Desolation (Book 2): Into the Inferno

by Lucin, David

  “Ed,” Dylan said plainly. “He told me in confidence after one too many bourbons, so if he finds out I—”

  “I won’t say anything,” she said, holding up her hands. “I promise.”

  “Good.” Dylan leaned his head against the wall. Jenn thought he might fall asleep, but not once did his eyes stay shut for more than a blink.

  Hearing about Sophie made Jenn think of Sam. This was the longest she’d gone without speaking to him since they started dating. After Payson, she should have just talked to him about how she felt, about how much she was struggling. More than once he gave her the opportunity. Typical Sam—he only wanted to help her. And typical Jenn—she wouldn’t let him. It shouldn’t have taken a trip to Prescott and Phoenix to realize how selfish she was being.

  She wondered if Maria had slept at all in the past two nights. Both of Maria’s daughters had abandoned her now: Camila for the war and Jenn for Phoenix. Maria didn’t deserve that. Jenn promised herself that she’d never leave Maria again.

  For the first time since she left, Jenn was excited to go home.

  “You still with me?” Dylan asked her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m awake. I can take over so you can sleep.”

  He bounced on his toes. “All good. Could use some company, though.”

  “Sure, but you need to answer one question for me.”

  Dylan lifted his cap and scratched his head. “Shoot.”

  “What the hell do you do for fun in Red Deer, Alberta, anyway?”

  18

  “Two out front,” Dylan said over the radio. “By the entrance.”

  Just before 2:30 a.m., the group piled into the trucks and drove, slowly and with the lights off, to a spot only a block from the hospital. There they unloaded Rusty, and Dylan climbed onto the roof of a house, from where he now used Sophie’s night-vision binoculars to scout their target. Everyone except Carter wore empty backpacks to fill with supplies. They also had a few duffel bags. Hopefully that would be enough for everything.

  Jenn knelt on a concrete slab beside an abandoned home’s patio door. Her guts swirled in anticipation like she was waiting for a two-out payoff pitch in the ninth inning when the bases were loaded and her team was down by one—only this was a thousand times worse. Every time she tried to breathe, slowly in and out, her mind ran over the plan.

  Her plan.

  Dylan lowered himself from the patio overhang and landed on the concrete beside her. In the darkness, she could hardly see his face. “Where are we going?” he asked her.

  She viewed a satellite photograph of the area on the tablet. They were west of the hospital and across a four-lane divided road from the main entrance. According to Dylan, two guards were on watch there. “The ER is on the north end,” she said. “From the looks of it.” The image showed a line of semi trucks parked side by side near the hospital’s southernmost edge. “The loading bay’s on the south. Might be the best way in.”

  “Doubt it,” Sophie said. “You ever worked in a warehouse?” She answered her own question. “Of course you haven’t. Those bays are closed and locked for security reasons, and the man doors only open from the inside.”

  “So the ER then,” Dylan proposed.

  “Will it not be locked also?” Valeria said.

  Sophie scratched her nose and crouched next to Jenn. “Maybe. Maybe not. But every emergency room I’ve seen has those automatic glass doors. Easy for stretchers to go through. Worst comes to worst, we can bust them and get in that way.”

  Crickets chirped as the group considered it. Jenn’s mouth was dry, but she doubted her stomach could handle a sip of water. She shouldn’t have eaten half of Dylan’s soy protein bar earlier. If she hadn’t, her insides might not have been so upset with her.

  “Let’s do that,” Carter said. “The emergency entrance.”

  “Oh, no, no, no.” Sophie waved a finger at him. “You’re not going anywhere. Someone needs to guard the trucks and—”

  “No!” Carter cried, his voice carrying. Valeria shushed him, but he puffed up his chest and crossed his arms. “I want to help. Ed’s my friend, too.” He held out two duffel bags to his sides. “I’m bigger than everyone. I’ll carry more of the medicine.”

  Sophie grimaced and rubbed her forehead.

  “He makes a good point,” Dylan said. “We’ll need all the hands we can get, and if someone finds these trucks, Carter won’t be able to stop them without Rusty.”

