Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (38 page)

“
Jake!”

The ringing voice she used to sing projected
over the creature’s moans and reached his ears. O'Connor's head
snapped skyward and his face lit up when he saw her safe on the
roof. “Laurel! Are you alright?”

“I'm fine!” She knew it was a lie. She could
hear the moans of the infected on the floor below her.

“Hey, roomie!” Kat called, as she jumped and
waved at her.

“Hey!”

“This isn't working out so well,” Kat said,
with a pout. “Going forward, I think someone else should be in
charge of coming up with all the rescue plans.”

The redhead laughed. “Oh, I don't know. This
one seems to be very popular.”

Kat looked out beyond the fence. “Yeah. But
you know, popularity isn't everything. Take Miley, for
example.”

“I'm pretty sure she got chomped during the
first week,” Laurel called back.

“My point exactly,” Kat replied. “Sometimes?
It's better to be that anonymous face in the balcony section,
rather than the hoochie-mama in the spotlight.”

Laurel scanned their nearby surroundings.
“Let's use another analogy, shall we? You guys need to get out of
there!”

“We'll figure that out once we get you down,”
Jake told her flatly.

The access door thumped in its frame and
Laurel jumped in surprise. “I think they just found the door up
here.”

“Fuck! Laurel, just stay where you are.” He
looked around quickly then trotted over to the scissor-lift.
Hopping up on the platform, Jake turned the ignition and the
machine puttered to life. Laurel shook her head and wondered what
he thought they could do for her with a three-storey elevator, from
the bottom of a five-story building.

Jake ran back to the gate. “Alright! Here's
the plan. Kat and the others will get up on the conduit, and then
start sniping the ones by the gate. I'll ram that thing through and
pull it up to the building. Once I get it set, I'll extend it up.
You can hang from the roof's edge and drop—”

“All that's going to do is get you killed.
There are so many of them back there, they'll tip the lift before
you even
make
it to the wall,” she said, folding her arms
under her breasts and cocking out one hip.

Jake felt his chest tighten. “Well... then
we'll get a line up to you and you can climb over! It won't be too
hard. You can loop it to an air intake, wrap your legs around it,
and slide down, just like Kat and I did when—”

“Do we
have
any rope?” she asked
calmly, and glanced back at the roof-top door. It was vibrating in
its frame.

“We've got to think of something! Now!” He
was starting to get really worried.

The writer passed a hand through that unruly
hair of his, causing a flash of regret to move through her and
Laurel began to tear up. There wasn't any way down. She wasn't
getting off the roof.

She thought about all the things they'd never
get to do. She'd never kiss him again. Never feel his arms around
her. They'd made love for the last time the previous night. She
wouldn't be with him when they met back up with Allen and Maggie in
Pecos. She wasn't going to get to swim in the Pacific with him, as
they'd talked about when they'd briefly sheltered at Rae's
safe-house. Or just relax in the sand beside him, once the Mimi
made it past the Rockies. She'd never see him smile again.

Laurel also realized that she couldn't wait
any longer, or she'd lose her nerve. The dead banging on the access
door knew she was up here, and they were
hungry
. The metal
frame was pushing out of the wall as she watched.

“I'll get you down!” he promised. “Once
George finally gets here, we'll—”

“Jake.”

He looked up at her and saw something in
Laurel's face that stuck a shard of ice though his heart.

“There no more time,” she said sadly.

Jake's eyes got big. “That's it, I'm coming
up!”

“You
can't
,” she exclaimed. “There's
just too many of them down there. You wouldn't even make it to the
door.”

“No!” Kat yelled. “You can't ask us to watch
you
die!
We'll fight through them and make our way up the
stairwell! Just keep moving around the roof's edge! You should have
enough ammo to hold them off 'til we get there!”

“You know you can't. Not even the both of you
together could make it through without being bitten.” Laurel shook
her head and wiped her eyes.

“Rae, Penny, and Gwen can cover us from the
pipes!” Kat turned to the trio of women, her eyes desperate. “Right
guys?”

