37 hours
Back in the lobby, Lilith told Fallon that Light and Sansome had taken off. She could ask Book to find them, but she had just given him a task and didn’t want to interrupt him with another. Besides, if he was busy trying to find out who the cartel woman was, maybe he wouldn’t bug her about talking to Briggs. Or notice that she had misplaced two members of her team.
Lilith, Pybus, and Antonetti sat together at the end of one of the long tables in the makeshift cafeteria. Coffee sounded good, as did food, but they’d have to wait until she found the runaways. “Did either of them say where they were going?” she asked.
Pybus spoke up. “Hank said he was going to check the perimeter. A little while after that, Joe got up and said he was going to bring Hank back. We tried to persuade him to stay put, but he wouldn’t.”
“Sansome isn’t a guy you want to argue with,” Antonetti added.
“Maybe not,” Fallon admitted. “But we need him. We need—”
She broke off her sentence when a ratcheting sound that could only be automatic-weapons fire echoed down the quiet urban canyon outside. “That’s people,” she said. “Infecteds don’t use guns. Come on.”
The others hurriedly gobbled up the remains of their food and headed for the valet station. On the way, Fallon thanked Quinn and Parker for their help and wished them luck. Parker tried to get them to stay, but she just shook her head. She couldn’t, even if she wanted to. There were two of her people out there, and their mission still wasn’t anywhere near complete.
But the truth was that Fallon was glad to leave the hotel behind. The encounter with Elliott’s torturer, followed by Warga’s would-be rape, had shaken her more than she wanted to admit. She didn’t regret what he had done to the woman, or what she would have done to him if he hadn’t backed off. But it was still two close calls; a lot to deal with for someone who spent most of her time in sterile labs full of emotionless machines.
The others had grabbed their weapons and followed her outside. They ran to the south side of the hotel, which is where the sound had seemed to emanate from. When they didn’t see anything there, they went to the end of the block and saw Light walking their way. Behind him was a UPS truck with bodies strewn around it.
“What happened?” Fallon asked when she was close enough.
Light nodded at the carnage and started back toward the truck. Fallon joined him. “Infecteds found these people in the back. Sensed them, somehow. Smell maybe, I don’t know. They broke in, and the people tried to get away. One of them did—last I saw him, he was still running. But they caught these other three. I blew them away, but I wasn’t in time to save the people.”
Fallon walked around the truck, eyeing the dead UPS driver on the sidewalk and the other two bodies behind the truck, along with the ravaged corpses of the Infecteds. She didn’t entirely buy Light’s version of events, but the humans didn’t have bullet wounds and the Infecteds did, so she couldn’t call him on it.
“We heard the shooting inside the hotel, so I’m sure we’re not the only ones who did,” she said. “Have you seen Joe?”
“He’s not with you?”
“Apparently he went out shortly after you did, looking for you.”
“Haven’t seen him,” Light said. “He’s not easy to miss, either.”
“Let’s scour the neighborhood, then,” she directed. “Everybody watch for Sansome.”
“We don’t have to do it on foot,” Light said.
Fallon wasn’t sure she’d heard him right. “What?”
He held up a set of keys. “I found the keys to the truck, in the driver’s pocket. We have wheels again.”
“Can you drive that thing?”
“When you’ve taken an ambulance through Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic on the interstate, you start to think you can handle anything on four wheels.”
“That truck has six.”
“Close enough.”
“Okay, then,” Fallon said. “Climb aboard, everyone. Hank, cruise the streets around here. If Joe’s around, we’ll find him.” With any luck, before Book realizes he’s missing.
They’d barely covered a block when two Infecteds came out of a parking garage, running toward the truck. Antonetti and Warga cut them down before they got close. The next group they saw was larger, seven of them, and Fallon joined in. If her survival was going to come down to being able to shoot somebody, she needed all the practice she could get.
When they found Sansome, emerging from a driveway about six blocks to the west, she almost fired at him. She was holding the Glock up, steadying her right hand with her left and getting a bead on him when she realized who it was. “Joe!” she shouted. “Hank, stop!”
Light braked, and the truck shuddered as if trying to shake them all off it. It was no wonder her packages so often came looking like they’d been run over, Fallon decided. She jumped down while the truck was still rocking back and forth. “We’ve been looking all over for you,” she said. Then she noticed his huge hands, which looked like he had dipped them in a bucket of red paint. “What happened?”
“I found a couple of ’em,” he said. “Infecteds. I killed ’em.”
“With your bare hands?”
“Yeah?” He said it like a question, as if unsure what her reaction might be.
“Are you okay?”
“Sure.” He saw where her gaze was directed, and raised his hands, fingers spread. “Oh, this isn’t all from that,” he said. “Want to see?”
If it was just more Infected bodies, Fallon was sure she wouldn’t mind skipping it. But Lilith, Warga, and Antonetti had already climbed down from the truck, and Pybus stood at the doorway. “Sure,” Antonetti said. “Got me curious, anyway.”
