Banished (21 page)

Kaz shot forward, launching himself low against Bryce’s torso, trying to knock him down. But I could see that Kaz’s injury had weakened him, made him miscalculate. Bryce stepped neatly out of the way and his finger tightened on the trigger, almost in slow motion. I heard the shot and saw Kaz’s injured hand fly out at an odd angle and bang against the wall in a spray of blood.

C
HAPTER
25

T
HE HOLE IN
Kaz’s bicep stayed neat and round for a second before blood began to leak from it. I could see now that his hand was badly damaged, the fingers bloody and bent at odd angles, his index finger hanging by a thin strip of skin. A wave of nausea rolled through my stomach, followed by shame. I was supposed to be a
Healer
—how could I be so weak?

Prairie reached for Kaz, but Bryce jammed his gun under her chin and drove her back against the wall. Kaz sank to the floor, his face going white as he tried to squeeze his uninjured hand around his arm, above the bullet wound, and stop the flow of blood.

Bryce sighed. “I told you we could do this the hard way or the easy way, Eliz—I mean, Prairie.”

I stepped toward her, but Bryce swung his arm around and aimed at me. “That’s far enough, Hailey. It might be wise for you to remember that your aunt won’t be a bit of good to you if you get hurt. Kind of an interesting arrangement, wouldn’t you say? It’s going to be fascinating to study that, Healers’ natural resistance to each other’s gifts. I’m certainly looking forward to that research.”

Prairie was inches away from Bryce, backed up against the wall, and the second he turned away from her, she tensed. I could tell she was going to attack him. I shook my head and tried to form the word
no
, because I knew Bryce would kill her, but I also knew that she was past caring. As she lunged at him, I waited for the sound of the gun, a silent scream building inside.

But Bryce surprised me.

He brought the gun crashing down against Prairie’s skull, above the temple, and she crumpled to the ground like a puppet with cut strings.

But he didn’t kill her.

When he looked up, there was something in his expression I recognized. It was part longing and part defiance. It had something in common with the way Rattler had looked at her. The ancient blood connection was missing, but in that second I realized that Bryce too had loved her, in his way. Enough that he couldn’t shoot her.

And I realized that love could be dangerous. “Don’t think I won’t enjoy killing her slowly,” Bryce said, but now we knew he had a weakness, and for the first time I saw uncertainty in his eyes. He kept his gun trained on me, but he knelt beside Prairie and felt for her pulse.

If only there was a way to use his weakness against him. I glanced at Kaz. His eyes were squeezed shut with pain. I could tell that he was starting to lose his balance. A shocking amount of blood was leaking from his arm. The bullet must have hit something important.

The need to heal surged hot and demanding inside me, pulsing its way along my nerves to the tips of my fingers, and my desire to put my hands on Kaz, on his wound, was irresistible.

I willed him to open his eyes and look at me—and he did. The second his eyes found mine, I felt it again, the connection I’d noticed when he first took my hand.

Only, now his life depended on it. All of our lives.

I stared deep into his eyes and tried to shut out everything except the gift that was a part of my lifeblood. Kaz’s eyes flickered, his lips parted slightly. I could feel my heartbeat slowing and then I sensed my breathing diminish to almost nothing. Something happened to my vision, too; the edges fell away, replaced with a haze of shimmering shadow, and there was nothing but me and Kaz. My vision began to fade and my lungs screamed for air, but it was beautiful, too, exquisite and so sharp that it felt like it might tear my heart in pieces, this link between us that was more powerful than either of us could ever be alone.

I fell.

I didn’t realize it was going to happen until I collapsed onto the floor at Prairie’s feet. Bryce yelled something and turned his gun from Prairie to me, and I braced for the impact of the bullet, wondering where he’d shoot me, wondering whether it would be better if he merely disabled me and kept me alive in his laboratory—or if he killed me.

And then Bryce slammed into me hard. It took me a second to figure out that Kaz had shoved him, that he had found the energy, a last reserve of strength, to attack.

“Get away, get away from him!” Kaz yelled. I tried, but Bryce was so heavy and he was scrambling on top of me, heavy knees and elbows—God, it hurt—and what about the gun? He still had the gun, and then he was pulled off me and slammed into the drywall and that was Kaz. Kaz, whose good arm was plenty good; Kaz, whose bad arm was good enough, because I’d healed it, not very well because it was damn hard to heal without putting your hands on someone, but enough. Enough.