  “Fine,” Sophie relented. “I’ll let you—on two conditions. One, you never tell Ed about this. Two, you stick beside Dylan like glue. You got it?”

  “I got it,” Carter said too loudly. Valeria shushed him again.

  Dylan rose to his feet. “All right, then. Let’s move out.”

  Jenn put on her backpack and touched the pistol on her hip for good measure. She wished she could get this over with, then head to New River and sleep in the jewelry store at the camp. A second bath wouldn’t hurt, either. Simultaneously, another part of her wanted to drag these last few moments of safety out as long as possible. Here, behind this abandoned home, she wasn’t in danger. But in the hospital? Without a doubt, the Major’s men would shoot her on sight.

  “Jansen,” Valeria whispered impatiently.

  “Sorry,” Jenn said. “Coming.” Before putting the tablet to sleep, she took a final mental snapshot of the surrounding area. North, she reminded herself, across two roads. Then right to get onto the hospital’s north side.

  Carter patted Rusty on what could have passed as the drone’s head. Fully erect on all fours, it stood nearly chest high on the tall man. “See you soon, Rusty. We’ll come back for you.”

  In their time together yesterday afternoon, Carter must have grown attached to the thing. Jenn understood why; it was strangely animal-like in appearance, almost as if it were a pet—one with a built-in .50-caliber machine gun.

  The five made their way through the copy-paste residential neighborhood, staying off the roads and choosing to pass through yards. They had to climb six fences, but Jenn preferred that to being spotted on the road. Everything depended on them reaching their destination unseen.

  A strip mall loomed across the street from the hospital. Jenn guided the group to a drive-through bank kiosk in the parking lot, where they crouched behind a sedan. Moonlight, an eerie shade of yellow-orange through the persistent layer of smoke high in the sky, glistened off the hospital’s three stories of glass windows. On the near side, a roundabout led to an arched canopy attached to the main structure. An ambulance was parked underneath.

  The emergency entrance.

  “That’s it.” Dylan brought the night-vision binoculars to his eyes. “Looks like two more guards.”

  “Are we fully prepared to do this?” Sophie asked. “Because there’s no backing down once we press the start button.” Though she spoke to the group, Jenn sensed that the question was directed mostly at her. She nearly shouted no in response but managed to snuff out the temptation. Was she ready for this? Could she ever be ready for something like this? Was this how her brothers felt before they went on patrol or attacked the enemy? Jenn wished she could have talked to them about the war and what they experienced; it could have helped her prepare for tonight.

  “Ready, boss,” Carter said with conviction. His courage inspired Jenn, so she huffed and told herself that waiting to do something frightening was always harder than actually doing it.

  Jenn exited the map app and navigated to the home screen. “You should do it.” She handed the tablet to Carter. “Rusty’s more yours than anyone’s.”

  His eyes lit up. “Really?”

  “Yeah. Here.”

  He took the device and accessed the drone’s functions as Dylan had shown him. “Ready?” he asked.

  “Just do it already, Vladdy,” Sophie said. “My husband doesn’t have all year and I’d like to go home before the first snowfall.”

  Carter smiled devilishly and pressed the screen.

  Jenn ex
pected more fanfare. All she heard was Carter’s nose whistle and Valeria’s shoes scrape on the concrete as she shifted her stance. Growing impatient, she pulled out her Glock, then tapped her pants pocket. Good, her spare magazine was still there. The others carried what she assumed were AR-15s.

  Hands sweaty, she bounced on her toes. No screwing around, she reminded herself. They needed to find the storage room, fill everyone’s backpacks and the duffel bags with supplies, then get out. Intravenous antibiotics for Ed were the priority. Simple.

  She checked her watch but couldn’t see the time in the dark.

  “It’s taking too long,” Carter complained. “When will Rusty—”

  The shot reverberated in Jenn’s stomach and sent a bolt of adrenaline through her veins. A second shot followed. Then a third. Each was deep, almost guttural, and echoed off the surrounding buildings.

  Rusty had found a target.

  “Are they moving?” Sophie asked, referring to the guards at the emergency entrance.

  Rifle fire cut through the air and joined the staccato of the drone’s machine gun.

