The ZPOCALYPTO Book Bundle (#1 of 4), page 75
Standing side by side, Jake somehow manages to look fitter and stronger than Reggie does. Both their faces are a little leaner than they were almost a week ago, but Jake started off heavier than the rest of us, and so he doesn’t look quite so haggard.
It’s the bruises, I realize. Jake doesn’t have any.
Which means the tunnel didn’t collapse on them.
Kelly’s fine.
“What do you want to do, Jess?” Jake quietly asks. He kneels down, rubbing the cuff marks on his wrists. As far as I can tell, they’re the only injuries on him.
“We’re running out of time.”
Reggie drops the cardkey into my lap. “It’s after five, Jess. We need to get that door open.”
“Five o’clock? Shit. Go help Ash. Get her ready.”
I stand up. I’ve got an idea. It’s not totally original, but it worked before.
“Fire extinguisher,” I tell Jake, setting my jaw. I head down the hall past Ashley’s room to where the emergency sign hangs from the ceiling.
“You’re going to burn the door down?”
“I believe I said extinguisher, not starter. If we’re lucky, there’s an axe.”
“You can’t break the door down!” Jake exclaims. “This is federal property! Homeland Security!”
“Give me a break.”
He gawps for a moment. “You and your axes,” he finally says.
But there’s no axe, just the extinguisher. I yank it out of its little glass home and turn. It’s got a nice heft to it, but will it work? It’ll have to. Jake watches me with wary eyes. For a second, I wonder if he’s going to try and stop me. He steps aside.
I try hitting the door first, but the wood is too hard and the tank just bounces off. In fact, the door doesn’t even splinter. It dents.
“It’s some sort of plastic resin,” he says.
“Damn fake wood.”
Mabel starts going ape shit. Jake flinches, but he doesn’t act surprised. “Reggie told me what you did.”
“I didn’t infect her.”
He shrugs.
It’s strange how easily he accepts this, first that I actually killed a real person in real life, which makes me a murderer, and second, that she turned, despite not being bitten. I don’t know if it’s because our whole situation is just so screwed up to begin with, or we’re all in a state of shock. Very little surprises us anymore.
Reggie sticks his head out of Ashley’s room to see what the noise is about. “Try the handle,” he suggests. “Not down, but straight at it,” he adds, before going back inside.
“Not down?” Jake echoes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
I lift the tank over my shoulder, both hands on the neck like I’m strangling it. I hope and pray the thing doesn’t break open and explode on me on impact. Jake must have the same fear, because he raises his hand to protect his face and suggests I might want to empty it first.
“Good idea,” I reply, sarcastically. “Because then it won’t be so heavy. Or effective.”
I bring it down onto the door handle with all my strength.
The tank pings off, and nearly slams into my shin. The handle rattles and bends a little, but it doesn’t break.
“That was effective.”
I scowl at him.
“I said straight in!” Reggie says, reappearing in the doorway. “You’ll just break the handle off without disengaging the latch assembly. Straight into the door. Knock that sucker into the room.”
I try again, aiming from directly in front of the handle. I can’t get as much leverage this way, but the impact thrusts the door handle flush into the fake wood. I hear something ping off the floor inside the room.
I push against the door. It still doesn’t open.
“Well, that worked like a charm, didn’t it?”
“Too bad it’s not glass,” Jake says, gesturing for the extinguisher.
“Shut up.”
He motions for me to step back, then he puts all of his weight into slamming the bottom edge of the tank straight into the center of the door. He hits it so hard that his sheet nearly falls off. He drops the extinguisher to grab it, and gives me a sheepish grin. He takes a moment to adjust himself. “Sorry. I just—”
Mabel smashes into her door, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. “Cripes!”
“Don’t worry about her.”
He lifts the tank and slams the door again. This time a crack appears in the tough resin. He does this twice more, and the crack widens and chips of faux wood begin to fly.
