Remy’s nerves felt like they were about to vibrate through her skin as she stood guard beside Ethan, her back to the gate behind her, her bolo knife grasped in her sweaty hand. She trembled as she squinted through the darkness of the lobby, hoping none of the infected would notice her or Ethan. The man in question knelt on the floor beside her, nearly lying down, as he worked at the lock on the security gate pulled over the hotel bar’s entrance. Remy personally thought the short detour was the epitome of stupidity; they didn’t have time for this, not with people possibly dying eleven floors above them! But Ethan had insisted, had pushed on it until she couldn’t say no, not without risking him going alone.
“Almost got it,” Ethan whispered below her, mostly to himself. Remy didn’t bother responding to his statement, knowing it wasn’t necessarily intended for her. Instead, she straightened her back and squinted into the darkness again.
It hadn’t been long since she and Ethan had split off from Brandt and Cade. The other two had disappeared to the right, on their mission to seek out Alicia Day. Remy and Ethan were intended to search for and rescue any survivors they could. But even with this mission in mind, Remy could still remember Brandt’s words to her, spoken earlier in the day, while Ethan napped, the promise he’d forced out of her. The one that tore her heart in two whenever she thought on it. If Ethan shows any sign of turning into one of the infected, any sign of the medication wearing off whatsoever, you pull the fucking trigger on him. Promise me, Remy.
Remy wasn’t sure she could do it.
She glanced at Ethan. He still worked at picking the lock with two slender screwdrivers, twisting and jabbing in an intricate manner that she wouldn’t claim to understand. She returned her eyes to the scenery around them. Still nothing moved. Another gunshot rang out on the other side of the lobby, but it wasn’t followed by any more. Remy hoped that meant the other two were okay and had only been threatened by one of the infected and not a mass of them.
“How much longer?” Remy asked hoarsely. A flicker caught the corner of her eye, and she turned, instinctively brandishing her knife.
“Just a minute more,” Ethan promised.
Remy located the source of the movement when she turned her head to the left. She drew in a sharp, startled breath at the sight of infected. There were at least ten, and they were headed straight for the two of them.
“Want to make that just a few seconds, Eth?” Remy snapped. She stepped forward to meet the infected, even as she warned, “We’ve got company.”
Ethan glanced up from his work, and his eyes widened. “Shit, shit, shit,” he chanted emphatically. He worked more frantically at the lock, not worrying about the noise he made anymore.
The infected were closing in fast. Remy knew Ethan wouldn’t get the gate opened before they got there. So she did the only thing she could do.
With a short step forward, Remy raised her knife and lashed out, turning sharply to the right. The blade caught the nearest infected man across the face, splitting his nose and cheeks wide open, and he went down in a splatter of blood. Remy gritted her teeth and reversed her swing, bringing the knife back around to attack a second infected person. With a two-handed grip, she slashed at a woman, embedding the knife’s sharp blade into the side of the woman’s neck, ripping it free, and slamming the blade into the woman’s chest. The blow wouldn’t kill the woman; Remy wasn’t so stupid as to think that. But the goal wasn’t total death and dismemberment. Remy only wanted to slow them down long enough for Ethan to get the damned gate open.
“Hurry the hell up!” she barked out to him. She slashed at another infected man and missed him by centimeters. “Get that gate open! Now!”
“What the hell do you think I’m trying to do?” Ethan snapped back. There was a squeal of metal against metal behind her, and Ethan called out breathlessly over the fray. “Got it!” Remy barely listened as she lit into another enemy, slicing and hacking at his hands and arms. A hand, disconnected from its owner’s body, fell to the marble floor with a sickening wet sound as Remy’s blade struck home. She kicked it into the crowd and, despite Ethan’s shouted, triumphant statement, she kept fighting, slashing at the infected with everything in her. “Remy, come on!” Ethan yelled impatiently.
Remy started to turn, but a hand closed around her right forearm, the one that grasped her bolo knife. She swore and yanked her gun from its holster, spinning and pressing the barrel against the forehead of the infected woman that grabbed her. She squeezed the trigger.
