Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (28 page)

“Well that’s disappointing…,” Christina mumbled.

“It’s not like anyone’s going to steal it,” Doc mocked.

Beverly and Christina each glared at him.

“It’s a Porsche,” Beverly argued.

“In a deserted city,” Doc pointed out.

“You don’t know-”

“We need to get back to the cars,” Harrison interrupted.

Each of us darted our eyes at him first and then out across the cityscape. It was motionless, dead, not even a shadow glinted off the glass in the high-rise towers.

“Do you hear some-”

That’s as far as Mei got before Doc yanked her arm in his urgency to pull her with him, cutting off her words as sharply as his action cut off the conversation. We watched them stumble over the concrete field toward our line of vehicles, not catching the hand signal he was throwing up behind his back with his free hand. The first two fingers and the thumb curled together to form a claw but in his hurry to get Mei to safety, it looked more like a strained limb than a signal. This was where our idea of keeping quiet and using gestures to indicate danger had failed us. It was meant to limit our noise and prevent drawing any Infected nearby to our location. What I hadn’t realized—as Beverly revved the Porsche’s engine and I sat in terror over the idea that they would be stranded on the other side of the rock field as the Infected attacked—was the engine’s noise had already acted as a foghorn, leading the Infected right to us. Now every one of us was at risk.

When Doc’s silent rush for the cars was enough to tell us that we were in trouble, I spun around and began to run. Doc and Mei had hurdled five feet of rocks before I met up with them.

Then came Harrison’s bark.

“Get out of here!”

In the deep recesses of my mind, I realized that sounded a lot like a command…from someone intent on staying behind.

My head swiveled to the right in search of Harrison, Beverly, and Christina. They weren’t beside me. They weren’t behind me. They hadn’t even moved.

“GO! GO! GO!” Harrison bellowed, using Doc’s traditional warning.

It worked.

Beverly and Christina spun and lunged over a jagged concrete block. Christina tripped in her urgency but didn’t make it entirely to the ground. Beverly’s hand caught her and picked her up.

That was when my heart stopped. Not because they were fleeing but because Harrison wasn’t. He didn’t dash into a race for safety with them. He had done the math. He knew we weren’t going to make it. And he had turned to face the onslaught alone.

I skidded to a stop, my ankle slamming into concrete in my haste to end my forward motion. A shot of searing pain exploded up my leg but I ignored it.

Enjoy the pain, Kennedy. It means you’re still alive.

I raced back to Harrison, barely missing Beverly as she ran blindly from the opposite direction, nicking my shoulder on our pass. Again, I didn’t register the sharp pain that sparked across my clavicle and up my neck. All I noticed was Harrison.

He knew I was coming before I reached him, lifting his palm up and back in a signal to stop without ever turning around, without taking his focus off the advancing threat. I ignored it. My feet stopped beside his, planted in place among the blocks in a solid Weaver stance, my rifle rising to my shoulder.

“Get-”

They were just starting up the onramp. All fifty or so. Filthy, hungry mouths ajar.

“No!” I shouted, jostling my scope and disrupting my target.

No more talking, Kennedy. Just shoot.

And I did. The first head exploded like it had become shrapnel; the second ended in a pink mist; the third was squishy, consuming the bullet in the forehead like it had slurped it up before keeling over backwards.

I was efficient, precise, flawless in my execution. I felt comfortable and in control. And then I saw something shift into my target area, the back of a head. This meant one thing…

Someone was in between us.

I lowered the end of my barrel just enough to peer over it. And what I saw made terror press its cold, hard hand against the back of my neck.

Harrison stood midway down the ramp now, having stolen past me in a bid to cut off our attackers. Leaning slightly back against the grade, fingers clenching and uncurling as if he were stretching his hands to fit around their necks, he strode with purpose directly into the mob.

I didn’t even have time to scream.

They swarmed him like a hive of bees, devouring him in a mass of frenzied bodies as I watched feebly from above.

Stumbling over the last row of rocks, I ran at them, shooting mindlessly, numbly at anything that moved. I think I was shrieking but can’t be certain. My only conscious effort was in aiming to the right of center, because the center was where Harrison would be.

My rifle’s blasts kept coming and bodies kept falling, but when one gave way another took its place.

I kept shooting.

I was almost to the outskirts of the moving bodies when I heard the empty click prompting me for a new supply of ammo. Yanking the empty mag to the ground, pulling a fresh one from my pouch, and reloading it made the world feel like it moved with the speed of molasses. In that chasm of time, I witnessed two certainties: Harrison’s bloody body writhing from inside the throng and a blade cutting the air over my left ear to land in the back of an Infected’s head.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Doc, Mei, Beverly, and Christina springing forward, their weapons carving a path ahead of them as they moved. They’d come back for us.
Thank God.

By the time I slammed the action closed and aimed the barrel at my next target, the Infected discovered they weren’t alone. Their heads twisted enough to see us and I braced for their attack, but it never came. They didn’t deviate from their efforts to get to Harrison. At the time, I figured they smelled his blood and were being driven insane, which only made me work faster, more ferociously myself.

We chiseled away at them and gradually their numbers lessened, leaving gaps large enough to see Harrison below, struggling to deflect their advances. He was still alive! I wanted to cave in with relief right then but I didn’t of course, instead keeping my efforts going until the last one was finished off.

She sank to the ground with a bullet hole in the back of her head, a knife in her temple, a saw blade in her throat, and a stab wound to the eye. We’d all gotten a piece of her, all of us except one.

“Christina,” Mei muttered and sank to the ground just outside the mound of dead Infected.

