Blood Soaked and Contagious (49 page)

“Save the morality for later,” he hissed at me, “you do not have time for it now. Do you want to rescue Bajali? Then fucking get back on the program or I will leave you here. Understand?”

Looking into the hardness of his eyes, for one second or a hundred, I was frightened enough that I remembered who I was and what I had come to do. The realization was tempered with the almost-sure reality that by the time the night was finished I would have seen more horror to lose sleep over for the rest of my life.

My brother and my father were here, somewhere, and they could not be allowed to escape or end the day alive.

“Thank you, Matt. Let’s go.”

He nodded, and we kept moving.

The view from our vantage point showed more activity toward the parking garage, and much less towards the front of the building. There was not a single intact pane of glass on that side and little to no movement to be seen.

What few guards that were at all apparent were clustered near the door into the building from the upper garage deck. We counted six other figures moving around on that deck and the one below it.

There was so little movement on the other side that it was actually suspicious.

Franklin turned back to the group and said exactly what I had been thinking. “There’s too little motion at the front. No triage, no nothing. They rigged something in there.”

“Franklin, move up to the near corner of the building. Hard cover if you can take it, soft if you can get it.” Flower’s orders were clear, and he seemed to have formulated an approach in mere moments. “I’ll take out the guard closest to the door. Franklin, you double tap the middle one, and I’ll take the third in the confusion. Frank, Charlie, and Omura, you three move up and take that door. We’ll follow, depending on resistance. Got it?”

We got it. Franklin slipped across the street like a greased weasel, fast and fluid. Flower chambered a round in his absurdly long sniper rifle and waited for a signal from our point man. It could not have been three full breaths before Flower stopped breathing and his finger tightened on the trigger.

Crack! He didn’t miss, but there was no way I would have expected him to miss. The guard closest to the door was the victim of a magic trick that made everything from his collar upwards disappear.

Franklin reacted as soon as he heard the shot and the second guard’s head exploded into wet fireworks. The third dropped out of sight in a spray of blood shortly thereafter.

“Go.” Flower’s order was nearly a whisper, but all three of us heard it and moved.

We got the high sign from Franklin as we passed him, scurrying onto the top deck of the parking garage. The only thing there to meet us were the bodies of the three guards, and the cyclopean gaze of a security camera that we weren’t able to see from our original position. The body of the camera sported a red “On” light, and in my imagination, the lens blinked at me.

I broadcast to our team, “They’ve got a camera. Probably know we’re here, if the exploding heads weren’t a clue.”

Flower fired back a quick response. “Take out the lens.” I raised my rifle and cracked it with the stock. The red light went out. “You three,” he followed up after watching me disable the camera, “get in there, split up, and make shit happen. I’ll follow in 60 seconds. Franklin will hold the exit.”

“Sir, I pinged Fitz. Relay says we’ve got about eight minutes before the convoy stragglers enter the theater,” Franklin sent to the whole team.

“You three, I’m giving you five. No more. No less. Scram!”

We went through the door in a single-file line. Omura mimed tipping his hat to us and scrambled down the open stairway. Charlie and I moved up to the door leading to the lobby and she poked her nose to the window, gave me a thumbs up, and we let ourselves in.

It was a fairly standard corporate lobby, tasteful marble tile, slap-dash colorful art on the walls, and you could almost hear the Muzak that would have been playing on any given normal work day. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a normal workday. There was shattered glass all over the tile and enough dried blood spatters to make Jackson Pollock nauseous. We also learned that Franklin’s intuition about the front door was spot on.

Someone had lined the area with trip wires, caltrops, and no fewer than five Claymore anti-personnel mines. It was, to my eye, inexpertly done, but it would have stopped us long enough for a team of defenders to pick us off like baby seals on an ice floe. The question became, “Then where are the defenders?”

“They were going to box us in and pick us off,” Charlie whispered, clearly on the same mental page as I was.

“Yeah, that’s my guess.”

“So where are they?” She took the words right out of my mouth.

“Potty break, feeding time at the slaughterhouse, or they’re waiting for us somewhere.” I looked around, noting the elevators and the empty reception desk. “We don’t have time to wonder too much. Stairs or elevator?”

“Stairs.”

Charlie and I turned around and headed in the door towards the stairwell that Omura had used to make his disappearance into the structure of the building. His nefarious purposes were clear: blow it up. We had one clear objective, and a few that flew under the banner of “Gosh! It would be great if... ”

The second floor was dead quiet, just offices with open doors into a central free area, and nothing much to speak of beyond that. We elected to not bother poking around and scurried up to the next level.

We were greeted with garbage and six people chained to the walls. They were all on their way to meet whatever Maker they believed in, and it was just a matter of time before they got there. I knew I smelled gangrene somewhere nearby, and a closer look at one of the poor saps confirmed that his hand from the leather belt at his wrist down to his fingers was turning distressing colors.

He wasn’t even able to lock eyes with me. They just rolled around in their sockets. I didn’t have time to look each of these people over, but this man moved me to take action. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and pulled the Man Scythe free as quietly as possible.

I caressed the inside of his naked thigh with the curve of the blade, and he didn’t make a noise; none of them did, and he simply started to bleed out on the floor. When I turned around, Charlie wasn’t behind me.

That’s when I heard her yell, “Hey, Frank! Who’s the asshole in the pajamas?”

I took off down the hallway and into the boardroom at the end of the hall. Charlie stood against the far wall, surrounded by a small crowd of zombies carrying clubs and machetes. Both of her wakizashi were glinting in the light of the daylight-corrected fluorescent light bulbs.

I looked to my left and saw someone I really would have preferred not to see. Unfortunately, I didn’t have much choice in the matter.

