Pretty Much Dead Already, page 18
“I’m fine,” I say, but I lean into him anyway.
He smooths my hair, then kisses my forehead. “You’re more than fine,” he whispers. “You’re perfect.”
I want to tell him he’s crazy, that I’m a mess, that I’m dangerous and damaged and more trouble than any man should risk. But I don’t.
Instead, I look up and see the way he’s watching me—like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
We’re interrupted by the sound of shattering glass somewhere down the hall. Michael’s face snaps back to professional in an instant. He wipes his mouth, straightens his lab coat, and gestures for me to follow.
Shouts echo off the cinderblock, and the familiar panic of disaster overtakes the calm.
The alarms start before we make it back to the med bay. First a single, piercing wail—the sound of the perimeter breach alert, different from the “someone forgot to close the gate” warning. Then, as if the noise itself summons the dead, it’s joined by a ragged chorus of shouting, boots pounding the tile, and the distant metallic pop-pop-pop of gunfire.
By the time Michael and I reach the main hallway, the world is pure chaos. Two orderlies streak past, barely registering us, while a third runs the other direction, clutching a box of IV bags. A Beta with a facial wound already half-unravels his own bandage as he’s swept up in the current, heading for the triage center at the end of the hall.
Michael is instantly in doctor mode, barking orders at the nearest staff. “Split the beds—trauma left, infection right. Anyone who can walk, put them on discharge protocol.” The nurse he’s talking to nods, eyes huge, and disappears into the fray.
I help clear space by dragging a rolling gurney into the main corridor, nearly plowing into a woman in hospital scrubs who is white with terror. “They’re coming through the East fence,” she says, but I’m not sure if she means zombies or people.
Michael catches my arm. “You’ll need this,” he says, pressing a small canister into my palm. “Pepper spray,” he adds, reading my confusion. “We’re low on bullets.”
For a second, the absurdity of it makes me laugh.
Then the first casualties arrive.
A pair of guards burst in, supporting a man whose leg ends in a mass of exposed bone and shredded denim. The wound is fresh, but the blood is already slowing, arterial spray giving way to the dark ooze of shock. Michael signals for the stretcher, and together we lift the man—he’s unconscious, but moans as we shift him, fingers clawing at the air.
“Artery’s gone,” Michael mutters, more to himself than me. “Tourniquet, now.” I hand him the rubber tubing, and he wraps it tight, not gentle this time, not caring about bedside manner.
The triage bay fills rapidly: a woman with a bullet graze on her scalp, a boy who smells of burned plastic and is still crying for his mother, another man with three missing fingers, blood pooling between his knees.
I move from bed to bed, adrenaline overriding fear. Somewhere outside, the guns are louder, punctuated by the animal howls of the infected. I can’t see them yet, but I know from the way the ground trembles that they’re close.
I hear Cass before I see him—a wild, unhinged laugh as he rounds the corner with a Beta in tow. The Beta’s clutching a radio, shouting into it, but Cass just grins at me, teeth streaked red, and says, “Birdie! Didn’t think you’d miss the action.”
“Are you hurt?” I shout, scanning him.
He flexes his hands—bloodied but intact. “Not my blood,” he says, and winks.
“Where’s Rhett?” I ask.
“Wall duty,” he says, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “He’s got the south line. Gonna hold it or die trying.”
Cass pulls a battered sidearm from his belt and shoves it into my hand. “Just in case,” he says. “If anything happens, you find me.” For a second, his bravado flickers, and I see the fear underneath. Then it’s gone, replaced by the swagger.
He takes off down the corridor, trailing the chaos behind him.
I pocket the gun. It’s heavier than I remember.
The next hour is a blur of wounds and blood, every surface slick and sticky. The triage line wraps around the corridor, men and women sitting on the floor, cradling burns or bites or each other. The air is thick with the smell of bleach and panic. Every few minutes, someone runs in with a new body—some dead, some close to it.
