Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (31 page)

He led us across the outdoor entrance decorated with pillars and barren plant containers and was just about to take the first step down the stairs leading to the street when he came to a sharp halt.

Instantly, I looked at him, searching for hints as to what he knew was coming.

His eyes were wide, staring straight ahead but seeing nothing, and his breathing had stopped.

He was listening.

What brought the prickle of fear back was that I’d never seen Harrison this way. He was alert, as was usual, but his behavior was stiff, vigilant, like someone who had just found himself cornered.

Snapping his head to the left, he surveyed the street. Already, I could see the Infected coming, turning a corner from two blocks away. Looking right, we found another swarm of them coming through a parking structure, crawling like animals over the hoods of vehicles as they advanced on us.

He rotated at the waist only to make it no farther than halfway.

“They’re coming from all three directions,” he announced.

Only one direction remained.

He sprinted down the steps, his hand lifting mine into the air as if that might make me float over them, which would get me to safety that much quicker. But it wasn’t until we reached the street that I flew. He kept up but the others struggled.

In the reflection of the building directly in front of us, I saw the Infected behind us begin to flood out the doors, their warped bodies blending and separating in the natural imperfections of the windows. I also saw six other bodies just behind us, their arms pumping and legs a blur as they pushed themselves faster.

Harrison and I pulled the door handles, finding them open. And of course they would be, given that the infection spread during morning commute. People had been expecting to enter or exit these doors. And I hoped they made it.

We raced behind the vacant desk designed to greet visitors to the corridor behind the elevators, my eyes frantically searching for the next door. It was ten feet from us. As we reached it, Harrison hauled it open.

I was at the entrance to it, one foot through when I heard a groan and the sound of a body hitting the marble floor. I looked back and Beverly went through instead, then Mei, then Doc. As I turned away to help Eve to her feet, the others slipped by me, blocking Harrison from reaching for me.

There was no way I was going to let the person most capable of converting Harrison’s blood into a cure be left behind.

I scooped my arms beneath her elbows, already seeing the Infected moving in my peripheral vision. The pounding of the Infected’s feet reverberated off the walls and vibrated through my chest but I tried not to concentrate on it. Eve was stumbling toward the door but she wasn’t going to make it, so in a panic and with no other apparent option, I shoved her through it. Her feet carried her, haphazardly, across the threshold, twisting at the ankles, stumbling over themselves. But she made it.

What I processed after became a blur, a chaotic mess of movement and color. Only two things came through clearly…Harrison running for me and the darkness of the stairwell, so close I felt like I could reach out and touch it. Then it came, the distinct pressure against my left shoulder. It started as a sharp ache, like a deep pinch, and rapidly grew into searing pain. I heard more than felt the piece being taken from my shoulder, a ripping sound similar to thick burlap being torn. It resonated mostly in my head. Then all sound became secondary, quieting to a whisper, as the heat surged through my back and down my arm.

Unable to manage my limbs any longer, I stumbled forward but an arm caught me. Harrison. He had come for me. He picked me up and tucked me against his chest all while using his free arm to snap the neck of the Infected who had touched my shoulder.

Touched…The man had done far more than that. I knew this, registering it on some level as the surreal daze engulfed me.

My body flopped limply as Harrison carried me up the stairs.

“The door.”

“It’s jammed,” Harrison barked. His tone was rough, edged with irritation.

He didn’t want to answer questions about the door.

“Oh my-” Mei said, and through the haze I saw her hand come to her mouth.

“Was she bit?” Beverly asked, panting.

Harrison tenderly rolled me to the side for inspection.

“Was. She. Bit?” Beverly demanded.

Harrison’s head jerked up, taking his gorgeous face out of my view, when all I wanted was to stare at it. It made the pain lessen. But he was intent on shutting Beverly up. Drawing in a breath, he released it with more fury than I’d ever seen. “YES! DAMN IT! SHE’S BIT!”

And right then and there I woke up.

Gasping, I shot out of bed.

My hand instinctively flew across my chest and sought out the backside of my left shoulder. It was solid, without any indent or depression. No pain burned from it. No blood streamed down my back.

I’m all right
, I told myself,
I’m all right. I’m all right…I’m all right…

My heart was still racing as I scanned the room, a small corner of the world at the boy’s reform school that I had claimed as my home for the last weeks. It looked the same. The candle I’d lit the night before still stood on the shelf above my bed, burnt to almost a nub. The bare walls with their psycho ward bright white paint were intact. Even the lumpy mattress I’d slept on was there. The room was fine and intact.

It was also empty.

Harrison had left.

I sat on the bed, wondering where Harrison had gone as I questioned whether my racing heart would ever calm down. It did, gradually, as I sucked in deep breaths from my belly, as I always did after living through a nightmare. Once my heart returned to a serene pace and I’d smeared the sweat from my face, I stood, dressed, and slung my rifle up over my shoulder.

Doc and Mei were in the dining area, sitting with Beverly who hadn’t cleaned the dirt from her hands or face yet. She sat quietly, her expression bitter.

I wondered when she’d finished Christina’s grave. It looked like it must have been recently.

“Are you okay?” Doc asked. He directed this question at me. We all knew how Beverly felt.

“Fine, why?” I said, taking a seat.

“You look…,” he began, but Mei finished his sentence for him.

“Frazzled.”

“I had a bad dream.”

That’s all it was, Kennedy, a bad dream.

“I get those, too,” Doc admitted, trying to support me.

“I’m sorry,” I said and genuinely meant it. “I used to have them a lot too after my dad passed.”

He and Mei nodded. Beverly continued staring at her oatmeal.

