Pretty Much Dead Already, page 14
There’s no old world etiquette for this. No script or ceremony.
So I do what feels right. I take Dr. Mare’s hand, and he squeezes it. Jace’s fingers are on my other arm before I can blink. Cass moves to my side, his shoulder bumping mine. Rhett steps in last, anchoring the circle, his presence solid and warm.
For a moment, nothing moves. We’re a single, messy unit, stitched together by fear and violence and the absolute certainty that we won’t let the world tear us apart.
Then, as if on cue, the thud of boots and the crash of fists against the fire door shakes us loose. We spring into action—Rhett and Cass moving to block the entrance, Jace gathering makeshift weapons, Dr. Mare pressing a syringe into my hand “just in case.”
I take a breath, letting the heat of their bodies and the pulse of shared adrenaline fill me. I’m not the omega bride anymore, not the target or the trophy or the fragile thing they expected to break.
I’m the center of this, whatever it is, and trust me it feels oh so right, and I’ll be damned if I let them down.
The next impact rattles the door, louder than before, but I don’t flinch.
Let them come.
We’re ready.
Chapter Thriteen: Heart's Revelation
Lira
The next impact rattles the fire door, the concussion of a full-body event—sound, shock, vibration. Cass bares his teeth in a predator’s grin, eyes slitted like a wolf about to savage the neighbor’s shepherd. Rhett is already crouched low, weapon up, the veins in his neck corded and sharp. I can feel the adrenaline snapping through the room, spiking the air with the scent of male sweat and antiseptic, plus the sweeter undercurrent of panic.
The pounding comes again. Thud-thud-thud. It’s not random, I realize—it’s code, the kind of pattern guards use for ‘open up’ or ‘we’re about to torch the whole building.’
Cass glances at me, then at Rhett, an unspoken argument passing between them. Jace is suddenly at my side, his palm sweaty on my biceps. He’s breathing hard, but his grip is steel. He pulls me behind the nearest med cart, wedging us in with a tray of scalpels and three jars of tongue depressors. I’m not sure if I’m safer or just a better target, but I let him move me. His eyes are wide, pupils blown, and for a second he looks younger than me.
Dr. Mare is the only one who doesn’t move like a cornered animal. He walks, slow and measured, to the door.
“Door’s coming open,” he says, voice like sandpaper over silk. “Be ready.”
Rhett positions himself to the side of the frame, sidearm up. Cass takes the opposite side, something short and black in his hand—a baton or a crowbar, I can’t tell. The two exchange a look, a dark little smile at the corners of their mouths, and it occurs to me that neither is faking it. They are thrilled.
Dr. Mare hits the final key and the maglock disengages with a muted pop.
For a heartbeat, nothing happens.
Then, from the other side, the handle turns. The door cracks open just enough for a single pale hand to slip in—too clean, too small. Cass lunges forward, snatches the wrist, and yanks. The hand recoils, and whoever is attached to it gives a high, animal yelp. Cass grins wider.
“Amateur hour,” he mutters.
Rhett nods at Cass, who plants a boot against the door, shoves it open, and pins it against the stop. They both move in tandem, a violence ballet, Cass leading and Rhett clearing the angle with surgical precision.
The corridor is empty. Not empty like nobody’s there; empty like the world stopped existing ten feet past the door.
A flicker of movement—a blue sleeve, a flash of pale face. Cass is after it in a heartbeat, Rhett a pace behind. I hear a scuffle, the sound of flesh on tile, and then a shriek. Jace flinches, shoulders hunched, like he’s the one getting manhandled.
Dr. Mare signals us to stay put, then glides into the hall, his movement so smooth it doesn’t even register as urgency.
I want to peek. Jace doesn’t let me. He’s got me bracketed behind the cart, hands on my shoulders now, and for a second I think he might be praying. His breath is hot on my neck.
The screaming stops. Silence drops into place like a guillotine.
Then—footsteps, heavy and uneven. The trio returns, Cass dragging a Beta man in gray by the collar, face mashed and bleeding. Rhett walks beside them, gun still up, scanning the hall behind as if expecting the rest of the cavalry to come charging. Dr. Mare trails, his lips pursed in a tight, unhappy line.