I find myself in the back room with a boy maybe fifteen years old, his eyes glassy and his leg seeping blood through a makeshift bandage. He’s quiet, just staring at the wall. I kneel beside him, peel the bandage back, and wince at the jagged, crescent-shaped bite above his ankle.
I look up at Michael, who’s standing in the doorway. He sees the bite, then meets my eyes.
He shakes his head. “No chance,” he says, voice soft.
I want to scream, but instead I just nod and cover the bite again. The boy blinks, as if waking up, and says, “Is it bad?”
I squeeze his hand. “It’s not good,” I say, and I hope he forgives me for the lie.
Michael touches my shoulder as I stand. “You did everything right,” he says.
“Did I?” I ask, voice sharper than I mean.
He squeezes, once, then lets go.
By now, the gunfire is unceasing. There’s shouting, someone calling for more hands at the main gate. I glance through the window—over the heads of the wounded, past the rows of plastic sheeting that pass for privacy curtains—and see the perimeter wall. Figures are moving along the top, silhouettes against the gray sky, rifles flashing at the line of bodies pressing up from the outside.
Rhett is easy to spot, even from here: he’s the tallest, always at the front, shouting over the noise. I watch him sweep a rifle in an arc, pause to check the footing of a smaller guard, then move to plug a gap in the sandbags.
He looks up and sees me, just for a second. He nods once, calm and certain. I’m not sure if it’s a farewell or a promise.
At the far end of the quad, a new sound starts—thunderous, rhythmic, almost musical in its horror. The dead are piling up at the wall, bodies stacked three deep, the ones behind climbing over the ones in front, heedless of the damage to their own flesh. The defenders try to keep up, but for every infected that falls, two more take its place.
The first breach comes with a shriek: a section of the chain-link gives way, and the horde floods through, moving faster than I thought possible. The guards retreat, laying down cover fire as they fall back toward the admin building.
Inside, the panic doubles. People trample each other in the rush to block the interior doors. The staff drag beds and chairs into barricades, while those strong enough to walk start arming themselves with whatever is at hand—mop handles, kitchen knives, fire axes.
Michael takes my arm, yanking me out of the main bay just as a window shatters behind us. Glass rains down, a cold, glittering storm.
He holds my face in both hands. “If they get in the building, you run for the tunnels,” he says. “Don’t look back.”
I want to argue, but I know he’s right.
He kisses me—fierce, bruising, the taste of copper on his tongue.
Then he’s gone, back into the fray, I grab the gun from my pocket, check the magazine, and wait.
I watch through the narrow glass panel as the makeshift wall of beds and cabinets shudders with the force. Someone screams. Someone else fires a shot, and the bullet punches a hole in the drywall above my head.
I duck, heart pounding so hard I can barely see. The infected are relentless—hands clawing, jaws gnashing, faces smeared with old blood and new. I recognize one of them, a girl who used to clean the kitchen, her apron still knotted around her waist. She was kind, once. Now her eyes are empty, teeth bared.
The barricade won’t hold. I know it. The others in the hall know it, too.
I look for Michael—he’s in the center, trying to staunch a chest wound with his bare hands, barking orders even as the blood pools under his knees. He’s covered in red, his lab coat a lost cause, but he doesn’t slow down. Not for a second.
A gunshot rings out, impossibly close. The window behind me explodes inward, shards tearing through the air. I duck and cover my head, but a sliver of glass bites into my cheek. I barely feel it.
I crawl along the floor, keeping low, as the first of the infected break through. The hallway is chaos: people shoving, screaming, a melee of fists and teeth and whatever weapons are left. I raise the gun, aim, and fire at the nearest face. It’s a man, Alpha, his mouth a ruin of broken teeth. The bullet drops him, but the next one is already there, and the next.
I back up, step by step, until my heel hits the door to the supply closet.
I duck inside, slam the door, and bolt it from the inside. My hands are shaking so bad I can barely hold the gun.
I listen.
There’s noise—so much noise—but underneath it, I hear someone moving. A scuff of boots, the hiss of breath through clenched teeth.