“Not anymore though?” Mei asked. It seemed to be an attempt to keep some conversation going at the table.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t particularly in the mood to discuss it. “It’s been a long time,” I said offhandedly.

But this was what unnerved me. When the nightmares began, they were so common I thought they’d never stop. But they had. I hadn’t had one since I learned that Harrison was the archetype to the T1L2 virus, since I discovered that he was our resolution. But the duration of time or the fact that one suddenly occurred wasn’t what unnerved me. What kept coming to the forefront of my mind was that my nightmares always came true.

Partly to change the subject and divert my thoughts to something positive and partly to prove to myself that this nightmare was just that, nothing more than fiction made up in my dream state, I asked if they’d seen Harrison.

“He went hunting,” Doc replied casually.

“Hunting?” I repeated, a subtle alarm going off in my mind.

“Yeah,” Doc said, confused. Harrison had been using hunting as a guise to search for raw meat for some time now. “You know…for food…” Doc prompted.

“That’s funny,” Beverly mumbled, without any sense of humor in her tone, “where’s his truck then?”

“His truck isn’t outside?” I asked, and the alarm picked up its pitch.

“It wasn’t when I came inside.”

“When was that?” I asked.

“A few minutes ago.”

Doc, Mei, and I exchanged looks. The alarm grew louder.

Then Doc’s expression fell.

“What?” I asked, my tone harsher than intended.

“He said not to go into Detroit today.”

My eyebrows shot up. “He said what?”

“That we shouldn’t-”

“It was rhetorical,” Mei explained, placing a hand on Doc’s forearm to stop him.

But I wasn’t paying any attention. I was standing, the alarm in me blaring now.

Before I knew it, I was heading out the door, my name being called faintly from behind me. The truth was I didn’t have the will to stop myself. My entire self-control was wrapped up in one goal: Find Harrison before the Infected.

Seconds later, my Humvee rattled to life and I sped off the property, a line of cars filing out behind me in pursuit.

For the first two minutes, my two-way radio buzzed with static and demands to turn around. Then I turned it off. And when silence set in, my thoughts ran wild.

Of course he left…

His greatest fear was endangering others, and he’d gotten the proof he needed to confirm it was a rational fear. The Infected were tracking him. And Harrison, unfortunately, was someone who acted on that kind of information.

I knew exactly what he’d done and why he’d done it.

He’d fled to keep us safe.

Damn it…

It didn’t take long for the questions to set in.

How long could he survive out there without someone watching his back when every Infected in the world was seeking him out? Not long.

How do I find him? Drive faster.

And the worst question that crept up, the one that left goose bumps on my arms…
Was another one of my nightmares coming true?
It sure seemed like it…

I took a deep breath.

In that case, if I don’t go to the theater, will he still end up there, surrounded by Infected?
There was no way of knowing.

Breaking down the dream, I realized that everything we’d done after I woke up with the gash on my forehead was reactive. We were forced out of the hallway and down the stairwell. We were forced into the theater. We were forced to seek refuge in the building across the street.

But it hadn’t held refuge for me. It had been the site of my demise. And wasn’t this what the nightmare was trying to help me avoid?

All right, I determined, since I have no control over the events that follow once I’m knocked unconscious there was only one solution…Don’t get knocked unconscious.

I entered Detroit at the same location where we’d left the day before, although this time we used my Humvee. Doc, Mei, and Beverly continued to follow me, unwilling to turn back until I was with them.

In my rearview mirror, I saw Beverly sitting in the front seat of Mei’s truck, the same metal sword in her hands that had taken Christina’s life as we drove over that very spot. I didn’t notice any flinching or even a turn of her head, but this may have been because my focus turned to the buildings and for any sign of Harrison inside them.

We sailed through the streets, taking mostly sidewalks, while looking for movement of any kind. My knuckles gripped the steering wheel for most of it.

When we turned the corner and found a traffic jam leading onto the freeway, I put the car in reverse and that was when I saw them. With cars blocking our front and buildings on both sides, I knew that we’d made a mistake.

Without knowing or intending it, the Infected had used our own techniques against us. They were coming up behind us fast as we now sat inside their funnel.

I clicked on my radio and shouted, “Everyone out,” allowing my hasty tone to convey the reason why.

We kicked open the doors and fled into a store. I made my way through the racks of clothes to the back room, hoping there was a back alley. It opened to an outdoor parking lot, or more specifically a car’s hood. I slid over its edge and began sprinting across the blacktop, slowing only when I didn’t hear anyone else’s footsteps. When I turned around, I was alone. A few yards away was the car and on the opposite side of it were Doc, Mei and Beverly. In their frenzy, they’d gone a different direction.

Doc peeked inside and in a split second judged there was no time to traverse the distance we’d brought between us.

Instead, he shouted, “Rally point?”

Without thinking, as the Infected appeared in the doorway, I screamed, “Humvee.” I turned then and ran like the wind.

The hood of the car ended up being an obstacle for the Infected, giving us valuable time to get away. This was a stroke of luck, as was my choice for a rally point.

In my nightmare, I had knocked myself out at the rally point. But there was nothing there that could hurt me other than an Infected, and I’d awoken with a cut, not a bite.

So as I circled the corner and looped back to the Humvee, I felt confident that I’d dodged that bullet, so to speak. What I hadn’t counted on was Beverly crouching behind the Humvee as I raced up to it or that she might mistake me for an Infected or that she might wield her metal sword and take a swing at me. But this
was
what happened. It was how I got the gash to my forehead, how I awoke in the theater building, how I was reunited with Harrison. And it was how I was bitten and infected with the T1L2 virus…