Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (25 page)

A flash of movement caught Finn's eye
and he turned in time to see Nami snap the Wraith's neck. The count
reached five. At the same moment, Jonathan slammed his foot down
onto the neck of the other. Both were free of the creatures as the
forty-first second died on the crowd's lips.

Only Jonathan's wet cough broke the
silence.

Both men backed away from the lifeless
forms. Their chests heaved. The crowd was frozen, waiting. Forty
eyes studied the four inside for signs of infection.

Jonathan stumbled over to the gate.
"Let us out," he begged. "We did your dirty work!"

Adrian slowly walked over to him. He
seemed genuinely surprised at what he saw. He checked Jonathan's
face for several seconds, then turned to the crowd.
"Salvation!"

The crowd erupted.

"Let him out," Bix screamed. His voice
sounded hoarse and far away. Nobody heard him. "He's not infected!
Let him out!"

But while everyone was looking at
Jonathan, Finn was looking at Nami. The man had fallen to his one
unsplinted knee in exhaustion, his head lowered. Slowly, he raised
his face, and a chill descended over Finn. Death was in the man's
eyes, the blackness of the Flense.

"Oh no," Finn moaned. "No!"

The crowd was quick to notice the
change. The cheers rose once more.

"Get him out of there!" Finn tried to
scream. He turned to Jonathan and shouted his name and pointed
behind him. "Look out!"

Bix was shouting and pointing, too.
Jonathan whipped around and finally saw. He grabbed the wire of the
gate and shook it. There was a new fire in his eyes, not the
blackness of death but the vibrant red and white of terror. "Let me
out!"

His arms quavered and his knees
collapsed beneath him. Still weak from the lung infection, he fell
to the dirt, coughing and spitting.

A gray husk swept over Nami's skin.
His nails turned black. He raised his head in agony, but no sound
came out of his mouth.

Finn tried to get to the gate, but he
was tackled and thrown to the ground. Something slammed into the
back of his head, and for a moment he saw stars. But he got back up
and tried again. Once more, he was hit hard and knocked onto his
side. This time, he could only crawl.

The crowd was drunk with
bloodlust.

Bix had been bound, his wrists tied
behind him. He was screaming, but no one could hear him. Finn read
the words that formed on his mouth. He was begging Jonathan to turn
around, to kill Nami.

Billy pressed Finn down, a handful of
his hair in his fist, twisting. The pain was terrible, but not as
bad as his anguish. He forced his head to turn despite Billy's
resistance. He needed to see.

Nami's transformation was progressing,
faster than it should, it seemed. The changes swept over him in the
space of a few minutes.

On the other side of the cage,
Jonathan had finally pulled himself up again to his feet. Slowly he
turned, as if finally resolved to his fate. He took a step toward
Nami, then stopped as indecision crossed his face.

But it was too late for any salvation
now. Everyone knew it. Finn watched as Jonathan stumbled over to
Nami and grabbed his friend's head in his arms. But he was too
weak, and Nami was too far along, less himself than the monster he
was becoming. The struggle went on for a very long time, with
Jonathan growing weaker and Nami growing stronger.

Then, at long last, Nami extracted
himself. Jonathan collapsed to the ground, no longer able to fight.
He began to pull himself over to a corner of the cage. Outside the
wire the crowd seethed like a living thing, a single mindless
organism, a shapeless parasite engulfing its prey.

Nami began to move toward Jonathan,
stepping jerkily, as if the monster inside of him still wasn't
fully in control. It seemed to consider its old friend for a
moment. And when it reached down, its hand hesitated for a moment.
Then it turned its face toward the crowd and hissed.

Everyone went silent. Everyone
waited.

"Do it!"
someone whispered.
"Touch
him."

The thing that had once been Nami
twitched at the sound. It slid over the ground toward the crowd,
then seemed perplexed when it couldn't go beyond the
wire.

"Touch the fucker! Do it!" a man
screamed. He threw a handful of dirt. It hit Nami in the face and
bounced off. More people picked up the chant: "Touch him! Touch
him!"

Finn knew the instant the change
happened. He saw it take hold of Nami. The slack muscles quivered
and tensed, turning to fury. His whole body seemed to expand,
filling with rage. It growled.

"Yes! Yes!" the crowd screamed. "Touch
him!"

The Nami-thing began to scramble about
the cage, trying to get out, wanting to get out. Like a spider, it
scrambled across the wire fencing, onto the mesh on top.

The crowd came alive. "Touch him!"
they chanted, pointing at Jonathan. But Nami seemed not to notice
the man inside the cage at all.

Not until Jonathan moved.

In a flash, the Nami-thing was by his
side. This time, it did not hesitate. It didn't reach out to touch
him. It wasn't interested in spreading its disease to him anymore.
Instead, it slammed its fist down through Jonathan's back, through
spine and ribs alike. Blood spurted into the air, and the crowd
backed away with an utterance of awe.

"No!" Finn cried. He tried to reach
the fence, but he was dragged away instead. The crowd swallowed him
up, trampling him. It cheered and slapped him where he lay. All he
could do was try not to be crushed beneath their feet.

