4 hours
“Fallon? Fallon! Talk to me!”
She heard the voice, but it was so far away. She reached out her left hand, felt only emptiness. She tried to speak, but the air she drew in was thick with dust and smoke, and she choked on it. Coughing hurt, more than she expected, eliciting a sharp, stabbing pain in her midsection.
“Fallon! Is that you? Are you okay?”
She coughed again, tried to spit, but couldn’t. “M . . . Mark?” she managed. “Is that—?”
“No, Fallon. It’s me! I mean—dammit! It’s Book! Booker Eisenstadt.” He sounded frantic.
“Book? Are you here?”
“No, Fallon. I’m at the—what the hell do they call it, again? The tactical operations center. The TOC. You’re at the Sutter house. I think the ceiling collapsed on you. The others are close to you, according to their GPS coordinates. Sansome’s closest. Are you okay?”
“I—everything hurts, Book. I can’t see. I can’t move.” Panic welled in her chest. “Book, I can’t move!”
“Breathe, Fallon. Take in a deep breath.”
“The air’s full of crap. I can’t breathe.”
“You’re breathing now, Fallon. Shallow breaths, then. In and out. In and out. Don’t panic. You’ve got to keep your cool. I can’t lose y—can’t lose any more of you. You’re so close!”
Fallon tried to fix on his voice in her ear. She remembered that now, remembered where he was. Where she was. In the basement of the Sutter house. That horrible, tragic little girl. And something else . . . all those Infecteds upstairs. And the house was on fire. “The ceiling collapsed?” she asked.
“I think so. I couldn’t tell for sure—I could only see what the camera showed, and it was obscured pretty fast.”
“What do you see now?”
“I see—move your head a little to the right, Fallon. Can you do that?”
“I . . . think.” She tried. It hurt, but she was able to tilt her neck that way. “Like that?”
“Just a little bit more.”
She did. It hurt like hell. She bit back a yelp.
“That’s good,” Book said. “That’s really good, Fallon. Hold it there.”
“I can’t see a thing. God, Book, am I blind? Am I paralyzed and blind?”
“Easy, Fallon. Breathe. Breathe with me. In, out. In, out. In, out. You okay?”
“I’m scared to death.”
“I know, Fallon. It’ll be okay. There’s—I think there’s a ceiling beam across your chest. And something over your head, or at least part of your head. It’s like I’m looking under a shelf or something. Can you sweep that area with your hand? Move whatever it is? It’s probably carpeting, or a floorboard or something. It’s not so heavy that you can feel it, right?”
“If I broke my neck, I wouldn’t feel it anyway, would I?”
“If you broke your neck, you wouldn’t have been able to move your head for me.”
“I guess.”
“Just try.”
Moving her arm hurt even more than moving her head. Panic was millimeters away—she couldn’t think about that, or she would give in to it, start screaming and never stop. She could hear things now, besides Book’s voice in her ear. She heard people moving around, shuffling feet. Moans and bangs and crashes and something else, a crackling noise she couldn’t place.
Then her own wail of pain as she moved her arm again, toward her face. He was right, there was something on her, but she couldn’t tell what. She tried to do what he’d said, just sweep it away. It was too heavy, though. It wouldn’t go. It was soft, and it gave when she pushed. But it was on top of her head and her head was on something else and it was heavy. She pushed it again.
It pushed back.
She heard it murmur something. “Ain . . . ja?”
God, it was an Infected! There was an Infected lying on top of her. It moved again, and she felt fingers on her scalp, reaching through her hair, and she screamed, and screamed, and screamed.
“Fallon! Fallon!”
“Book?” she asked. “Book, it’s on me! It’s on top of me!”
“No, no, Fallon! It’s me. It’s Joe! Just hold on!”
“Joe?”
“It’s Sansome!” Book’s voice said. “He’s right there, Fallon. Let him help you.”
“I got it, Fallon,” Sansome said.
As he spoke, a weight was lifted from her, and she could see again. She saw Sansome’s huge bulk, illuminated by some uneven glow. He was holding an Infected off the ground. A teenage boy, it looked like. He was on the chunky side, his belly showing beneath a black T-shirt, and he was struggling in Sansome’s arms. The big man had the kid’s neck in the crook of his elbow, and he was twisting it, then twisting it more. There was an audible snap, and the boy went limp. Sansome dropped him on the ground.
He wasn’t dead, though. Fallon could still hear him shifting around on the floor, muttering, trying to stand up even though his limbs wouldn’t obey his commands. “Joe,” she said. She cut her eyes toward the floor.
“Sorry,” Sansome said. He raised his foot high—Fallon saw his knee almost reach his stomach, saw the blood streaking his pants from the bullet he’d taken—and brought it down hard and fast. There was a stomping sound and a squishing sound, and then the kid was quiet.