Cass dumps the Beta onto the floor. The man writhes, clutching at his nose, blood pouring through his fingers.
“You got a name?” Rhett asks, voice a controlled monotone.
The Beta glares, spitting blood. “Viktor’s going to cut your fucking heart out,” he slurs.
Cass cocks his head. “Not if we get his first.”
Rhett ignores the exchange. He kneels beside the Beta, calm as a mortician. “How many with you?”
The Beta blinks, startled. “Fuck you,” he says, but softer. There’s a wet, frightened edge to it now.
Rhett’s face doesn’t move, but his hand does—a lightning-quick chop to the man’s temple. The Beta sags, eyes rolling. Cass helps himself to the guy’s radio and a battered Glock from his waistband.
Rhett looks up, addressing the room at large. “Viktor’s crew is inside the perimeter. They’ll push for this wing. We hold until backup or until we run out of options.”
Dr. Mare helps me up from behind the cart, his hand cool and dry. “We’re safest here,” he tells me, eyes darting to Jace, who still hasn’t let go of my arm.
I manage a laugh, a bitter little cough. “Safe is relative.”
He smiles, but his face says exactly.
Jace relaxes his grip, but only a little. “What do we do if they break through?” He asks, voice thin.
Rhett doesn’t answer right away. Instead, he rips the radio from Cass, tunes it to a local band, and listens. Static, then a volley of panicked shouts.
“…they’re inside!—No, not people, not—RUN!—” The transmission dies in a screech of feedback.
Cass and Rhett share a look, and for the first time, Cass isn’t smiling.
“What’s happening?” I ask, but nobody answers. The silence is answer enough.
More gunfire, distant now. A howl, maybe human, probably not. Jace pulls me closer, sheltering me behind the medical cart again.
The fire door explodes inward, hinges shrieking, and five men in gray rush in. The first two are on their feet. The third stumbles, half-limping, his pant leg shredded and a dark stain spreading across the fabric. He’s pale, lips purple. The fourth and fifth are dragging something between them—a woman, maybe, but she isn’t moving right.
Rhett doesn’t hesitate. He fires once, twice, three times. The first two Betas crumple, dead before they hit the floor. Cass takes out the limper with a shot to the head. The woman lands in a heap, her scalp torn in a crescent, jaw hanging by a strip of tendon.
Jace grabs my arm. “That’s not—” He whispers, but he doesn’t have to finish.
The woman’s hands slap the tile, scrabbling for purchase. Her head lolls, then snaps up, and her eyes are milk-white, the pupils blown and ringed with black. She moves faster than physics, surging up and grabbing Cass by the ankle.
He kicks, hard, but she’s strong, stronger than she should be. She bites down, teeth clacking against his steel toed boots. He slams the baton across her face, breaking the jaw clean, but she doesn’t let go.
Rhett fires again, this time straight into her eye socket. Her head splits, and she goes limp, still attached to Cass’s leg. Cass pries her off, disgust plain.
“Fucking hell,” he spits, staggering back.
Rhett turns to me, voice perfectly flat. “They've breached the wall.”
The implications hit me like a crowbar. The “they” isn’t Viktor’s men. It’s the dead. The infected. Whatever we’ve been calling them since the world ended they all had one goal. Eat.
More noises outside—scraping, the sound of flesh on glass, a wet slapping as bodies hit the building in waves. Cass and Rhett reload, motions practiced and unhurried.
Jace is shivering. Dr. Mare sets a steadying hand on his arm. “Stay focused,” he says, and Jace locks his jaw, blinking hard.
Cass limps over, face ashen. “We can't stay, we need to move. ”
Rhett shakes his head. “No. We need to keep digging in. Hold until the breach is cleared. If we run, we get funneled into open ground.”
Cass looks like he wants to argue, but he glances at me, then at Jace, and he lets it go.
I swallow, the reality electric in my veins.
Rhett addresses the room. “We make a stand here. They’ll send a rescue team, once the perimeter is secured. Until then, nobody leaves.”
Jace nods, lips bloodless. “How long will that take?”
Rhett shrugs, the motion barely perceptible. “Could be hours. Could be dawn.”
