Plague World (Ashley Parker Novel) (30 page)

I stared at him, then took the phone. This was just too convenient. I could almost see the words “It’s a trap!” in big neon letters, blazing above my head. And yet, what other options did I have? I made my decision.

“This diversion—what exactly do you have in mind?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Dragon mused. “Knocking on the front door always seems to work pretty well. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First things first.”

“And that would be?”

He grinned. “We’ve gotta find you a boat, so you can go kill Bill.”

“We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

JT looked a little green around the gills as our rubber craft lurched up over another swell.

“Farewell and adieu… ye fair Spanish bikers,” I intoned, slightly off key. JT shut his eyes, as if in pain, and leaned back against the inflated rim.

We’d snagged a
Zodiac
rubber raiding craft at the San Diego Yacht Club—the Veterans Allegiance seemed to have a source for everything a girl could want. I’d driven some speedboats up at my parents’ place in Lake County, so operating the thing wasn’t as much an issue as it could have been. But it didn’t make for the smoothest of rides.

“Just make sure when you near the point,” Dragon had said, “you cut the engine and use the oars. We don’t know what kind of surveillance they’ll have where you’re going in. Better safe than sorry, right?”

Right.

I felt surprisingly good, all things considered, enjoying the mist of salt spray on my skin, but then my injuries were healing up faster than JT’s. And while he hadn’t sustained nearly as nasty a beating as I had, he’d spent enough time as a punching bag that I wasn’t surprised he was feeling a bit punk. He also was not a fan of open water. Even Super Parkour Man had his phobias.

I thoughtfully resisted the urge to start humming the theme from
Jaws.

“You want some painkillers?” I asked.

“Nah. Just get me to dry land, and give me some three-story buildings to play on—then I’ll be fine.”

I grinned and kept steering us toward the Point. Dragon had pulled up a fancy map program on his phone, with a satellite view of the installation. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t legal. He’d shown me exactly where my point of entry would be.

So I was scanning the shore, despite the fact that it was late afternoon, and we were losing the light with every passing minute. To make it more fun, a fog had come in that could give San Francisco a run for its money, and the bay was surprisingly choppy—it looked like a storm was coming in off the ocean.

San Diego Bay was a regular obstacle course as various craft just drifted aimlessly in the water, bobbing all around in the swells, moving with the current, and apparently abandoned. I saw a few boats with random blood smears, and more than one undead mariner on board.

Other boats were manned by the living, all headed out towards the open sea. Some of the people were armed, but luckily no one seemed interested in messing with us. At least not yet.

“So how did you get into the leaping tall buildings at a single bound stuff?”

JT gave a faint grin.

“Parkour? It seemed like a natural progression from the circus.”

“You were studying to be a clown?” I raised an eyebrow.

JT snorted. “Hardly. I fucking hate clowns. Mimes, too. Nope, I was into high wire and trapeze. I was going to that school across the street from Golden Gate Park, right next to G’s apartment complex. You remember?”

I nodded. We’d passed it on the way into UCSF.

“Anyway, I was dicking around one day, doing the Donald O’Connor run up the wall routine, and someone asked if I’d tried free running. I looked into it, and I’ve never looked back.”

He stopped as we hit a particularly large swell, and I began to edge toward the shore.

“What’s the plan when we get there?” JT sat upright now, looking a little more lively now that the possibility of dry land was in his near future.

“Dragon and the boys are going to create a diversion, to give us an opportunity to sneak in. He said when we got close that we should wait for the signal.”

“What’s the signal?”

“He said we’d know it when we heard it.” I grinned. “Big badaboom.”

As we motored along the shoreline, closing in on the position, I could see a trail curving up from the water line. There were no signs of zombies, which was both a relief and a worry. A relief in that we’d have a break from fighting our way through them, and a worry because it meant someone else had cleared them out. Whoever had done that, they weren’t likely to be friendly.

A sudden
whupwhupwhup
of helicopter rotors made both of us shoot panicked looks skyward. A black whirlybird flew in our direction, coming from somewhere on the Point.

