Up From the Grave: A Night Huntress Novel (10 page)

Seventeen

A
fter I crushed her larynx, I stripped the late Dr. Obvious’s lab coat from her and put it on. Not because I thought I’d fool anyone into thinking I worked here, but there was something unsettling about walking around stark naked while on a murder spree. Then I searched the room for weapons, keenly aware that I only had moments. Like every other place in this facility, there were security cameras. Sure enough, soon the whoop of an alarm went off. I’d only managed to find two semi-automatic pistols and two extra clips, which wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

Then I burst through the doors right before they shut and thick bars slid into the doorframe in some sort of automated lockdown. Once in the hallway, I ran toward the cluster of thoughts approaching me instead of away. As soon as the soldiers rounded the corner, I flung myself forward, belly-flopping onto the tile with enough force to break my ribs. The pain was fierce and immediate, but their shots went over my head. I kept my arms straight out as momentum and the polished tile carried me forward while I fired until both guns were empty.

The guards dropped with multiple
thumps.
They’d been outfitted with Kevlar vests and mesh steel collars around their throats, but while their tinted visors were proof against mind control, they weren’t bulletproof.

I dropped my handguns into my pockets along with the extra clips. Then I snatched up as many of their assault rifles as I could carry.

Now this was more like it.

Not a moment too soon, either. In the hallway ahead, another stampede of booted strides sounded. I glanced around, decided being out in the open was too risky even with my new arsenal, and propelled myself upward hard enough to blast through the ceiling. It left my head ringing with more than the sounds of gunfire as the next set of soldiers found their buddies and began shooting at the hole I’d made, but I was long gone from it by then. The outer shell around this facility was too reinforced to blast my way to daylight, yet like most hospitals and laboratories, it had interstitial spaces between its floors.

And this one, at least, wasn’t guarded or equipped with automated lockdown doors.

I jumped over pipes and other equipment as I ran toward what I guessed was the vampire cell section, based on the thoughts of the employees plus the fact that it had a solid wall of steel going all the way up into the next floor. Before I could attempt to shoot my way through the base, though, I had to duck a barrage of bullets. The soldiers had found their way into the space between the floors, too.

“We have Specimen A1 cornered above Section 9!” someone barked.

That was followed by a reply I didn’t catch when I had to dodge another hail of gunfire. I took cover behind one of the steel buttresses, keeping low as I fired back. With the distance and smoke from all the gunfire, I didn’t have nearly the same success rate. Only a third of the guards dropped with their visors shattered, and I heard more reinforcements coming.

I began firing at the soldiers with one gun while shooting into the floor with another. Glancing back and forth between the two and needing to change position to keep from getting shot made my accuracy nosedive even more. The split in my attention also resulted in getting grazed by more than a few bullets. To my surprise, they were firing regular rounds, not silver. Still, if one struck me between the eyes, I’d be helpless while my brains knit back together enough for me to think.

Then a grenade was lobbed into my corner. I kicked it away a mere fraction of a second before it exploded. It wasn’t an amped-up concussion grenade like they’d used on the pier, but it contained silver shrapnel. They must be getting impatient. I spent a tense few minutes firing blind while my eyes healed, and when my vision was restored, to my dismay I saw that the steel barriers above my friends’ cells were still intact despite my emptying two full magazines into the floor.

Another silver-filled grenade exploded nearby, forcing me away from the protection of the bullet-resistant buttresses. I couldn’t risk one detonating near my heart.

Frustration made me almost oblivious to the pain as I was shot several times despite keeping low to the floor. The steel barriers above the vampire cells were too thick—I couldn’t get to Tate and the others this way. Very soon, I’d have to propel myself through this ceiling or risk getting blown up where I crouched, and that was only if I beat the soldiers who were already on their way to the sublevel above me. From the thoughts I overheard, not to mention their communicating on their wireless devices, Madigan had ordered them to attack me from the upper level, too. He might want more of my blood for testing purposes, but he wouldn’t risk my escaping to get it.

Madigan.

My fingers tightened on the M-4 despite its having been fired enough to make the metal scorching. It looked like I wouldn’t be able to free my friends, but there was still something I
could
do.

