Nathan had made it halfway down the longest side of the Olympic-sized pool when the doors at the other end burst open to reveal Diana and three other Nike employees, each with a rifle slung over their shoulders. He skidded to a stop when he noticed Diana's clenched jaw.
"Aren't you going to help them?" Nathan asked, gesturing vaguely towards the wall where he had left Amanda. "They could be coming back any minute now."
Diana regarded him with a cold glare but said nothing.
He began to backpedal, and a feeling settled into the pit of his stomach. He turned, ready to take flight as Diana and her goons advanced on him.
A loud bang behind him caused him to jump. He turned to see another group of people, armed and grim, filing in through the door he had used to enter the pool. He was trapped between the two groups.
"Hey, come on now. This isn't funny," Nathan said, eyeing the guns trained on him. He spun, looking at one group and then the other. "Why are you doing this?" he pleaded. He moved inch by inch, keeping himself perfectly between both advancing groups. Their silence was maddening. Finally, he stopped turning and stared at Diana. She was in charge here. She was the one he would have to get through to. "They need our help," he said to her.
She didn't acknowledge him, advancing, her boots clomping on the cold concrete that surrounded the pool.
"They saved us! They taught us how to survive!"
Diana stood in front of him now. She grabbed him by the front of his shirt and jerked him to within inches of her face. "The key-word is 'taught,' Nathan. 'Taught us,' as in past-tense. There's nothing left to learn from them. We don't need them anymore."
She paused then, and by staring into her cold, dark eyes, he was able to form a psychic connection with her. He knew what came next. He read it in her mind.
With a voice like a glacier, she said, "And we don't need you." She spun him around, so his back was to the pool, and then she pushed.
His eyes grew wide as he went weightless. He fell backward, his arms pinwheeling in the air. Then he landed with a crunch. The back of his head bounced off the concrete, and he felt everything go black. He wasn't even awake as Diana ordered her men to fire. Several rounds ripped through Nathan's body, several ricocheted off the tiles of the pool, cracking them and spraying porcelain shards into the air, but one round hit home, and without an ounce of pain, Nathan died, permanently.
Diana said nothing. That was one nuisance that was gone. As far as she knew, there was only one more remaining on the Nike campus. In less than ten minutes, that one would be gone too.
****
Amanda saw the flare in the sky a few minutes before she heard the faint echo of gunshots from across the Nike campus. She froze, literally and figuratively, the metal coping she straddled cooling the inside of her thighs and her crotch until she was almost numb down there. Her mind locked up as she went through all of the possible explanations for the gunshots.
Her mouth opened and closed as if it had the answers that her mind couldn't supply. They would be here any second now, Rudy and the others.
She looked down below her at the mass of dead that had gathered upon seeing her atop the wall. Panic filled her body and her mind. Escape. That was all she could do at this time… get out and away. She should have brought her own rifle. She hadn't practiced with hers as much as Rudy had, and despite knowing all of the things that could have gone wrong, she inexplicably had left her rifle back at the guard building. This was too fast, too soon. It shouldn't be happening like this. But it was, and like a child swallowing their medicine, she gulped the thought down and made it part of her understanding of the world.
"Ok, ok." She nodded to herself and decided to do the only thing she could do. She waited. Maybe it wasn't as bad as she feared. Maybe she was just overreacting. She divided her attention between scanning outside for Rudy and looking inside for Nathan or, worst-case scenario, Diana and her followers. Back and forth she looked, hoping that she'd see Tejada's square head appear at any moment.
But Diana appeared first, her and eight, rifle-toting Nike employees. They strode across a once-manicured stretch of grass. The length of a football field was all that lay between Amanda and the building Diana had exited. They could shoot her at any moment if Diana gave the word. And then she'd fall, outside the wall and into the waiting hands of the dead. Hell of a way to go, she thought.
She turned to scan for Rudy and the others one last time. Nothing. There was nothing, just the dead, grunting and growling to get at her, her foot hanging just out of their reach.
She turned and looked at Diana. Her group was closer now, close enough that Amanda could see the look on her face. It was not the look that one would want to see on a potential enemy. She actually smiled, a quirk of a smile, and Amanda knew that she had to go. Though