The snap of the gunshot was surprisingly loud as the sound ricocheted and magnified against the marble flooring, even as blood and other matter Remy didn’t want to think about fanned out from the infected woman’s head in a spray. Remy swore again and wrenched herself backward toward the gate. Ethan was already on the other side, holding the gate open two feet off the floor; clearly, he’d simply rolled underneath it once he’d managed to get it open. Remy slung her bolo knife underneath the gate and grasped the bottom of the flimsy-looking barrier. With one last glance at the infected surging toward them, she swung herself under the gate, flattening her body to clear the two-foot space. Once she was in, Remy twisted, walking her hands over each other and using her full body weight to slam the gate closed, even as she gained her footing again. She scrambled to her feet, panting, and she and Ethan both stumbled back from the gate. It took her only seconds to recover her knife, and then they just stood there, wide-eyed, watching as the infected on the other side flung themselves at the gate.
“Shit,” Ethan hissed.
“My thoughts exactly,” Remy muttered. While Ethan had the gate covered, she turned on her heel to check out the rest of the small restaurant they’d entered. It was a bar more than a restaurant, full of small, round two- and four-seater tables and booths. A large menu board behind the bar listed an assortment of alcoholic and nonalcoholic drinks and included a noticeably bigger advertisement for fresh oysters. Remy raised an eyebrow as Ethan spoke up.
“Ah, an oyster bar,” he said. He winked at Remy and added jokingly, “Think they got any fresh ones?”
Remy wrinkled her nose, shuddering with disgust, and glanced at the infected. They shook the gate with their hands, shoving it with their bodies. “If I had to choose between eating oysters of any kind and running into a horde of infected with steak sauce all over my body, I’d choose the infected,” she said. She snagged a serving cloth from a table and wiped the blood from the blade of her knife, following Ethan farther into the bar.
“Wait, you’re from New Orleans and you don’t like oysters?” Ethan asked, raising an eyebrow and stepping behind the bar.
“I had an awful experience involving a raw oyster and a bad bet when I was a child, okay?” Remy said in exasperation. “And just because my family is of Cajun descent doesn’t mean we shotgun raw seafood. Now what was so important that you felt the need to detour from our assigned mission to come in here?”
Ethan picked up a glass bottle and held it up for her to see. “This,” he said, slinging his backpack around to set it on the counter. He unzipped it and started grabbing bottles, stuffing them in his bag as rapidly as he could, arranging t-shirts he’d already cut into strips around them to keep them from getting broken.
“Wait, you threw us on a detour and possibly stuck us in a trap so you could grab a bunch of whiskey?” Remy demanded incredulously.
“I thought you were the one who’d been around Brandt too much,” Ethan said pointedly.
“I have not,” she protested. “I think you’ve gotten me confused with Cade.”
“Do I have to remind you about the stove in Maplesville?”
Remy smirked. “That was just a rare moment of creative ingenuity,” she proclaimed. “These are for Molotovs, aren’t they?” A grin split her face. “Aw, Ethan. Brandt would be so proud of you.”
Ethan snorted and stuffed a few more bottles in his bag before zipping it shut. “Who said I got the idea from him?” he asked. He shouldered the bag and settled it close to his body. “Don’t let me do something stupid that will get these bottles busted. I don’t want to end up smelling like an alcoholic hobo.”
Remy bit back a laugh as he circled around the counter and headed for a door in the corner of the bar. A sign of a little stick person climbing cartoon stairs was stuck to the wall next to the door. “I don’t think they call them hobos anymore,” she pointed out as Ethan paused at the door and checked over his Glock.
Ethan let out another undignified snort. “I don’t think they call them much of anything anymore.” He grasped the door handle and wrenched the door open, quickly stepping through and swinging his flashlight and gun around, searching the stairwell for any immediate dangers. When he didn’t see anything, he beckoned to Remy. “Come on, babe. Let’s get this shit taken care of.”
Remy smirked at the nickname and slithered into the stairwell, her newly cleaned bolo knife grasped firmly in her hand, the sound of the infected on the other side of the security gate still echoing in her ears.