“What the hell are you saying? Why, Doc? Why’d you do it?”
“I wasn’t about to let you carry out your orders to kill me if things didn’t work out here. Let’s just say I needed my own guarantee.”
“I’m going to kill you anyway, you idiot. You just killed us both for nothing.”
“You said you would give your life to save the world. See? Ray Young is here. We still have a chance to gain viable samples. If you kill me, you will prevent me from saving the world. So give your life. Go somewhere and die.”
Fielding lowers the gun, considering this.
Travis turns to Young and says, “You’re bleeding through your dressing. I’m going to put another dressing on top of it, okay? We’ve got to stop the bleeding.”
Fielding raises the gun again. Travis stares up at him, feeling real terror for the first time. His gamble failed. The man is going to kill him.
“I gave it some thought, Doc,” Fielding tells him, his face a mask of rage. “I realized I don’t give a shit about the world if I’m not in it—”
The man disappears in a blur, the gun cracking once, burying a bullet in the asphalt. Travis blinks in shock several times before realizing Fielding is at the bottom of a pile of hoppers. The man screams as they rip into him with their teeth and tiny hands, stingers pounding.
“Doc,” Young says. “Hey,
He stammers several times before answering, “Yes?”
“Heal me, or you’re next.”
Anne
Anne crouches next to the window, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shot the bastard, she shot him good, and he’s dying now, but Marcus is dead, dead like everyone else she ever loved, and now that the tears have come, they won’t stop, flowing down the channels created by her scars.
A hopper launches itself against one of the room’s windows, cracking the glass and bouncing off with a scream. The next crashes through in a burst of glass shards and falls to the carpet writhing and spraying blood. A third peers into the window on her other side, hissing at her with its jagged mouth as she shoves the barrel of her rifle against its forehead and squeezes the trigger, splashing the contents of its little skull across a photocopier.
More scratch at the walls, trying to figure out a safe way in. Anne can hear their glottal clicks and grunts. In the distance, she catches a glimpse of an arc of fire streaming from a flamethrower. The air is still filled with gunfire. Ray must have summoned every monster from miles around. The hoppers, being fast, got here first. Others will follow. Already she can hear the booming foghorn calls of the juggernauts. When they get here, anyone still out in the open is going to be slaughtered.
It’s time to make a quick exit if she wants to live. Sadly for her, Anne appears destined to survive this fight as well. She backs away from the front of the building, her rifle banging in her hands as the hoppers appear in the windows. It is hard work without someone watching her back, but it is work that is second nature to her, work that she’s good at.
Even now, with the hoppers pouring through the windows into the withering fire of her rifle, she sobs, mourning Marcus, the man she believes died to save the world from the plague spreader. At the end, when he saw the soldiers and realized their desperate plan was certain to fail, he told her to jump off the back of the bus and save herself, and then stepped on the gas for his suicide run while she rolled away and disappeared into the office building.
The rest was surprisingly easy.
Anne swore she would kill Ray Young for what he did to Camp Defiance, and she has fulfilled her oath. She wonders if it was worth the cost. All of her Rangers are dead. Todd is missing. What if Marcus had taken her up on her offer to go to Nightingale? He was strong; he could have made it. They might have had a life together. Is it possible she could ever be happy?
She hears another window shatter somewhere to her left. The hoppers have found another way in and are hunting her among the cubicles. Anne continues to retreat into the gloom, backing toward a door under an EXIT sign, which she knows accesses the stairs and offers a route to the rear of the building.
The creature flies hissing at her. She catches a glimpse of mottled gray flesh and large black eyes before putting a round through it, sending it spinning among the cubicles. She turns and shoots another two creeping up on her other side, arms outstretched like children wanting a hug.
As her back connects with the door, she feels a tremor jolt through the building, bumping her body an inch off the ground. Then another.
A violent, agonized roar rakes her ears, sending massive vibrations through her body that leave her feeling shaken.
“Demon,” she whispers, paling.
The building shakes, filling the air with dust. Something is crashing through walls and pounding the floor with giant feet. Behind Anne, a workstation shelf collapses, spilling staplers and tape dispensers and photos of smiling children.
Anne backs away from the door, eyes wide with terror.
The monster roars again. The building continues to shake violently, spilling light fixtures and pieces of acoustical ceiling tile into the workstations. She can hear drywall crumbling into dust on the other side of the door.
Anne has stopped crying. A wave of calm washes over her. She is going to need everything she’s got if she’s going to escape.
She turns and runs back toward the front of the building.
Behind her, the wall explodes, flooding the room with a thick, rolling cloud of dust.
Wendy
Wendy plants a final long, deep kiss on Toby’s mouth and breaks away with a gasp.
“Wish me luck,” Wendy says, pulling on the gas mask.
“Be careful, babe,” Toby tells her. “We’ll have you covered.”
“I love you,” she tells him, winking. “It’s show time.”
She touches the Bradley’s instruments lightly, as if saying goodbye to an old friend, and climbs into the passenger compartment. Toby is already dropping the hydraulic ramp and she keeps moving, exiting at a crouch with her police-issue Glock in her hand.
A rifle pops to her right and a hopper flies skidding and tumbling across the asphalt. Wendy turns and sees Todd running toward her, pausing to shoot at distant targets. She points at herself and then Ray. Todd gives her a thumbs up and pats his rifle. He will cover her.
They parked the Bradley in front of a strip mall housing a Thai restaurant, dry cleaners, flower store and 7- Eleven. Across the parking lot, side street and another parking lot, Ray lies with his back against his truck, thirty yards from the office building from whose windows someone shot him, triggering this whole mess.
Her plan is simple—at least, once she reaches Ray Young. First, she just has to run a hundred yards through Hell.
Wendy starts running.
Bullets rip past, taking her breath with them, tracers flashing red in her eyes. Someone shrieks in pain. A fireball blooms in the distance, a single figure making his stand with a flamethrower at the center of a circle of