Cass is back at the door, stacking bodies as a barricade. He’s not joking now. Every motion is survival.
I crouch behind the cart, Jace beside me. His hand finds mine, and we squeeze—hard, desperate, but alive.
Time passes in jerks and lurches. There are moments of silence, broken by screams, gunshots, the wet thud of bodies against concrete. The dead don’t moan or wail like in the movies. They just keep coming, tireless, a pressure at the edge of your sanity.
Once, in the gap between attacks, Dr. Mare kneels next to me. He checks the cut on my wrist, retapes it, his hands gentle and quick. He doesn’t look at my face, not directly. I wonder what he’s thinking. I want to ask, but the words are gone.
Cass leans against the door, sweating, every muscle in his body coiled. Rhett never sits. He stands, back to the wall, watching, listening.
Hours crawl by. At some point, I start to hallucinate—maybe from fear, maybe from exhaustion. I see my mother, her face the same as the last time I saw her: perfect, unscarred, a mask of composure even as the world ended around us. I wonder if she’d recognize me now, if she’d approve of the people I’ve fallen in with.
At what must be close to sunrise, there’s a change in the noise outside—a new rhythm, more human. Then, a banging at the outer door, three-two-one, like before. Cass peers through the shattered glass, then laughs, a broken sound.
“It’s ours,” he says. “They did it.”
Rhett moves to the door. “Let them in.”
Cass unlatches it, and in pile three men in security black, faces streaked with blood and soot, one missing an ear, another with a raw bandage around his thigh. They slam the door, wedge a chair under the handle, and drop to the floor, spent.
“They’re gone,” One gasps. “Cleared. The breach—patched. Most of them—” He gestures at the corridor. “They didn’t make it.”
Rhett kneels, offers water. The man chugs it, then wipes his mouth, staring at nothing.
“Viktor?” Rhett asks.
The guard shakes his head. “No idea, but given how disorganized their attack was I doubt he was with them.”
Rhett stands, shoulders squared, as if nothing in the world could strike him unprepared. Cass, meanwhile, is jittering in place, knuckles white on the grip of that scavenged Glock, a kind of post-frenzy energy humming through his body. Jace collapses against the med cart, all the tension gone, replaced by a warm exhaustion that makes his head tip sideways until it rests against my shoulder. For a second, I let it. Then I remember there’s no room for after-care, not yet.
Dr. Mare moves among the battered, doing triage with a steady, efficient cadence. He splints the security man’s thigh, hands off a packet of antibiotics, and cracks an ammonia tab under the nose of the one who fainted. Each movement is clinical, but his hands linger a little longer on the wrist when he checks my pulse. He doesn’t comment on how fast it is, only meets my eyes for a beat longer than necessary.
I collect myself and study the guards who just arrived. They’re extra-ruined, faces caked with a mix of dried blood and the gray dust that accumulates under the old windowsills of the Fort. One is crying, in the snorting, ugly way men usually reserve for funerals. The other two keep their heads bowed, as if the floor might explain what just happened.
The sound of Rhett checking his ammo clip breaks the awkward silence. He looks up, making sure there’s a round in his chamber. “We need to move. Viktor’s men aren’t the only threat, we got the undead wandering around now to.”
Cass and Dr. Mare share a look, then Dr. Mare says, “Rooftop’s best. Service stairs on the south wing weren’t in the blueprints—they’re maintenance only, the doors open onto the comm tower. There’s makeshift barricades, but nothing official.”
Rhett nods his approval of the idea, “It’s a half-mile sprint if the west quad is flooded. If we’re moving, we’re moving now.” He stares at me as he says it, as if daring me to protest.
I don’t protest. I just look at Jace, who’s already rising, determination rewiring the lines of his face.
Cass collects the scavenged weapons, tucks the shattered radio into his belt, and flashes me the kind of conspiratorial wink reserved for thieves and junior bridesmaids. “Stick close, Birdie. If you get bit, I have to tell everyone you died saving my life in an act of unconditional love.”
I smirk. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
He leans close, voice a mudslide in my ear: “I never do.”