Mei already had one hand wrapped beneath Christina’s neck and was lifting her when Doc registered what had happened. He grabbed Mei’s shoulder to haul her away but she shrugged him off. He lost his balance at her force but regained it and stayed by her side.

Christina’s elbows slid under her back and began to prop herself up.

She was making a move to stand despite the chunk of skin torn from her arm. Someone’s saliva still ran across her skin and around the rim of the gash, a streak of foam now blending with her blood.

Christina buckled beneath her weight and sank back to the asphalt.

“I just…,” Christina said through a sigh. “I think I need a minute. Then we can go across.”

I blinked as that message sank in. When it did, I suddenly understood why Beverly, who had dropped to her knees and taken Christina’s hand, had acted so recklessly in crossing the field of broken concrete blocks. Her protégé, her steward, her best friend had insisted on it. And that simple, adolescent mistake had cost Christina her life.

Silence surrounded us for the next few seconds, broken only by the howl of the breeze and Beverly’s heavy, erratic panting. She hadn’t broken into sobs yet which was good. She was trying to remain strong for Christina’s sake, which I recognized as the first genuinely altruistic effort Beverly had ever made in my presence.

Christina jerked awkwardly and I braced myself. When she turned, both Mei and Beverly would be within her reach.

Doc bent down and removed Mei’s grasp before hauling her away, and she let him.

Christina didn’t seem to notice. She was looking for Harrison, who was standing nearby.

“Harrison,” she said, lifting her chin for no apparent reason other than to seek some comfort as her body transformed. It settled back to a resting position again.

He knelt beside her, evaluating her, knowing she was close now.

“You have regeneration properties,” Christina stated breathlessly, as if the air was already seeping from her lungs.

I didn’t understand at first why she’d use the last of her breath to declare something we all knew, but that was because I hadn’t remembered what humans, we living humans, do when death comes.

We fight it.

Harrison recognized before the rest of us what she was thinking.

He’d personally witnessed someone’s desperation to manipulate inevitable outcomes through his father. He understood that those same traits his father abhorred in him were the very same ones Christina now pleaded for him to use.

Harrison exhaled desperately, openly distraught, because he had already concluded what neither of them had…There was no controlling his abilities. If that were possible, he would have absolved himself of them long ago.

“You can…,” Christina insisted, hope giving her the energy to nod encouragingly.

“No,” Harrison whispered, taking her hand.

“You can do it,” Christina urged, her eyes pleading for him. “I’ve seen what you can do.”

“They don’t work that way,” he said, swallowing back whatever had come up in his throat.

Her eyes began to glass over. “You can…”

“No,” he said, although it came out garbled, empathy choking back his rejection. He swallowed, clearing his throat. “Christina…I can’t.”

“You can,” she whispered. “You can save me.”

“No,” Harrison uttered, shaking with the feeling of helplessness, fury rising fast in him. He finished his answer through clenched teeth. “I can’t.”

“But you ca…” Her pleading eyes grew empty and her voice drifted away.

And that was how Christina went—arguing, defiant, stubborn. Exactly the same way as when we met her. I expected no less.

Beverly stood, giving Harrison the space to move his hands to Christina’s throat.

“No,” she snapped, pushing her palm at Harrison for emphasis. “I’ve got this.”

I hadn’t seen it but as Beverly rotated to face Christina head on, the metal sword she held came into view.

Harrison didn’t move. “Beverly,” he began, overtly leery of what she was demanding.

She settled her eyes on him, looking willful and determined. “I’ve. Got. This.”

Harrison rose steadily and stepped back, a single step, close enough to protect, far enough to give them their space.

And as Christina stirred and life, chaotic, frantic life, returned to her eyes, Beverly drove the weapon she’d used to protect Christina from this very end down through her skull.

And in the recesses of my mind I understood why Beverly had done it, how she was capable of this action. She felt the responsibility for having made Christina this way and she would be the one to end her this way.

When it was done, Beverly pulled the metal free and carried it silently to the railing. I waited for her to throw it, to strike it against something, to release the rage that must have been flowing through her. In all the time I’d known Beverly, bitterness was her dominant emotion, the first to flow forth when something, anything upset her. But she was different now. Hardened by what we’d been through, by what we had bore witness to, by what we’d had to do. And it was this strength in her that finally allowed her to
feel
.

She stood motionless as if she was soaking in the view of the city and in the silence we watched as her shoulders rose and her fists tightened and her head tilted back before the roar rumbled up from the depths of her stomach and into the open air. It screamed into the city, echoing back at her in waves, as a taunting, pounding reminder.

Mei started across the road for her but Doc held her back, knowing that Beverly, more than at any other point of time in her life, needed space.

Then Beverly’s knees buckled and she fell to a heap, sobbing.

My gaze drifted aimlessly to the buildings towering over us, to the generals watching from above as another innocent victim was claimed.

Sick with the realization at just how powerless we were, fighting the feeling of weakness suffocating me, I turned away, my eyes searching for something else to occupy my thoughts. They landed on something, although I didn’t comprehend what it was at first. My own emotions were blinding me, boiling just below the surface like magma threatening to erupt. For several long seconds, only anger, resentment, and helplessness existed in my world.

Then she came into focus, the blade in her skull glinting at me as if someone from above were flashing a light at it, begging me to notice.

This woman was the last one we’d taken down, her multiple injuries competing for the first place honor of having been the one to finish her off. Maybe this was why I had been drawn to her. Her newest afflictions, made by us, were in stark contrast to an older one that had nearly finished her.