Now that she could see, she was even more frightened than she had been. Book was right, there was a beam lying across her chest. She wasn’t on the floor, she had fallen on something bumpy, uneven. Then she remembered the room before the collapse and knew what it had to be.
Jane’s unwanted leftovers.
She wanted to scream again, but she fought the urge. There were Infecteds all over the room. Many had died in the collapse, crushed by debris or by each other. But some were still alive, and they looked hungry.
And there were flames climbing the far wall. Some of the Infecteds were on fire, too. They didn’t look particularly concerned about it, yet, but they would be soon.
“Joe, can you . . . ?””
“Hold still, Fallon,” he said. The strength had gone from his voice, sapped by his wounds. “It’s wedged under this other one.”
“Hurry, Joe.”
“Fallon?” Book again. “Listen to my voice. Let Joe do what he has to do.”
“Where are the others? Hank and Lilith?”
“They’re somewhere close by, that’s all I can tell.”
“Are they . . .”
“They’re moving. They’re alive.”
Fallon heard Sansome grunt, then a massive creaking of wood and something else, followed by a crash. Then he swept back into her field of view and lifted the beam off her. It was a strain—veins popped in his neck and at his temples—but he got it done. He was reaching for Fallon’s hand, to lift her off her bed of body parts, when she heard a piercing shriek.
“Get offa me, you mealy-ass motherfuckers!” The shout was followed by a long burst of automatic-weapons fire.
Apparently, Lilith was okay.
Fallon took Sansome’s hand. He helped her to her feet. She was dizzy, still a little disoriented, but when he released her, she found she could stand on her own. “Thank you, Joe,” she said. Remembering Jane, she turned too quickly to look for her and almost keeled over again. Sansome caught her arms and held her up.
Jane was nowhere to be seen. A pile of rubble topped by a thick cloud of dust occupied the place where she had been. “What happened to Jane?”
“I don’t know. You shot at her at the same time the ceiling caved in. I don’t know if you hit her or not—you might just have hit falling wood or Infecteds. I think she’s dead. Haven’t seen her move, anyhow.”
Now that Fallon was upright, she took in the scene. Infecteds had come crashing down on other Infecteds. Many had survived and were either finding their footing or already up. Unlike before, though, they seemed to have lost their bearings, wandering around in the wreckage as if looking for the mental connection they had lost with their Queen’s demise. Light was upstairs shooting them in single-shot mode—he had been on the staircase the last time Fallon saw him, and most of that had miraculously survived when the overloaded floor fell through. Lilith was across the big basement room, in a corner, swinging her M4 like a club at the Infecteds trying to get to her.
Several were gathering in the vicinity of Fallon and Sansome. She reflexively patted her hips, looking for her guns. Sansome recognized the motion; he reached into the rubble surrounding his feet, and came up holding an M4. “Here. I don’t know where yours is, so take mine.”
“Thanks,” she said. Reaching for it, she saw, behind Sansome—mostly blocked from her view by his bulk—a muscular Infected swinging a chunk of two-by-four in a vicious arc. “Joe!” Fallon managed.
Before she could get any more out, the club had struck Sansome’s head, tearing a chunk of scalp loose. He went down on his knees, and the Infected hit him twice more. The third one broke through his skull. He pitched forward, and Infecteds swarmed over him, all of them grabbing for brains.
Fallon whipped the M4 into position and opened fire. When the Infecteds piling on Sansome were dead, she released the trigger briefly, then took aim at the ones Lilith was trying to hold off. She fired until the gun was empty, then dropped to her knees beside Sansome and pawed through his pockets. She would mourn him later; for now there were still Infecteds to deal with. He had two unused magazines—just like Joe, protecting me even in death—so she rammed one into her gun and tossed the other to Lilith. “Last ones!” she called. “Conserve ammo!”
“Got it!” Lilith shouted back.
With both of them shooting, it didn’t take long to clear the basement of Infecteds. The sounds of Light’s battle against those upstairs were encouraging, too, as the gunshots came farther and farther apart.
“Do you think we’ve killed them all?” Lilith asked, stepping gingerly among the Infected corpses to join Fallon.
Fallon did a quick mental calculation, thinking about the millions of people living in the Valley. “Maybe all of them in the house,” she said. “But not all, by a long shot.”
“But without their Queen—”
“We don’t know what will happen. Maybe they’ll get a new Queen. Maybe they’ll just be like they were at the start: slow-thinking and disorganized. No way to tell except to wait and see.”
“I guess.”
Lilith had reminded Fallon of Jane. She went to the mound of debris that had fallen on top of the girl. It came up to Fallon’s chest, and much of it looked heavy. She shoved some of it aside, then worked with Lilith to get a few of the bigger pieces out of the way. They didn’t stop until they saw one of Jane’s lifeless hands. Fallon poked it with a long stick a couple of times, but it didn’t budge.
“Looks like she really is dead,” Lilith said.
“So it seems.”
“What now?”
“Now,” Fallon replied, “we find that damn meteor in this mess.”