Gravewalkers: Dying Time (29 page)

Ever more ghouls poured in
from the street. They howled up a tremendous racket as they chased
after Critias who sprinted over to Carmen, lifted her over his
shoulder, and then carried her away toward the door to the
stairs.

“
Give me your pistol,” she
demanded, “and grab mine from over there!” Once she had his gun,
Carmen blasted the brains from ghouls while Critias ran as he
carried her. He scooped up her overheated weapon on the way to
dashing into the stairwell. As soon as he was through the door,
Carmen instructed, “Hold the door closed while I lock
it!”

He put her down so he could
grab the door handle with both hands and keep it shut
tight.

Carmen limped over to the
stairs then pushed her strength to rip the hand railing right off,
support-spokes and all. While ghouls frantically beat on their door
in an effort to get in at them, Carmen stuffed some of the steel
spokes through the rectangular hoop-handle of the door then rapidly
twisted them off into a knot so that once she had them tight, the
length of rail wedged against the wall effectively barred the door
from ever opening. “It will take them some time to find the way
around,” Carmen gasped as she started up the stairs hobbled by her
crippled right leg. She knew his expression behind her without ever
seeing it. “I can make it,” she growled with tenacity.

As Critias lifted her in
his arms to carry her up, he demanded, “Tell me where to find a
window I can jump from.” He started up the stairwell by taking five
or six steps at a leap. Ghouls that were already above them in the
building came down the stairwell only to have Carmen shoot them in
the face as Critias sprang past. He tried to figure out how she
would ever be able to get back across to the Customs House. Critias
finally asked, “How bad is your leg?”

“
It tore out my tendons I
think,” she told him truthfully. “I’ll need surgery to correct it
or I’ll regenerate lame for certain.” She chuckled darkly, “Unless
you would prefer to have a limper for a,” she paused perhaps from
pain, “partner.” When he had gone up enough floors, Carmen told
him, “Take this door,” which he opened with a kick. She directed
him down the hallway then picked an office, “This one should be
good.”

Critias sat her on her good
leg then they opened the door; once inside, he closed and locked
it, then put a desk against it.

Carmen limped into a window
office that had missing glass. They were two floors higher than
their destination across the street. “I still have one good leg,”
she tried to sound positive. “You’ll have to throw me.”

“
Fucking hell,” he
exclaimed with no time to delay over his fear that he would toss
Carmen to a splattered end on the street below. Ghouls were coming
up and they needed to be gone when the infected arrived. Critias
went to the window then laced his fingers for her to step in when
he launched her.

Carmen wiped his sword
clean of infected blood on a soggy old chair then put it in his
scabbard. She stepped her good foot into his laced grip, balanced
herself with her hands on his shoulders and then counted, “One,
two, throw.”

They counted off then
Critias heaved her with all his might. Carmen kicked away on her
healthy leg with flawless timing to sail over the street to the
building across the way. From the extra height, she came down rough
in a plot of chicken-wire-covered tomatoes. Critias backed up to
have room to run then went after her to land clean on an open area
of roof edge.

“
Help me get inside,” she
urged him so that they could escape the light of sunrise. For the
moment, they were in the shadow of the tower and that concealed
them a little. “We don’t want the ghouls to see us here and get any
ideas about trying to jump across.”

Critias took her arm then
they went to the door to enter the stairwell. Once they were
inside, he stopped at the first landing to say, “We’re too dirty
from rolling with the dogs to track it all through the hallways
without decontamination.” He sat her down then used his helmet
radio on the guard-patrol frequency to summon help.

The first guard arrived
within a minute. He was a young man, short of breath from his run
up the stairwells as he asked, “Are there ghouls on the
roof?”

Critias was about to
explain to the guard that they had been in the office building to
the east, but then he realized that would mean that he would also
need to explain how they could accomplish such a seemingly
impossible leap. Instead, he said, “It’s possible for a hunter to
jump from that office building to the east to land on this roof.
There are no ghouls up there right now, but it could happen. Your
guard commander needs to station a watch at this door and we need a
crew of cleaners to decontaminate us so we can get to the medics.
We tussled with a bull of a hunter and are somewhat worse for
wear.”

The guard sounded excited
at their news of such an encounter, “Did you kill it?”

“
No,” Carmen confessed,
“but it damn sure knows that it was in a fight.”

Critias chuckled painfully
to the taste of blood, “Lady Beowulf here blew his arm off then her
Grendel ran away to learn how to wipe his ass with the other
hand.”

The guard couldn’t believe
it, “A hunter ran away? A hunter would never run from anything
except maybe a flamethrower or Godzilla.”

“
We lit his ass on fire
alright,” Critias assured the guard. “It chose the better part of
valor.”

Two more guards soon
arrived followed by four decontamination technicians in
splatter-suits. They carried suction vacuums and wash buckets. The
crew removed all their possessions then put them aside while they
scrubbed Critias and Carmen clean.

The decontamination
scrubbers searched them diligently for any signs of infectious
abrasions. Critias’ armor had protected him from any wounds aside
from crushing injuries. Carmen’s formfitting diving suit had done
much the same for her. Her titanium bones were all but unbreakable
and nothing sharp had penetrated her splash-protection.

“
Their pistols are
filthy,” the lead technician told the guards as he put them in a
plastic tub. “You must escort them to King’s Tower then deliver
them to Tinker Bob’s new doctor friend, Kevin. If anyone complains
about them not having weapons, you tell them they’re still
undergoing decontamination according to my instructions. We will
take all their stuff to the cleaners.”

By the time the guards had
escorted Critias and Carmen to Bob’s floor, Critias hurt so badly
from his beating that it was hard for him to walk without his
mechsuit to support him. Carmen had radioed ahead with her burst
interlink so that Kevin awaited them at the elevator.