The route is chaos. Rhett and Dr. Mare move point, picking the cleanest possible path down the pockmarked maze of old cinder blocks and wet ceiling tiles. Cass and Jace bracket behind, keeping a wary eye on the way we came. I’m in the center with the others, still shell shocked. Adrenaline has burned out, replaced by the sizzle of pure, high-voltage focus. I can hear the wet shuffle of bodies against the floor two turns ahead; the low, urgent rumble of someone’s voice on a still-active comm channel; the distant, metallic whine of the Fort’s main gate failing, just for a moment, and then slamming back closed.
We get as far as the service elevator—a battered, pre-war machinery, barely big enough for our group—before Cass bends down and, with a flick of the wrist, jimmies the panel open. “We’re not waiting for a lift,” he whispers. “Shaft’s a straight shot. There’s a ladder, if you trust it.”
I don't trust it. But I trust Cass, which proves I have some pretty low self-preservation instincts.
He’s first down, feet finding the rusty rungs as if he was born in an elevator shaft. I dangle in after him. The first three steps are fine. The next few, the metal flexes under my weight and I have to choke off a squeal. Cass’s hand snakes up, steadying my ankle.
“You lose your shoes, I will not stop making fun of you,” he grunts, and I want to stomp his hand but instead I move faster down up the rungs.
Jace and Dr. Mare follow, the doc moving with a surgeon’s grace. At the bottom, the service corridor is pitch black, except for Cass’s scavenged flashlight slicing the dark. There’s no mildew—just the clean, electrical courtship of ozone and old copper. We make our way, only stopping when Rhett stops, “Hold, I have to pry open the hatch.” His voice is low, yet still echoes in the elevator shaft. There’s the sound of metal grinding on metal before a hiss of fresh air rushes in and the dull overhead lights blaze a path into the dark corridor.
Rhett crawls out first, motioning for me to wait. A few minutes later he reappears and offers me his hand. He quickly and easily pulls me up. My arms and legs burn from the effort of climbing. I’m a quivering mess, trying to clam my breathing as the others exit the hatch as well. Glancing around I see we’re in a service closet, oil stained rags and tools boxes littering the nearby tables and concrete floor.
“Just a bit more and we’ll be here. Everyone stay close and stay low, we don’t know if they breached the roof but its better to assume they did.” Rhett’s voice is low but commanding, wincing I get back to my feet and wait for him to lead.
We walk single file, Jace’s fingers at my sleeve even when he can’t see me. We make a left, then a right, and come to a metal door.
The roof.
Raising his gun, Cass, not far behind Rhett throws the metal door open.
The air is so cold it makes my teeth ache. Smoke hangs on the horizon. I can see the river, and beyond it, the orange glow of some other fire, some other disaster. At our backs, the roof is lined with water tanks and satellite dishes, now useless but still standing. There’s a blanket of bodies ringed around the access hatch, others who had the same idea but it backfired for them.
Cass’s jaw sets. “We’ll need to clear it.”
I nod, and together with Rhett and Dr. Mare, we move along the perimeter, working as a unit. Each time I hear a hiss or a wet, lipless sigh, my body jolts, but the reality is less dramatic than I expect. Death up here is quiet, a series of small, irreversible decisions.
It’s over in minutes.
We push the last one—a girl no older than sixteen, her dress still formal, lips stained with her own blood—over the edge. She falls without a sound.
The silence that follows is almost holy.
Rhett plants himself at the stairwell, Cass at the far cap of the roof, Jace and Dr. Mare tending to wounds and rationing what little water is in the roof tope rain catchers. The wind is so sharp it seems to peel the night off in strips. I wrap my arms around myself, feeling every nerve ending. I want to sleep, but I think if I close my eyes I might not open them again.
Cass joins me, shoulder pressed to mine. He’s stinking of cordite and something sharp—his own fear, maybe. Or mine.
“Why’d you do it?” he asks, eyes fixed on the river.
“What?” My confusion is almost palatable making him look at me like I'm daft.
“Report Viktor’s plan. You could have run. You’re not a hero.” His words hold no bite or malice. It’s true, I’m not a hero. I’ve always been just a trophy, a pretty doll that’s supposed to just shut up and look pretty…
Well, not anymore. “I didn’t want to owe anyone,” I say. “And I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t let others decide my fate for me.”