“Lira?” The voice is rough, barely audible.
I fumble with the lock, open the door, and Cass staggers in, blood streaming down his forearm.
“Didn’t think I’d make it,” he says, collapsing onto the floor. “Where’s the doc?”
“Still fighting,” I say, breathless.
He leans his head back against the wall and laughs. “Figures.”
I tear a strip from my shirt and wrap it around his arm. “You’re not dying,” I tell him.
“Good,” he says, and grins. “Because you still owe me.”
I want to kiss him, but there’s no time.
The pounding outside gets louder. The infected are inside, tearing through anyone in their path.
Cass gestures to a vent at the back of the closet. “That goes to the crawlspace,” he says. “You can make it, you’re small.”
I don’t want to leave, but I know I have to. I look at Cass—his eyes bright, his jaw set—and I know he’ll be right behind me, if he can.
I squeeze his hand, then climb into the vent, crawling through dust and darkness.
But ahead—there’s a sliver of light.
I crawl toward it, heart still hammering, and think of Michael, and Cass, Jace, and Rhett, and all the impossible choices that brought me here.
The horde howls. The fort shudders. But I keep moving.
Because this is what it means to survive: you keep going, even when the end is right behind you.
You keep going, and you never look back.
Not until the light is all you can see.
Chapter Seventeen: Divided We Fall
Lira
The light at the end of the vent is not as heroic as I hoped. It’s a medium sized opening behind the lower shelf of a janitor’s closet, three feet off the ground, caked in decades of grease and lint. I stick my face through and choke on the stale, chemical air—then wriggle my shoulders, and finally slide out onto the cracked linoleum.
My knees hit the floor with a hollow clack. The rest of me follows, scraped raw and shivering. My hair is stuck to my face with a mixture of sweat and dust, and there’s a gash on my thigh I don’t remember earning. I suck in a slow, careful breath and wait for the next shoe to drop.
It takes a moment for Cass to appear. There’s a low, animal grunt, and then the vent buckles around his hips. For a second I think he’s stuck—truly, impossibly stuck—and the prospect is so ridiculous I almost laugh. Then he manages to wedge both arms forward, grabs the metal lip of the opening, and levers himself out. The effort costs him: when he lands, it’s with a crash that sends empty mop buckets rattling.
We stare at each other across the gloom. His hair is wild, the dark black locks stained gray at the tips with dust. His nose is bleeding again, but he doesn’t seem to notice. The silence between us is thick with all the things we won’t say.
After a minute, Cass grins, the full wolf. “That was almost fun,” he says, voice barely above a whisper. “You okay?”
I nod, too winded to speak. I gesture at my thigh, at the blood soaking through the canvas. “Just a scratch,” I manage.
He glances, shrugs, then wipes his nose on the sleeve of his jacket. “You get used to it.” He’s already scanning the closet—finding the brooms, the battered first-aid kit on the shelf, the low slit of light under the door. “Ready?”
I’m not, but the only thing worse than going is not going.
Cass cracks the door open a centimeter, then pulls back. “Mess hall’s just outside, looks secure, for now.” He says. “You first. Less likely to shoot a pretty face.”
“Debatable,” I mutter, but slide past him anyway.
The mess hall is chaos. Not the chaos of outside—no screams, no gunshots. This is the slow, simmering kind. The benches have been pushed to the edges of the room, where refugees huddle in family clumps, backs to the wall. There are more people than the fire code ever imagined, all of them radiating the same low-level dread. Children stare blankly into space; adults grip each other’s hands so hard the knuckles glow white.
Cass is a head taller than most, but nobody looks at him. They look at me.
At first it’s just one or two—old men, a Beta nurse I recognize from the med wing. Then it’s everyone. Faces tilt up in unison, and the effect is so surreal it feels choreographed. I keep my head down, try to tuck into the far corner, but Cass won’t allow it. He steers us through the open floor, hand warm at the small of my back. He keeps his eyes straight ahead, but I see the flick of his gaze at every corner.
