Chapter 23

 

Feeling broken, Demetrius stared up through the black bars of the tree’s upper branches at the clearing sky, where thinning clouds gave way to hard-dark star-glittering skies. I’m alive. He needed to repeat it over and over before it would sink in. I’m alive.

He turned his head, pleased to find that his neck hadn’t broken in the fall. His gaze scaled the library to the bright rectangle that was the window from which he’d leapt. Rough, jagged glass framed the edges. He focused on the short length of hose and the faint powder blossoms where bullets had pocked the surrounding bricks.

I’m alive.

Since the jump, the shooter hadn’t fired another shot. Maybe he thought the fall was fatal. Maybe he left the rooftop. Maybe he simply didn’t care, not with so many targets coming and going. Or maybe he was panning the tree and ground with his scope this very second, waiting for Demetrius to move.

Okay, then, don’t move. Lie still. For now, that sounded fine and dandy, anyway. Moving hurt too damn much.

His hands were sticky with blood, the right palm slashed from wielding the shard of glass. His eye was swollen nearly shut, and blood and mucus packed his surely broken nose and the fall had knocked the wind out of him and bruised his back, ribs, and shoulder. None of that mattered, though. What mattered was he was alive, alive and pretty much unbroken. He’d gotten lucky. That’s all there was to it.

Thirty feet below, milling amid winking shards of glass, four or five crazies stared up at him, one of them making cooing sounds. Another, a spindly looking girl whose glasses glowed like twin flashlights in the illumination of an adjacent sodium arc pole light, jumped at the end of the hose depending from Demetrius’s waist. She clawed the air, hit the ground, and jumped again, bounding up and down like a terrier. The hose was well over her head, though. More luck there. Watching her and the cooing idiot, Demetrius knew the truth. If he had whacked and tumbled and spun the rest of the way through the limbs, he would have zipped into a three-story free fall and hit the ground hard enough to break anything the tree had left intact, giving that little crew of crazies down there an all-they-could-eat buffet.

He shifted position, keeping his movement steady and subtle, and scanned the dark line where the face of the chemistry building met the moon-bright sky. Raking his eyes back and forth, he saw no silhouette, no huddled mound of shadow, no barrel-line protrusion jutting sticklike against the sky.

No sign of the shooter.

He decided he would just lie still and assume the shooter could see him, whether he could see the shooter or not. He’d lie still and wait, get his head together.

What was the scope of this thing? How many people were affected? Was it contained to College Heights, or was it happening elsewhere, everywhere? And why, when just about everyone seemed to have gone completely psychotic, did he feel unaffected? It wasn’t age that had saved him—Eileen, Brian, Boyd, and Miranda, traditional students all, had also remained sane—and it hadn’t been race or gender, either. He hoped the others were all right. Then he thought of Brian, who was most decidedly not all right, and remembered the bad, stupid end he’d made in the elevator. Shit. That kid had been smart, motivated.

He couldn’t dwell on them. For now, he had to get out of this tree before Lee Harvey Oswald started shooting again or somebody handed Terrier Girl a ladder.

The first point, then, was to get moving.

The second: get out of the tree without making too much commotion or breaking his ass in half.

The third: avoid the welcome wagon.

The fourth: don’t underestimate these kids. They had changed. Now they knew enough to use weapons, to feint with one hand and strike with the other. They were strong and fast and undeterred by pain. Thinking of them as weak and cocky credit card brats would get him killed.

He wondered what Sam was up to. Passed out cold, probably. Or hung over. Or dead. Or crazy. That last thought, of Sam, out on the streets, reaping, didn’t sit well. Not one bit. Demetrius hoped—

Bang!

Demetrius flinched instinctively. Down below, Terrier Girl had stopped jumping. Now she lay on the ground, her brains smeared on the grass like bug on a windshield.

Demetrius eyed the roofline. There. A dark shape. Movement. The shape dipped back out of sight.

Looking down, Demetrius grunted with interest. The other crazies were nowhere in sight. Scared off by the gunshot? That meant self-preservation, something new. That kid up in the library certainly hadn’t seemed very worried about pain or death or even staying in one piece. Did this mean they were calming down? Or simply growing craftier, more dangerous?

He didn’t have time to weigh the possibilities. Later, yes, it would be important. For now, though, he had to get out of this tree. He felt confident in his ability to climb out of the tree, especially with the remaining hose at his disposal. He was happy that the crazies had run off, clearing an LZ, but Terrier Girl’s death proved that the sniper had an angle and was still watching the base of the tree. The guy might even feel some kind of personal grudge toward Demetrius…the one that got away.

Demetrius didn’t plan on hanging around any longer than he had to. He didn’t want the sniper repositioning, and he didn’t want a fresh batch of crazies at the base of the tree.

