Mutated - 04 (30 page)
Authors: Joe McKinney
His hand moved to his chest, and for the first time Sylvia noticed—really noticed—the necklace of shriveled, mummified human ears that ringed his throat.
“You will tell me,” he said again.
“Or what?”
He smiled. He leaned close to her, so that she could smell the rot on his breath. He said, “Or I will eat you, and make her watch.”
C
HAPTER
24
HAPTER
24
Niki walked confidently out of the shadowed protection of the hallway, the metal bar down by her side, her shoulders loose and ready. Nate followed along behind her, his nerves humming with adrenaline. At this point, after seeing her fight, he was prepared for just about anything.
Five zombies were staggering around the landing, unable to find their way downstairs. But when Niki stepped into their midst they all turned as one, their bodies twitching with the excitement that came from an imminent meal.
“Ruh,” one of them grunted as he stumbled forward. His mouth was hanging open, his dead gaze locked on Niki’s neck.
He never saw the blow that killed him.
She dodged to one side and came up behind him and before he could react swung the bar at the back of his head. It connected with a sharp crack and the zombie pitched over forward, hitting the wall head-first. He slumped to the ground, landing on his hands and knees. Niki was beside him before he could stagger back to his feet, bringing the weapon down at the point where his skull met his spine. He fell to the floor and didn’t move.
Niki’s face was twisted with rage and anger, and another emotion that Nate didn’t quite recognize. But it almost looked like she was enjoying the fight. Really, really enjoying it. Like the girls in the porno movies he used to watch.
But the next instant the look was gone, lost in the shadows and her twisting and turning. He watched her. He was no longer frightened. Not like he had been. Connecting the look on her face to the girls in porn was something of a breakthrough for him. Niki Booth was in love with killing zombies. Maybe love wasn’t the right word, but she certainly liked it.
Another zombie went down. Niki turned from it just as a woman with dark stains all over her dress reached for her. Niki sidestepped the woman’s hands and crushed her knee with the bar. The zombie sagged to the floor without so much as a grunt of pain. Niki leapt over her and kicked another zombie in the groin.
Its legs went out from under it and it landed facedown on the floor.
It was dead with the first blow, Nate was sure, but Niki hit at least a dozen more times, turning its head to a bloody soup, spattering the walls with clumps of its brains and scalp.
Niki stood up from her kill, chest heaving, and turned back to the woman in the dress. She was trying to rise on her broken knee, but her legs wouldn’t work right. Niki kicked her over onto her back and jammed the jagged end of the metal bar down into the woman’s right eye.
The zombie went still instantly, her arms falling to her side.
The final zombie was still leaning against the far wall. He hadn’t moved throughout the entire fight, just stood there bobbing his head, his mouth miming an eating motion.
Nate had seen this kind before. Too addled by the necrosis filovirus to do anything but follow a larger crowd. Most were on a short countdown to starvation, because on their own they were helpless. They couldn’t hunt, couldn’t even fall on food that wasn’t already dead or dying.
They weren’t completely harmless, though. No zombie was harmless. They were all walking virus bombs. But Nate had learned to just keep an eye on them as he moved on past. No need to fight when he didn’t have to.
Niki was trying to pull her metal bar from the dead woman’s eye socket. She put her boot on the dead woman’s neck and gave it a hard yank, but the bar didn’t budge.
“Suction,” she said, and kicked the body away.
She looked at Nate, then back at the zombie still making chewing motions over at the wall.
“Goddamned wallflower,” she said. “I’ll get it.”
Before Nate could say anything she walked over to the—what had she called it, the wallflower zombie?—man and grabbed him by his hair. She twisted him around so that he was facing Nate and their eyes locked. His dead stare never wavered as she twisted his head sharply to one side, cracking his neck with the soft, muffled crunch of deep-down bone going where it wasn’t meant to go.
He fell to the floor with the same dead look locked in his eyes.
Nate’s gaze rose to Niki Booth, who was staring at him, bloodlust in her eyes, even while her mouth twisted with the pain in her ribs and lower back. Her chest was heaving, her tongue dancing at her lips.
“We need to find Avery,” Nate said.
The sexual intensity in her eyes melted away at the mention of Avery’s name, and a different sort of intense stare took its place.
This look, Nate couldn’t put a name to. But he recognized its directed ferocity just the same.
She nodded. “You’re right. We need to go.”
Niki walked away from the kill without looking back, and Nate fell in behind her. She was at the stairs that would take them down to the hotel’s main lobby when a middle-aged man in a blue sport coat and khaki slacks, now grotesquely emaciated, his suit hanging off him in filthy rags, hair matted with mud and blood, one eye ruptured and the remaining jelly congealed in the socket, grabbed Nate from behind and pressed him against the wall. Niki took a few steps back and scanned left and right, looking for more zombies; there were none. Nate struggled to get away, jamming the heel of his hand into the zombie’s mouth as he tried to get enough of a grip to throw the man aside. The man let out a rusty moan and shuffled his feet, a movement that put him off balance just enough to give Nate the leverage to push him away. As they broke contact Niki stepped in and killed the zombie with three sharp punches to his Adam’s apple.
When she looked up from the corpse, Nate was holding his wrist, the heel of his hand leaking blood from a fresh cut.
“How is it you’re still alive?” Niki said.