We find a quiet spot behind the serving line, a low counter lined with dented thermoses and the abandoned remains of breakfast. The smell is foul—burnt oats and the sharp ammonia of too many people breathing too little air.
Cass leans in, voice lower now. “You see what I see?”
I risk a look up. The stares have shifted to whispers—fast, sharp, and not even pretending to be polite. I catch fragments: “That’s her,” and “…the Omega…” and “…if they just…”
My hands tremble. I stuff them into the pockets of my jacket, fingers searching for the pill bottle Jace gave me. It’s there, cold and rattling, but I don’t open it. Instead, I rub the plastic smooth, wishing I could disappear inside it.
Cass watches me, then grabs a cup off the counter and fills it with the dregs of something brown and acidic. He pushes it toward me, then taps his finger on the rim. “Drink. We might need the energy.”
I drink, and it burns all the way down.
We’re quiet for a minute, letting the noise of the room wash over us. The crowd is shifting—someone is setting up a portable radio at the far end, the static pulsing through the air like a second heartbeat. People glance at the door, at the windows, at the ceiling. Waiting for something, or someone.
Cass leans back, one boot braced against the counter. “You want to hide, I’ll cover for you,” he says. “Or we can face the mob together.” His grin is half joke, half challenge.
I want to say, “Hide.” I want to run. But the only thing worse than being the target is being a coward, so I shake my head. “Let’s get it over with.”
He shrugs, as if this is the answer he expected. He drains his own cup, then sets it down with a clink. “Stay here,” he says, then vanishes into the crowd.
Alone, I notice the other details. The way the benches are angled for quick escape. The way mothers pull their children closer as I walk by. The painted lines on the floor—emergency routes, but now just faded reminders that order was ever possible.
I wander the edge of the room, hoping to look useful. Hoping to look invisible.
It’s not working.
A young woman blocks my path, her hair hanging limply around er shoulders. She’s carrying a toddler on her hip, both of them bundled in donated army jackets two sizes too big. The toddler stares at me with huge, unblinking eyes.
The woman’s voice is soft, but her posture is pure threat. “You’re the one,” She says.
I don’t answer. I can’t.
She doesn’t push it. She just angles her body, blocking the aisle. “You shouldn’t be here,” she says, not quite mean. Not kind, either.
I want to scream, or hit her, or apologize for something I never did. Instead, I just nod, and find another route.
Around me, the conversations are hushed but urgent. I hear “…only takes one…” and “…they should just give her up…” and “…maybe then they’ll leave us alone…” It’s like being pecked to death by crows—one tiny jab at a time.
I wrap my arms around myself, feeling the old ache in my left wrist where the zip tie gouged a stripe of flesh. I run my thumb along the inside of my forearm, tracing the ridges of yesterday’s pain.
At some point, I notice the bracelet—Rhett’s, still wound around my wrist, copper and blue beads glinting in the emergency lights. I want to hide it, but I also want to show it off. A mark of protection, maybe, or just proof that I belong to someone, somewhere.
I keep moving, head down. My boots slap the tile in a steady rhythm, faster than necessary.
At the next turn, I almost plow into Rhett himself. He’s just as battered as last time, a new gash at his eyebrow and his shirt stained with something dark. His eyes scan the crowd, then fix on me. He relaxes, just a fraction, and motions me over.
“Everything okay?” He asks, voice pitched for privacy.
“Define ‘okay,’” I say, forcing a smile.
He nods, as if this is the right answer. He stands close enough that our shoulders almost touch, a wall between me and the crowd. I can smell the sweat on him, the metallic tang of blood and fear.
“You’re not safe here,” he says, not unkind.
I look around at the faces—some glaring, some just afraid. “Nowhere is safe,” I say.
He snorts, almost a laugh. “True.”
There’s a lull in the background noise. People are gathering near the windows, staring at the wall outside. I follow their gaze and see nothing—just the gray expanse of concrete, ringed in razor wire. But the sound is different now. Not the random shuffle of zombies, but a pulse, a rhythm.
