He glanced up at her, saying nothing.
“What do you mean?” she asked with budding alarm, mopping her brow with a towel.
He rose and gently handed the baby over to Kate. She took the baby girl as if she’d handled children all her short life.
“Tommy came back,” he said, wiping at the corners of his eyes.
She stood. “How?” she asked quickly. “From where? Who was with him?”
“I don’t know for sure,” Jesse said, “but I heard gunfire coming from the conference room. I went back to get—”
“Did you see him? Did you see David?” She grabbed his shirt at twisted, forcing him back on his heels.
“No,” he said flatly. “I didn’t go back.”
She let him go. She wriggled her lips as she thought. Creases formed on her brow. Then she suddenly leaned forward and bumped him backward with the heels of her hands.
“What about Tommy?” she asked, grabbing his shirt in her fingers again.
“He’s dead. I shot him,” Jesse said flatly. “Killed him dead along with two of his guys. Dmitri and…the other one. Can’t remember the guy’s damn name. The one Ryder stabbed in the hand.”
She released him and straightened his shirt. She seemed distant. She was thinking again, thinking hard and fast. Then she nodded and squeezed his upper arm.
“Them?” she asked, puzzled. “What about…? How can you be certain David is dead?”
“I can’t,” he said. “But I don’t think anyone survived.”
She reached for a rag and used it to wipe her hands, and then twisted the rag tighter and tighter until her knuckles turned white.
“I’ve got to go,” she said, sternly.
Jesse shifted to block her. “No,” he said. “You can’t. I’ll go. I need to go.”
“But,” she said, “there could be injured. I mean… What if someone needs help? They might…might need help.”
He knew what she actually meant. She wanted to check on David. “No. You should stay here.”
She ignored him and grabbed her medical kit from beside the bed.
“No, stop. No way you’re going,” he said. “I’ll go check. Once it’s clear, I’ll come back and get you.”
“But there isn’t time,” she said. “I’m going. Try to stop me.”
He stared at her for a long, thoughtful moment.
“Come on, Kate,” Andrea said. “I’ll need your help.”
Kate started to hand the baby off to Eve.
“Absolutely not,” Jesse said.
Andrea waved a hand to dismiss him. “I need her. She’s coming.”
“No goddamn way,” Jesse said. “Not until it’s safe.” He wasn’t going to give in on this.
Crossing his arms over his chest, he blocked the way. Andrea moved to get around him. He shifted to block her again.
“No,” he repeated.
Andrea frowned and glanced at Kate. “He’s right,” she said. “Stay here. Help them. We’ll need to find a wet nurse for this one. Can you two do that?”
Kate acknowledged Andrea with a silent stare. Eve nodded.
Jesse uncrossed his arms. He indicated toward the body covered by the red-stained sheet. “Who was she?” he asked.
“Her name was Camila,” Andrea replied. “Her body was simply not strong enough for that baby. And I…” She trailed off, muttering something incomprehensible.
“Sorry,” Jesse said.
“It wasn’t your—” Andrea cut herself off. She said nothing more, but her mouth hinged open, and she licked her lips. Deep grooves formed on her forehead and the skin of her cheeks sagged under her too-large glasses.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Jesse said.
“Yeah,” she breathed, swallowing hard.
With Andrea following closely behind, he trekked through the tunnels and back into the complex, making his way to the conference room. Along the way, Andrea stopped to check a pair of limp forms lying prone in the corridor one level up from the conference room. Jesse held up the lamp to illuminate them. One guy had his arm raised above his head and his face flat on the floor in a graceless sprawl of death. The second guy lay twisted, blood leaking from his side, wet pieces of his skull showing bone white. Each man wore a gold armband. Jesse recognized them. They were the two who had gone after Tommy earlier.
Jesse turned to Andrea. “Why are the lights off here? Back there they were working, along with the ventilation system,” he said, partly to distract her, partly because it didn’t make a lot of sense.
