The Survivalist - 02 (12 page)

She jerked her hand away.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she spat, scrambling off the bed and pulling down her nightgown.

He stood up too, towering a good eight inches over her, his body strong and lean.

“Come to me tomorrow, and I’ll satisfy your hunger.”

She swung at his face, not a slap, but a full-fisted punch.

He caught it by the wrist and squeezed hard. She winced from the pain. He pulled her close to him, their bodies once again touching like two electric wires. Leaning down, he kissed her hard on the lips. When he pulled back, the blood from where she’d bitten his lip was smeared across hers.

“I’ll see you tomorrow night. And don’t for a minute pretend you’re not coming.” He looked her up and down, grinning, as if admiring the lines of a new sports car.

Alexus pressed her lips together as she struggled to reconcile anger with lust. Her heart pounded like a jackhammer on Sunday morning. She was uncertain and off balance, and that was exactly how he wanted her. Without another word, she spun around and stomped out of the room, slamming and locking the door behind her.

Mason lowered himself to the bed and let out a heavy sigh. He looked down and saw that his hands were trembling. Over the years, he had faced off with all manner of violence, but manipulating a hellcat in the bedroom was outside of his comfort zone. Way outside.

“The things we do for love,” he said with a nervous grin.

One thing was now for certain. He had to escape. When Alexus returned the following evening for unfinished business, she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

CHAPTER

12

Even though Tanner was a big man, he had always been a capable runner. As he vaulted over cars, jumped garbage cans, and kicked aside anything that got in his way, he couldn’t help but feel like he was competing in a life and death game of parkour. Unfortunately, despite his agility, his pursuers only seemed to be growing in number. How many there were now, he couldn’t say, but it felt like the entire Confederate Army was hot on his heels, every one of which seemed absolutely determined to get a piece of him—literally.

The almost impenetrable darkness was both a blessing and a curse. It made Tanner harder to see, but it also hid all sorts of debris for him to stumble over. He figured the only way to escape his pursuers was to get enough distance between him and them, and then find a cubby hole in which to hide. As far as he knew, the virus didn’t bestow the infected with a supernatural tracking ability rivaling that of a bloodhound. It did, however, seem to enhance their night vision. He suspected that might have something to do with their pupils being permanently dilated. As for the disgusting black ooze leaking out of their eyes, that was for doctors with stronger stomachs than his to diagnose.

As he whipped around a street corner, he thought he saw his opening. To his right was a small first aid clinic—a “doc in a box,” as he had called them in the past. The glass door was smashed and hanging on the frame by only a single hinge. He bent over and carefully stepped in through the broken door. It smelled like a slaughterhouse in summer. The stench was so awful that it nearly shoved him right back out the door. Determined that this was his best, and perhaps only, chance, he covered his nose and pressed ahead.

The waiting area was littered with small metal chairs that had once lined the walls. The unmistakable shapes of three human corpses were slowly decomposing onto the white tile. While it was too dark to make out their details, he heard the incessant buzz of blowflies as they swarmed back and forth between the dead bodies. Tanner couldn’t help but consider that, if he died here, the flies would soon enjoy his flesh as well.

“Over my dead body,” he mumbled.

The flies didn’t seem to appreciate his humor, continuing to feast without so much as a single chuckle.

Tanner burst through a heavy interior door and found a hallway with examination rooms on one side and a long built-in service counter on the other. The doors to all but one of the rooms were open. The body of a nurse wearing light green scrubs and a face mask sat on the floor in the hallway. She leaned to one side with her head propped against a small rolling cart. Her legs were splayed out in front of her, like a doll that had been hastily dropped.

He raced from room to room, searching the building for a weapon. The best he could find was a Brooklyn Crusher baseball bat. At twenty-nine inches and just over two pounds, it could do some damage, for sure. Best of all, it was made of hardened polypropylene, a material that was nearly indestructible. While it wasn’t a twelve-gauge with triple-aught buck, it was better than bare fists. What a baseball bat was doing in a first aid clinic was anyone’s guess. Perhaps a Little Leaguer had come in with a sprained ankle and forgotten to take it home. None of that mattered to Tanner. When fate gave him a baseball bat, he held on tight and swung for the fences.

He also found an assortment of medical supplies scattered on the floor, as well as several more bodies. While the entire facility stunk of human decay, the body count wasn’t nearly as bad as the smell suggested. His last stop was to check the room with the door closed. He kept his fingers crossed that maybe the room had doubled as the armory for the town’s National Guard.

When he swung the door open, hundreds of thousands of flies swarmed out, smashing into him with the force of an ocean gale. He squinted his eyes and waved them away, choking and gagging on the unrelenting insects. When they finally thinned, he saw that one side of the examination room was filled with a massive pile of bodies. How many people lay dead in the room, he couldn’t say, but it reminded him of the mass graves he had seen in Holocaust documentaries. Even holding his breath, his eyes began watering from the gases released from the decaying corpses.