I spent several precarious minutes trying not to get shot while sending my senses outward to weed through the myriad of thoughts in this compound. At last, I found the ones I was looking for, and for once, he wasn’t singing something to himself. Madigan was implementing emergency security procedures that had never before been needed, all while rushing to get to a safe place in the facility.

I focused on his thoughts as if they were a homing beacon. Then I used the straps to hang two M-4s around my neck before I yanked up a large thermal control unit. Holding the metal machine in front of me, I flew toward the opposite corner of the enclosed space, wincing as more rounds found their mark. Still, none of them were near my head. I couldn’t fire back while holding the bulky unit, but it was an effective, if crude, bulletproof shield.

I also used it as a battering ram when I shoved it above my head and propelled myself upward at the same time. Debris hampered my vision, and my lower half took the brunt of gunfire as I forced myself through concrete, wood, and steel to the next level above me. It took longer since this section was far more reinforced than the other one I’d blasted through. Then, amidst a cloud of dust and insulation particles, I looked for Madigan. He wasn’t here, but from his thoughts, he was close. Before I could leave to search for him, a new set of guards rushed up to the single doorway. Without hesitation, I chucked the demolished coolant machine at them.

With the supernatural speed I’d used, it made a smear out of the ones it hit, but sadly, that was only a few of them. The rest poured through the door while opening fire.

I tried to escape by smashing through the nearest wall and ended up splatting against it as though I were in a cartoon. The room I’d forced my way into had steel walls that had to be two feet thick and its single door sealed shut with the ominous sound of heavy locks. When I tried to force my way through the roof next, I had the same dismal results, with an added detriment of cracking my skull hard enough to daze me.

This was no ordinary office. With its lack of furniture or other fixtures, plus its incredibly thick steel walls and door, it had to be a panic room. The only way out was down, and a glance into the hole I’d made showed almost a dozen guards with weapons aimed right at me.

Son of a bitch, I’d trapped myself in Madigan’s panic room before the bastard made it in here!

“Switch to silver ammo,” a helmeted guard barked, to the accompanying sound of multiple magazines being slammed home.

Uh-oh. I tried to jam their weapons with my borrowed telekinetic abilities, but it didn’t work, probably because my head still
really
hurt. I didn’t think all the cracks in my skull had knit back together yet, and I didn’t want to know what the wet, sticky thing was dripping down my neck.

“There’s no way out, suck head,” the same guard spat. “Stand down.”

Suck head? That made me laugh, which sent alarms to the part of me that could still think.
Do what he says, or they’ll kill you,
that part urged.
You’re in no shape to fight, and they’ve got you cornered.

True and true. But when I spoke, I didn’t say “I surrender.” Instead, I said two other words.

“Fuck you.”

Death didn’t scare me. It was my way back to Bones.

Then I tensed, about to attack and take as many of them with me as I could, when a frantic voice burst through their com system.

“This is Falcon 1. Specimen A1 is loose in Section 6!”

Wasn’t Specimen A1 what the other guards had called me? Huh, same as the steak sauce . . . I shook my head in aggravation to stop that useless line of thought.
Heal faster, brains!

“Negative, Falcon 1. This is Falcon 7, and I have Specimen A1 contained in Section 13,” said the one who’d called me suck head.

“Falcon 7, I’m
looking
at A1,” came the emphatic reply.

“You can’t be, the bitch is here,” my guy snapped, sounding pissed.

My haziness lifted, either because my head finally finished healing or because I was the only one who knew how two people could swear that I was in different places at the same time. When I laughed again, it wasn’t in a dazed way. It was with relief.

Denise
was
here, and from the screams that came through on the next transmission, she was kicking serious ass.

“I’m telling you A1 is
here,
and we’ve also got an unknown hostile tearing up Section 11. They need backup, now!”

Helmeted heads began to swivel between me and the guard that I’d deduced was this unit’s leader.

“What the fuck?” someone muttered.

I didn’t know who this other “hostile” was, but I knew a good distraction when I saw one. I flung myself up and sprang off the roof to maximize velocity as I plowed into the guards. The impact killed two on the spot, but the others opened fire. I pulled one of the dead guards on top of me, using him as a shield as I lunged toward the rest, snapping ankles and then necks when they fell.