Rae looked at her, eyes full. “Kat, there's
just... You wouldn't get ten yards. Look out there.”

She pointed outside the fence at the hellish
crowd. They were packing in against each other so tightly, most of
them couldn't even move. If it had been living people in that mess,
they would've been crushed, suffocated by the press, and unable to
draw a breath.

There wasn't any way through.

Jake began to tremble violently. He cast his
eyes desperately around the yard, searching for something,
anything
he could use to reach Laurel. Nothing. Nothing but
useless hulks of steel that used to power people's homes.

“No goddammit!” Pulling his crowbar free, he
stumbled towards the gate. The others were so shocked, they didn't
move to stop him for a few seconds. He began stabbing his weapon
through the fence and into the creature's heads. He burst eyes;
crushed noses, shattered temples, but none of it did any good. More
and more of them filtered through the cafeteria and from around
both corners. Despite his efforts, the horde was getting
bigger.

“Jake! It's not working!” Rae exclaimed, and
put a gentle hand on his back.

He ignored her.

“Jake—”

“No! This isn't happening!” He thrust the
weapon through the links again, impaling a creature wearing
hospital scrubs through its forehead.

Kat was weeping openly as she came and took
his arm. “Jake. We can't. You have to stop.”

“
No!
” He shrugged them off callously
and killed another zombie. This one was a blue-haired grandmother,
who was missing half her throat and one ear. Her jaw hung
lopsidedly, half-torn from her skull, which would make it
impossible for her to feed. That didn't stop her from trying
though, right up until his crowbar passed through her pallet and
into her brain.

“Jake, stop!” Laurel called, crying now
herself. She could see the gap between the door-frame and the
roof's entryway widen.

Kat wrapped his good arm around her body
tightly. “Rae!”

George's shapely counterpart slung her huge
rifle across her back and jumped forward to get a solid grip of his
other appendage. “Gwen, Penny, help us!”

Carson and the surviving member of the Barbie
Duo let their weapons hang from their straps, took hold of him
around the waist, and started pulling. The writer moved back half a
step, and then muscled ahead to the fence-line once again. His eyes
were wild and unseeing. He twisted and fought them, almost taking
the women off their feet as he swung his arms in an attempt to free
himself.

They shoved and heaved against each for
another a minute, until Kat and the others managed to push him back
half a dozen yards. She rode his swinging arm around and, as she
thumped into his chest, strained to push him towards the center of
the enclosure. Jake was very pale and half-mad with panic. She saw
his shoulder had begun bleeding heavily again, and she ignored the
warm wetness as it soaked her shirt. Shoving with everything she
had in her legs, the blue-haired woman managed to move him back
another yard.

He was just so
strong.
Adrenaline was
running rampant through his system, and it gave his limbs
frightening power. The four of them struggled to keep O'Connor away
from the fence, and he cursed them for it, swearing he'd fight his
way through to the redhead above if it meant killing every damn one
of the things waiting outside. From the roof's edge, Laurel begged
him to stop, terrified at the thought of Jake actually making it
outside the slim barrier. He'd be torn apart. The dead would kill
him as she watched from above or worse, make him a member of their
awful fraternity.

It was Kat who broke him out of it. Knowing
her friend was doomed, and there was absolutely
nothing
she
could do about it, hurt her badly. She couldn't imagine life
without her red-haired roomie. Laurel had always kept her grounded,
kept her honest. She was the lovely Asian's touchstone.

She let go of Jake's arm, threw her own
around him, and began to sob. His struggles ceased and his arms
went limp. She wasn't able to take her face away from his chest,
because she knew. She knew her friend was saying goodbye.

Jake's eyes were locked on Laurel. “Please.
Please!
There's has to be a way!”

The redhead watched as Kat clung to him, and
something in her mind finally clicked into place. It seemed to her
that the power plant, the smell of cordite, the blood-smeared patio
below, even the dead pounding their way through the security door
behind her, all just fell suddenly into the distance. She looked
calmly at her friends, seemingly from only a few feet away, seeing
into their hearts and their futures. They had so much suffering
still ahead. It stretched out behind them as they stood together,
like malevolent shadows that lurked just past their shoulders;
difficult to see in the fading, evening light.