“This way,” Sansome said. He wore a goofy grin, reminding Fallon of how Jason looked when he had built something with Duplo blocks that he was especially proud of.
They all followed, even Light after he’d killed the engine and pocketed the dead driver’s keys. The driveway led to a small parking area behind the building. The corpses were there. One looked badly beaten. The other one was worse, nearly decapitated, except all Sansome had to work with were his hands, so it was a ragged, bloody mess.
But that wasn’t what he wanted them to see. Like some mutated Vanna White, he stood beside the parking lot’s back wall, right arm extended, open hand pointing to words written there in what Fallon wished was paint: THE SYKOS ARE HERE. The blood was still fresh, shiny and bright.
“What’s that mean?” Fallon asked, confused. “You mean ‘sickos?’ ”
“Psychos,” Sansome corrected. “Us. Seven psychos.”
Everyone laughed at that, but Lilith found it hysterical, almost doubling over in whoops of laughter. “That’s fuckin’ sick!” she said when she could breathe again. “I love it!”
“That means it’s good, right?” Fallon asked softly.
Warga nodded. “To her generation, yeah.”
“You really don’t know how to spell ‘psychos?’ ” Lilith asked.
“That’s not right?” Sansome replied, surprised and maybe even a little hurt.
“Oh, it is now,” the girl said. “Nothing else will ever be right again. The Seven Sykos.”
“Like the Seven Samurai,” Pybus offered. “Hopefully with a better ending.”
“How does it end?” Antonetti asked. “They all die?”
“Not all,” Pybus said. “Just most.”
“Everybody dies,” Light said. “It’s just a matter of when and how. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d rather die here, a free man—more or less—than rotting in a cell somewhere.”
“Not me,” Lilith said. “I’m never dying. Living’s too much fun.”
“That’s not always a call you get to make,” Warga pointed out.
“I know that. I’ve picked the time for enough other people. But I’m not dying. None of us are. The Seven Sykos are indestructible!”
She broke into another fit of laughter. Watching her, Fallon couldn’t help smiling. Inside, she was wishing Lilith was right. They’d been lucky so far, and perhaps that luck would hold.
Counting on that would be stupid, though, and she was not a stupid person—her presence here in the zone notwithstanding. They would have to be wary as well as lucky. Even then, they might lose some people. They might lose the whole thing, and their lifeless, brain-eaten corpses would be obliterated by nuclear bombs.
But that was defeatist thinking, and she had to shake it loose and let it go. She looked again at Sansome’s scrawled message.
THE SYKOS ARE HERE.
That they were. If the fates were willing and the ammunition held out, they would make it out of here, too.
Fallon’s detour had cost valuable time and had yet to bear fruit other than patching up Warga. Once they’d collected Sansome—and found a sink where he could wash some of the blood from his hands—they piled back into the UPS truck. Fallon trusted Light’s knowledge of the city streets, so told him to head for Mesa. He took Jefferson past Chase Field, then 7th Street to Interstate 17, heading east. Behind them, the sun was lowering in the sky. Fallon saw the shadows lengthening and wondered if they should have stayed at the Hyatt overnight. It was nearly summer, though, so it would be light for a few hours, yet, and she wanted as many miles behind them as possible before they had to stop.
“Look at that,” Antonetti said. Fallon sat on the pull-down passenger seat, and he was crouched in the space between her and Light.
“At what?” she asked.
“That, probably,” Light said, pointing to the southeast. A massive fire raged there, probably a whole neighborhood in flames, or an industrial park. “Phoenix will never be the same.”
“I don’t see how it could be,” Fallon agreed.
“Probably be like New Orleans after Katrina,” Antonetti said. “Lots of government money for redevelopment, so grifters and con men will move in to skim off as much as they can.”
“Isn’t ‘grifters and con men’ redundant when you’re talking about government?” Light asked.
“Hey,” Fallon said. “Remember who sent us here. They’re trying to fix this mess.”
“I remember. That’s why I’m expecting some colossal fuck-up along the way. The word SNAFU didn’t originate in the private sector. Neither did FUBAR. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“My cousin Paolo was in the Marines,” Antonetti said. “He said FUBAR all the time, but he never told me what it meant.”
“ ’Fucked up beyond all repair,’ ” Light said. “And SNAFU is ‘situation normal, all fucked up.’ ”
“He was a Marine, but he made you do all the killing for him?”
“He didn’t make me.” Antonetti was clearly hurt by the implication. “He let me. I wanted to. He’d killed plenty of people, in the Gulf, but I never got a chance to.”
“It’s not exactly something most people aspire to,” Fallon said.
“We’re not like most people, Doctor.”
“No, Gino. No, you’re certainly not.”
By extension, then, neither was Fallon. And she realized she was actually perfectly fine with that.