The sealed room that had trapped me now trapped them. The guards below began to fire through the hole, but they hit their friends more than me. Plus, with the extensive Kevlar the guards wore, my dead body shield kept the bullets away from any vital spots, though my arms and legs sizzled from all the silver pumped into them. I ignored the pain, concentrating on finishing my task. For all I knew, one of these guards had fired the shots that killed Bones, so I was merciless in my actions.

Snap. Crush. Tear.

I repeated those until nothing around me moved. Then I shoved bodies into the hole to stop more bullets from peppering the room and ricocheting off the steel walls. When that was done, I let out a victory howl that ended when I realized I’d won, but I still couldn’t get out of the room unless someone opened the door.

Maybe I could get someone to do that. Seized with an idea, I grabbed the nearest dead guard and spoke into his communication system.

“Denise,” I shouted. “You’ve gotta find a way to open this door!”

“Who the fuck are you?” the voice on the other end snapped.

I didn’t care enough to answer. I heard background noise from him, which meant Denise should have been able to hear me, too, if she was still near this guy. From the fierce sound of fighting, she had to be.

Then a different voice blasted from a com device on another body.

“ALL units to Section 13! Situation critical!”

Aw, hell, Section 13 was where I was. The guards below must’ve called in the fact that I’d demolished the soldiers in the panic room.

“Hurry up, Denise!” I yelled into the com. Then I began to gather up M-4s that had the most ammo left before pausing to pull a Kevlar vest off a dead guard. Much more manageable than taking his body with me.

“I repeat, situation critical!” screamed the panicked voice through the com. “Hostile sighted and . . . oh God. What is that? WHAT IS THAT?”

I pulled on the blood-spattered vest, wondering what Denise had shapeshifted into this time. From the sound of the guard, could’ve been a
Tyrannosaurus
rex
. She’d made it to my floor fast, too. Just moments ago, she’d still been in Section 6, wherever that was—

The thick titanium bolts around the door snapped back into the walls faster than they’d deployed. Then it didn’t open; it crashed inward, flattening a body beneath it with enough force to make something that looked like raspberry jam spurt from its sides.

But that wasn’t what made me freeze, my M-4 halting halfway up in its arc. It was the thing on the other side of the door. White hair framed a face that showed more skull than skin except for a set of blazing emerald eyes. Bullet-riddled clothes hung off a body that looked like old leather and dried meat wrapped around bone. When it bared its teeth in a hideous version of a smile, I instinctively recoiled.

And then it spoke.

“Hallo . . . Kitten.”

Eighteen

L
ater, I’d be ashamed that I didn’t run into his arms when I realized who it was, but at the moment, my brain refused to reconcile the half-rotted, walking corpse with the man I loved.

Bones didn’t have my hesitance. He also didn’t have over sixty percent of his flesh, but that was the point. He grasped my arm and yanked me out of the panic room, then propelled me down the hallway. I let him lead me, still trying to grapple with the reality of his
being
here, let alone trying to make sense of the condition he was in. Bodies of guards littered the hallway, their heads ripped mostly off and puddles of their blood causing me to slide once or twice as we ran. Red lights flashed, and alarms blared, but we didn’t encounter more guards, and if this section had employees, they’d long since evacuated.

Then a large set of double doors barred our path into the next section. From the empty security station, the entry guard had left his post, and through the small viewing panel, I didn’t see anyone in the room beyond, either.

“Initiating Dante Protocol for Section 13 in fifteen seconds,” a computerized voice intoned over the com system.

I cast my senses outward trying to discover what that meant, and the thoughts I caught were ominous.

They can’t incinerate Section 13! There might be survivors!

Oh, God, I’m gonna die . . .

That’s right, burn every one of those fuckers!

“They’re going to torch this section,” I told Bones, then shook him when all he did was close his eyes.

“Bones! We have to go now, or we’re going to
burn.
”

He still didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t he hear me? Maybe not, it didn’t look like much of his ears were left under that shock of white hair.