“Kelly!” I shout, mostly so I don’t have to listen to that fucked-up moaning behind us. “It’s us. We’re coming in.”
There’s no answer from the inside the room.
“He might not be in there,” Jake says.
“What do you mean?”
“It might be Micah.”
“Why do you say that?”
He sucks in a breath and purses his lips. I wait for him to answer, but he turns back to the door and resumes battering it.
“Jake? What’d you mean by that?”
“Nothing.”
“It wasn’t nothing. Why don’t you think Kelly’s in there?” I grab his arm to stop him. I need to know.
He sets the extinguisher down and turns to me. “How’d you guys end up in here with us?”
“We had to go back for you.”
He looks away guiltily. “Had to? You left me.”
“We had no choice. And Kelly did go back. We all would’ve, but he took it upon himself.”
He still doesn’t look at me. “I was all alone in that stupid tunnel.”
“We’re lucky any of us got through. Anyway, you’re alive, aren’t you?”
“Barely. I just made it back before my cartridge failed.”
“Yeah, and same with us.” I don’t go into how we had to share a single cartridge between the five of us. “It’s not our fault. Anyway, we all made it out alive.”
“I just don’t want you to blame me for this.”
“You’re the one trying to lay blame. None of us wanted any of this to happen.”
He sighs.
“Tell me why you don’t think it’s Kelly inside this room.”
He starts hitting the door again.
“You did see Kelly, didn’t you? When he came back?”
“The next—”
[BAM!]
“—morning, yes. I had to spend the night locked inside a car blocks away from the overpass. It was still—”
[BAM!]
“—swarming. Kelly was already there when I got back.”
“So, why don’t you think he’s here?”
[BAM!]
“Jake! Why don’t you think it’s Kelly?”
“Because he’s dead.”
My blood freezes.
“How do you know? Did you see him die?”
He shakes his head.
“Give me that extinguisher,” I growl.
He refuses. He keeps ramming it into the door. He quickly tires himself out, and yet he still won’t quit. He’s using it as an excuse not to face me.
Reggie comes out with Ash under his arm his good arm. He’s half-carrying her, half-dragging. Her feet make sloppy stepping motions, and she struggles to keep her head upright. I notice he’s abandoned the sling.
He lets her down gently halfway at the other end of the hall and props her up in the corner. She opens her eyes, blinks a few times, and mumbles his name. Then she drops her head to her chest.
“Slowly but surely,” Reggie says. He beckons for the extinguisher and asks for a try.
“I got this.”
“Give me the damn thing, Jake, and get out of my way.”
“Your shoulder, Reg,” I remind him.
“I’m fine.”
He starts off using only the one arm, his beefy palm encircling the tank’s neck, so he’s wielding the extinguisher like a mallet. Even like that, he still manages to do more damage than either of us. And yet the door remains stubbornly intact.
I go to Ash. I feel numb. Jake joins me, and it’s everything I can do not to scream at him to go away. “Too bad we don’t have smelling salts,” he says. “That’d snap her right out of it.”
I stare at him, then jump up.
“Hey!”
I run down the hallway to Nurse Mabel’s room and start flinging drawers open. I finally find a box of ammonia inhalants about halfway down. I extract one ampoule and hurry back, squeezing it between my fingers. The delicate glass inside shatters. A cool liquid soaks the cotton wrapper, and I immediately feel the urge to sneeze as the hard, sharp smell of ammonia reaches my nose.
I shove it right up to Ashley’s face and wait. At first she does nothing, then her head snaps back. It lolls to one side. I push the ampoule closer to her nose.
“Whuh?”
“Ashley, wakey wakey.”
She lifts a hand and swipes weakly at her face. “Stahhhp!”
“You’re going to burn her nose hairs off,” Jake warns.
“You’re worried about nose hairs? She’ll grow them back.” I practically shove the thing into her nostril on the next try.