Using short movements and keeping an eye on the roof line, he tugged the hose up through the branches, wrapping it around his chest and abdomen so it wouldn’t catch or tangle in the branches as he climbed. Once he had it all reeled in and wrapped up, he swiveled around to opposite side of the tree—just like a squirrel keeping itself away from a hunter on the ground, he thought grimly—and began his descent. He took his time, pausing to check the strength of the branches, the ground below, the roof line, then moving again, dropping limb by limb, lower and lower. His battered body ached with the effort, but Demetrius had learned to ignore pain during his military career, and he did his best to file this current discomfort away under "L" for later. When, at last, he reached the bottommost branch, he set to work with the hose, tightening his crude harness and tying the free end to a limb as thick as his thigh. Satisfied, he ran his checks again—roof, ground, hose, roof—dropped the slack and stepped off the limb with the hose held in both hands.

He descended hand over hand, hating the swaying motion he was building. Nothing to do about it now, he knew, and he hurried along, swinging side to side like a pendulum and dreading the sound of the rifle.

There was no gunshot. He hit the ground, flattened against the wide trunk, which shielded him from the chemistry building, and untied the hose from around his waist. The girl he’d thought of as Terrier Girl lay dead at his feet spread out in the grass next to all that glass. Those shards would work as weapons, he knew, but thinking of his cut hand, he decided to hold out for something better. Standing here with solid ground beneath him, having survived a pair of hand-to-hand situations, sniper fire, a jump from the upper stories of the library, and the climb out of the tree, he was feeling downright spry, almost giddy.

What now?

Back into the library to help the kids he’d left upstairs? It was a nice thought, but it wasn’t very realistic. The place was crawling with crazies, and chances were he’d just get his ass killed in the attempt. Besides, he had no guarantee they were still alive, let alone that he’d find them if he went hunting.

What, then?

He scanned the area. In the distance, crazies flashed by. Down in town, buildings burned. From here, he could make out one of the big apartment complexes on College Drive—Gable Arms, he thought it was called—fully engulfed in flame. Alarms shrieked in all directions, as did people, most of them sounding fairly distant, he was thankful to note. He glanced at the roof line. Nothing.

Over in the west end of town, something exploded. A string of smaller, popping explosions followed. Secondary events, caused by the main explosion.

One thing he wasn’t hearing much of was gunfire. Off in the direction of the residential sections, a few shots rattled in uneven succession, different calibers, different locations, different shooters. Once, nearer, he heard the flat crack of a .22. Then silence. Overhead, nothing.

Something nagged at Demetrius. The whole event, at least as far as this part of campus went, had been going on for less than an hour and probably only half that time, yet judging from the memory of shots he had heard while inside the library and the number of bodies strewn along the quad, Demetrius concluded the rooftop sniper had been blasting away for a good fifteen or twenty minutes prior to Demetrius rappelling from the window.

The fucker had known.

He had known this was going to happen, and he’d prepared everything before all this shit had hit the cosmic fan. There was a chance it was a cop trying to stabilize the situation by sniping psychos, but Demetrius doubted the notion. Even if some cop had mistaken Demetrius for a crazy, why play games? Why shoot the rope till it snapped?

The guy was no cop. Who was he, then? His excellent marksmanship wasn’t much of a clue. After all, this was Central Pennsylvania not Central Park, and in this part of the world, boys picked up rifles as soon as they put down their baby rattles. Shooting and hunting were a way of life here, so much so that many of the local schools shut down on the opening day of buck season each year. Really, then, it could be almost anyone up there. But the time thing…that’s what felt significant, the shooter getting into position so quickly.

The bastard had known it was coming, the whole thing. He’d prepared for the event. He didn’t warn everyone. He didn’t high tail it out of town. He set himself up with a rifle and plenty of ammo and waited for the fun, the sick bastard.

I wonder if he remembered a comfy chair and popcorn, Demetrius thought, and his hands curled into fists.

This was terrorism. Right here in Cheery Valley. It was a simple equation, really. If someone, even one person, had known all of this was coming—and that fucker up there had definitely known all about this shit—it meant terrorism. Planned mass murder. That son-of-a-bitch had killed a lot of people from his convenient little perch. Under the right sort of persuasion, he might share a good deal of information about what was causing this mass psychosis. He might even know how to make these kids normal again.

Demetrius caught himself. They’re not kids, not anymore. He could not think of them, even fleetingly, in those terms. These were no longer the weak, shuffling wingnuts for whom he’d built such a reservoir of contempt. These were killers. For Demetrius, any encounter meant fight or flight, no posturing allowed. And if he did fight, he had to fight hard and fast and for keeps.

What’s the spirit of the bayonet fighter?

No mercy, drill sergeant.

But his gripe wasn’t with the random crazies. He’d snap their necks if he had to, but they hadn’t caused all this, and if he could avoid hurting them, he would, so long as it didn’t put him in danger.

He looked again to the roof line and, seeing the slightest movement there, he smiled. My gripe’s with him.

He sprinted from the tree to the dark shrubbery bunched at the side of the chemistry building. Then he started looking for a way in.