Condemn (BUNKER 12 Book 2) (6 page)

"Go!" Allison screamed.
"
Gooooo!
Oh my
god! They're coming in! Help!"

Kari fumbled the keys trying to fit
them into the ignition. She wondered why they hadn't just left them
in there to begin with. She could hear people running around behind
her, could hear them crying out, shouting. Someone screamed. She
heard the soft smack of something hard hitting flesh, the
distinctive sound of bones splintering, the sound of glass
shattering. Someone fell.

"Hurry up!
Hurry uuuuuup!
Oh god,
hurry!"

She shoved the key into the ignition,
but it twisted in her fingers and fell into the darkness at her
feet.

"Oh no! Hannah! Don't touch
her! Get away!
Go go GOOOO!"

Don't touch who?
Kari's mind screamed as she swept her hands over
the surface of the floor. They hit the keys and knocked them into
the step beside her left foot. "I dropped the keys!" she screamed.
"I need light!"

"Allison! Oh no!
Allisonnnnn!"

"Get away from her!"

Something slammed onto the roof of the
bus. Everything seemed to stop for a second. Everyone froze and
looked up. They all heard the scuttling noises. There was a scream,
and Fran Rollins shouted, "They're climbing the telephone poles!
They're on the wires!"

"Go! Get out of here!"

Another crash sounded
overhead.

"There's more!"

"Get away from the windows! Bren!
Hannah!"

"Daddy! Help!"

Kari found the keys and leapt back
onto the seat. She almost lost them again, then shoved the damn
thing into the slot and turned it. The engine roared to life. She
shifted into gear and the bus leapt forward, nearly stalling.
"Lights!" she screamed. "Where are the goddamn lights? I can't
see—"

The bus slammed into a curb, then hit
the light post.

"We're stuck!"

"Get her out! Get her out!"

"How?"

"Hit her! Push her out with
the—"

"It's Allison!"

"She's gone! We can't save her! Now!
No! Don't touch her! Get back! Don't touch her!"

"You can't!" Allison screamed. "No!
Please don't make me go!"

"Oh god. Don't kill her."

"She's gone, Jasmina! No! Get her
away. Get away!"

Kari yanked the shift into reverse and
gunned the engine. She could hear people falling behind her as she
backed up. She twisted the wheel to the right and aimed for the
center of the street, toward the paler gray between the darker
walls of the buildings. The engine screamed in protest, then bucked
and nearly stalled.

She could feel the Wraiths behind her,
crawling over the outside of the bus, working their way inside,
getting at them. She knew that Allison was already gone, had
somehow been touched and had only minutes left before the Flense
took hold of her mind and turned her into one of them.

"Get off the bus!" someone shouted.
"Allison! Get off!"

"No! I won't! You have to help
me!"

"You have to go!"

"Daddy!" Hannah screamed. "Another
one's coming in!"

There was an explosion of a gunshot
and a flash of light reflecting off the windshield, blinding Kari
for half a second. Then another gunshot.

"Alli— Oh my god!
You shot her!"

"I had to! Go go go!"

The bus roared past the garage, and as
they went, Kari thought she saw Jonah's and Eddie's faces. But she
couldn't be sure.

The fight wasn't over behind her. She
could hear more glass breaking as the metal pipes they had brought
with them were used against the creatures. Metal slammed into glass
and against more metal. The men shouted, directing each other.
Susan shouted. There was a another sickening thud.

Kari wanted to turn around.
She
needed
to turn
around and see. "What's happening?" she screamed.

"Anymore? " Harrison yelled. "Are
there anymore?" He sounded out of breath.

"I don't— No. No!"

"Stay alert. Spread out. Watch the
windows! Hannah, get away from there!"

Kari kept driving, caroming from one
side of the road to the other. They passed the last structure and
the landscape opened up in front of them, glistening in the
starlight. The road became a silver vein, straight and
unbroken.

Behind them, the inhuman things that
had once been human gave chase, loping along on naked feet, somehow
running faster than any human — or anything that had once been
human — should be able to.

The survivors, men and women and
children alike, wept. They wept because they were still alive and
untouched. They wept for Allison, whose lifeless body lay folded
over the window frame through which the Wraith had reached her. The
hole in her skull from the bullet Nami had fired sprayed blood
against the side of the bus and onto the road, leaving a
trail.

Nami sat beside her, not daring to
touch her. He sobbed for the woman he had secretly
loved.

Still weeping, he pulled off his belt
and wrapped it around her ankles like a lasso. Then he pulled it
tight and canted her out the window. Nobody came to help him;
nobody came to console him.

He turned his eyes away from the pale
lump in the road. He didn't want to see what the Wraiths would do
when they reached her.

In his mind, he was already imagining
it.

What Jonah saw in the warehouse had deeply troubled him, but by the
time they exited the shop twenty minutes later and headed for the
bus, his mood had significantly improved. The search had yielded a
better-than-expected outcome. In his arms were two cases of Penzoil
SAE 5W-30 weight motor oil. In his estimation, it would be enough
to get them to the evac center.

