Allen gave a mighty wrench and pulled his hatchet free. Epps went over to the window and pulled the shade. Before it was all the way down, Allen saw a crowd of the dead milling in the distance by the bank thirty yards away. Fuck. They're still out there.
But he didn't have time to dwell on the ones outside because the ones inside were making quite the racket. One by one, they opened the doors to find the dead waiting for them. When they were finished, the halls were lined with the corpses of Annies. They stood gasping for breath, their arms quivering from overuse.
****
Tejada and Amanda sat behind the reception desk. Tejada listened closely in the gloom of the lobby, listening for screams, shouts, calls for help… anything. He felt useless sitting in a stupid desk chair. He had never liked desks, never wanted to be tied down to one. Desks weren't for men. Real men got shit done. Though, now that his body seemed to be turning on him, he had to consider the possibility that he wasn't a "real" man any longer.
The moments seemed to pass in agonizing slowness. He heard a muffled gunshot, followed by the pounding of the dead from the floor above. He hissed between his teeth, resisting the urge to call out to his men and find out what was happening.
Amanda must have noticed his angst because she said, "They'll be alright. You've trained them well."
"Training doesn't make you invincible."
"They know that. You know that. All you can do is control what you can control."
"Well, that's not good enough." He attempted to rise up out of the chair, but the pain in his hip flared bright, to the point that he wasn't even conscious of falling back into the desk chair. One second, he was trying to get up to help his men, and the other, he was sitting again. But hey, at least the chair had some good lumbar support.
"How's your hip?" Amanda asked.
"It's a pulled muscle, maybe a tear. Nothing that a little time won't fix…"
"But we don't have time," they both said at the same time. Tejada laughed quietly.
"Am I that predictable?" Tejada asked,
"I wouldn't say predictable. No, that's not the word. I would go more with reliable."
Tejada smiled. Amanda had a way of making everything seem all right. He had that gift too, but his was more of a "Do what I say, and everything will be alright" type of gift. Amanda could probably make a tornado seem like a gust of wind. Hell, even after she had leapt over the Nike wall with no weapons on her, she had been all smiles. Most people he knew would have been shitting in their pants.
"You're alright, Amanda," Tejada said.
"That's high praise."
"And don't you forget it."
From another hallway, he heard a scream. It sounded like Allen. He tried to rise again, but his hip wouldn't let him. "Aww, fuck," he said as he plopped back down into the desk chair once again.
"You're gonna make it worse," Amanda said.
"Well, shit, it already feels like the worst thing in the world. Can't imagine making it worse would be a good idea." He resigned himself to being useless. He began to wonder how long he would be useless for, but then the thought crossed his mind that he might just be at the end of his journey, and he didn't like that.
"You got anyone out there?" Tejada asked, nodding his head to the outside world.
"You mean family?" Amanda asked.
"Yeah."
"I have parents. They live in Florida. Notice I said 'live.' Not past-tense. I know the odds, I know reality, but I choose to believe they're still out there. Maybe they took the yacht out, and my dad is catching fish out on the Atlantic."
"A yacht, huh? I never pegged you for a rich girl."
Amanda rolled her eyes, and for one of the few times in knowing her, she didn't have a smile on her face. "It's not like that. We weren't rich, but my dad scraped and saved for a yacht. It was his dream. Our house was small, he worked the docks, and though we could have moved into a bigger house, he always said that if we had a yacht, the entire ocean would be our house, so it was better to scrimp and save. And that's exactly what he did." Amanda smiled, her mind drifting back to those days on the ocean with her mom and dad.
She'd always felt free in those days, as if the entire world had disappeared, leaving only her family.
"Sounds nice," Tejada said.
"Didn't you ever have any dreams?" Amanda asked.
Tejada shook his head. He couldn't talk about dreams. To talk about a dream was like telling your birthday wish to someone after you blew out the candles. It wouldn't come true. "Never had time for dreams," he said.
"You got time now."
He laughed quietly. "That's what I'm afraid of." He paused then, but Amanda didn't speak. She didn't take up the slack he left her, and he knew, without having to even think too hard about it, that he wasn't getting out of this conversation without something.
"There is one thing," he said. Then he hesitated, feeling foolish.
"Go on," Amanda said. "I won't tell."
Tejada smiled at her sheepishly. "Well, I