“No!” Ashley raises both hands now and pushes. She blinks, her eyes watering. “Whathafug?” she mumbles. “Jeh?” Her head turns and she sees Jake.
Reggie stops his assault on the door and comes over. “Hey, babe, it’s me.”
“Reggggsh? Whazgoingon?”
“What’s going on is we’re getting out of here.” He smiles and nods at me. “Good thinking.”
“The smelling salts were my idea,” Jake says.
Reggie returns to the other door and starts battering it with renewed vigor. He grunts from the effort and pain. He’s now using both arms, despite his shoulder injury. Ashley flinches each time the extinguisher crashes into the door, and she tries to push us away. She looks drunk, but it’s a definite improvement from where she was just a few minutes earlier.
Finally, there’s a splintering sound. Reggie doesn’t stop. In fact, he lays into it even harder. Every few strikes, he glances over at us. At Ashley. My heart skips a beat seeing the determination on his face. I can’t help feeling a little jealous. She’s the reason he’s doing this. She’s why he’s fighting through the pain.
He pries a piece off the bottom corner off with his bare hands, then begins working on another. Jake gets up and helps. They get another wedge off, and Jake bends down and peers through.
“I can see a bed,” he announces.
“Get out of the way,” Reggie pants. “Let me finish.”
“No, wait a sec. There’s another. There’s two beds in there! I can’t tell if anyone’s in them, though.”
I hurry over, but Reggie resumes tearing the door apart. He hammers some more, pulls some more, and even tries kicking. Finally, another wedge begins to bend. He wrenches it back and forth until it snaps off. The hole’s still too small for either of them, but I might be able to squeeze through.
“Careful,” Jake warns. “You’ll get splinters.”
Reggie snickers. “She just got blown up. I think she can handle a few splinters.”
“She didn’t get blown up.”
“While she was trying to save your ass she did, so how about showing a little respect?”
“I didn’t disrespect—”
“Just get out of the way,” I say, and begin to shimmy my way through.
The boys continue their back-and-forth. I know Reggie’s just needling Jake, and poor Jake’s falling for it. I don’t bother telling them to knock it off. It’s actually good to hear.
I stand up inside the room.
While I was on the floor, I’d seen wheels for both beds, but I couldn’t see any higher because, just like in Jake’s room, a privacy curtain blocked my view.
On the floor against the wall next to the door is a pile of stuff. I recognize our backpacks and some of our clothes. It’s all unwashed, still muddy and stained. To my left is a bank of computer servers on metal racks. Old tech, which would be consistent with the sign outside and the extra secure door. It doesn’t explain why they’re still on, though, unless they’re the servers Mabel had mentioned, then one they’re connecting the new implants through. They hum softly away, lights blinking green and yellow.
“It’s like a refrigerator in there,” Jake says, poking his head through the opening.
Reggie pulls him out of the way. “Is it them, Jess? Micah and Kelly? Are they okay?”
I pull the curtain open and find Micah lying in the first bed. He looks like he’s been through hell and back. His face is badly swollen and bruised. His eyes flutter open. He whispers my name.
“S’all noise about? Thaw were bean bomb again.”
“It’s just us. We’re getting you out of here.”
“Jess?” Reggie calls.
“It’s Micah,” I say. “He’s...” There are a lot of bandages around his head and his arms. But no slings or splints. And no casts. I reach down and pinch his toe, and his foot curls. The way he’d hit that sign, I was sure he’d broken his back. He doesn’t seem paralyzed, anyway. “He’ll live.”
“And Kelly?”
I turn toward the other bed. The person lying in it is as still as death.
And a cry of utter despair escapes my mouth.
Chapter 21
“Jessie?” Reggie calls in through the opening. “Hey, it’s Kelly, right? Is he okay? Jess?”
No.
“Jess?”
...lost one of them.
Why did it have to be him?
I don’t know what to do. I’m frozen. I’m melting. I sink to the floor.
