, girlie,” Light snapped. “Don’t think you’re indispensable.”
“We’re all indispensable,” Fallon said. The last thing she needed was for her Sykos to start in on each other. Everybody was exhausted, dispirited, and irritable. Herself included, and with her extra-psycho jolt, she could add impatient to the rest of it.
Lilith took Sansome’s big arm in her two small hands. “Fuck with me, Hank, and Joe will demolish your ass. Won’t you, Joe?”
“I don’t—” Sansome started to say.
Fallon cut him off. “Ignore them, Joe. We have real things to worry about.”
And they did.
The number of Infecteds they faced was nothing like it had been before the Hellfires. But there were more than twenty, maybe closer to thirty. They were milling around in the flickering firelight, so it was hard to get a solid count. More streamed toward the house from every direction, like ants drawn to a picnic lunch.
Like others they’d encountered in the neighborhood, some of these were armed. One woman in her late sixties carried a shovel that was almost her size and might have nearly matched her weight. A man wielded a chainsaw, but he hadn’t started it, reducing its intimidation factor considerably. Others were genuine threats: a guy holding a shotgun in a way that suggested he knew how to use it; a woman in a Western shirt, jeans, and boots with a revolver in each hand; a muscular man in a blood-spattered butcher’s apron slowly swinging a samurai sword to and fro.
Most of them were murmuring or snarling or outright chanting the now-familiar “ane-ja, ane-ja.”
“Three-round bursts,” Fallon said, rolling the safety to that position. “Conserve ammo.”
As the others fol
lowed suit, the man with the shotgun raised it, pressed the butt into his shoulder. Fallon took aim and squeezed the trigger. Her rounds went low, catching him midchest. He staggered and jerked his trigger. The shot flew high, over their heads. Fallon corrected her aim and fired again, and this time, his head shattered like a ripe melon dropped from ten stories up.
An Infected six or eight feet behind him got a faceful of blood and brain matter. She ran a finger down her fouled cheek, touched it to her tongue, made a face.
Samurai butcher lowered his head and charged. His gait was uneven, and more so when Light fired a burst into the top of his skull. Momentum carried him one more step before he sprawled forward, his sword hitting the street and spinning like the metallic pointer in a children’s game.
Annie Oakley fired her right-hand pistol, then lowered that and raised the other, arms swinging in rhythm like they were on a swivel. Her first shot spanged off the Escalade. Before she got another off, Lilith—having ignored Fallon’s order—opened up on her at full auto, stitching up the woman’s body from jeans to brow.
“Bursts, Lilith!” Fallon shouted. She swung her attention back to the Infecteds but sensed the one-finger salute the girl directed her way just the same.
The Sykos started forward again. Each fired bursts into the crowd—even Lilith—
thinning it with every pull of the trigger. With the most dangerous ones taken out early, the others posed little threat.
Or so it seemed.
Because before they could react, a scrawny guy in a Flaming Lips T-shirt snaked a small semiautomatic pistol from behind his back and opened fire. Sansome took a bullet in the fleshy part of his right thigh. He let out a moan, shook his leg, and put three rounds in Scrawny’s left eye.
Light mopped up, putting down the last two Infecteds with carefully placed bursts, then there was no one alive—or impersonating that state—between them and the garage. After Light made a quick tourniquet above the wound with one of the Infected’s belts, Sansome broke the lock on the double garage’s doors. While he did that, Fallon checked in with Book. “I don’t know how much time we’ll have here,” she said. “The place is on fire, and there are more Infecteds coming this way—it feels like every last one in the Valley is zeroing in on this place. Can you tell where the meteor is?”
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