Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (34 page)

“Let me,” Michael said. “Let me help him.”

“Sure you can handle him? He’s kind of heavy.”

“I’ll try,” Michael answered, and he looped John’s arm around his shoulder. “Yeah, I can do it.”

“Good.”

“I’m… going to die,” John said, looking into Michael’s dark eyes. “You know that… right?”

“No one else dies,” Burns said. “That’s an order.”

“We’re making it out of here together,” Michael said, taking a few tentative steps while holding John up. He was pleasantly surprised that the reporter shuffled right along with him.

“I want… you to make… a life for yourself out there. You… you’re a good man. You… deserve more than this… shit. I need to… hear it from… you… from your own… lips.”

“What? What do you need to hear me say?”

“That this isn’t… all there is for you. That you’ll… get out of here alive… and you’ll help other people. The way… you helped me. You won’t… fall backwards. Not back… to that life. Not… to that.”

“I promise you I won’t. Only, we’ll both get out of here, John. I’ll survive, and so will you and I’ll be someone again. I won’t go back to the underground. I swear it.”

The reporter smiled through broken teeth, then coughed up a wad of blood and spit it across the tracks. When he finished choking, he said, “Good. That’s… good.”

“Now we need to get this party started again,” Burns said. “You guys think you can keep up with the rest of us?”

John said, “No.”

“We’ll keep up fine,” Michael said. “Just keep the sprinting down to a minimum. Think we can rest a bit? Get our bearings?”

“We need to keep moving,” Nicole suggested. “I’m sorry for being so blunt, but there it is. We have to get somewhere safe or we’ll all end up like Alice and Beth.”

Burns turned toward Michael. “You ready to lead us out?”

“I don’t feel like much of a leader right now,” Michael said, shrugging his shoulder to get a better grip on John.

“Maybe not, but our reporter friend isn’t doing so well. Let’s get him to someplace better, where he can get some medical attention. What do you say?” Burns asked, extending his hand.

Michael peered at it, then nodded. He took the general’s big hand in his and shook it.

“We’ll have to follow the fire now,” Michael said, pointing down the blackened walls of the subway tunnel. “Brooklyn’s that way. If we’re going to get to the East River, then that’s the direction we need to go.”

Burns sniffed the air, said, “I don’t smell the gas anymore. Or at least, not so much.”

Howard said, “The fire probably burned it all out. That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

Burns nodded. “Probably. Don’t see how it can be that bad.”

“Let’s go,” Michael said. He wanted to move, to get rid of some of this adrenaline.

John groaned as they took a few steps, but his legs seemed to be working fine.

Michael squinted, wanted to get these people someplace where they’d finally be safe.

If there was such a place anymore.

“This way,” he said, and he walked away from the crippled train and into the darkened tunnel. “Come on.”

No one said a word. They listened to him, and they followed.

8:40 p.m.

The group had been walking for ten minutes, following the trail of the fireball that had left the brick walls tarnished with soot and everything else in its path scorched or burned to smoldering crisps. They stumbled across several bodies along the tracks, although it was difficult to tell if they were human or bestial. They were burned beyond recognition, their limbs twisted, their bones black as coal. Sometimes, the skulls were all that was left, and these gave clues as to the original state of the corpses. The extra-long snouts and all the teeth lining the jaws exposed many as Lycanthropes caught in the flare of the gas explosions, but others retained the rounded skulls of humans trapped by the flash fire.

They still heard rumblings overhead, explosions muffled by the earth separating the tunnel from the streets of the city. They were less frequent now, as though the fires had fizzled out, the gas in the pipes depleted. Still, every once in a while, a fair-sized tremor would rock the little group, and they would stop in their tracks.

