He glanced at Flynn’s Superman watch. Two hours and forty-five minutes until the streets were flooded with fire. Another look up and down the street, and Rhys ran across it.
***
Rhys panted when he arrived at the end of the alleyway and looked into the square. He rubbed his face; his tears had driven some of the smoke from his eyes, which helped him to see clearer. The square seemed vacant but looks meant nothing with the city in its current state.
Another couple of deep breaths, and the tightness in his lungs eased. After several more blinks, his misty vision cleared some more. The chaos of just a few hours ago had gone, although the memory remained burned into Rhys’ mind in high definition. His heart raced as he looked at the open space.
The lowering sun lit up the square. When they opened the shutters, they’d be unleashing chaos on the city, but at least the shiny windows would return light to some of the dark crevices. If he never ran down a gloomy alley again, it would be too soon.
A final round of forced blinks, and Rhys rubbed his eyes yet again. When his vision cleared, he lost his breath. The vast expanse of concrete that paved the square glistened. Spilled blood covered what seemed to be every inch of it. The sun reflected off it, the blood deep enough that it hadn’t dried yet.
Not only had it painted the pavement red, but blood also coated the stone benches, and several of them had been broken clean in half. It must have taken a serious whack to break them; they looked like they could withstand a lightning bolt. Thank fuck he got out of the square when he did.
Every part of the open space had been stained or damaged by the diseased. Everywhere except The Alpha Tower and—his heart skipped—the fountain. The almost white concrete wall remained immaculate, even in the sea of blood that surrounded it. Jake wasn't in the water anymore either; although how the fuck he went anywhere with broken shins…
The only difference between the fountain in front of Rhys now and the one he’d left earlier that day was the water. The pump worked fine, it recycled the water as it should have. The water itself, however, had been dyed bright red.
Rhys squinted and his eyes ached at the sides from where the smoke had dried his skin. A look back at the ground again and he saw chunks of flesh scattered across it. Some pieces were so big and nondescript they could have been packaged up and served in the chilled section of a supermarket. Others retained their human form. A strip of skin lay to his right; about a foot long, muscle still clung to it. Short, curly hairs ran the entire length of it and Rhys saw the corner of a tattoo. It looked like it had been rent from someone’s leg.
Before he could think on it further, the thwapping of a helicopter blade vibrated through his chest and disturbed the air around him.
Rhys pulled back into the alley and watched a large black chopper come in over the top of a couple of towers.
The air forced down from the blades tousled Rhys’ hair and sent ripples over the surface of the layer of blood that coated the square.
The helicopter lowered over the middle of the square and stopped about ten metres from the ground. The loud rotors battered his eardrums, and the wind flapped so violently, Rhys had to blink repeatedly. Two men, dressed from head to toe in black and wearing helmets with tinted visors, lowered a large cage out of it.
After about thirty-seconds, the cage scraped against the concrete ground. The men pulled back into the helicopter and Rhys lost sight of them.
About the size of a small car, the cage remained still. The men had given the chain attached to it enough slack so it didn’t shift around with the bird above.
When Rhys cupped his hands around his eyes to protect them from the wind, he finally saw the contents of the cage and his stomach sank. Icy dread drained the strength from his muscles, and he shook where he stood. He could only manage two words. “Fucking hell.”
Chapter Seventeen
One side of the cage fell away and hit the concrete with a loud crash. It created an opening into the rectangular prison. It had clearly been designed as a trap; bait had been tied inside the cage on the far wall. The sound of the loud rotors had drowned him out, but since Rhys had seen him, he couldn’t help but hear the naked man’s screams. He yelled so loud his voice cracked and wavered. Rhys gulped against the taste of plastic in his own throat as he watched on.
In a matter of seconds, the scream of the diseased joined that of the man. A glance across the square, and Rhys saw the pack. Clumsy in their desire to get at the man, they sprinted straight for the cage. They ran like they always did—heavy footed and right on the edge of their balance. One misstep and they’d crash flat on their faces. Rhys did a quick headcount. Seven… seven diseased—all of them male.
