38 hours
The elevator doors chimed open on the sixteenth floor. Elliott’s room was at the end of the hall. As Fallon walked down the strangely silent corridor, she felt like there were eyes pressed against every peephole. The skin on the back of her neck began to crawl, and she couldn’t suppress a shiver.
As she neared her destination, she saw an old room-service tray sitting outside the door. It had obviously been there since the world turned upside down, and whoever was responsible for returning the trays to the restaurant kitchen found more important things to do with their time—like trying to survive. Though flies buzzed thickly around it—a sound almost worse than the carpeted quiet of a few moments ago—Fallon could still see the small empty bottles of Merlot, and the hamburger buns with the middles torn out and eaten, the crusty shell discarded. Elliott’s favorite drink, and his habitual meal. She hadn’t been a hundred percent sure Ed Johnson was in fact Elliott Jameson, but now she was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt.
Fallon didn’t bother knocking, just used the keycard to open the door, which, fortunately, was not chained on the other side. As it swung open, two things caught Fallon’s attention.
First, a curvy Latina woman in a tight dress and heels, one of which was splattered with blood. Second, a chair in the middle of the floor, its legs cracked and splintered in places. On the floor around it were lengths of rope, duct tape, and a pair of pliers, jaws caked with something black and flaky.
There was no sign of the prototype or Elliott, but Fallon had a pretty good idea of what had happened to him when he had been here.
He’d been tortured.
Dammit, she thought. The bitch beat me to it.
Parker led Light and the stitched and rebandaged Warga to the “cafeteria.” Light got a BLT and nibbled around its edges, but he was increasingly ill at ease. He didn’t like the way those hotel employees stared at him and the others. They weren’t infected, but they looked hungry just the same. Or fearful. Under these circumstances, there wasn’t much difference between the two.
Sitting around waiting for Fallon was stupid, he decided. What she had told them was bullshit. She’d been gone way too long. Meanwhile, Infecteds owned the streets, preying on defenseless human beings.
Those humans needed an angel, and he was it. Angel on the hunt. Prey turning on predator. The idea of it made him grin.
“What’s funny?” Pybus asked.
The old man’s eyes were brown and moist and reflected the overhead lights. A poet would have had a field day with them. To Light, they just looked like candles that needed to be snuffed. “I’m going for a walk,” he said. “Check the perimeter.”
“Dr. O’Meara said to wait here.”
“Well, she’s not here, is she? Who knows if she’s even coming back? I want to see what’s out there.”
“Go for it, Hank,” Warga urged. His voice was weak; undergoing Light’s ministrations had been hard on him. “If any Infecteds spot you, make sure they chase you away from us.”
Light ignored him. That was, he had learned, the best way to deal with Warga. He always wanted to get under your skin—and in the case of anything female, under their panties.
“Back in a while,” Light said. Sansome raised an objection, too, but Light hurried out before the big man could even finish his sentence.
The street was quiet. The whole Valley seemed to be, for that matter. Light had expected hordes of rampaging brain-eaters, like the ones he had mowed over at the hospital. Sure, they’d encountered groups of them here and there, but in the usually bustling downtown area, nothing seemed to be moving at all. He had thought that by now, there might also be pockets of human resistance—like the people in the hotel, but more assertive, taking to the streets to defend their right to intact craniums. This is Arizona, after all; we have more guns per person than almost any other state. If they were illegals instead of brain-eaters, people would be out here in force.
He wandered down 2nd Street, and as he crossed Adams, he spotted a trio of Infecteds coming his way. They were scanning storefronts, looking in windows the way hungry diners studied restaurant menus before going inside. They didn’t see him, so he dashed across the street and took refuge in an alley midway down the block. A Dumpster and some shipping cartons shielded him from view; though if they came down the alley—or if they could somehow sniff out living humans—they might still find him. They would also find destruction from the barrel of his M249.
