Chapter 357: Atlantic Theatre [10]
The doors slammed shut behind us and my thoughts were already moving faster than my feet.
Twenty infected, give or take, scattered through the space in various states of agitation. Most of them were manageable. The ones that weren’t were the ones already closing in on Paul and Theo, who had taken the worst of Romero’s move and were sprawled across the stairs looking like men who had just had the world thrown at them. Some of the infected that had come down with them were already reaching, hands clawing toward them through the debris and the disorientation, and neither Paul nor Theo was in any shape to do anything about it yet.
I didn’t think about it. I froze time.
I was already moving before the quiet fully settled, vaulting over the nearest row of seats in two strides and covering the distance faster than I would have managed with time running normally. I came down in front of Theo first because he was the closer of the two and the infected reaching for him was almost on top of him. My hand axe came across in a clean arc and opened the thing’s skull before I planted a front kick into its chest that sent it tumbling back into the row behind it.
I turned in the same motion, read the angle, and threw the axe.
It crossed the room and buried itself in the forehead of the infected leaning over Paul with a solidity that ended the conversation immediately.
Time resumed.
"Maribel!" I shouted.
She blinked at me from across the room, thrown for a half second by the fact that I had been standing next to her and was now suddenly twenty feet away with my axe embedded in something’s skull. She shook it off fast, which was one of the things I had come to rely on about her, and pushed forward without needing to be told what the situation was asking for.
She went for Paul. I stayed with Theo.
"You alright?" I asked, grabbing his arm and pulling him upright.
"Yeah." He came up with a grunt, one hand pressed to his ribs. "Yeah, I think so. Thank you, Ryan."
I pressed one of the guns I had taken from Crab into his hand. He checked it once, nodded, and brought it up.
Across the room Maribel had her hands full. Four infected had converged on her and Paul in the time it had taken me to sort out Theo, coming from different angles through the seats and the wreckage of the stairs. She reached for the rifle to charge it, realized it was going to take a second she didn’t have, and reversed it instead, driving the long muzzle into the nearest infected with enough force to put it down.
Paul was propped against the back of a seat behind her, one hand pressed against his shoulder where he had taken the impact of the fall, his face tight with it. He was hurt but upright, which was what mattered right now.
I started moving toward them and felt it before I saw it. That particular sharpening at the edges of my awareness that my Dullahan senses produce when something significant is about to enter the picture.
The double doors at the far end of the room swung open hard.
Two of them. Hybrids but the fast types, which was the worst version of this particular problem, both of them already in motion before the doors had finished their arc. They came in low and quick and made straight for me with the singular focus that fast hybrids always carried.
Theo raised the gun and fired twice in quick succession. Both shots landed, both hit chest mass, and both did almost nothing beyond a slight stagger that they recovered from before the sound had finished echoing. Unless you caught the brain directly a hybrid’s chest was just an inconvenience.
I shoved Theo sideways out of the first one’s path as its arm came around toward me, the nails grazing my cheek close enough that I felt the air of it before the sting arrived. My hand axe was still buried across the room so I brought the Beretta up instead, already positioned, and pressed the barrel against the back of the thing’s skull at the base where the bone was thinnest.
BANG!!
One shot and it dropped.
The second one was already on me. It hit with enough momentum that I went back hard into a row of seats, the armrests catching me across the back as I went down, and suddenly it was on top of me with its jaw working and its full weight trying to drive itself toward my face. I got my forearm up under its chin and pushed, locking my elbow, feeling the strain of it in my shoulder as the thing threw everything it had against the resistance.
My other hand found the Beretta.
I forced the barrel up into the soft tissue at the back of the hybrid’s throat, angling it, and pulled the trigger.
BANG!!
The shot came out the back of its skull and the weight on top of me went completely limp in the same instant. I shoved it off me and got to my feet in one motion, checking Theo first, finding him on his feet and functional, then shifting immediately to Maribel and Paul.
Maribel had cleared her four thankfully and even took care of the others.
Paul was still up.
All of us were breathing hard.
"Everyone in one piece?" I asked.
A few short nods came back at me from different directions. Nobody had the breath for more than that yet.