They were quiet as they moved. Sandy and Nicole walked in the lead, followed by Howard, then Michael, still supporting John, while Burns kept watch on their backs, rotating his upper torso to the rear, then back. Once, Sandy reached for Nicole’s hand, and the soldier shook it off. Her Colt was the last of their weapons, other than poles and sharpened, twisted pieces of metal. The shotgun was bent at the barrel during the explosion on the train, left to burn in the subway car, and all of Burns’ weaponry had been destroyed during their escape from the fireball. He’d been reduced to carrying John’s long pole and feeling pretty silly. Also, more than a little vulnerable to attack.

But the gas explosion and fire seemed to have cleared the tunnels of Lycanthropic creatures. They hadn’t made an appearance in more than ten minutes. Burns figured they were probably wary of the tunnel after the blast, but he also knew they’d get bolder and more intrepid as the night went on, sniffing out fresh prey. At some point, they would return to their furious search. At the rate they were sweating, Burns figured the beasts could smell the group at the surface.

“And then there were six,” Howard said, finally breaking the silence as they walked.

Sandy turned and tried to give him a reassuring smile, but it came out as a grimace. She said, “Try not to focus on it.”

“Hard to think about anything else. I keep seeing their faces – Beth and Sylvia, Alice, even that jerk Craig.”

“Hey,” John croaked. “I’m… still here.”

“Barely,” Michael said. He was noticing John was walking a little straighter, regaining some of his strength.

“Push on,” Burns said. “It’s all we can do. Survive this night, and we can tell all the stories we want to tell about them.”

“I do wish they all were still with us,” Michael said. “But what can you do?”

They passed another subway train that had been hit and scoured by the fireball. Three of the cars lay on their sides, and there were still small blue flames sputtering on the melted orange plastic seats, goo dripping from them like candle wax.

“Where are the bodies?” Sandy asked, looking around the demolished cars. “Shouldn’t there be bodies?”

“Maybe they were all changed when the rats swept through,” Nicole suggested. “Try to think of something else.” Her eyes darted around the corridor.

“Like what?”

“Think about us,” Nicole suggested, and she looked at her girlfriend. The strength of her devotion shined through her eyes as she allowed herself a brief respite from her lookout duties. She stroked Sandy’s chin. “Maybe think about the baby you wanted.”

“Yeah, that I wanted. Seems to me you weren’t having any part of that – what did you call it? – oh, yeah, maternal bullshit.”

“Sweetheart, if we get out of this alive, I am totally willing to work with you. We’ll have that kid, and I’ll be the best mom I can be. I don’t know how far that can go, but I’ll try.”

Sandy gave her a quick squeeze, but she was serious when she released her. “But who’d want to bring a child into a world like this? I mean, whatever the world’s like now. I don’t know if I can do it in good conscience.”

“I’m just saying I’m willing,” Nicole said, and she snapped her attention back to watching out for lurking monsters. The gun in her hand was starting to feel heavy after carrying a weapon for so long. As a sniper, she was accustomed to having a tripod, someplace to rest her gun. Even when she was on a mission routing out a nest, it would only last a half hour or so. Plus, she could feel her adrenaline levels lowering, and she was getting tired and cranky and hungry. She suggested they split whatever junk food remained in the backpacks and everyone agreed, tearing into the beef jerky and Hostess cupcakes like the primeval monsters that chased them. John had some problems with anything hard; his broken teeth prevented him from devouring the beef jerky, but he went through four mini-cakes. The sugar in them revived him somewhat. Soon, the food was gone, and they resumed their trek toward Brooklyn.

Sandy didn’t stop talking, all through the so-called meal, as though her words were keeping her mind off the problems at hand. Maybe they were. But they also reminded everyone else about what they might be facing when they reached the surface again. Family, friends, neighbors – all of them were probably dead or altered by the new strain of virus.

“What are we going to see up there once we get aboveground?” Sandy jabbered away. “How much of the city will actually be left standing? I know the military is on the job, trying to keep it contained, but if we’re able to escape from the city, then what else is getting out right now as well?”