A couple of minutes later, they passed the alley with barely a glance inside and continued down 2nd. He gave them some time to get past, then moved cautiously to the alley’s end and peeked around the corner. The Infecteds had moved on at a reasonable clip. Checking their back trail seemed beyond their mental capabilities, but Light took no chances; he followed, but quietly, taking advantage of recessed doorways, newspaper boxes, and any other cover he could find.
The light rail ran down Washington, and there was a train parked at the station. From the corner, Light couldn’t see anyone on it. The Infecteds noticed it, too, and diverted their course, crossing the usually busy street diagonally, a move that might have gotten them run over if the city had been functioning normally.
They climbed up into the train, looked around, and left again. Empty, then? Light waited until they were down the next block, then raced across the street on the same path they’d used. He hoisted himself up into the car.
Not empty, after all. There were plenty of people inside, but they were all dead. He couldn’t count how many because some had been torn to pieces, body parts strewn on seats and on the floor among the whole corpses there. Mostly whole, anyway, except for skulls cracked open and brains removed. The stench was ghastly; these people had died in the last few days, their clothes still reeked of the piss and shit of their final evacuations and the blood from the wounds that had killed them. Flies were thick on the corpses, an undulating, buzzing black blanket.
Light had seen enough gore in his life that it seldom bothered him. This scene made his gut clench, though, his blood run cold, despite a vague stirring of arousal. His killings were merciful, meant to deliver people from pain and hopelessness. But maybe he was a psychopath, like O’Meara claimed. Maybe he was fooling himself about the nature of his actions, and he really did belong in a cage.
He looked up and saw that the Infecteds had reversed course. They were coming back his way. He ducked so they couldn’t see him from ground level and moved inside the car just far enough that if they looked at the doorway, they wouldn’t spot him. His left foot brushed up against an arm that had been ripped off just above the elbow, with stringy muscle and flesh hanging out. He glanced at it, dispassionately, his momentary doubts forgotten. Touching a severed arm would bother some people, but not him. Hank Light was stronger than that. Better.
He lifted his head above the window’s edge, just enough to keep track of the Infecteds. They were wandering down Washington, back across 2nd, toward Central. He waited, immersed in the stink of violent death, flies crawling on his skin and buzzing around his face, until the Infecteds were almost out of sight. Then he jumped down from the train and darted toward the corner. By the time he reached it, they were almost to the corner of 1st Street. They crossed it and kept going. When they reached Central, Light hurried to 1st, across it, and down the next block.
He made it to Central just in time to watch them go into Duck and Decanter, in the One North Central Tower. He’d been there before; it was a small, upscale food and gift market and eatery, tile-floored and trendy, with huge windows all around. Light went to a window and stood, mostly blocked from view by a section of wall, and watched.
The Infecteds were two men who had probably been in their mid-twenties before Crazy 8s got them, and an older woman, sixtyish, with silver hair and deep lines in her face. All three had the rosy cheeks and red eyes symptomatic of the virus, and their cheeks and lips and chins were bloodstained, symptomatic of creatures that fed on human beings. Their clothes were filthy and torn, as one would expect of those who walked the streets and survived through violence. The market appeared empty, but the Infecteds spotted a door, back past the refrigerator cases and the soda dispenser. They tried the door handle, but it didn’t open.
Light expected them to give up and started to duck back behind the wall. Instead, one of the men picked up a chair and started slamming it against the door. The chair was wood, and it splintered before the door budged. The Infected tossed it aside, then he and the female hoisted one of the tables. It had a steel center post with short crosspieces at the bottom, for stability. Together, they rammed the door with that end.
The fourth time, the jamb gave way, and the door swung open. Light could hear screaming from inside. He ran around the exterior, to a window that offered a better view. Behind the door was a storage area containing steel shelves stocked with drink cups, napkins, cartons of foodstuffs and merchandise.
Two people had been holed up in there for days, from the looks of them. One was a young woman, blond and pretty despite being unkempt, and the other was a man in his forties, unshaven and greasy-haired. They both wore shirts bearing the Duck and Decanter logo. Employees, Light guessed, who had taken refuge early on and stayed inside, probably subsisting on stored food and beverages. He guessed there was probably an employee bathroom back there.