It hadn’t seemed possible, but when the man saw them, he screamed louder still. Rhys’ sight cleared with every passing second, and he now saw him thrash more violently than before. His exposed penis shook. Lacerations covered his body. Maybe the disease would be a relief from what he’d evidently been through already. At no more than twenty-five, this man’s short life had reached a torturous conclusion.
As the diseased closed in on him, their roars grew louder.
The man’s screams changed into violent shaking sobs. With his hands, feet, and neck tied to the cage, he fell limp like a hung puppet. Hope had obviously left him.
With an accelerated pulse, Rhys watched on. In a perfect world, he would have done something. They didn’t live in a perfect world though, and he had too many people he loved that needed him.
One of the diseased had broken away from the pack. With no more than about ten metres between him and the entrance to the cage, it seemed to speed up.
The man looked at him. His mouth moved but nothing came out, almost like he screamed on a new frequency—a frequency that could only be heard in hell.
When the lead diseased entered the cage, the metal bars rattled as they bounced against the concrete ground. The other diseased entered behind him just as the one in the lead reached the naked man.
Metal clattered; both the diseased and the man screamed, and the rotors turned. Yet all of that paled in significance when Rhys heard the wet crack as two bodies collided.
The man cried out as the lead diseased bit into his face. As if the cage had been electrified, he shook and yelled as it chowed down. Seconds later, the other six crashed into him. Shortly after, his screams fell silent.
A cable that hung down from the helicopter snapped taut and the cage door slammed shut. It trapped the diseased inside the cage with the man—not that they noticed; they shared a single-minded purpose as they all chomped onto a part of the now flaccid corpse.
By the time they’d finished with him, the helicopter had lifted the cage several metres from the ground. The man had been reduced to a torn up piece of meat. The position of his shackles seemed to be the only thing that retained his human form. Covered in blood to the point where Rhys couldn’t see any of his skin, the man looked like he belonged in a butcher’s freezer.
Then he twitched and Rhys jumped. His sore throat turned arid. What the fuck?
Another twitch and the man lifted his bloody face to stare at the other monsters in the cage. Where he’d been the focus of their interest only moments before, none of them even looked his way now.
Only when the man opened his mouth did Rhys see the orientation of his face. Skinned to the flesh beneath, his head didn’t even resemble a skull. It looked more like an overripe piece of fruit, juicy and fleshy beyond any kind of definition. Suddenly he vomited what looked like about a pint of blood.
When he’d finished, he opened one of his eyes. The other seemed to have been gouged out or battered shut. As the cage moved farther away, it became harder for Rhys to see the finer details. Thank god.
Another sharp jolt ran through the man and he released a wet roar. The dampness that gargled from his throat sounded like a man drowning.
His slow moment of awakening sped up as the jilted fury of the disease took over. He snapped his jaws and
thrashed his head from side to side. Now too far away for Rhys to see anything other than his form, the man shook as if he thought he could break free of his bonds.
The helicopter continued to rise and took the man and his new friends with it. Rhys squinted against the downward wind as he watched on.
Once the helicopter had cleared the top of the buildings, it tilted in the sky and pulled away from the square.
A few seconds later, the thing had disappeared from view.
Rhys glanced at his watch. Only two and a half hours left. Whatever the people in the chopper were doing didn’t matter; Rhys had to keep on. At least the helicopter had drawn the diseased in the square out of hiding; hopefully it would be clear for him now.
The Alpha Tower stood shutterless and as indomitable as ever. He focused on his breath, but it did little to combat the tension that twisted his intestines, and his lungs continued to ache from the smoke that came from Dave’s tower. He checked around one last time. It looked clear. A nod to himself as he focused on the tower and Rhys ran out into the square.