Kaz kicked Bryce and the gun went skittering out of his hand and down the hall. I pushed against Bryce as hard as I could and managed to roll out from under him. I tried to reach Prairie, but I knew I couldn’t do anything for her now. I couldn’t heal her, couldn’t wake her up.

Kaz was fumbling in the backpack that lay open on the floor, pulling out the last can of lighter fluid, holding it in the crook of his wounded arm while he twisted the cap off. The smell hit me hard as Kaz shook the can over Bryce, the clear liquid splashing his clothes and his face, and he clutched his eyes and started screaming, a scream of rage that turned to terror when Kaz lit a match.

So much screaming. I had finally found my voice and it joined Bryce’s. I backed away from the fireball that Bryce had become, dragging Prairie with me, watching the trail light up like a sparkler in the dark.

Bryce’s scream turned into a horrible yowl of pain as he rolled toward the door he’d come through. Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me upright.

“You don’t have much time,” he said urgently. “Check the server room, make sure she got the program started. Just in case it doesn’t all burn. I’ll take care of Prairie until you get back.”

“Don’t wait for me,” I said, already backing down the hall. “Just go, take her with you.”

But our eyes met and held and dark energy passed between us, and I knew he wouldn’t leave.

I wouldn’t have either.

I bolted down the hall. Smoke rolled down in hot, gritty clouds after me, and I knew the fire must be raging in the main room. The last thing I saw before entering the server room was Kaz bending low next to Prairie, pulling his shirt over his mouth, and I prayed there would be enough air for them.

The door was open to the smaller, inside server room. It was still cool and dark in there, where the fire hadn’t yet reached, and glowing numbers scrolled at lightning speed along the single monitor on the desk. So Prairie had succeeded—the data on the disk was being scrubbed out of existence.

It was about time for some good news.

I emptied the lighter fluid around the equipment and had turned to go, to run back to Prairie and Kaz so we could try to race the fire out of the building, when I noticed a door along the other wall of the server room. It was a heavily reinforced door, like the one to the main lab, with a scan pad set into the wall next to it.

I hesitated. The fire was burning, and the data was being erased. It ought to be enough.

But the door was locked. Something in there was important enough that Bryce had secured it separately. More data? Specialized equipment?

And then I remembered what he had said:
She’s become a permanent guest of the laboratory
. His new Healer—she was imprisoned somewhere nearby, and this was the last place we hadn’t looked.

Fear shot through me. I had to find her and get her out of the burning building, to save her if I could.

I didn’t have a gun, didn’t even have any more lighter fluid, but I pulled the prox card from my pocket and jammed it against the pad. I heard the click of the lock releasing; without thinking I grabbed the door handle and yanked it.

What I saw struck me with such blinding horror that I nearly fell back into the raging flames. A scream started in my throat and burst from me with the ragged, howling desperation of a trapped animal. I tried to run, but my legs weren’t working—my terrified brain couldn’t control my movements as electric panic shot along my nerve endings and adrenaline threatened to drown my conscious mind.

Inside, sitting motionless on a dozen folding chairs, were a dozen men dressed in plain T-shirts and khaki pants. As I blinked away smoke and gulped the poisonous air deep into my lungs, I saw that these were no ordinary men. They were decomposing. Their skin ranged from pasty white to gray and purple, and in a few cases it had started to separate from the bone. The smell hit me next, worse than anything I had ever smelled, and bile rose in my throat. Some of the men weren’t wearing shoes, the flesh swollen and splitting from the bones of their feet. The one closest to me had stains on his shirt. With a wave of nausea I realized that his torso was leaking bodily fluids.

Worst of all were their eyes. Empty, as though the souls of these men had been sucked out through the sockets.

Their heads slowly turned to me. One by one, they rose from their chairs and started toward me, arms outstretched.

They were zombies. And they were coming for me.

C
HAPTER
26

F
OR A MOMENT
I couldn’t move, my legs still frozen in place from the shock. Then the closest zombie stumbled in front of me and its fingers scrabbled at my arm. They were crusted with black filth, and the skin covering its hands had started to separate from the bone. I screamed and backed away, but not before I saw that its eye sockets drooped with rotting flesh, that its gums had shriveled back from broken teeth, that its hair was coming out of its head in clumps. The smell was so strong that I gagged on my own vomit.