“Charlie, meet Stewart. Stewart, meet Charlie. He’s my younger brother.”

She looked thoughtful, a wakizashi in each hand, surrounded by no fewer than eight zombies, and asked me, “Well, does that mean you’re going to kill him or let him make a deal and we’ll get him later?”

I looked at my smug, undead younger brother. His ninja jammies were pressed, he didn’t smell bad, and his claws had been shaved down to long, clean tapers. I couldn’t have been more disgusted if Josef Mengele had popped over to bugger one of the poor bastards who were chained to the wall in the foyer. There was enough blood on Stewart’s hands to merit an eternity of nasty reincarnations.

“If you don’t mind, m’dear, I think I’ll kill him now.”

Stewart “I’m a zombie and I don’t smell” Hightower actually had the nerve to look surprised!

“Frank! I’m still your brother! What do you want to kill me for? Join us! Besides, you’ll make a fabulous cow and fucktoy for me and my associates.”

I couldn’t believe he used Dad’s oily, salesman voice on me. All things considered, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised—Stu was a fucking nudge as a child.

Stewart and I closed the distance on one another and I snapped the blade of my weapon of choice into a low guard position. He drew his sword, the “classic” ninja chokuto. I was also willing to bet there was something in the hand he kept out of sight behind his leg. Shuriken?

In the quarter of a second I had to think about it, it seemed less likely he’d have a distance weapon, even an annoying one in here. My brother was a sneak. I didn’t think more training, dying, and coming back to life would have changed a single thing. Instincts told me it was either a weighted chain, or something equally compact.

I tuned out the noise coming from Charlie’s direction, because something bloody had begun. None of it sounded like her. A few clubs, claws, and teeth against someone who was comfortable using two blades wouldn’t do much good unless they rushed her. Even then I’d put my money on her.

That moment of considering my environment nearly cost me my life. Stewart flew forward and put a foot on the Man Scythe, which slammed it to the floor but not out of my grip. His sword came down, and I let him bury it into my shoulder. It hurt like Hell.

The look on his face when he realized he’d not only landed a hit on me, but that he’d actually tried to kill a flesh-and-blood relative, was almost delightful enough to make me forget that my shoulder was on fire and that I truly wanted to vomit. Instead, I smiled at him.

“Hey, Stu,” I said. “Why don’t you pull that out of my shoulder and take a good look at it, you festering excuse for an ass boil?”

With a snarl, he obliged me, and I dropped to my knees. The snarl cut off rather abruptly, because it was a bit of a shock to see how little of his sword blade remained. The section that had cut into my shoulder had a lovely crescent of metal missing, leaving only a pencil-width of steel holding the blade in one piece. I guess my little friends needed to make more playmates, and I was deeply grateful for their sense of dramatic timing.

He took a step back from me and looked at me as if I were the one who ate people for fun. When he shifted his weight off the business end of my weapon it became instantly clear that a moment of truth had arrived.

I don’t feel any guilt for taking advantage of his surprise or for killing him. He was already dead once, and the second time didn’t matter.

A flick of the wrist turned the Man Scythe upward and sent it slamming into his body. I think it entered behind his testicles and continued for all 20 inches of the blade until it popped out under his sternum.

He froze solid, gasping. I stood up, reversed my grip on the handle, and pivoted with my hips. The blade pulled free, cutting through his pelvic bone, and opening his abdominal cavity to the world. My brother was too shocked to scream and didn’t even attempt to pull his guts back in. All I got from him was a blank stare and a spray of bloody entrails.

I pulled my pistol from the holster and put the barrel to his forehead.

“This is a shame, Stu. I love you, but I’m not the least bit sorry.” I fired once. There was no way to miss.

When I turned around, Charlie was watching me with a very sad expression on her face. The crew that would have done her harm was strewn around the floor in various states of decapitation and dismemberment. It didn’t look like any of them had managed to lay a finger on her.

“We’ll talk about it later. We’ve got to get Baj and get out of here.” I waved her out the door and followed her.

There was a certain silence between us that I didn’t quite understand, but I also knew we had very little time to deal with the rescue. Whatever was happening between us needed to wait until we got the job done, because it wouldn’t matter at all if we died in the attempt. For all I knew, she’d take it up with me in the afterlife, if such a thing existed.

She had stopped in the foyer and was surveying the five remaining people attached to the walls. I tapped her on the shoulder and raised my eyebrow when she turned to face me. Her voice appeared in my head, and she told me she had to do something. I nodded and told her I’d meet her on the next floor.

I turned to go and headed up to the next floor. I had no clue what she was planning; all I knew was that I didn’t hear any noises as I hauled ass up the next flight of stairs.

The fire door was dented and the reinforced glass was cracked, but it was typical in every other way. I eased it open, and stuck my head into the room, followed by the rest of my body. My baby was still open in my hand, and I remembered to shift my grip at the last moment before it could have made a racket against the steel door.

Another lobby, but it was neater and a lot closer to high tech than the floor below. When I turned my head, I saw something that I had been loathing to see but was an important indicator I was in the right place. The logo of my father’s company was on the far wall for all to see, looking sharp and angular in brushed stainless steel.

What I didn’t know was simple: was this the nerve center or just the first of the floors that he controlled?

Charlie appeared beside me, having accomplished whatever it was she felt compelled to do for those sad people. She indicated left and right and then forward, so we split to opposite sides of the hallway and explored ahead in tandem.

She found the lab on her side. I didn’t find anything or anyone.

To laypersons such as us nothing in the lab looked all that unusual. Computers were set up all over, as were microscopes, beakers, and several industrial refrigerators. It wasn’t as simple as finding something with a sign next to it that said, “Steal me!” We looked at one another and made the decision to move up another floor, and quickly.