I grabbed him and tried to fly, intending to blast us through the ceiling into a section that wasn’t about to be barbecued, but he planted his feet and wouldn’t be budged. How he managed that while looking like an extra from
Night of the Living Dead
was beyond me, yet I might as well have been trying to lift a mountain.

“No,” he said in that guttural, unfamiliar voice.

“Five seconds until Dante Protocol in Section 13,” the warning system intoned.

Bones still didn’t move. If I flew away without him, I had a chance of making it, but I’d rather die than do that. Freaky-looking or not, this was Bones, and my place was with him, in life or in death. I threw my arms around him and squeezed my eyes shut, hoping the fire was so intense that this would be quick—

Explosions did go off, causing everything to shudder as though we were caught in an earthquake, yet there was no heat or pain. After a few seconds, I dared to open my eyes.

No wall of flames rushed toward us. Or guards, for that matter, but from the frantic crescendo of screams in my thoughts, people were dying somewhere. It took some doing to sort through the mental chaos enough to figure out what happened, and when I did, I was stunned.

“You used your power to sabotage their incineration machine before it could torch this floor, and it blew up where it was located.”

Talk about fighting fire with fire. Or with telekinesis, in this case. When had Bones gotten to be that powerful? A better question, how
could
he still be, in his condition?

He nodded. “And . . . opened . . . doors.”

Speech was clearly difficult for him, but his abilities were at astounding levels, judging from what he’d done.

“Which doors?” The ones leading to the surface, hopefully.

“All . . . of them.”

So saying, the doors in front of us unlocked and slid open. When a surge of new screams invaded my mind, I understood the significance of what he’d said.

He hadn’t only opened these doors. He’d opened
all
the doors in the facility, including the ones that kept undead captives in their cells.

This time, when I listened to the mental screams, I smiled.

From the sounds, Tate, Juan, Dave, and Cooper had their situation well in hand, but more guards could be on their way to them.

“Stay here, I’ll get the guys,” I told Bones.

He might be missing over half the flesh on his face, but he still had no trouble conveying “Are you bloody joking?” with his expression.

“There might be fighting, and you look like a hard stare could break a limb off,” I said in exasperation.

Something beamed me in the back. I whirled, already shooting, but I’d been struck with a detached head—gross, yet not dangerous. Then another head came rushing toward me as if it were a bowling ball, and my legs were pins. I dodged out of the way only to have it turn in midair and smack me in the ass.

“Stop it, you made your point!”

Guess I should have realized who killed all those guards to begin with, although with how rotted Bones looked, the only threat someone would assume him capable of was to their appetite . . .

It hit me then. All of it. Maybe it should have been obvious from the moment he broke down the panic-room door, but shock had prevented me from putting the pieces together. Now I knew how he was still alive although I’d seen him die, and why he looked the way he did.

And if it wouldn’t have knocked a hunk of his flesh off, I would’ve punched him right in the face.

“You heartless bastard,” I choked out.

His gaze was unblinking. Lacking eyelids will do that to a person.

“Later,” he replied in that rasping voice.

Oh, he could bet on that.

“Cat!”

I turned, seeing a mirror image of myself bounding down the hallway. At some point since her transformation from rat to my doppelganger, Denise had swiped a pair of medical scrubs. From all the holes in them, she’d also taken on heavy fire while pretending to be me.

My happiness over seeing her was tempered when I noticed she didn’t look the slightest bit surprised to see Bones alive, or in the condition he was in. Was I the only one who hadn’t known the
real
plan behind my meet-up with Madigan on the pier?

“Come on, the vampire jail section is this way,” Denise said before running past us and taking a right where the hallway forked.

I followed her, pushing past my whirling emotions to send my senses outward. It wouldn’t do for us to run right into a trap. After listening for a few moments, my tenseness eased. Bones’s destruction of the Dante Protocol machine hadn’t just killed a lot of people. It had also injured many of the rest of them since most of the thoughts I picked up on were disjointed with pain. The thoughts that were still clear seemed panicked, as Madigan’s employees realized that all of the interior doors were open, but the main lift to the surface was out of order.

Good. It was time they knew what it was like to feel helpless and trapped in this underground hellhole.