I turned and bolted for the door, but the zombie managed to grab the back of my shirt. I was yanked backward, and I realized the zombie wasn’t weakened at all by decomposition. A second gruesome hand reached for my neck and spun me around, and I saw that they were all converging on me, their hands out, their mouths slack and open.

I screamed and shoved at the reaching hands. I screamed harder when my own hands touched flesh that was wet and slick and loose. A hand snaked around my face and pressed against my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I breathed in the stench of rot. My screams turned to fury as I fought to pull away from the bodies pressing in on me, but there were too many.

I bit down. Hard.

My teeth closed on a finger. As I threw all my strength into fighting, I heard a soggy crack and the finger separated from the hand. I spat it out and kept screaming, my voice going hoarse. I stomped on the shuffling feet around me, but there were too many. Another hand replaced the first, and then another, tugging at my hair, thumbs poking at my eyeballs.

I was going to die. The zombies had been ordered to destroy me—to destroy anyone but Bryce, I guessed. How long had he been building this ragtag army? Judging by the state of their bodies, it must have been days. Weeks, even, given what Prairie had told me about decomposition slowing. Even longer, if Bryce had been working on ways to retard it.

I was going to die, but my rage kept me fighting. My fingers found flesh, and they shoved and poked and fought, undaunted even when they sank into rotting tissue. I knew I couldn’t kill the zombies. Their pathetic bodies would keep going until all the flesh had fallen away and they were nothing but skeletons, and only when the last of the tissue had rotted would they be truly dead. I, on the other hand, would die as a human dies; they would squeeze the breath from my throat and twist and crack my limbs and take me to the floor to kick and pummel the life from me.

“Hailey!” Kaz burst through the door. He hesitated only a second, taking in the scene, and then he picked up one of the folding chairs. Wielding it in front of him, he charged the zombies. They were clustered in front of me, for some reason lacking the instinct to circle behind and surround me, and Kaz slammed into them, knocking several down right away, and then, with stunning force, going after the ones that remained. He jabbed and slammed the chair the way I’d seen him use his lacrosse stick in the park, with deadly accuracy and the force of all that hard-built muscle.

Their hands fell away from me one by one. They were slow to adapt to the change of circumstances, and they bumped into one another and hesitated, their hands closing on air, their expressions unchanged. The ones that had been knocked down were getting off the floor and coming at Kaz, and I knew I had only seconds until they adapted to the new threat.

I put all my energy into kicking and clawing. I managed to tear my arms free as I delivered a kick to the legs of the last one holding me, and its feet slipped and it went down.

“Now!” I screamed, and grabbed Kaz’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He threw the chair at the advancing zombies, and we both fell through the door as I pulled it shut hard.

“They’re locked inside,” I said, as much a prayer as a statement. Kaz grabbed my hand and we ran back into the smoky hall.

There were flames licking along the floor, and I realized that the fire would reach the server lab in seconds.

“Prairie?” I asked, choking on the smoke.

“Got her to the lobby,” Kaz said. “Try not to breathe until we’re clear.”

I took a last lungful of breath and held it. We ran until we couldn’t see through the smoke, and then we put our free hands to the walls and guided ourselves that way, following the corridors until we were running through fire. The flames licked against us, and I knew that if our clothes caught fire, we were doomed. Then, suddenly, we burst into the lobby, where the smoke was thinner, and I saw Prairie laid out along the floor near the guard desk.

She looked dead, her head lolling against her outstretched arm, and my heart plummeted.

“She’s going to be all right. I’ll get her,” Kaz managed to wheeze, and he slung her over his shoulder, much as he’d carried the guard earlier. I coughed hard, trying to clear the smoke from my lungs, and when I followed him through the doors, out into the chilly night, I breathed the sharp, cold air greedily. Before I could catch my breath, Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the building, into the shadows of the trees lining the street.

“We need to hurry,” he said.

“What about the Healer?” I said, my voice hoarse and raw. “She’s still trapped in there somewhere!”

That was when I heard the sirens.

Kaz heard them too. He looked back at the building, where flames were now pouring from every window. Then he looked at me with such pain in his eyes that I knew there was no hope. The Healer would die, alone and in agony, alongside the horrible creatures she had been forced to create.

Prairie moaned softly and stirred.

“We need to hurry,” he repeated, and I knew we wouldn’t speak of the Healer again.

By the time we got Prairie settled into the backseat, police and fire vehicles were hurtling down the block toward the lab.

I turned away from the burning building and stared out the windshield into the night as Kaz drove us away.