Garbled voices suddenly sounded from outside the medical center. Tanner whipped left and right, surveying the building for somewhere to hide. He could duck behind the counter or into one of the other exam rooms, but he would almost certainly be found. And, while he was eager to see how well the Brooklyn Crusher stood up to its name, he didn’t think it would be nearly enough to successfully stand against such overwhelming odds.

He looked back through the doorway to hell. Surely, there was another way.

The voices grew louder. They were in the building. When they came through the interior door, they would see him, and hiding would no longer be an option.

Tanner pushed through the flies and eased the door closed behind him. The room was so black that it seemed to be sucking photons from adjacent galaxies. He stumbled forward, feeling blindly in the darkness. Everywhere he touched, his hands felt something sticky and wet, bodies slowly melting into puddles of guts and goo. Eyeballs, intestines, organs, huge flaps of loose skin, skulls, everything one needed to set up the scariest haunted house ever made.

Ignoring every instinct to flee from the horror, he scrambled to the top of the bodies and slid down the back side. No sooner had he settled against the corpse of a bloated woman than the door swung open.

After a moment, a garbled voice said, “He’s not here, either.”

Another man screamed in anger and struck something heavy against the wall.

“Find him!”

The door slammed shut. Tanner waited in dark silence, the Brooklyn Crusher gripped tightly in his hands like a string of rosary beads. The only sounds that remained were the soft rasp of his labored breathing and the occasional
pfffft
of bodies releasing their putrid gases.

Samantha stayed under the Jeep for a good twenty minutes after the creature left. The night around her remained quiet, and she eventually felt safe enough to crawl out. She scanned the alley left and right. Nothing moved. Tired and afraid, she quietly opened the door to the Jeep and climbed inside. The back seat was packed with a variety of supplies, including bottled water, blankets, and food. While she was confident that Tanner would eventually return, there was no guarantee that it would be before something hungry managed to find her. She needed a weapon.

Digging through the pile of gear, she found an unopened box of shotgun shells. She was surprised at how heavy it was as she lifted it to the front seat. She opened the box, withdrew a shell, and studied it. One end had a brass cap with a small bead in the middle. The plastic on the other end was knurled inward to keep the shell’s contents in place. She guessed that inside the shell there must be bullets as well as some gunpowder to project them.

Samantha had seen Tanner load the shotgun a few times, so she had a general idea of how it was done. She lined up a shell against the collapsible metal flap on the bottom of the gun and pushed it forward. The slide folded up and the shell pushed up and in, almost like it went into the barrel. That’s weird, she thought. If all the shells go into the barrel, how does it know which one to fire? She studied it a little more. Upon closer inspection, she saw that there was a round metal ammunition tube below the barrel. She grinned, proud of her discovery.

“I can do this,” she whispered.

She pushed a second shell in behind the first. It was a little harder to push in. She pushed in a third shell and then a fourth. Each shell was successively harder to insert as she compressed a spring in the magazine tube. She tried to get a fifth shell into the tube, but her fingers weren’t strong enough. That’s okay, she thought. Four will be enough.

She looked at the shotgun. Was it ready to shoot? There was a button at the base of the trigger guard. Even in the dark, she could see a small orange band showing on one side. She clicked the button both directions. One way showed the orange band, the other showed all black. She thought about it for a moment. Hunters wear orange for safety. So, logically, if orange is showing, the weapon is safe. She smiled again. This really wasn’t so hard. She was ready to protect herself.

She dumped the rest of the box of shells into her backpack. Then she grabbed a bottle of water from the back and drank nearly the whole thing. She nibbled on a granola bar but found that she was too nervous to eat. In case she got hungry later, she stuck several more in her pack.

“Now what?” she wondered aloud.

She checked, and sure enough, the keys were still in the ignition. If it became necessary, she could drive out of the city. She felt a pang of guilt at having balked at Tanner’s insistence that she learn to drive. The problem was that, even with the headlights on, it would be nearly impossible to navigate the dark streets, especially with the dense fog. It would be better to wait until morning, she thought. Besides, that would give Tanner time to come back.

But what if he didn’t come back? Her gut twisted at the thought.

“I’ll give him until the sun starts coming up,” she said. “If he’s alive, he’ll be here by then.”

With her decision firmly made, Samantha clutched the shotgun and curled up on the seat, determined to wait a few more hours.

Tanner looked and smelled like the lowliest of grave robbers. His clothes, hair, and hands were sticky with blood, bile, and piss. He stood at the entrance to the first aid clinic, staring out into the street. Everything was quiet. His pursuers had either moved on to look elsewhere or had simply abandoned their search. Why the infected had such a hard-on for him was a mystery for another day. This wasn’t his first violent encounter with them, and it surely wouldn’t be his last.