Escape (58 page)

They started after her, but when Ferrel reached the catwalk, he balked at the cracked and crumbling castcrete, wondering if adding his weight to the bridge would be enough to make it collapse. Kieran watched Jilly begin crossing the bridge, sent Ferrel an apologetic look, and then left him there. Ferrel waited to see if the bridge would suddenly buckle and toss Jilly and Kieran to the waiting maw of the abyss below.

“Only one way to find out,” Gallian said, giving Ferrel a sudden chill. People reading his mind still took a lot of getting used to. He watched Gallian start across the bridge, the back of his blue patient's gown flapping open in the breeze, revealing more than Ferrel cared to see. He averted his eyes, and took the opportunity for a backward glance. His eyes lit upon the broken windows of the Tekasi Med Center's pysch ward, and he imagined a legion of wrinkled gray monsters climbing through the holes. Who knew how many more infected lay within the cells and patients' quarters in the pysch ward. Ten? A hundred? A thousand?

Ferrel shivered and started accross the bridge.

Chapter 37

S
o what's your plan?
Kieran thought at Jilly.

What?
She regarded him with eyebrows raised.

You said you had a plan.

No, I said I had an idea, which is considerably less sophisticated than a plan.

Don't argue semantics with me, tell me what your
idea
is, or I'll pluck it out of your mind.

You can't pluck a thought that I'm not thinking, so good luck.

Jilly
 
.
 
.
 
.

What?

Don't be difficult.

Jilly sighed.
I'm not. Just consider who else is listening. I'll tell you later.

Gallian?

Who else?

You don't trust him.

You shouldn't either. There's a problem with his story, in case you haven't noticed.
Jilly gave him a moment to figure it out, then added,
He's just like us. The virus has been rampant for weeks, according to him, and somehow, he's only as far along as he would be after a few days of infection. How did he manage to avoid catching the virus for so long? Especially if his caretakers were all infected.

Huh. So, he's either really lucky, or he's lying about his story.

Yeah. Makes you wonder what else he's lying about.

Like how he remembers what was happening two weeks ago if he was in such an advanced state of dementia he didn't even know how to dress himself
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
Kieran mused.

Exactly. It couldn't have been the virus repairing the damage to his brain, because two weeks of infection at the rate the virus has been altering our bodies would be more than enough to turn him into a slavering gray monster, the same as Brathus. Speaking of your friend, who was he?

Kieran's jaw tightened.
Not a friend.

Who then?

A business associate and a mutineering backstabber. Let's leave it at that.

Jilly frowned, but took the hint, and they passed a moment in silence, picking their way accross the crumbling catwalk. They came to an area near the middle where it narrowed to a footpath, the sides having crumbled away completely.

Kieran stopped and gawked at the narrow connection to the opposite side of the bridge. Jilly backed up, took a running leap, and landed a dozen micró-astroms from the weakened area. Kieran blinked, for a moment unable to believe she'd been able to jump so far. There were definitely some advantages to the virus. He'd almost be sorry to see it go when
—
if,
he corrected himself
—
they found a cure. After a moment's hesitation, Kieran backed up, then took a flying leap of his own. He landed poorly, skidded in the rubble, and rolled to a stop, fetching up against a bent railing that rattled violently, but thankfully held. He had a momentary, breath-stealing view of the abyss he'd be falling through if it hadn't. Jilly stopped to offer him a hand up, while Ferrel looked on in dismay from the opposite side of the broken catwalk.

“You must be yanking my balls!” he said. “No way I'm crossing this!”

After considerable prodding he and Gallian both jumped across the crumbling segment of the catwalk, and they continued on their way. Jilly eyed Gallian thoughtfully as they walked down to the end of the catwalk. She wondered if he had read her mental conversation with Kieran earlier. Did he know they were suspicious of him? Probably. It would be impossible to keep her impressions a secret from a mind reader. Yet no matter how hard she concentrated on him, Gallian's thoughts remained a mystery. She frowned, wondering why she could read some people, and not others.

Gallian noticed her scrutiny and gave her a sunny grin.

Jilly frowned and looked away.

The building at the end of the catwalk surprised them by identifying itself with a cracked and faded sign, hanging above a gaping double-doored entrance with no doors. The sign read:

THE WELCOME TO THE 101ST PRECINCT. And below that, was a blue crest in the shape of a Wolvin's head, with the words: CRATER CITY PATROLLERS DEPARTMENT emblazoned on it.

Kieran nodded to the sign, and said, “At least we know where to find some weapons.”

Jilly nodded. “Maybe a ship, too.”

“Let's not get our hopes up,” Ferrel added.

Jilly started toward the broken entrance, rubble crunching underfoot. “Only one way to find out.”

Their eyes accustomed quickly to the more absolute darkness inside the building, but for a moment they couldn't decide what they were seeing. Then recognition came in a horrifying rush. At the end of a short entrance hall lay a set of stairs, and at the base of those stairs were a long line of barricades with bodies lying in tangled heaps on both sides. On the stair side of the barricades, the bodies were armored in shiny black tetrillium; on their side, trailing all the way from the entrance where they stood gawking, were even greater numbers of blue-gowned patients. Most of the bodies were so badly mangled that they were barely recognizable as people. Their skins, what parts were visible between the blackened holes torn by plasma fire, were an ominous shade of gray, wrinkly and dry-looking. Jilly hoped that was just a combination of dust and decay, but knew better than to believe it. These men and women were obviously all former patients of the adjacent hospital, but they hadn't attacked the patrollers department because they'd somehow escaped and were suffering from mental illnesses that left them too deranged to know any better. They'd attacked because they were infected with the virus, and so overcome by animalistic rage that they couldn't help themselves.

