Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (7 page)

"Go ahead and give it a push back,
Danny. Careful you don't fall in."

Danny did as asked, and the truck
began to roll back. After it had gone about eight feet, Jonah then
pressed on the brake. The pedal sunk immediately to the floor, but
the truck kept rolling.

"You're going to crash!"

Jonah leapt out. He pushed Danny out
of the way, then heaved a tire from an old stack under the rear
wheel of the truck before it could slam into the metal supply
shelves, where it would raise one hell of a racket.

The vehicle hit the tire, bounded
forward, and came to rest a few feet away.

"That was close."

"That was stupid!" Jonah hissed. "I
should've checked the brakes first. I should've realized they'd be
dead!"

"Can we just check the pit and get the
hell out of here?"

They found the oil and coolant, along
with a half dozen bottles of wiper fluid that had half evaporated
away, as well as a full toolbox. But the tools were pneumatic and
therefore useless to them.

Rats scurried out of a nest they had
built in a ragged tarp dumped there, They ran about the pit floor,
squealing in fright, then dissipated into the drainage vent and the
sewer beneath the floor.

By the time Jonah and Danny stepped
outside with their supplies, the sky had gone from yellow-gray to
deep purple and was edging on black. Neither had spoken again about
the blood and chains in the warehouse, but it had weighed heavily
on their minds. Jonah was excited about the oil, and both were
eager to return to the bus for their own separate
reasons.

Except that the bus was under
attack.

Now they were stuck inside the
nightmare warehouse. Daylight was gone, and the only barriers
between them and the killer beings outside were a few thin walls
and questionable doors. They had no weapons, no food, and no water.
And they had limited light.

The bus's motor roared to life in the
distance. The gears crunched, then there was the sound of a crash.
A moment later, the engine's whine rose as the bus approached the
shop.

"We can run for—"

"Sit down, Danny," Jonah hissed.
"They'll come back for us."

Afterward, once the silence and
darkness swallowed them up again, Danny lowered his face into his
hands and quietly sobbed.

* * *

They slept little that night inside the cold, empty warehouse. In
fact, other than the hour or two when Jonah managed to doze off
while seated against the door to the automotive shop, neither of
them spent all that much time doing much of anything but pacing as
quietly as they could.

The darkness and silence were
infuriating, driving them both to imagine ever worsening fates for
the bus and its occupants, each one more grisly than the last. With
each hour that passed without their friends returning, their hopes
grew dimmer, their nightmares more horrific.

"I can see you."

Jonah had set the chair upright on the
floor and was leaning on the back of it. He looked over in the
direction where Danny's voice had come. "What?"

"There's light."

Danny materialized out of the shadows,
a vague shape taking on the familiar form of the man. He pointed
toward the ceiling, where a dull gray rectangle glowed in the wall—
the warehouse's only window. "Morning's coming."

"About time."

"I don't know how much more waiting I
can take."

"They'll be back once the sun's fully
up," Jonah said, but he didn't sound too sure of himself. "Just sit
tight."

"Where do you think they came from?
The Wraiths, I mean. One minute there were none, and the next they
were all over the place."

Jonah had been wondering that same
question through the long night. If it were true that they had been
in this place all along, hidden away inside the ghost town
buildings while he and the others had walked unknowingly among
them, then it also had to be true that the Wraiths had waited for
nightfall to attack the bus.

He just couldn't accept
that.

But neither could he dismiss it
outright, and so he struggled with the uncertainty all night. The
fear was like a living thing crawling over his skin, scratching at
him, trying to find a way inside. He kept trying to push it away,
to keep it from entering. He knew that once the fear entered, it
would take hold on his mind, and then take over. He couldn't let
it.

The Wraiths had to have come from
somewhere else. Perhaps they'd been drawn across the desert by
smell or sound. Or perhaps simply by coincidence.

It was no
coincidence.

Where had they come from?

The only logical explanation was that
the Wraiths had followed the bus all the way from the
dam.

No, not possible. How
could they travel all those miles in just a few days? Those things
are still human, after all.

Except they weren't human. Not
anymore. He'd seen what they were capable of, both in the days
before arriving at the bunker and the day they had escaped from it.
The Flense turned people into something else, something both
superhuman and inhuman at the same time. People became creatures
with abnormal strength and resilience. They lost all constraints.
They consumed with a hunger that seemed insatiable, yet at the same
time they seemed not to require food or water at all. They ran like
animals, covering ground faster than any human being possibly
could. They jumped higher and climbed better. They could suffer
more injury, seemingly without pain.

So maybe it really was possible that
they had tracked them all the way from the dam, maybe even
following the strong scent of the burning oil.

Running nonstop at six
miles per hour, they'd need only forty or fifty hours to cover the
hundreds of miles the bus had traveled
.

It would be a grueling pace for any
human, but maybe not for a Wraith. And the numbers worked out with
uncanny precision.

If that were so, then it could also
explain where they had come from to begin with and why he hadn't
seen them in the weeks he had spent outside the bunker fixing the
bus.

