Chapter 349: Atlantic Theatre [2]
The lobby hit us like a wall.
Infected. Everywhere. Packed into the space like they’d been drawn here and forgotten, milling through the dim wreckage of what used to be a place people came to sit in the dark and watch something that wasn’t real. Now the dark was real and so was everything moving through it.
The one saving grace was that Romero’s group was nowhere in sight. A handful of bodies lay scattered across the lobby floor, already shot down, his men had punched through here fast and hard. If I had to guess, they’d pushed straight through to the corridor door at the far end, the one currently being pressed against by a slow, stupid tide of Infected trying to follow them through.
I caught a glimpse past the doors into the corridor beyond. More Infected inside. Moving.
How Romero’s group had gotten through without casualties that was beyond me. But that was a problem for later. Right now we had our own.
"They’re everywhere—" Maribel turned slowly, taking in the full scope of it, Infected already clocking our presence and beginning to drift our direction.
"Stay close. We’re moving," I said.
"Moving where?!" She pulled out a steel rod, gripping it with both hands.
I looked at it. Looked at her. Said nothing.
"Are you seriously judging me right now?" She caught my expression immediately, eyes narrowing.
"I didn’t say anything."
"You didn’t have to!" She cursed sharply under her breath. "Fine! I know, I’m an idiot, you can be happy about it." She said it before I could, getting there first like admitting it herself somehow made it sting less. And to be fair to her, she hadn’t exactly packed for this. She’d followed me out expecting to find people, not walk into a cinema stuffed with the dead.
"Not really the moment," I said. "We push through to the corridor. That’s where Romero’s group went and it’s where the hostages are."
"You mean the same corridor Callighan’s men just ran into?!"
"Do you have a better idea? We came here to get Theo and the others out. That hasn’t changed." I looked at her.
She opened her mouth and closed it.
"Fine," she said.
"Good." I shifted my grip on the hand axe and let Dullahan rise through my right armn, not held back, not measured. I let it come properly. The chain tattoos surfaced along my skin, winding up from the wrist, and wind began to curl and sizzle around my forearm, pulling tight, blade-edged and humming.
"What—" Maribel stared, eyes wide.
"Stay to my left. Don’t get close to the right arm," I told her.
She repositioned immediately without arguing, which I appreciated.
Then I moved.
The first Infected in my path caught the axe head clean, and the wind release hit like a detonation. The body didn’t just go down, it came apart, the gust shearing through it and the two behind it, sending them cartwheeling backward in a wet, ugly tangle. The sound was enormous in the enclosed space, impact, wind, the crunch of bodies hitting walls and floor.
I pushed forward, swinging in tight arcs, the blade energy doing the heavy work. Each swing carved a path. Infected came from the sides and I drove my boot into them, kicked them off balance, let the next swing finish it. Maribel held close behind my left shoulder, moving when I moved, not crowding me.
"It’s disgusting," I heard her mutter, quiet enough that I almost missed it.
She wasn’t wrong. The wind blades were efficient but they weren’t clean, flesh and rotten matter spraying wide with each impact, the stench thickening with every body opened. You never quite got used to the smell, even when you told yourself you did. You just learned to breathe through it and keep moving.
We reached the double doors. I planted my foot and kicked them open hard.
And immediately I wished I hadn’t.
The corridor stretched ahead of us, wide and low-ceilinged, dim emergency lighting painting everything a sickly amber. Infected dotted the length of it, some turning at the sound of the doors. And at the far end, maybe thirty meters away, stood Romero.
He wasn’t running. He wasn’t dealing with Infected. He was standing square, rifle already raised, already aimed. Like he’d heard us coming and decided to wait.
Our eyes met for half a second.
"Got you, fucker—" He fired.
My senses snapped before the word was even finished. I twisted hard, grabbed Maribel’s arm and wrenched her sideways, throwing us both behind the heavy door frame as the shot tore through. Rounds punched into the door, through it, the impacts thundering through the metal and echoing off every hard surface in the lobby behind us. One round clipped through the gap close enough that I felt the displaced air.
"Ryan!" Maribel’s voice was loud against my ear, her back pressed to the same wall as mine.
I looked back into the lobby. The gunfire had done what gunfire always does in a closed space full of Infected, every head had turned. They were converging on the doors now, pushing toward the noise, toward us.
Romero ahead.
Infected closing behind.
Nowhere to go but through.
Damn it!
"Ryan, huh!" Romero’s voice boomed down the corridor, rough and almost gleeful. "You’re that fucker Callighan and Gaspar kept going on about!"