“I’m pretty scared of that, too,” Howard said. “I mean, if we make it out – and that’s a pretty big ‘if’ right now – what’re we going to do afterwards? We can’t just go back to our lives the way we were living them. I mean, there’s no dance company left now, no shows at all, so I am out of a job, out of my only real way of being happy. That’s really my only skill. I don’t have a lot more I can do to help.”

“You were pretty good in a scrap,” Burns said gruffly. He was getting tired of the whining and worrying. Certainly, he was scared, too, but he refused to show it. He noticed Nicole had adopted the same indifferent, half blank and half bravado Army expression he wore, and he wanted to slap her on the back and say, “That’s my girl!” Instead, he kept watching their tails and said, “Let’s focus on what’s important right now, can we? No more brooding or moping. We need to get to the river and get on that helicopter. We need to carry on. Once we’re out of here and in a safe place, we can worry about the fall of society. Okay?”

Nicole nodded agreement. “Okay,” she said.

“Yeah, okay,” Michael added.

“Any more cupcakes?” John asked.

They moved on in silence, broken only by the occasional crackling of an extant small fire. Once, they had to step over three charred corpses, lying on the ground in running positions. The fireball had caught them in the process of fleeing from it, the bodies trapped forever in Pompeii death poses. Sandy’s foot brushed against one of them, and the black ashes of skin sprinkled to the ground like soot-covered snowflakes, exposing the white bones beneath. She shivered and moved on, staying close to Nicole.

“Can I just say how scared I am right now?” she asked her lover.

“I’m scared, too, baby.”

“But you don’t look it. You’ve got your sniper face on, like nothing could ever bother you. It’s kind of disturbing.”

“You can’t see my insides,” Nicole said, and her face lost its gravitas for a moment. Her frightened eyes and twisted mouth briefly exposed the emotion hidden beneath her sober demeanor, exactly as the disturbed ashes had exposed the femur of the luckless fire victim farther back in the tunnel. In a heartbeat, the wariness in her eyes yielded again, like a veil of levelheaded reliability dropping. She was once again a warrior, alert and ready for danger. The dichotomy of the two personalities shimmering back and forth was a revelation to Sandy, exposing both sides of her girlfriend – the vulnerable and the rock solid combatant. She realized she had always known these two people lived in Nicole’s personality, but she’d never seen them gel together so seamlessly.

“I know you’ll do your best,” Sandy said, touching Nicole’s arm.

Nicole gave her a sharp nod and continued down the corridor. She said, “Why don’t you go back and visit with Howard a while, stay away from the front line, so to speak. It’s not that I don’t want you around, baby, but if something comes at us…”

“Okay.”

When she waited and stepped between Howard and Michael and John, she asked, “How are you guys doing?”

Michael answered, “Hanging in there. I mean, really, what’ve I got to lose?”

“Don’t lose me,” John said with a grin.

“Never, buddy,” Michael grinned. “You’re stuck to me till you make me famous.”

Howard said, “But you don’t feel any need to just stop, do you? You don’t wanna sit down and give up?”

“No,” he answered, shaking his head. “I need to get you folks out of here first. That’s my real purpose right now, helping you guys. Once I get you up top, safe and sound, we’ll see. Maybe it’ll all catch up to me. We’ll have to see.”

“I’m okay,” Howard said. “Feel pretty good with the military on our side. Your girlfriend’s one tough bundle of woman, you know that?”

“Oh, yeah, I know. Didn’t get to really see it till today, but I feel like I’m looking under her protective coating for the first time, like she’s peeling back the hard layers and exposing herself.”

“You’ve never seen her in action?” Howard asked.

“No. Just heard stories.”

He raised his eyebrows. “I got to admit, it’s kind of hot. Tough woman taking charge. She knows what she’s doing. So does Burns.”

“What’re you going to do when we reach Brooklyn, Howard?”

“Don’t know, do I? Figure I’ll see how this virus has spread. I’m thinking going home might be nice. Suddenly, the small town life doesn’t seem so boring and sheltered anymore. Or maybe boring and sheltered is just sounding better to me.”