Chapter Eighteen
Rhys slipped several times as he sprinted across the open square. Blood covered every inch of the ground, although, from what he could tell, all of the diseased had gone from the area around The Alpha Tower. Not that he could be sure of much in the fucked-up city.
The low sun forced Rhys to squint as he ran.
When he reached the other side of the square, The Alpha Tower blocked the sun’s glare and he saw Oscar for the first time. He’d obviously been there all the while and had watched Rhys run toward him. The large man leaned against the wall by the entrance and had propped his bike up next to him. He seemed almost relaxed, like someone waiting for a bus or something equally as trivial.
He’d only get a blank stare from Oscar until they were close enough to speak, so Rhys focused on the tower instead. He’d gotten so close that on a normal day, security would have shooed him away by now.
The Alpha Tower stood as the only skyscraper in the city that hadn’t been surrounded by steel shutters. Its white walls and blacked-out windows seemed even more imposing surrounded by the huge grey pods that had once been government administration offices, and were now prisons.
Rhys looked for signs of smoke and saw none. Good fucking job. It would take a lot to persuade him to enter a building on fire. Grief twisted in his chest. He had to hurry for Dave’s sake.
When Rhys caught up to Oscar, both his low level of fitness and smoke-impaired lungs prevented him from speaking to the man. His throat stuck when he swallowed, and he continued to gasp for air. He pointed back across the square and finally managed, “Did you just see that?”
Oscar stared at him.
“The helicopter, Oscar; the huge fucking helicopter with the trap beneath it.”
A glint sparkled in Oscar’s eyes. “Yeah, fucked up, wasn’t it?”
Words abandoned Rhys as he stared at the man. He looked like he knew something Rhys didn’t, almost like he got some kind of twisted pleasure from what he’d just witnessed. “What were they doing?”
A sharp shrug and Oscar said, “How the fuck would I know?” He looked around. “I’ve been standing here like a lemon waiting for you to turn up. I feel like zombie bait. So if you don’t mind, how about you open this fucking door and we get into the tower? Or do you want to see how much longer we can tempt fate before our luck runs out?”
The man’s directness ran unease straight to Rhys’ core. Sure, he’d be desperate to get into the tower too if he’d stood there waiting for that time, but yet again, Oscar’s behaviour seemed like a cover for something else. Despite all that Oscar had done for him, something sinister lurked beneath the surface of the man. He didn’t trust the fucker one little bit.
Still, Rhys needed Oscar. The Alpha Tower would no doubt be overflowing with diseased. If Rhys could choose anyone to have his back in a tight spot against them, Oscar came a close second only to Vicky. The guy knew how to fight them without a gun—leg injury or not—and right now, Rhys needed that from a companion more than anything else.
“Are you going to carry on staring at me,” Oscar said, “or are you going to open this fucking building? You can take a fucking picture of me for later if it’ll make you hurry up.”
Flynn’s Superman watch showed less than two and a half hours left. He looked at The Alpha Tower again and then back at Oscar.
Oscar shrugged. “Well?”
Oscar had helped Rhys every time he’d needed it. He had no reason to suspect him of anything untoward.
When Rhys pulled the map Vicky had drawn for him from his top pocket, he turned it around and showed it to Oscar. As he held it open, his hands shook.
“Vicky drew that for you, did she? She’s proven to be quite handy in all of this, wouldn’t you say?”
And then he goes and says something like that. Without the ability to rewind time, Rhys couldn’t know if he’d told Oscar Vicky’s name or not. It still jarred him to hear Oscar say it though. Not that it mattered what Oscar knew; the second the shutters came up, these two were done.
Rhys straightened the crinkles from the map as best as he could. The paper rustled in the near silence of the square. “We need to head straight for the elevator; that’ll take us to the top floor.” Although the map showed just a crude rendering of what they would no doubt find up there, it showed enough. “It looks like we have to head to the very end of the corridor we come out on. There are two rooms at the end.” A warble ran through Rhys’ voice and it threatened to expose his lie. “The room on the right has the computer to override the shutters.”