He had to be careful carrying it. The
cardboard holding the plastic bottles had gotten wet at some point
and was flimsy, threatening to disintegrate at any
moment.

Danny followed along behind him with a
case of radiator coolant. He had suggested to Jonah that they come
back for it in the morning, reasoning that at least one of them
should have their hands free in case they encountered trouble. But
Jonah didn't want to leave it behind. It was only fifty yards to
the bus, and he was pretty sure the town was completely empty,
despite what they'd just seen inside the shop.

But the moment they stepped out onto
the street, he knew he'd been wrong. Again.

"Shit!"
he whispered.
"Go back,
Danny!"

He spun around, nearly losing the oil
as the sides of the box began to fail.

"What fo—" But Danny saw the Wraiths
converging on the bus. He ducked back, sucking in air in
alarm.

"Get back
inside!"

As soon as they were in the shop
again, Jonah set the cases on the counter, not bothering to chase
the loose bottles that avalanched onto the floor. Danny set the
coolant beside them.

"What do we do?"

"The warehouse," Jonah said. "Get in
the warehouse."

Danny's face went white with fear. He
didn't want to go in there, not again.

"We've got no choice. It's the only
place we can secure the doors."

Their arrival twenty minutes earlier
had been through a smashed front door. The glass was scattered
everywhere, and the brick which had done the job lay in the middle
of the mess, half buried beneath a season's worth of dead leaves.
Evening was rapidly bleeding the sky of light, but there was still
enough coming in through the opening and the row of dusty windows
in each of the three rolling gates for them to make their way
around.

As Kari and Nami had reported, a
single vehicle occupied the maintenance section of the building. It
was parked in the central repair bay. The ancient heavy-duty pickup
truck sat like the empty shell of a giant terrapin, its hood
propped open and nothing but a dark, empty space in the engine
compartment staring out at them. For some reason, the sight gave
Danny a chill.

Jonah aimed the light from the cell
phone down through the engine compartment and into the shadows in
the pit below. Something moved, either a number of small things or
a single large one with multiple appendages capable of reaching
into the far corners of the space. He stepped away in fright before
letting out a nervous laugh. "Rats," he said. "I can hear the
babies."

The animals' claws made dry, ghostly
sounds as they scraped against the cement floor.

He reminded Danny to look for oil,
then made his way over to the supply shelves. Danny glanced back
into the pit, his pulse still pounding in his temples. He knew
Jonah was right about the rats, and yet his mind kept conjuring
images of other creatures lurking in the darkness. His ankles felt
suddenly much more exposed than he wanted.

"Nothing here," Jonah said in
frustration. Most of the boxes had been torn open, their contents
clearly rifled through by other people in the past. "Brake pads and
hoses, filters. Random bits and pieces. Nothing we can really
use."

"I think we should come back in the
morning, Jonah."

"Don't you think it's strange that
there aren't any tools? This place has definitely been picked
clean."

"Here's the drum," Danny said. He'd
edged his way back toward the front, to where there was more light.
He gave the metal barrel an experimental tap. "Might be oil. Sounds
like it might be half full."

Jonah joined him, frowning. "No easy
way to pump it out without electricity. Keep looking."

He found the doorway to the warehouse
behind the supply shelves, propped it open, and went through. A
solitary window, high up in the wall, provided almost no
light.

Danny stepped up beside him. Air
whistled through his teeth. "Let's get the hell out of
here."

The room was large and mostly empty. A
single wooden chair sat in the middle. It was turned onto its side.
Small piles of garbage collected in the corners. Ropes and chains
hung from the rafters.

"There's nothing here, Jonah. Come
on."

But Jonah was already making his way
around the room, peering closely at the dark stains dripping down
the walls. He stepped carefully over the dried pools on the floor.
He stopped by a set of chains bolted into the wall and rattled them
with his pipe. Thick blood caked the links, stiffening them. He
could smell it, the rotten coppery tang. Dried blood and clumps of
something that might've been flesh or fabric. And clumps of
hair.

"Jesus," he whispered.

"Jonah, we need to go."

The splatter pattern reached to chest
height, hinting that whoever had been bound there had either been
shot or hit hard enough with some object to cause serious
damage.

He crossed back to Danny. The look on
his face was pale and grim. "You're right. There's nothing here.
Come on."

Danny let out a sigh of relief. "Right
behind you."

"One last place to check, though."
Jonah's voice sounded pinched, and for once he looked scared. He
headed back into the shop. "Give me a hand with the truck
first."

"The truck? Why? It's
useless."

"I want to check out the pit
underneath."

"The rat's nest? Come on, Jonah. It's
almost dark. We'll come back in the morning."

"We're here now. It'll only take a
minute."

"There's nothing under
there."

Jonah faced Danny. "When I was in high
school, I used to hang out where my older brother worked at a body
shop. They would keep supplies down in the pit, although it was
against safety regulations. I think I saw something down there. I
need to know."

Danny watched him in disbelief, anger
rising up inside of his chest as the reckless teenager pulled open
the driver's side door. The released emergency brake let out a loud
thud that reverberated through the shop. He wanted to smack
Jonah.