A beat, then a short ugly laugh escaped his lips.
"Perfect. I’m gonna end you right here and save everyone the headache of dealing with another freak like Gaspar!" He opened up again, rounds punching through the already-shredded doors in rapid succession.
We were already moving. I grabbed Maribel and pulled her back into the lobby, cutting away from the door frame as bullets tore through the space we’d just been standing in. We pushed back through the Infected, vaulting over the main counter and dropping down behind it, using the solid base as cover.
"That bastard!" Maribel pressed her back against the counter, breathing hard. "He’s drawing every Infected in this building toward him, does he have a death wish?!"
She had a point. Romero was making enough noise to wake everything in a three-floor radius. But that was his problem.
"I wasn’t exactly quiet either," I said, glancing back toward the doors. "He already knew someone was behind him."
"He’s waiting for us to come through again so he can shoot us," Maribel said.
"He won’t stay planted there forever." I reached down to my side and drew the Beretta I kept holstered for situations where the powers weren’t the right tool. I thumbed the magazine, ten rounds, maybe a little under.
Fine. It should do.
Maribel’s eyes dropped to it, then came back up to my face.
"We’re pushing through," I said.
"How?"
"I kick the doors, we move right immediately. Romero’s position is straight ahead so we have a window, small, but it’s there. If we cut right fast enough there should be a path into one of the halls. We get in, we get a door between us and him, and we regroup." I said.
She looked at me for a moment. "You’re dangerously optimistic, you know that."
"Don’t worry about it."
At the back of my mind, the Time Freeze sat ready. Last resort, but it was there. Whatever happened in the next thirty seconds, we weren’t dying in a cinema lobby.
"Ready?" I looked at her.
She pulled her Glock, checked it, and gave me a short nod.
"Then let’s go."
We came up over the counter together, hitting the ground running. Infected lurched toward us from both sides and I let Dullahan surge harder through my right arm, chains tightening, the wind coiling into something dense and sharp. I swung the hand axe upward in a wide low arc from the ground, and the blade gust tore through the tile floor in a line, catching the mass of Infected clustered between us and the doors and throwing them back like they weighed nothing. Limbs, debris, a fine dark mist.
We ran through the gap before they could recover.
The double doors were still swinging from before, riddled with bullet holes, panels cracked and bent. I hit them with my shoulder and we pushed through into the corridor.
I narrowed my eyes and scanned ahead fast.
Romero wasn’t standing in the open anymore. He’d fallen back to the far end where another set of double doors separated the corridor from whatever lay beyond. I could see through the small rectangular window in the door glass, he was using the doors as a barricade, probably with men on the other side helping hold them shut against the Infected pressing from beyond. Smart enough. Buying himself a position.
And his rifle was already up, muzzle tracking through the broken glass directly toward us.
Even from that distance I could see the smirk.
I swung the hand axe forward without breaking stride, the wind burst scattering the Infected in the corridor ahead, clearing space, buying fractions of a second.
Then Romero fired.
Everything sharpened. My Dullahan senses were already running at their absolute ceiling, the world not quite slowing but becoming readable — trajectories, angles, the shape of incoming danger laid out in the space of a heartbeat.
He wasn’t aiming at me.
The angle was wrong for me. He’d shifted it, he was aiming at Maribel.
My hand was already halfway to her wrist. I closed my fingers around it and yanked her hard into the wall just as the shot cracked past. The bullet crossed the space between us at a distance that I felt more than saw,, and then it found me instead. A white-hot line opened across my cheek, a chunk of flesh gone, blood welling up instantly along the graze.
I hit the wall beside Maribel, one hand still locked around her wrist, the other raising the Beretta toward the far end of the corridor.
My cheek burned like someone had pressed a coal to it but I ignored it.
I didn’t give him another second.
The Beretta was already up in my left hand, arm extended, one eye glowing dark green lining the shot down the corridor through the ragged hole in the door glass. No time to think about it, just the angle, the distance, the target.
I squeezed the trigger.
The shot cracked out sharp in the enclosed space.
It covered the distance in less than a blink. Romero had just enough time to exist in that moment before the bullet clipped the side of his head, shearing clean through his left ear. Not a kill, but close enough that it counted for something.
His eyes went wide. For the first time since I’d laid eyes on him, the smirk was gone. He stumbled back a full step, hand flying instinctively to the side of his head, rifle dropping out of position.
That was my window and I took it without hesitation.
"Move! Now!" I shoved Maribel forward and we cut hard to the right, pushing through the narrow gap at the corridor’s edge and forcing ourselves around the corner before Romero could recover his footing and his aim.