  Dylan brought up the binoculars. A second later, he said, “One of them’s on the radio.”

  Jenn gnawed the skin on the inside of her cheek. The men at the ER had to abandon their post to reinforce the front of the hospital against the drone. If that didn’t happen . . .

  “They’re moving!” Dylan said. “Both of them. It’s working!”

  The temptation to bolt across the street struck Jenn, but Dylan remained still. Valeria mumbled what sounded like a prayer in Spanish while Sophie touched her necklace. Carter gave the tablet to Jenn, who tucked it into her pocket.

  Then Dylan put the binoculars into his backpack and zipped it up. “Let’s move,” he said.

  On light feet, the group crossed the road and entered the roundabout leading to the emergency room entrance. By the time they got there, Jenn was dizzy from turning her head and searching for movement. The clap of distant gunfire rose to a crescendo. In the dark, the charcoal-black drone was probably hard to see. Only its muzzle flashes would give it away.

  Dylan was the first to the sliding door. “Carter,” he said, squeezing his fingers into the slot where the doors came together. “Gimme a hand.”

  Carter pulled with Dylan. Both men grunted, but the door didn’t move. Locked.

  “Plan B.” Dylan waved Carter off. “Let’s hope it’s not bulletproof.”

  Jenn stiffened. She hadn’t considered that. Nurses, she knew, usually sat behind plexiglass barriers in emergency rooms, especially those in the city, and now that she thought about it, those were almost certainly bulletproof. Was this door, too?

  The crack of Dylan’s gun hurt her ears. A hole pierced the glass in one of the doors, and thousands of cracks spiderwebbed out from it in all directions. When Dylan kicked at the weakened glass, it fell away. He used the butt of his rifle to knock loose some shards around the edges.

  “Let’s go,” he said over the echo of machine-gun fire. “Someone still might have heard that.”

  “Lights on,” Sophie said. She pressed the switch on a flashlight duct-taped to her gun. Valeria and Dylan did the same. Jenn pulled Gary’s LED from her pocket. Her pistol in one hand and the flashlight in the other, she followed Dylan and Sophie through the door, careful not to cut herself as she went.

  Four beams of light lit up a hexagonal reception desk shielded by protective glass. Padded seats ran along the walls, and wide, dark screens hung from the ceiling. On their right, another set of sliding doors, these ones open, led to a space with a medical bed and a chair. A hallway on the left stretched deeper into the hospital.

  The storage room was up one floor. They needed to find a staircase.

  “Jansen,” Dylan whispered to her. “You ever been here?”

  “No.” She angled her flashlight down the hall. “Let’s try this way.”

  Jenn made to lead the group, but Dylan stopped her. “I take point. Sophie behind me. Jansen and Carter, you’re in the middle. Val’s got the rear.”

  In a line, they crept into the hallway. Beams of white swung back and forth. More rooms, each with two medical beds separated by a curtain, passed on their left. The air stunk of bleach and cotton balls. Goosebumps broke out on Jenn’s forearms.

  “Here,” Dylan said. His rifle-mounted light illuminated a sign depicting a man climbing a step. He turned to Valeria, who lifted her weapon and pointed it at the stairwell. When she was in position, Dylan stood off to the side, then pressed the handle and pushed the door open. Valeria barreled through. “Clear,” she said after a moment.

  Sophie went through next, followed by Jenn, Carter, and finally Dylan.

  At the second floor, they performed the same maneuver at another door. This time, Sophie was first. Jenn silently thanked whatever training these people did before the bombs; to her, they all looked like soldiers now, not just Dylan. Never again would she mock a doomsdayer.

  The stairwell opened into a long hallway. In both directions, it seemed to stretch on forever before being swallowed by darkness. The smell of bleach returned, and Jenn heard the faint crack of gunfire from outside. If the Major’s men failed to take out the drone, it would eventually run out of ammunition.

  “Which way?” Sophie asked.

  Jenn had no idea. All Lionel’s instructions said was that a supply room on the second floor would have what they needed, but they didn’t have time to scour the entire building. “Should we split up?”