I did a fast sweep of the room. The remaining infected were still present but tangled in the seats, wedged between rows, unable to walk the wreckage quickly enough to matter right now. We had a window and it was not going to stay open.
"We have to leave now," I said.
I didn’t want us to take the risk to rest here for other potential Hybrids to appear.
"Emergency stairs," Theo said, already turning. "In the back. I saw them on the way in. Romero and the others probably went that way too."
"Alright."
I kicked the doors open and stepped through first, scanning the corridor beyond. Clear enough. Whatever Romero’s group had stirred up on their way out had either followed them or dispersed.
"Let’s move," I said.
The others fell in behind me without a word. Theo pushed forward after a moment, taking the lead. We followed his read and moved at pace, keeping the noise down.
Romero had at least done us one favor. The path down was littered with his group’s work, Infected already dealt with, corridors partially cleared. We moved through it faster than we had any right to expect.
"Maribel—"
I turned to check on Maribel.
She wasn’t there.
I stopped. Looked back down the corridor. Theo and Paul pulled up behind me, turning to look as well, equally puzzled.
"Where is Maribel?" I asked, already knowing I wasn’t going to like the answer.
Neither of them had one.
"Keep going," I said, making the decision before I’d finished the sentence. "Both of you, straight out, don’t stop, don’t look back. Watch for Romero’s men on the way down." I pulled the Beretta from my side and held it out to Paul. "Take it."
Paul took it without arguing.
"Ryan."
Theo’s hand caught my arm before I could turn. I looked back at him.
"Thank you," he said. "Really."
"Yeah." Paul’s voice was quieter but he meant it just as much. "You didn’t have to come in here for us."
I smiled to them.
"Get back to Margaret," I said. "Stay alive. Do it for the ones who didn’t make it out."
The weight of that landed between all three of us without needing to be explained further.
They nodded. Then they went.
I turned and moved back toward Hall Seven at a run.
The door was already open when I got there. I stepped through and found her inside, moving through the darkness of the hall slowly, torchlight sweeping across the area.
She was looking for it.
Obviously.
"Romero took the battery," I said.
She turned at my voice. Her face was unreadable for a moment.
"I could feel it," I added. "It was here and now it isn’t."
She was quiet. The torchlight lowered slightly.
I knew what it meant, what it meant for the Screamer, for Callighan’s timeline, for everything Margaret’s people had been trying to work against. We’d come so close to having something real to show for all of this and walked away with nothing to show but the fact that we were still breathing.
"Yeah," she said finally. "I figured."
I climbed down to her level and looked at her properly. "Zakthar is still in that hotel, the one we’re planning to move on. We get him, we get answers, we find another angle. This isn’t finished."
"Hopefully," she said with a low voice.
"Come on. We need to leave, this building isn’t getting any safer," I said.
She didn’t move.
"Maribel."
"I can’t."
"What?" I raised a brow.
She turned toward me slowly and held out her right arm.
The torchlight caught it clearly.
A bite. Deep, ragged, just above the elbow, the skin broken badly, darkening already at the edges in that way that meant it hadn’t just happened.
The air went out of the room.
I crossed to her anyway, closing the distance fast, some stupid instinct making me look at it up close as if proximity would change what it was. It didn’t. The mark was real and it was deep and the color spreading from it was already doing what it always did.
"W...When," I asked gritting slowly my teeth staring at it.
"When they had us surrounded," she said simply. "In the rows."
I looked up at her face. She was pale, really pale. Her breathing had a slight shallowness to it that hadn’t been there an hour ago. And it wasn’t just because of exhaustion.
"No...," I muttered
"It’s fine." She replied. "I chose to come here. You told me not to and I pushed every single time. That’s on me."
I just looked at her.
She smiled bitterly.
"Damn this..." She said, mostly to herself. "I really wanted to be around long enough to watch Callighan’s whole group come apart. I wanted to see that."
"You still can," I said.
She looked at me sharply. Something flickered across her face, confusion, maybe a thread of anger at what she might have thought was false comfort.
"What?"
I held her gaze.
I was already thinking about the last time, about Cindy, about what it had cost, about the quiet naive hope I’d carried afterward that I would never have to make that choice again for someone.
That hope hadn’t lasted long.
I met Maribel’s eyes and said it straight.
"I can cure you."