Kevin helped get Carmen
into the laboratory then put her on a table to operate. He asked,
“What happened?”

“
Grendel,” Critias
answered. “That’s what she called the supersized hunter that nearly
killed us both. After she blew off an arm and I dumped a box of
bullets into him, the giant freak ran off to save its own
ass.”

Kevin used the med-scanner
to focus in on Carmen’s leg as he said, “Though a bromide
personification for the invincible enemy, it is still high praise
for a ghoul coming from a prototype Epsilon killer-stalker combat
unit like Carmen. Jim will be interested in this Grendel. With your
permission, I’d like to download sensory recording data of the
encounter from your helmet and from Carmen to prepare a displayable
video of the material for general study.”

Critias agreed, “If Carmen
is willing, go ahead and make your movie.”

“
I will be fine for the
moment,” Carmen told Kevin, “Help Critias first.”

Kevin got Critias on an
examining table where the android diagnosed him, “You have some
deep subcutaneous contusions but no fractures.” He went over to a
small refrigerator where he filled a syringe from a little bottle
then returned to inject it into Critias’ arm.

Critias was cautious about
the injection, “What was that?”

As Kevin went to see about
Carmen's leg, he told Critias, “Something to keep you calm while I
operate on Carmen and it will also ease your pain.”

Critias rested comfortably
on painkillers while Kevin performed surgery on Carmen so that he
could reattach a broken tendon, which would allow her leg to
regenerate properly without any lingering handicap.

Jim came in about the time
Kevin bandaged his successfully completed procedure. He was none
too pleased when he asked, “Would you two care to explain to me how
you got outside in order to get into a fight?”

“
We jumped off the roof of
the Customs House,” Carmen revealed.

Jim considered that and
quickly deduced what she meant, “Could a hunter make the jump back
here from that building?”

“
Absolutely,” Carmen
confirmed, “if they ever think of it.”

Jim saw something positive
in that, “Then it seems your ignorant stunt did us a favor. If the
ghouls had figured out our vulnerability before you did, things
could have gone a whole lot differently. From Critias’ bruises it
seems that something lurks in that building capable of putting up a
fight.”

Kevin went to a soldering
station then came back with an electronic device he had recently
manufactured. “I fabricated this,” he told Jim, “to allow your
primitive video technology to display our more advanced compression
stream.” He plugged a wire from his device into a high-definition
video monitor that he would use to display the downloaded images
from Carmen’s sensory recording of their adventure. The male
android already had all the relevant material stored in his own
memory.

Jim walked over to the
display to watch as Kevin played a recording that was a view from
Carmen’s eyes with sound from her ears. Kevin needed a few moments
to adjust the manual settings on his device and the monitor to get
the picture in focus.

The show began where Carmen
straddled Critias in their bed earlier that night. From her eyes,
their dark room was clear as daylight. Their hands together in
interlaced fingers dominated the scene as she slowly moiled over
him.

When Kevin came around to
see the perfected display, he apologized, “Sorry about that; allow
me to fast forward to the relevant material.”

The image advanced to when
they arrived on the roof of the Customs House. After Carmen landed
in the office building, the girlish ghoul had crept in to
investigate the noise where Carmen snatched it by the neck from
surprise.

Jim watched with interest
and Carmen’s ingenuity impressed him, “You can walk up to them if
they think you’re a ghoul.” Later he observed, “That hunter doesn’t
make feeding calls, not even when it must be sure you’re not
infected. What was that sound just before it fled?”

Kevin adjusted his device
then replayed the moment multiple times from just before the hunter
running away. Among all the howling of ghouls and sounds of battle
there was a distant tinkling, then the hunter turned away and
fled.

“
That was falling glass
perhaps,” Kevin guessed as to the source of the sound.

Jim doubted it was falling
glass, “Not a bell?”

They listened again
repeatedly, but Kevin remained unsure, “It could be a bell. Perhaps
there were such things in that stationery store that fell from a
shelf. I hear the sound, but I don’t have anything in memory to
compare it against so that I could positively identify it with any
certainty.”

“
Yeah,” Jim replied, “but
I don’t think so. I’m not that lucky.”

Carmen guessed at Jim’s
thoughts, “It was a dog-whistle?”

Jim said, “For a
bodyguard,” before he made a loud whistle.

Hatchet came in to answer
the call, “What is it, boss?”

Jim quizzed him, “What is
this sound?”

Hatchet guessed, “A bell,
or maybe some falling broken glass.”

“
The bastards are knocking
right on my doorstep,” Jim realized in dismay.

Carmen quoted one of her
books, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way
comes. Open locks, whoever knocks.”

Kevin answered her, “How
now, you secret, black, and midnight hags. What is it you
do?”

“
A deed without a name,”
Carmen finished it.

“
I know his name,” Jim
told them with a less-illustrious quote from an immortal of his
own. “Hatchet, call Derek and tell him we need to secure the roof
of the Customs House from bridge-jumpers coming in from the
east.”

“
I’m sorry I did something
so reckless,” Carmen apologized.

“
Are you sorry?” Jim knew
she was not, “If that hunter had broken Critias’ back and then hung
him from the ceiling by his own guts, then you would be genuinely
sorry right now for being reckless. When you’re a negligent mother
running around begging someone to shoot you after having spent the
last twenty-four hours watching your son turn ghoul in an isolation
cage to end up wanting to eat you then you would know what sorry
is. You don’t know what sorry is yet and I hope you never find out.
If the two of you want to come back alive from Houston, you’ll need
to train for all the insanity you can. We all got lucky today and
you learned plenty. The next time you want to go play in the
backyard, you tell us what is going on so we can be ready. What we
have here in this community is a team effort. All these people are
not just an entourage for you divas.”