“And the one of the left?” Oscar said.
The rendered boxes represented the rooms at the end of the corridor and nothing more. Rhys focused on them as heat flushed his cheeks. “I dunno; let’s just worry about getting to that back room. I’m guessing it’s not important, otherwise Vicky would have said.”
Oscar pointed at the room on the right. “Don’t we need another clearance card to get into it?”
“Yes. Hopefully there’ll be some scientists up there that we can take one from.”
“Hopefully?”
“I’m not fucking psychic, Oscar. I’d say there’s a good chance, but if I’m being honest, I don’t have a fucking clue what we’re going to find in this building. We have nothing but a baseball bat and an axe on us. Your leg’s fucked and I’ve inhaled lungfuls of smoke. We could be walking straight into hell.”
The glint returned to Oscar’s eyes, almost as if the prospect of chaos excited him.
“All I know,” Rhys said, “is that I have loved ones who need rescuing.” Another check of his watch. “We don’t have long before this place goes up like a lit match to petrol. So are you ready, or do you want to spend what little time we have left complaining?”
Oscar locked a penetrative stare on Rhys. The heat returned to Rhys’ cheeks. He’d seen Rhys’ lie about the rooms at the end. He must have worked it out.
“Right,” Rhys said and clapped his hands together. “Let’s fucking do this.”
The building may have looked different from all of the others in Summit City but the card reader on the outside looked exactly the same. When Rhys swallowed, it hurt, and the taste of molten plastic still sat in his throat. He couldn’t smell a thing since he’d left Dave’s tower other than smoke. He removed Vicky’s card and his hand shook worse than before. He took another deep breath and swiped it through the reader.
The second the red light turned green, Oscar shoved him aside and barged through.
Hopefully he’d believed Rhys. Hopefully he’d go for the room on the right.
Chapter Nineteen
The second Rhys stepped into The Alpha Tower, he drew an involuntary breath. Tall and wide, the foyer took up what could have been the first five floors had they chosen to utilise the space. The Alpha Tower seemed to be the only place in the city where efficiency bowed down to beauty.
The floor, as large as a foot
ball field, looked like it had been made from one piece of marble. The walls had been made from the same material, and like the floor, Rhys couldn’t see the joins. Several grand black leather sofas had been placed on the floor. Everything that could have a trim, had been outlined in gold.
“Talk about luxury,” Rhys said. “This place looks more like a swanky hotel than an office building.”
Rhys had to squint to see to the other end of the vast room. Two gold doors lay flush with the far wall. They stood side by side, separated by a strip of green marble about a metre wide. Each door had a small round call button next to it and nothing else. Two letters had been inlaid into the marble halfway up the wall. Gold, like every other trim in the foyer, they stood about ten metres high and five metres wide. They read ‘AT’.
Like Rhys, Oscar looked around the room. Unlike Rhys—who stood limp jawed with his arms flopped by his side—he had his axe raised, ready for use.
Rhys finally snapped out of it and looked for danger. Another good reason to have Oscar around; the man remained permanently vigilant when Rhys could only gawp like an awestruck child.
Rhys leaned close to Oscar and said, “See anything?”
“No, it looks—”
The roar of the diseased echoed through the cavernous reception area. The shrill call bounced off the hard walls, which made it difficult to pinpoint its origin. Rhys spun on the spot and his heart pounded in his neck. Although he swallowed, his throat remained dry. “Where the fuck did that noise come from?”
The darkness shifted to the left, and six diseased burst from the shadows. The group consisted of four women and two men.
They sprinted on the edge of their balance as if they’d fall face first on their next step. Their arms slashed the air in front of them and they snapped their teeth. The top halves of their bodies leaned forward, but instead of watching the floor, they lifted their faces and glared at the pair through bloody eyes.
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