Yet this grouping, the patients on one side, the patrollers on the other, showed a level of collaboration between infected people that went beyond pure insanity; they'd still retained enough mental capacity to join forces.

Jilly took a halting step forward. Then another, and another, picking her way through the bodies, sometimes having no choice but to step on them, or pieces of them. She tried not to let her brain identify what she was stepping on. The air stank with the smell of charred flesh, and the nauseating, graveyard smell of decay. As she got closer to the barricades, the dead were clustered more tightly together, and their remains were even less recognizable. There were patients and patrollers still locked in a death grip accross the barricades: a patient's dead eyes staring into the faceplate of the patroller whose neck his hands still seemed to be crushing; the gaping hole in the patient's abdomen where another patroller's rifle could be seen, still resting on the barricade, still aimed, the trigger having been pulled with the last ounce of his strength as another patient hurled himself over the barricades and ripped the armor off his chest to sink his teeth into the soft flesh beneath.

Jilly's eyes winced shut. How could it have come to this?

Kieran spoke up beside her, and she jumped with fright. “They fought until the end. All of them. I guess virus or no virus, some damage still can't be repaired. This is actually good to see. They're not invincible. Maybe Dimmi is dead after all
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
”

Jilly shook her head and replied in a tremulous voice, “
Good
to see?” She turned to him incredulously. “They hurled themselves against a superior force, until hundreds were dead, and still they kept coming! They had no concern for their own safety, no rational, human feelings left to curb their anger
—
or their appetites. They were out of control. This is not a
good
thing, Kieran. Nothing about this is good! They commited suicide, and they didn't care. They
—
” Her voice faltered, and she continued in a strained whisper: “They ate each other. We're looking at our future, scattered in broken pieces all around us. This isn't
—
” Jilly broke off as her voice cracked. She looked away, her eyes suddenly moist, and sniffed audibly.

Kieran laid a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, but didn't move away. “We're not going to end up like them, Jilly. We'll find a cure.”

Jilly gestured helplessly to the carnage around them. “They didn't,” she said, her voice rough, tears glistening on her cheeks. She shook her head, sending her long, unwashed blonde hair flinging from side to side, tickling Kieran's hand briefly before she stepped away. Kieran let her go and Gallian took her place.

“So this is what became of them
.
 
.
 
.
 
.
” he sounded subdued and vulnerable, genuinely sad to see his fellow patients, maybe people he knew and sat with at lunch, lying in crumpled heaps all around him.

It was enough to lessen Kieran's suspicions for a moment. “I'm sorry,” he said.

Gallian nodded slowly. “Yeah
 
.
 
.
 
.
me, too.”

Kieran heard a rattling sound to his left and turned sharply to look. Maybe someone had survived and was just now reawakening.

But it was just Ferrel. He was stepping over the barricades. Kieran watched as he bent down beside a heap of dead patrollers on the other side, grimaced, and then began turning over the bodies, disentangling arms from legs, from unidetifiable remains. For a moment he wondered what the kid was doing, then he saw Ferrel take something from one of the bodies and hold it up to study it before tucking it into his tunic.

Kieran stepped over the barricades to help with the gruesome work. Jilly and Gallian joined them a minute later. They tried not to notice the nature of the wounds on the bodies, but sometimes, when a patient's jaws were still locked around a patroller's throat, it was hard not to understand how they'd died. A few bore more than the necessary wounds to kill, their corpses ravaged with teeth marks. There was surprisingly little blood crusted on the sallow gray flesh, as though their veins had begun to dry up long before they'd died.

Soon they had row upon row of equipment stacked along the stairs: power cells, stun and frag grenades, comm pieces, rifles, pistols, daggers, personal shields, helmets, and plates of armor. There was a whole arsenal there, very little of which was aimed at crowd control. The patrollers hadn't been concerned with sparing lives when they'd rallied to defend their precinct.

With quiet purpose, the group began arming and armoring themselves. Once Kieran was finished strapping armor plates to his arms and torso, he found a TX-42 Plasma Rifle and matching TX-9 Plasma Pistol. He pulled the pistol from its accompanying holster and aimed it at the wall above the stairs. The wall was dominated by a recessed tile mosaic of the department's wolvin's head crest. Kieran pulled the trigger, and the pistol discharged a blinding red flash of plasma which exploded against the mosaic an instant later with a deafening
boom,
followed by the clatter of broken tiles to the floor.

“What the kefick was that for?!” Ferrel demanded. “You scared the shakra out of me!”

Kieran shrugged and began strapping the pistol holster around his waist. “We have to make sure the weapons work, don't we? Fastest way to do that is to fire them.”

Ferrel growled something unintelligible, and Kieran allowed himself a grim laugh. Soon they were all firing their chosen weapons at the mosaic above the stairs. The hall began to cloud with drifting curls of smoke, and the smell of charred and melted ceramics wafted on the air as a bitter, acrid, eye-watering stench.

Gallian threw his chosen gun
—
an automatic bolter rifle
—
aside in disgust. “No ammo,” he said.

Jilly was about to discard an identical rifle, which she'd just test-fired into the ruined mosaic, when a better idea occured to her. Taking care to keep her mind blank, she stepped up to Gallian and said, “Here, take mine.”