They both tried to fight off the Infecteds, the girl with a carving knife and the man with a length of steel pipe that looked like part of the shelving. But the Infecteds were not dissuaded. The knife struck home a couple of times, and the woman was battered with the steel bar. They kept going, though, ignoring their wounds. When the girl saw that her knife was doing her no good, she hurled it aside and tried to run deeper into the back room, screaming so loud Light could hear her. In her panic, she collided with one of the shelving units, and the delay allowed one of the Infecteds to catch her long hair. He yanked her backward and got his hands around her throat, then drove her down to her knees, and farther. When she was face down on the hard floor, he started bashing her skull against it, keeping up a steady, rhythmic pace. Light saw when the blood started to flow, and when her resistance was gone, he knew she was dead.
The other man joined the woman, attacking the older man in the Duck and Decanter shirt. He swung his bar for all he was worth, but finally the woman batted it out of his hand. With that out of the way, she surged forward, biting and clawing. The man stepped in on the guy’s side, cutting off his only avenue of escape. The guy punched and kicked, but those were no more effective than the bar had been. If the Infecteds were hurt at all, they didn’t show it. When the woman got in close enough, she dug her teeth deep into his throat and tore. Blood geysered forth, and the guy’s knees went weak. They let him fall to the floor, then the woman picked up his metal bar and started jabbing the end of it into his skull.
Light stood there, watching, unnoticed, while they exposed the brains of their victims, then scooped them out with their hands and ate them. They shared, two brains between three Infecteds. Watching the greyish folds dangling from between bloody teeth was disturbing, even to Light, but he pushed from his mind the idea that either the victims or the Infecteds had ever been human and was able to watch with the dispassionate interest with which he’d view a TV show about life on the veldt. A lion eating a zebra was pretty much the same thing.
The Infecteds were efficient machines. They had done away with the niceties society imposed upon them and focused on their own needs. There was no communication between them that he had heard, but they knew they were safer together than alone. They didn’t bother trying to sweet-talk their prey, but took what they wanted by force.
It wasn’t for him, of course. His calling was to end human suffering or to limit it as much as possible. But he didn’t see a lot of difference between a psychopath like Sansome or Warga and these once-human creatures. Fallon said he was a psychopath, and he supposed he was, in a clinical sense. He knew most people would think of his services as murder, so he was careful to provide them only when he could be sure it was safe. He didn’t experience emotions the way other people did, but he thought his way was better. Safer.
Anyway, considering how he was brought up, who could expect him to live up to society’s definition of normal? His mother had died giving birth to his sister Juliet, leaving both kids to be raised by their physically abusive, drunken wretch of a father. The old man had farmed out a lot of that work to a succession of short-term girlfriends who shared his general temperament and weaknesses. Light’s first time helping someone out of misery had come when he was fifteen and Juliet twelve. The old man and his current piece, Constance, had been fighting. Somehow, Juliet had found herself dragged into it, and when it turned physical, she’d been knocked down the stairs—by whom, Light never found out. He had been downstairs, and when he heard the commotion, he raced to her side. Her neck was broken, and her eyes pleaded for release. By the time their father and Constance got downstairs, Light had set Juliet free with a pillow. He lied to the paramedics when they arrived, and he decided then that he would someday join their ranks.
He also decided he would do what he could to help those beyond the reach of medical intervention. The next time came soon after, when Constance passed out with a lit cigarette between her fingers. She woke up when the cheap sofa burst into flames, but she’d spilled so much gin on her blouse that she couldn’t escape the blaze.
She was so badly burned that no one bothered to look for another cause of death. Like suffocation. But her pained mewling had been infuriating.
Warga and the rest were psychos, sure, but he was no cold-blooded killer like them. He rendered the only aid that could ease the pain of the unfortunates he encountered. He was a caregiver, really. Instead of a prison cell, he deserved a medal.
Maybe he’d get one, when this mission had been accomplished. If he bothered to stick around for it.