He shrugged. “I’m immune. The disease can’t hurt me.”
“I know that. I mean how come you haven’t gotten munched yet?”
“Um,” he said, then trailed off. He evidently didn’t have anything else to say, because he shrugged again.
Outstanding, she thought. He’s too stupid to realize I’m making fun of him. Just great.
She didn’t bother to pursue the point. There was no point, and no time. But Nate was still standing there, his mouth open showing a fairly pronounced set of horse teeth. It was still unbelievable to her that anyone could actually be immune to the necrosis filovirus. After all the death that she had seen, all the heartache that disease had caused, the idea that someone was naturally immune to it simply boggled her mind. Too bad that immunity had to come in such a pathetic package. She’d known a lot of great zombie fighters over the last eight years. If any of them had been blessed with Nate’s immunity . . .
It was a shame.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Her eyes narrowed. “I’m fine.”
“What are you thinking about?”
“What?”
“Well,” he said, and then paused. “It just looked like you were, I don’t know, thinking about stuff.”
Her first instinct was to turn away. They didn’t have time to stand here gabbing about things that didn’t matter, but there was something about him, an open, questioning look in his eyes. She wondered if that was what Avery saw in him.
“Just about how everyone I’ve ever loved is dead,” she said, and the honesty and vulnerability in her tone surprised her. “Everyone except Sylvia and Avery.”
He frowned, whether out of pity or understanding or confusion, she couldn’t tell.
“Your immunity, it could wipe out the necrosis filovirus?”
“That’s what they tell me.”
“Will it cure those already infected?”
“I don’t think so. The doctor who was working on me said that he could make others immune, like me. He never said anything about curing zombies. But then I don’t really understand it all that good. He was always talking about gene ripping and stuff like that.”
She let out a long breath. “I’ve known a lot of great men and women who could have benefited from your immunity.”
He looked down at his feet, and this time she was pretty sure he was ashamed. “I know,” he said. “Ben Richardson used to tell me the same thing. He said he knew this guy when he was living in the Grasslands compound that was some kind of super zombie fighter, like you. He used to talk to me about how things might have been different if that guy had been immune instead of me.”
“Well, we all play the hand we’re dealt, I guess.”
She paused for a moment and listened to the rain outside. It didn’t sound like it was going to stop for a good long while, and she figured that was good. They could use the weather for cover, maybe.
She said, “You cared a lot about that old guy back there, didn’t you?”
He shrugged, then lowered his head and nodded.
“I’m sorry.”
He nodded again.
“You like Avery too, don’t you?”
He looked up, meeting her eyes for the first time. “How did you know that? I didn’t tell you that.”
She laughed. “You didn’t have to. I can see it in the way you look at her. She likes you, too. You know that, right?”
He smiled.
“I was impressed by what you did back at the loading dock to protect her, when the stairs collapsed. You shielded her. That had to hurt a lot.”
“It did. But I wasn’t thinking about it at the time.”
“I know,” she said. “You never do, when it’s someone you love. Listen, we’re gonna get out of here, and we’re gonna get Avery and Sylvia back, too.”
“I know.”
“Good.”
She looked around the landing, and then her eyes narrowed on a shadow in the corner.
“What is it?” he asked.
But she was already crossing to the corner. She pulled a rusted metal chair from underneath a curling section of wallpaper and brought it over to him. Before he had a chance to speak she kicked it, breaking it to pieces. And after it was completely smashed she reached into the wreckage and came up with two nasty-looking pieces of metal tubing.
“Not bad,” she said, testing the heft of one of them. She handed the other to him. “You think you could do some damage with that?”
“Oh,” he said. He reached into the waistband of his jeans and came up with the blackjack. “I don’t need that. I’ve got this.”
She stared at him.
“What?” he said.
“Seriously? We’ve been fighting our way all through this freaking hotel barehanded and you had that thing all along?”
“I—”
“Look,” she said, heat spreading across her face, “you need to get your act together. Got it? This is our survival here. This is everything. Everything. It all hinges on what we do here. Avery and Sylvia and everybody else we care about are counting on us to do this right. We cannot afford for you to be careless like this.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She wanted to slap him. The idiot. How in the hell had he managed to stay alive for so long?
“Just take this,” she said, handing him the metal chair leg. “And stay close.”
They started down the stairs to the main lobby.
Rain was coming in through the open front doors, splashing a dark and rank-smelling mud all over the marbled lobby floor. Niki motioned for him to follow her into a sitting area to one side of the doors. They picked their way through busted tables and moldy leather chairs and climbed up on the ledge so they could see through the windows there.
Niki whistled softly. “That’s a lot of zombies.”
“Yeah,” Nate agreed. “Do you see Avery?”
Niki scanned the open area down to the river. There had to be over a thousand zombies out there, standing as still as flagpoles in the rain, all of them facing the river. The soldiers had taken most of the boats out on the river. Something was going on, or was about to happen, but she couldn’t—
“Wait a second.”
“What?” Nate asked.
“There, up on that platform.” She pointed across the field to a raised metal stand, like something from which a marching band director would watch his band practice, except larger, and equipped with a switchback staircase leading down to the field. She had seen a flash of red up there through the gray sheets of rain. Loren Skaggs, that insane son of a bitch. “You see it?”
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