“It’s nearly dawn,” she said. “Figure it out your damn self.”
Taken aback by her harsh tone, he thought about it a moment. When he still couldn’t understand why, he shook his head once, and held up the lamp to light the way.
They continued down the final set of stairs. Jesse raised the empty Mac-10 and entered the room, holding the light like a beacon in front of him. He listened hard and sniffed the air, tasting the familiar coppery tinge of blood on the back of his tongue.
Then he heard something. A muffled groan. Was someone still alive? He raised the light so it illuminated more of the room.
Andrea shot past him, hurrying to get to the back wall.
“Wait,” he whispered.
She ignored his warning. Her medical bag banged against overturned chairs as she yanked it along behind her. Jesse followed with the lamp swinging in his hand. Wild shadows danced about the room. His boot hit something soft. He nearly tripped. Coming to a dead stop, he lowered the light to see what had snagged him.
What he saw made something cold and nasty turn over in his stomach.
He was standing in a pool of wet, sticky fluid. His front foot had jammed itself under the corpse of a man who had crumpled into the fetal position. The walls were splashed red with blood, and the whiteboard held the spattered silhouette of a body that had blocked a veil of crimson spray. At the end of the table was Ryder, still slumped face first on the mahogany table.
“David?” Andrea called.
Jesse raised the lantern and watched as she searched past the end of the table. She stopped abruptly and got down on one knee. He quickly joined her. She was hovering over a large, dark-skinned man. Tyrell. His chest was moving up and down in shallow, rapid pulses.
Jesse stooped closer, giving her more light, watching as she felt for a pulse on Tyrell’s neck.
“He’s alive,” she said.
“Of course…I’m…still…alive,” the large man wheezed.
Andrea quickly assessed him, running her hands across his chest and up and down his legs, while Jesse continued to hold the lamp out for her.
“Where’re you hit?” she asked.
“Leg,” he said. “Hurts like hell. Don’t think I can stand.”
Jesse moved the light again. There was a hole in Tyrell’s trousers oozing blood. She lifted his leg, bending it at the knee. The big guy grunted as she probed the backside.
“You’ll live,” she said and let his leg drop. “The bullet came out the other side. Nothing major hit. You’re lucky. Damn lucky.”
Tyrell let out a groan and wrapped his leg with his huge hands.
Andrea shifted to another body, then another. Jesse stayed with Tyrell. The big man was taking shallow, wheezing breaths but seemed able to cope with the pain.
“Oh…” Andrea said. “…God, no,” she finished a second later.
Jesse scrambled alongside her and fell to his knees, immediately feeling them grow wet as blood seeped through the denim fabric.
Andrea was holding up David’s head. The thick keratinous scar covering one side of the man’s ruined face was completely pale in the cast light of the bluish lantern.
David was not breathing.
Andrea pulled his head up to scoot her legs underneath him. She held him in her lap, stroking his blood-slicked hair, pulling it away from the crusted gore matting his face. With her fingertips, she swept his single good eye closed and began to rock him gently.
Jesse
let her be and returned to Tyrell.
“So?” the large man said.
Shaking his head, Jesse frowned.
Tyrell nodded. “Yeah, I thought so.”
Jesse watched the man carefully for a moment before asking, “So what exactly happened?”
Tyrell pulled himself back against the wall and drew a breath. “That bastard brought some of his racist buddies is what happened. Damn guy shot everyone. When I got hit, I dropped and played possum.” Tyrell tapped the side of his head with his index finger. His expression then changed to anger. “That flat-nosed prick came back for David. Man wasn’t even dead yet either, so he fired again until he was. Then the dude just left.”
Jesse whistled breathlessly and glanced at the doorway. Everything inside him wanted to leave the room behind and get the hell out of there. He’d seen too much death already. Way too much.
“Hey,” Tyrell said. “You all right?”
Jesse said nothing.