I hear them quietly murmuring to each other outside the room, trying to decide whether to continue or to wait. A few seconds pass, then they resume tearing the door apart. I barely notice the noise. I hardly notice when they remove the last piece and step inside. It only registers when Reggie touches my arm. And even then, I’m too numb to respond.
He steps past me to the other bed. “What the...?” he whispers. Then, “Fuck.”
I bury my head in my hands. After a moment, he comes back and crouches down. “I’m sorry, Jess. I know you wanted...”
“Don’t touch me!” I yell.
“But—”
“Please, just go away.”
He doesn’t. He stays in his crouch for several more seconds, then reminds me that we can’t stop now. “It’s coming up on six o’clock, Jess. We’ve got just over an hour to get out of here.”
“Leave me alone.”
He stands up again and joins Jake. They exchange a few words, then I hear them sorting through our clothes and backpacks. How can they do this, keep moving forward? How can I? I hear Reg quietly ask Jake if he knows what happened to Kelly, but Jake hems and haws like he did before. He knows something, but he’s not talking.
“Then answer me this,” Reggie says. He extracts a shirt from the piles on the floor and holds it up. The fabric’s stiff from dried mud and blood. It’s torn, even burnt in places. Even so, I can tell it was Micah’s. “How the hell did you manage to survive the bomb blast? You don’t have a single mark on you. Did the tunnel not collapse?”
“What tunnel? What are you talking about?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Reggie whispers. “What the hell happened to you guys? To Kelly?” He grabs Jake. “Tell me!”
“Okay! Okay. Stop!”
“Now.”
“First of all, there was no tunnel.”
“That’s not possible.” He finds Micah’s old tablet computer and holds it up. “We know you made it there. We saw your signals. They were—”
“Signals? What signals?”
“Micah’s tracking script. He and Ash got it to work. We could see inside the wall. You were moving away from the Midtown tunnel, northward. We figured you were heading for the Harlem tunnel. The signals disappeared right about where the tunnel begins.”
“Harlem? No. That’s not why we went north. Why would we take that tunnel? It’s nearly three miles long.”
“So, you weren’t in the tunnel when it was bombed?”
Jake frowns at him for a moment, puzzled. “You keep mentioning bombs. What bombs?”
“Because of what we’d done, Jake. We drew those goddamn undead into the water, and within a day they were showing up on the Manhattan side.”
“You think they came through the tunnel? But that’s impossible. They can’t swim.”
“No, but the currents must’ve dragged them there.”
“Overnight? Through the blockage?”
“There’s the other bore.”
Jake exhales. “You tracked us and thought we were trying to come back the Harlem tunnel? The Brooklyn-Battery would’ve made more sense.”
“Except the other end’s in a busy part of the city. The Harlem’s more remote.”
“And you waited for us at the other end,” he says, finally beginning to understand.
“Until they started bombing—”
“To stop anymore zombies from coming through. That makes sense.”
“Well, we’d seen the planes earlier, but we didn’t realize that’s what they were doing. We thought they were just trying to sanitize lower Manhattan. Then we thought they’d just focus on the two tunnels, the Midtown and Battery. By the time they hit us, it was already too late to get away.”
“Holy cow.”
“That’s what we’ve been telling you, Jake. And now you’re going to tell us what happened to you and Kelly.”
“Why? It doesn’t change anything!”
“It matters!”
“We need to get out of here,” Jake cries. “That’s what matters right now!”
Reggie takes a deep breath. He glances over at me. “Fine. Get your ass dressed.” He hands Jake a set of shorts and tee shirt, the same ones he’d worn last Saturday, the day we swam to Long Island. “But you’re going to tell us.”
He throws another set of clothes over to me, as if he expects me to change into them. But they’re filthy and burned. The pants look like they were cut off of my body. “Jess, we really need to move.”
He does a quick visual check on Micah, before kneeling down in front of me again. “He’s not doing so good, Jess. I’m worried if we move him, we could do more harm.”