They followed Micheal
Williams down the river. They're the infected from Bunker
Two.

And if all that were true, and they
had followed the bus, then they would have met up with Finn and Bix
on the road.

And there was no way the boys would
survive an encounter like that.

"Oh my god!" Bix exclaimed. "Are you freaking nuts? No way am I
crossing this!"

Finn frowned. "I'm supposed to be the
one afraid of heights, remember?"

He reached forward and slapped one of
the metal cables on the bridge. It barely moved, proving that the
structure was solidly anchored, as if the thick aluminum posts
embedded in concrete weren't enough to convince them.

Three years of neglect had had no
noticeable effect on its integrity at all.

"We're not going to fall,
Bix."

"Well, ain't gonna lie," Adrian said,
and gave the boys a wide grin at the irony. "It's possible y'all
could fall."

Full introductions had been
made the day before, which is when they discovered Adrian was
really
Father
Adrian Bowman. Despite knowing he was a religious man, the
boys were reluctant to entrust more to him than their
names.

The woman's name was Jennifer
McCoy.

Father Adrian pointed at a metal cable
running eight feet above their heads. "Used to hook people up to
that in case they slipped. But we ain't got no
harnesses."

"It's not the fall I'm worried about,"
Bix said, peering over the edge. "It's the landing. That's a long
way down."

Adrian handed his reins over to
Jennifer and got off his horse to join the boys. "I done crossed
this bridge dozens of times myself. It's perfectly safe. Nothin to
be skeered of." He gave the boys a mischievous wink. "Long as y'all
don't look down."

"Adrian!" Jennifer scolded. "Don't go
scarin them like that. You boys don't listen to him. He likes to
tease."

"It's all right, Miss McCoy," Bix
said. "Like I said, I ain't crossing it."

"Ain't?" Finn said. He was beginning
to lose his patience with him. "Fine, I guess we'll be walking an
extra forty or fifty miles out of our way then."

"The reverend will cross over with
you, won't you?" Bix said. "I'll go with Miss McCoy. We'll be
fine."

"It's Jennifer, please. Or
Jenny."

Since rising that morning, it had
seemed to Finn that Bix was paying her an inordinate amount of
attention, feeding her an unending stream of flattery that bordered
on blatant flirtation. Finn kept waiting for Father Bowman to get
angry, but the man seemed as amused with Bix's hapless attempts to
curry Jennifer's favor as she appeared to relish in the attention.
"I think yer partner there's tryin to sweet talk his way into the
lady's heart," Adrian confided to Finn along the way.

"More like trying to sweet talk
himself into a permanent seat at her kitchen table."

The man had laughed heartily, though
quietly. It was a wheezing sound, nearly silent. Both he and
Jennifer were always careful to keep their voices down. They never
dropped their guard.

As they rode along on the horses or
walked alongside so the boys could rest, they always kept a hand on
the stun guns in their hip holsters and their eyes constantly on
the trees about them. They listened intently both before and after
speaking.

They had made their night's camp soon
after Finn felt steady enough to walk. There was still ample
daylight left but, as Adrian said, it was better to settle in with
light to spare than to enter the darkness ill-equipped.

Both boys found their preparations
fascinating. The couple picked out their spot with utmost care,
quietly weighing the strategic advantages and weaknesses of the
location. They then established a wide perimeter around a central
point, which would be their campfire, and they strung bare wires
about them using the trees as posts. One was at shin height, the
other two feet higher. To these, they added motion
sensors.

"The alarm is a siren," Adrian
explained. They had learned that the noise confused the
Wraiths — ferals, as they called them. Simultaneously,
flashing spotlights would be triggered, which had a similar effect
on their senses. Then, around the outside on all sides, they
carefully placed claymore mines.

The setup was powered by a pair of
twelve volt batteries, which they unloaded from the packs balanced
on the horses' rumps.

"Don't touch the wires," Adrian
warned. "Not unless y'all enjoy gettin a little juiced." he
clutched his sides as he laughed, as if the image were hilarious.
The boys exchanged uncertain glances before chuckling. "And don't
step outside the wires, neither."

"Don't pee on the wires, either," Bix
whispered to Finn. Jennifer snorted in amusement, bringing a grin
to Bix's face.

"You shouldn't encourage him," Finn
told her.

The couple took turns keeping watch;
not a minute passed when one of them wasn't prowling the edge of
the campfire. Bix slept like a baby, but Finn couldn't seem to
settle down. And despite his offers to take a turn guarding the
camp, neither Jennifer nor Adrian would hear of it.

They had set out early the next
morning after disassembling the alarms and traps, and it was then
that the boys learned how the pair had settled in at a sprawling
ranch on a small lake about a day's hike north of where they
were.

The ranch had been a hunting lodge
before the Flense, probably owned by some television celebrity. It
was empty when they found it, free of Wraiths because of its
remoteness and the ten-foot rock wall surrounding the
compound.

"You live there alone?"

"Us and the boys, Billy and Luke,"
Jennifer told them. "But people come and go all the time. Father
Adrian ministers to them as needed."