“No reason for them to look at us, right?” JT said nervously. “It’s not like we’re the only boat on the water.”

“No, but we’re probably the only people dressed like SWAT ninjas in a military sneaky snake stealth boat.”

JT winced. “Good point.”

The helicopter flew overhead. I resisted the temptation to look up.

“These are
not
the droids you’re looking for,” JT muttered. I would have laughed if I hadn’t been holding my breath.

Then the helicopter swung past us, heading further out over the bay. My breath whooshed out in a sigh of relief.

“Looks like they didn’t see us.”

With the kind of timing that usually only happens in Michael Bay movies, the helicopter turned and headed back in our direction. A man in black leaned out of the open door, tracking us with his rifle.

“Shit, shit, shit!”

“We could swim for it,” JT said.

“With all the gear we’ve got on?” I shook my head. “We’d sink as soon as we’d hit the water.”

We were so screwed.

Then the helicopter exploded.

JT slammed into me, knocking me face down in the bottom of the boat and covering me with his body as bits and pieces of flaming metal—and possibly body parts—rained down around us. By some miracle, none of them hit us, or the boat.

Yup, definitely a Michael Bay film.

We both raised our heads and stared at the still-flaming debris littering the surface around us. As if on cue, more explosions came from the Point, and the sound of gunfire.

Team America, fuck yeah.

JT cocked his head to one side.

“I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that that’s our signal.”

I made a noise that was a cross between a laugh and a sob.

“Can’t stop the signal, Mal.”

Seals lolled about on both the sandy beach and the rocks, seemingly immune to the carnage in the bay. Several snapped and barked as we came aground, but none seemed motivated to do more than galumph a few feet out of the way. Good thing ‘cause being foiled by seals at this point would’ve been downright embarrassing.

JT and I hopped out of the boat and dragged it further up onto the sand, further annoying the local seal population. We grabbed the goody bags Viper had given us and made sure our weapons were locked and loaded. I touched the hilt of my new katana just to reassure myself that it was still there. What did it say about me that I couldn’t wait to try it out?

I kept it sheathed, though, opting to carry one of the Glocks. I figured if we did run into trouble, it was more likely to be the kind toting firearms, and I’d yet to figure out how to parry bullets. JT had a Glock, as well. I don’t know how much target practice he’d logged, but I trusted him to get the hell out of the way and let me take point.

The light was fading fast as we climbed the rocks, trekking about fifty or so feet to a dirt trail that—according to the schematics—led up to the Cabrillo Point lighthouse. We didn’t need or want to go that far, though. Our destination was only a short distance up the trail, to one of the old gun escarpments.

“Look for tracks,” I said softly as we jogged up the path. JT had regained some of his usual ebullience, and there was a distinct spring in his step now that he was back on terra firma. He wasn’t quite as Tigger bouncy-trouncy as usual, but a nature trail wasn’t exactly the best place for free running.

We rounded a bend and found ourselves in front of a pair of pitted metal doors set into the hillside itself, tracks running out from under them. Back during WWII, a big damn gun had been rolled out on these tracks to help defend San Diego from the possibility of invasion by sea. Although to my shady knowledge of history, San Diego had never actually been invaded.

“This is it,” I said quietly. I pulled on one of the metal handles set into the doors and was rewarded by a surprisingly squeak-free movement as it opened toward me, revealing the dark tunnel beyond.

JT peeked inside.

“Got a flashlight?”

“I don’t need one.”

JT shot me an exasperated look.

“It’s great that you’re all that and a bag of super-powered chips, miss wild card. But some of us can’t see in the dark. Guess I’ll just have to follow you and feel my way along.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Remind me to keep you and Cheeky separated in the future. How about you just put a hand on my shoulder?”

“I’ll take what I can get.” He put his left hand on my right shoulder, and we cautiously entered the tunnel, following the tracks, boots crunching softly on the gravel.

The temperature dropped a good ten degrees once we got more than a few feet in, a little more than uncomfortably chilly. There was a little ambient light from what remained of daylight, revealing that whatever had been mounted inside was long gone, leaving just the empty tracks and a low-hanging ceiling hewed out of the rocks and fortified with cement.