Showing a row of thick white teeth in the lamplight, Tyrell grinned. He glanced at the Mac-10 hanging from Jesse’s shoulder. “And now they are all dead?” he asked. “You got them?”
Jesse nodded somberly.
“Good. I hated those pricks. You sure you got all of them?”
Jesse tugged at his growing beard and nodded again. He listened to Andrea’s morose sniffling, while trying to figure out what to do next.
Tyrell was the first to break the silence between them. “Jesse’s your name, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Okay, Jesse. Can we get the hell out of here?”
“Give me a second,” Jesse said as he stepped past the dead to check on Andrea. He rested a hand on her back, and she gazed up at him. In the lamplight, her eyes, magnified by her glasses, were filled with worm-like red veins. Her cheeks were streaked wet with tears.
“We need to go,” he said.
She remained silent for a long moment. “And go where?” she asked.
“Let’s start by getting Tyrell out of here.”
“No,” she said, stroking David’s forehead. “I can’t leave him like this.”
“We’ll come back for him. But, first things first. We have to secure this place before anyone else discovers what happened here.”
“I’m not leaving him,” she said.
“You have to. Get up. Let’s go.”
“No.”
“Goddamn it. We have to get out of here. I’m too damn tired to argue with you. If you want to stay, fine. But I’m getting out of here.”
“Wait,” she said.
She stroked David’s hair once more and disentangled herself from him. She lightly rested his head on the floor and stopped to rub each of her cheeks with her thumb, clearing away the accumulated tears.
She stood. “It appears I need a change of clothes,” she said distantly.
Jesse grunted in agreement and set the lamp on the table. Together, they raised Tyrell to standing, bracing the large man between them. Jesse wondered how in the hell he was going to carry the man all the way back to where they had been. He’d carried Cory already and was feeling extremely weak.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“Been doing it most of my goddamned life,” Tyrell said. He stepped forward and nearly collapsed, grabbing the table to prevent himself from falling.
“Guess that’s a no,” Jesse said as he snatched the lamp from the table and ran his other arm under and around Tyrell’s arm and chest.
“You weigh a damn ton,” Jesse said.
Tyrell chuckled. “Good genes,” he said. “Played football back before all this shit went down.”
Jesse perked up. “Left guard, I’ll bet.”
Tyrell chuckled. “How’d you know?”
Jesse said nothing else, but had instant respect for the man. Football was a deep bond that needed no words to explain.
Progress was slow and demanding, but eventually they made their way up the first flight of stairs. At the top, Jesse had to guide them all so he could keep his back against the wall. Panting from the exertion, he realized he was too weak to support the man’s weight.
“The infirmary,” Andrea said, seeming to read his mind.
“What?” he said.
“Just go left,” she replied.
They continued to follow the curving hallway until arriving at a room marked with a red cross. Andrea stopped to open the door with a key. Then they helped Tyrell inside and onto an examination table.
Jesse doubled over, breathing hard. He ached all over and was bone tired. As he recovered, he watched Andrea fetch two more lamps from a nearby cabinet. She set them on the countertop and switched them on, which filled the room with light. After digging around in a drawer, she came back with a pair of scissors. Holding them up, she tested them before turning to Tyrell.
“Don’t cut those,” he said, holding the legs of his Chino pants. “I only got one pair that fit.”
The man’s legs were as large as tree trunks, making Jesse wonder where anyone could find Chinos that big.
Andrea clicked the scissors. She said, “I’ve got to cut those off if you want me to clean you up.”
“Okay,” Tyrell sighed.
She opened another drawer and rummaged through it, digging deep for something far in the back. Her hand eventually came back with a brown glass bottle. She set it on the counter and resumed digging, eventually coming out with a bottle of pills. She shook it, and it sounded as if there were only a few left.
She tossed the pills to Jesse. “Take one. You’ll need it.”
“What are they?”
“A little chemical assistance,” she said, smiling. “Keep you from falling asleep on us.”
Jesse opened the pill bottle while she retrieved the brown glass bottle and yanked out the stopper with her teeth.