Jake's was especially dark. The black
misshapen form loomed over him like an angry, thorny-skinned
wraith, waiting to tear through his flesh when he finally lost hope
and gave into his fear. It worried her, until she looked at Kat's.
Cho's was so very dark as well, but stood close against the
writer's, its night-toned hand pressed to the chest of his own
terrible shadow. While his was a jagged, wild-eyed behemoth, hers
looked slim, controlled, and composed entirely of razor blades
forged from the darkness between the stars. It caressed the ragged
hulk stretching over Jake and his shadow settled back again,
seemingly calmed by the others touch.

At that moment, Laurel could've either
laughed or kicked herself for being so bloody dense.

Kat had even
told
her—the night before
the outbreak—that she wanted to end up with someone like Jake.
She'd said it jokingly, almost in passing, and her roommate had
written the comment off as the lovely Asian just building him up to
her before they met. But that wasn't it at all.

Allen's unruly-haired friend actually
was
The One the lonely ninja-girl had been waiting so long
for.

And she'd turned away from him, and had given
him over to Laurel.

Because she loved
her,
too.

Laurel could only imagine how hard it had
been for Kat during the previous months. Being with the both of
them every day,
training
them, fighting beside them. Always
there, but never able to say anything, even to her best friend.
She'd encouraged Laurel to stop dragging her feet with him
repeatedly, and was ecstatic when they'd finally been together for
the first time back in Foster's hideaway. She'd been bouncing in
her seat with joy as Laurel told her about the way she and Jake had
made love, absorbing every detail, because she knew she would never
be able to experience it for herself.

“Kat,” she called.

Her friend's eyes came up, tear-streaked and
grief-stricken as she wept uncontrollably. “Oh god. Laurel. I...
Please. You
can't—
”

“There's nothing any of you can do. They've
almost broken through.” She looked back towards the roof entrance
again, just in time to witness a few gray skin and filth covered
hands coming around the door-jam. It wouldn't be long now. “I have
to ask you for a favor, roomie. I won't be there with you anymore,
so I need someone I can trust to watch out for Jake. Keep him from
doing all his dangerously
stupid
stuff, you know? If no
one's around, he tends to get into trouble more often than not...
Can you do that for me? “

Kat's face crumpled in pain. “Laurel—”

“Please?”

“I promise! I'll... Oh, Laurel!” Kat couldn't
hold it in anymore and sobbed brokenheartedly.

“Thank you, Kat,” she said, and turned her
gaze to Jake.

He was shaking so badly. The skin on his face
and chest was pale and covered in sweat, but he remained upright,
even though it was clearly a struggle. His left arm was almost
completely covered in crimson from the wound in his shoulder, too.
It hung listlessly; his hand barely able to retain its grasp on the
forgotten crowbar.

Jake watched her as she turned away to
compose herself. Laurel had never been much for public displays of
affection, per say. Her performances, singing whatever Celtic music
happened to take her fancy at the moment—and the occasional
kiss—were about as far as she went outside the bedroom. Even though
he was usually more affectionate in a relationship, he hadn’t
considered that to be a problem. Not when she was capable of such
sizzling heights when they were alone. But this was different.
Foster was nowhere to be seen, he was stuck inside the transformer
yard, and the infected were literally banging down her door.

The strange ringing in his ears was back.
O'Connor shook his head quickly to clear it and attempted to wrack
his brain again for an out. One that didn't involve some or all of
them being turned into tartar.

Zip. Zero. The synapses had turned to
Jell-O.

Laurel turned back and her eyes never left
his. What he saw there caused Jake more fear than he had ever been
capable of before. He didn't notice Kat watching him, her own eyes
full of worry. He didn't feel Rae or Penny's arms still wrapped
around his waist from behind. He didn't hear Gwen crying quietly as
she turned her head away, not wanting to watch what came next. All
he could see were Laurel's eyes.