“Creepy,” JT said. I had to agree with him, although it was also cool in an old haunted-mine sort of way. Under normal circumstances—without the possibility of running into armed enemies—I might have enjoyed exploring it.

The further we went, the darker it got—it wasn’t exactly pitch black in the tunnel, but it was close. JT’s hand stayed firmly on my shoulder as I led us slowly down the tunnel, the rock ceiling dipping uncomfortably low in places. I ducked under a particularly low-hanging outcropping.

“Watch your—”

“Shit!”

I winced at the meaty thwack sound JT’s head had made colliding with the outcropping.

“—head,” I finished lamely.

“Yeah, thanks for that. As a seeing eye wild card you need work.” After a few more minutes of slow progress, he asked, “Do we know where this ends up?”

“As far as I could tell from the schematic, this should lead to the lower level of the facility,” I said. “It wasn’t clear on what it was we’d find there, though.”

“No handy dandy map to the dungeons?”

“I think they call them ‘holding chambers’ these days.”

“Well, la-di-fucking-dah.”

We both laughed, then immediately stopped as the sound echoed up and down the tunnel, bouncing off the walls.

Just as the silence returned, a low, ominous rumble shook the tunnel. Little pieces of rock crumbled off the walls, hitting the ground with small clattering sounds. I was suddenly very aware of just how old this place was, and how easy it would be for the whole thing to collapse.

“Earthquake?”

“Or the boys having more fun,” I said. “Either way, let’s keep moving.”

As we moved further along, both the temperature and the angle of the ground rose a little bit. We reached a bend, the tunnel curving sharply to the left. Here it became more of a corridor, the rock walls giving way to cement, dim lights flickering from weak bulbs enclosed in little metal cages, spaced out at regular intervals along the ceiling. It wasn’t much, but enough that JT could navigate on his own.

Neither of us spoke as we continued along. The odds of running into someone increased with each step we took, and the element of surprise was pretty much the only thing we had going for us.

After another ten minutes or so, the corridor came to an abrupt end. It dead-ended into another metal door painted the same dull gray as the walls, rounded rivets bordering the edges and a wheel in the middle, like something you’d see on a battleship.

JT took hold of it, muttering, “Leftie loosie, righty tighty,” and gave it a yank to the left. Sure enough, the wheel creaked reluctantly, but it turned. When it stopped, he pushed the door open a few inches.

The creak made me wince. We waited for a minute, listening for the sounds of footsteps or voices, but heard nothing.

Good.

JT gave the door another push, wide enough to peek through the gap into yet another corridor. Another few inches and I stepped cautiously through, leading with my Glock… just in case.

This corridor stretched off left and right about fifty feet on either side before making sharp L-turns going in the same direction. The floor was dusty, as if it hadn’t seen any use in a while. JT and I looked at each other dubiously.

“We’ll make better time if we separate,” I said, my voice low. “Just try and stay out of sight, and if you see anyone from our team, get them out back through the tunnel.”

JT shook his head. “Splitting up’s a bad idea.”

“I think it’s worth the risk,” I argued quietly. “We need to get them out of here as quickly as possible.”

“But if we separate, you won’t have backup.”

I bristled. “Neither will you.”

He shrugged. “I usually don’t need it. Last time was an exception.”

“Hey, the only reason I got caught was because they used you as bait.”

“And I’m truly sorry for that, but I’m not gonna let myself get caught off guard again.”

I held his gaze. “Neither am I.”

He nodded slowly. “Fair enough. But if you do need me… holler.” He looked around appraisingly. “I think I can get some speed going in this place. I’ll take left, you take right?”

“Sounds good.” I started off down the hall, then stopped and turned back. “JT… no twerking.”

“I promise nothing.”

He flashed his manic grin and vanished in the opposite direction.

When I reached the corner, I took it cautiously, Glock leading the way. This hallway was empty, too, but there were metal doors spaced out every ten feet or so. The doors had small windows with bars set into them, like old-fashioned prison cells. About a hundred feet down, the hall turned yet another corner.