He covered his head, his face, his
ears. But the noise couldn't mask the sounds that came to him from
inside the cage, the snapping bones and the muscle torn away from
them. He could not unhear Jonathan's shrieks of pain or the echoes
of the manic cheers filling the barn.

Neither Bix nor Finn struggled against their captors as they were
returned to the underground chamber. Their shock and despair were
too great, crushing even their will to survive.

Finn barely remembered the long march
through the woods back to the house. He knew night was drawing to
an end, as he could see where to place his feet. And he remembered
emerging into the clearing near the house to find the scene etched
in the sterile metallic gray of pre-morning. The monochromic tone
mirrored his emotions, cold and hard, colorless. He knew he should
feel anger and fear, but his utter disbelief at the horrors he had
witnessed smothered his ability to summon anything from within,
much less a sense of urgency.

He lay on the cool dirt floor in the
absolute darkness, vaguely aware that someone was shaking him. He
didn't care. He was dead, beyond dead. He was in some sort of
living purgatory tormented by questions. He could feel them,
worming their way into his mind, prying at the flimsy glue that
held his sanity together. How could people do such horrific things
to each other? How could people stand around and cheer?

How could it be possible that Nami and
Jonathan were there?

And on the heels of that: Where was
the rest of the group? Were they here, too, at the ranch? If so,
where?

He remembered a locked door at the far
end of the animal barn. He'd thought it led outside, but now he
wasn't so sure anymore.

The shaking became more
insistent.
Hey,
someone asked,
what happened out
there?

The absolute darkness of their prison
made a perfect canvas for Finn's worst imaginings. They were all
dead— Bren and Hannah and Bix's father
and . . . . All of them. They had been turned
into Wraiths.

He could picture Bren in some dark
room, just like this one, terrified. Where was she? Had they killed
her? Had she been made into one of them?

Finn cowered deeper inside of himself,
ashamed of what he'd done, bringing them all out into this terrible
world. The bunker had been safer, even with that murderer
inside.

Snap out of it!

His head rocked to the side from the
force of the slap, and like a sudden flash of light piercing his
eyes, he rose up out of his stupor. It wasn't like coming to the
surface of a deep lake as it was an abrupt thawing, or an explosion
of air entering what had been a vacuum.

He gasped and pushed himself upright
again, coughing and heaving.

"What did they do to you up there?"
Byron asked.

Finn couldn't see the man, but he
could feel and smell his rancid breath on his face, could feel the
grip of his hands on his arms as he shook him. He turned to the
side, pushing Byron away.

"B-bix?"

"Answer me! What the hell did they do
to you?"

Somewhere in the darkness, on the
other side of the room, someone wept.

Finn pushed Byron aside again. "Bix?
Bix, is that you? I can't find you."

"That's my son," Byron said, still
gripping Finn's arm. "He's scared."

"Where's Bix? Did they take
him?"

"F-finnnn . . . ?"

He spun his head to the left.
"Bix?"

"I can't . . . "
There was a groan, and Finn tried once more to move toward the
sound of the voice.

"That's not him, either," Byron said,
and pulled him back. "Bix is over there, on the other
side."

"Finnnn . . . ."

Confusion wrapped its iron fingers
around his mind. If Bix was to the right, then who was to the
left?

Jones. Or
Jonah.

There was a slow, dry hiss, the sound
of air passing through swollen lips and the rustle of a body trying
to move.

"Who are you?"

"Finn, it's me," the man said.
"D-danny."

* * *

News trickled out of Danny like tree sap, coming slowly a drop at a
time. Finn had to be patient, and between careful sips of the
precious few ounces of water Byron and the boys had saved from the
last time they'd been fed, Danny told them what had become of the
other survivors.

Allison had died. He and Jonah had
been marooned in an empty town overnight during the same attack.
The bus had tried to draw the Wraiths away, only to be attacked
again. They'd been rescued. The survivors were taken to some old
army base.

"They were lucky," Danny said, his
weakness leaking out of him as slowly and steadily as the
information.

He told Finn how a couple men had
returned on motorcycles to find them. "Jonah warned me not to talk
to them, not to share any details. He didn't trust them, though he
didn't explain why. He was right."

"Where's Jonah now?"

"Dead. Ramsay broke the bike." His
body shook. "He left them out in the desert to die."

Finn realized the man was crying.
"Tell me what happened."

"He bragged about it, Ramsay did. He
said Jonah would ruin everything."

"Ruin what?"

"I don't know. He tortured me, Finn.
He wanted to know where we'd come from and if there were more of us
there. I tried not to say anything, but he . . . he
burned me."

"What did you tell him?"

"Everything," Danny sobbed. "The dam.
The bunker. The people inside. He promised to let me go. I couldn't
help it, Finn! It hurt so bad!"

"
Shh
, okay. Listen, Danny, it's okay.
We'll figure it out. But first we need to get out of
here."

"H-how?"

"Byron's working on it."

"These other hinges won't budge,"
Byron said from the direction of the door. "I worked on them the
whole time you were gone."

Finn went over to Bix. It took a long
time to elicit any kind of coherent response from him. He seemed to
be aware, he just didn't seem able to move until Finn grabbed him
by the shoulders and shook him.

"We need to get out of here, Bix!
Before we end up like—"