  “Good thinking,” Dylan said and pointed his flashlight to the right. “Jansen and Carter with me. We’ll go this way. Sophie, Val, take left. Anyone sees anything, call it in on your radio.”

  No objections from Sophie or anyone else.

  “All right,” Dylan said. “Let’s go.”

  Again, he took point. Carter kept close behind. Jenn’s lights skipped and jumped over a water fountain, a black LED screen on the wall, a bath, and a bed with unkempt sheets. Every room was empty. She reminded herself that the patients had been evacuated.

  The hallway turned left, and they followed it. Then Jenn spotted a closed and unmarked door. “Hold up,” she said.

  “What is it?” Dylan angled his rifle at the floor. The light bounced off the linoleum, bathing the hall in cool white.

  Jenn stuck the handle of her flashlight between her teeth and made to reach for the doorknob, but Dylan stepped in front of her. He shook his head and whispered, “Wait.”

  She bit down hard. They didn’t have time for this. Rusty would only work as a distraction for so long. Dylan was right, though: they had to think like soldiers.

  Flashlight in hand once more, she took up a position on one side of the door while Dylan waited in front. When he nodded to her, she twisted the doorknob and pushed. Dylan charged inside, and Jenn went in behind him.

  The room was small. A fridge stood on the far end, flanked by a sink and a counter. Wall-mounted cupboards hung open.

  “Guys,” Dylan said. “Take a look at this.”

  Jenn spun around. Splayed out in the corner, next to an empty water cooler, was a Middle Eastern man in a white lab coat covered in streaks of purple and red. His wiry hair was silvery gray, and he wore a short beard. Both of his hands were behind his back. Above his breast pocket hung a name tag that read “DR. BEN HAMIDI.” Initially, Jenn thought he was dead, but he squinted through the LED lights shining on him.

  “Please,” Ben croaked. “Don’t hurt me.”

  19

  Dylan let his rifle hang across his chest and then pulled the knife from his pocket. When he knelt, Ben kicked his legs and tried to bury himself deeper into the corner.

  “Easy.” Dylan held up both of his hands and showed his palms. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”

  Ben licked his lips. “You mean, you’re not with them?”

  Jenn answered. “With who? The Major’s people? No. We’re from New River.”

  “New River?” The doctor’s eyes widened. “Did Lione
l send you?”

  Dylan and Jenn exchanged glances. “How’d you end up here?” Dylan asked. “I thought this place was evacuated.”

  “After the bombs, yes. I came a few days ago with a team from New River. We were attacked on the way and they captured me. All of the soldiers were killed.” He brushed his fingers over the dried blood on his lab coat. “They’re forcing me to treat their wounded.”

  “Why are you in here?” Jenn asked.

  “When the gunfire began,” Ben started. “They went out to stop it, so they tied me up. I’m a prisoner.”

  Jenn listened for the signs of fighting outside but couldn’t hear any. Was that because she was inside this kitchen or because the firing had stopped? It didn’t matter. They needed to leave. Now.

  Dylan gave Jenn a look that asked, Should I let him go? The possibility that this so-called Ben could be a gang member in disguise crossed her mind, but the doctor’s trembling limbs and quivering lip made her doubt foul play. That kind of fear would be difficult to fake. “Do it,” she said, so Dylan reached behind the doctor and cut a zip tie that bound him to a pipe on the wall.

  Ben rubbed his wrists. “They’ll be coming back. We need to run before they catch us.”

  He began to stand but Jenn put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him down. “Wait,” she said. “We’re here for medical supplies. Lionel says they’re on this floor somewhere.”

  “We . . . We can’t,” Ben stammered, his eyes on Jenn’s weapon. “There’s no time. You don’t understand. If they find you here with me, they’ll—”

  Carter stepped forward and towered over him. “We aren’t leaving without medicine for Ed.” His voice boomed in the enclosed space.

  On his backside, the doctor made a yelping sound and crawled away from Carter while shooting pleading glances to Jenn and Dylan.

  “Take us to the storage room,” Dylan said, “and we’ll help you out of here.”

  Ben lifted his chin to look Carter in the face. Rubbing his wrists some more, he said, “Okay. Okay, I’ll show you. It’s . . . It’s not too far.”