Chapter 275: Chapter 274 - Save Herself
The young doctor’s last shot took the twitcher through the head.
It dropped in front of the bed and twitched on the floor, its fingers scraping uselessly at the tiles. For one second, the corridor held. Soldiers kept their rifles up. Doctors breathed hard. Iyisha lay there strapped down, her body heavy and slow, staring at the dead thing by the floor.
Then something hit the bed from the side.
The whole frame slammed into the wall.
Pain shot through her shoulder and skull. The IV stand crashed over. One of the side rails bent inward. Someone screamed. Someone else shouted for the line to hold. Iyisha’s vision blurred, cleared, then shook again when another heavy impact rolled through the floor.
"Back! Back!"
"Tank!"
The word cut through everything.
Tank.
Iyisha’s stomach dropped.
The old doctor rushed to her first. His glasses were crooked. Blood speckled the front of his coat. He reached for the restraints with shaking hands and sliced through the one over her chest. Then the one over her waist.
"It’s all right," he said, though his voice was breaking. "It’s all right."
It was not all right.
Gunfire exploded deeper in the corridor. Something huge slammed into the wall hard enough to shake dust from the ceiling. One soldier was thrown past the doorway and struck the glass hard enough to leave blood there before he slid down out of sight.
The old doctor bent over her thighs and cut another restraint. His face had lost all color. He looked over his shoulder, and the terror in him showed plain now.
"Come on," he whispered. "Come on."
He got to the last tie near her wrist.
A soldier grabbed the back of his coat and yanked him away.
"Leave her!"
"She can still move—"
"You’ll be dead if we stay here!"
The doctor stumbled, tried to fight him, then looked back at Iyisha.
Frankenstein was farther down the hall, half dragged, half shoved back by two soldiers while he shouted over the gunfire.
"Save her! Get her back! Don’t lose her!"
Something crashed again. More screaming followed. The old doctor was pulled backward with the others. His hand opened as he lost balance, and the exacto knife dropped onto the bed beside Iyisha’s hip.
Then they were gone.
The corridor filled with gunfire, boots, glass breaking, and the heavy sound of something smashing through metal. Iyisha lay there breathing too fast, staring at the knife, her body refusing to answer right away.
Move.
Her hand twitched.
Again.
It slid across the sheet and found the handle.
She almost dropped it. Her fingers were weak and slick. She had to drag the blade against the restraint and saw back and forth because she could not hold the angle steady. By the time the strap gave, her whole arm was shaking.
She tore the other loose with both hands, rolled to one side, and hit the floor on her knees.
Her stomach turned at once.
She vomited beside the bent wheel of the bed and caught herself with one hand before she collapsed fully. Her head swam. Her bare skin felt too cold. Every sound hit too hard.
Then she heard it.
Heavy footsteps.
Tank.
The word came back again, and with it came Long Island. The size. The strength. The way the thing had moved like a wall with hunger in it.
Iyisha grabbed the sheet hanging half off the bed and pulled it around herself. Then she crawled and half staggered behind an overturned equipment cart near the corner of the room entrance. The exacto knife kept slipping in her fingers. She looked at her hand, saw how badly it shook, then ripped a strip from the sheet with her teeth and tied the handle into her palm. She wrapped it around twice and cinched it tight with her other hand.
Gunfire kept going.
A body hit the wall outside.
Then another.
Something roared.
A soldier screamed.
Iyisha squeezed her eyes shut for one second and held the knife with both hands against her chest.
Then the shots started thinning out.
One burst.
Two more.
A single shot.
Then silence.
Not real silence. The alarms were still on. Somewhere farther off, someone was still screaming. But the gunfire near her had stopped.
Iyisha forced herself up.
The corridor outside looked wrecked. Soldiers lay twisted across the floor, some bitten, some broken, some thrown hard enough to leave blood across the glass. A body had folded over the bent remains of a cart. Far to the right, near the deeper turn of the hallway, three twitchers moved among the dead. One crouched over a body. Another jerked its head toward every sound. The third dragged a leg as it circled.
Malcolm.
He was here.
He had to be.
The doctors had gone down the other corridor. The one leading away from the bodies. Iyisha stared at the twitchers, then at the side hall. If she went straight back, they would hear her.
She bent, grabbed a metal tray from the floor, and threw it down the doctors’ corridor.
It clanged hard against the wall.
All three twitchers snapped toward the sound.
She grabbed a broken monitor arm with her free hand and hurled that after it. The crash echoed deeper.
The twitchers went.
Not fast at first. Then one launched forward and the other two followed, drawn into the side corridor where the doctors had fled.
Iyisha moved.
She limped into the main hall, one hand on the wall, the other gripping the exacto knife. Her legs were weak. Her shoulder hurt where the bed had slammed into the wall. Her stomach kept turning over, and every few steps her vision threatened to blur again.
Still, she kept going.
"Malcolm," she whispered.
No answer.
She pushed harder.
"Malcolm."
Her bare feet slipped once in blood. She caught herself on the wall and kept moving, dragging the sheet tighter around her body.
Then something stepped into the far end of the hallway.
Huge.
Her heart stopped for one beat.
The tank turned its head toward her.
Its shoulders nearly filled the corridor. Torn restraint belts hung from one arm. Its body looked swollen with dense muscle under pale skin. Blood striped its chest and one side of its face. One eye hung ruined and white.
Beside it, one of the twitchers from the side corridor jerked to a stop.
Then it saw her.
It came first.
Iyisha did not have time to run.
The twitcher hit her high, driving her back into the wall. Its teeth snapped at her face. She shoved the exacto knife up with both hands and buried it in its eye.
The blade sank in and stuck.
The twitcher shrieked and thrashed, still alive, biting blindly now. Its teeth closed over her hand and the wrapped cloth instead of flesh. She screamed and shoved harder, trying to keep its face away from hers while the tank came down the corridor behind it.
"Malcolm!" She screamed.
Save me.
The tank lifted its head.
A gunshot cracked.
Its head blew apart.
The body jerked once and dropped so hard the floor shook.
The twitcher on top of her kept clawing, half blind, mouth working around the cloth and her hand.
Then Malcolm was there.
He grabbed the twitcher by the back of the neck, drove a knife into its skull, and ripped it off her. The body hit the floor beside the tank.
Iyisha looked up at him through a haze of red light, sweat, and blood.
His right arm was wrapped in a torn strip of cloth dark with blood. His pistol was still up. His knife dripped. His face was hard and wild and fixed only on her.
"Malcolm," she said, and it came out broken.
He dropped to her at once and pulled her against him, one arm locking around her shoulders, the other hand cradling the back of her head.
"I’m here," he said.
She gripped his shirt with shaking fingers and buried her face against him while the alarm kept screaming around them.