“Give me a couple,” she said.
He poured them all into her hand. There were three left. She took one.
“To David,” she said skyward, set the pill to her lips, and drank from the bottle, tilting her neck way back. She paused to catch her breath and gulped another long pull. “You’re going to need some of this to wash it down,” she said to Tyrell, coughing roughly and passing the bottle to him neck-first.
Grabbing it, he swirled the bottle before smelling the contents. His nose wrinkled in disgust. “You sure it’s safe to drink?” he asked.
“Oh yeah,” she said, choking and coughing. She stilled herself. “When I start with that needle, you’ll be moaning like a baby.”
Tyrell glanced at Jesse, then, shrugging, he tipped the bottle back for a long pull of his own. He immediately started to cough violently. When the choking stopped, he took another long drink and held the bottle out for Andrea.
Jesse interceded and snatched the bottle before she could grab it. He sniffed the contents. It smelled vaguely of spoiled fruit, lawn clippings, and dog shit.
“Go on,” Andrea said. “It’s safe.”
Wiping his lips together, he popped the pills in his mouth and drank from the bottle until it burned so badly he couldn’t continue. Sputtering and gasping, he set the bottle down on the counter behind him, shielding it from her.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s get to work.”
-9-
SEQUESTER
IT ALL SHOULD have worked, Andrea thought. She’d been almost certain they could salvage the damage Jesse had wrought. But the rising body count was about to leave her with a complete, unmitigated disaster. All of her meticulous planning with David had just been erased in less than an hour’s time.
Holding back her anger at Jesse, she steadied herself and worked to clean and stitch Tyrell’s leg. She’d consumed just enough of the gut-ripping alcohol to keep her hands steady, but not nearly as much as she had wanted to. When she finished digging in the thick muscle for all the bullet fragments, she splinted the leg to keep it from bending and wrapped it with a thick gauze dressing. The man would live if the wound didn’t become infected
. She’d been careful with him, more careful than usual. So many times with the other heathens, the ones she despised, she’d done the bare minimum, just enough to be above suspicion.
“Ready?” she asked, bumping past Jesse to get the brown bottle. He grunted, but moved out of the way. She removed the stopper and drank, forcing herself not to choke as the burning alcohol stripped her throat raw. She wiped her mouth clean and set the bottle back on the counter, staring at Jesse. The amphetamines were kicking in, somewhat offsetting her buzz. When she looked at him, all she could see was the man responsible for the all the disasters that had occurred over the past couple of hours. He’d been the one who’d screwed up her plans. David was now dead because of it too. Everyone she’d so carefully groomed to help was now gone, leaving her alone once again. She’d only asked him to do one simple thing to help repair the damage, and he’d failed to do it. Then he’d gone around shooting and killing the same people she’d told him to eliminate in the first place.
“This is your damn fault,” she growled at him as she packed a collection of additional supplies into her bag. “You should have done what I said, when I said it. You should have listened to me. You should have shot Tommy dead the second you walked through the door. He was plotting against us and he…” She trailed off and drew a breath.
Jesse sat with his hands folded together, staring at the floor, leg twitching up and down.
“Are you even listening to me?” she asked, raising her voice louder.
He said nothing.
She reached for the bottle again. He got up and snatched it away before she could take another drink.
“Give me that,” she said, grasping for the bottle.
“No,” he said flatly.
“You really should have just listened.”
He stared at her for a beat. Then another. Her heart was racing. She wanted to just raise her hand and smack him across his smug-assed face. Make him somehow pay for what he had done. Damn him.
“I’m sorry,” Jesse said humbly.
“Sorry?” she said, taken aback. She found the word distasteful. But his reply had shocked her. Sorry? She repeated the word in her mind. “Well, you just… Goddamn it. Never mind.” Grunting, she threw her hands up in frustration.
Righteous Apostate: Raptor Apocalypse Book 3 Page 7