I hunted through the thoughts as best I could, yet Madigan’s wasn’t among them, making him either dead or unconscious. I hoped for the latter since I wanted to kill him myself. First things first, however.

Denise ran past the open security doors into the section where the holding cells were. Then she stopped, her nose wrinkling. The cells were vacant but bodies slumped over computer monitors, chairs, and on the red-smeared floor. Tate and the guys had been busy. Multiple bloody footprints led to an interior room past the cells, though another, smaller set had gone down the hallway in the opposite direction from where we’d come.

“A little more,
amigo,
” Juan’s low voice crooned from the interior room. Then softer and more urgently, “Get ready. Someone’s coming.”

I went in that direction instead of down the hall. “It’s Cat,” I called out, not wanting to get shot again.

“
¿Querida?
” Juan let out a weary laugh. “Of course. Who else could cause such trouble?”

I glanced at Bones and Denise before I spoke. “Most of it wasn’t me this time.”

Then I stepped over another crumpled form as I entered what looked like an operating room. Medical equipment hung from the ceiling in various spots, while scalpels, bone saws, and other sharp instruments rested on a table next to a large metal slab with restraint straps. That table was empty, but the tubular machine on the far side of the room wasn’t. Tate was inside it, tubes protruding everywhere from him, while Juan and Cooper stood next to a control panel.

Dave came out of the corner, lowering a bloody M-4 carbine.

“Damn glad to see you, Cat,” he said, giving me a brief, fierce hug. Then he held on to my arm when I tried to get to the others.

“Wait. They’re getting the liquid silver out of Tate.”

I looked around with grim understanding. I didn’t remember being here, but this must be the machine Dr. Obvious alluded to when she said the liquid silver had been dissolved with nitric acid and flushed out. That meant the restraint table and multiple instruments were for lesser cases when the silver could be cut out, not that it would make it any less agonizing.

“How did Tate get silvered?”

Dave started to answer, then stared over my shoulder. Denise and Bones were behind me, and it was a toss-up as to which of them had shocked him more.

“Denise can shapeshift, and Bones was playing possum,” I summarized. “He’ll regenerate fully when he drinks more blood.”

“Now I’ve seen everything,” Dave muttered, shaking his head. “Tate’s restraint clamps were still on when they put him back in his cell after you drank from him. When the doors unexpectedly opened, we went for the pricks, but one of them managed to hit the switch that turned on the juice in them.”

Flooding Tate’s body with liquid silver. I shuddered at the memory of how excruciating that felt.

“They’ll have it out soon, it didn’t get too deep,” Dave went on.

“How do they know how to operate the machine?”

He gave me a bleak look. “They picked it up after all the times it’s been used to get silver out of them.”

Tate mumbled something that sounded like my name, but his voice was barely audible above the noise the machine made.

“I’m here,” I called out.

“Not you,
querida,
” Juan said, glancing up before he pressed more buttons. “Katie. She ran when the cells opened. Have you seen her?”

“Is she an employee?” If so, I hated to break it to them, but she was probably dead.

“The little girl,” Cooper said impatiently.

I winced. How awful if someone had brought their kid to work today of all days . . . wait.

“The child in the cell?” I asked, memory surfacing of the one I’d glimpsed when the guards wheeled me past.

Dave let out a grunt. “Yeah, that child. Seen her?”

“Footsteps,” a guttural voice stated behind me.

Bones was right. Now we knew who the small ones leading away from this section belonged to.

“I’ll get her,” Denise said at once. “I’d rather do that than what you guys need to do.”

“Good, thanks.”

Denise hated killing, and I couldn’t leave some poor child wandering around, yet we couldn’t take the time to search for her. We’d already spent too much time here as it was.

Dave grabbed Denise before she could leave. “Do
not
attempt to force her if she doesn’t want to go with you.”

“I won’t scare her,” she said with a scoff.

“That’s not—”

“Madigan.”

Bones’s harsh voice cut off whatever Dave had been about to say. All of us turned except Denise, who left with preternatural speed.

“What? Madigan what?” I prodded.

His mouth stretched into a truly terrifying smile. “Alive.”

I gripped his arm and spoke one word.

“Where?”