Primeval (Werewolf Apocalypse Book 2) (21 page)

“Yeah,” Sandy said, rolling her eyes. “And those same asylum rejects also protested at soldiers’ funerals with signs saying that God hates fags. I’ve seen this all firsthand. My girlfriend’s been to enough soldiers’ funerals to have come across them three times.”

“You don’t think you might just disagree with them because of, well, what you are?”

“It’s not a grudge,” she explained. “Although, Lord knows I should hold one. It’s more of a way of seeing them. If they’re that Looney-tunes on one issue, who’s to say they aren’t off base on all the others. The way I see it, if God wants to influence mankind, wants to make them better, then why make them beasts that disobey every commandment He set down? These monsters kill without conscience. They rape, mutilate. You can’t tell me they’re keeping the Sabbath holy and honoring their mothers and fathers.”

Howard chuckled and looked down at his shoes. “I guess you got a point there. You a believer, Sandy?”

“I didn’t used to be, but the older I get, the more I feel as if there’s got to be something out there. I haven’t really decided if it’s God or the Tao or a flying spaghetti monster, but it gets harder every year for me to think we’re all alone.”

“I was brought up strict Southern Baptist. If they didn’t preach Jesus into you, they
sang
him into you. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia. Not much to do but coal mine and go to Sunday church. I always had this thing, though. Didn’t want to work in the mine. I never could sing a lick, but I could bust a move out. There’s not much call for a good dancer in the coal mines, nor in the church.”

“So, you came to New York? Our own American Billy Elliot?”

He nodded. “But not till my father died. Mamma ran off years before, never knew where to. I had a little sister, beautiful girl, seven years younger than me. Oh boy, did she have the spirit in her! That girl could have become a preacher on television.”

He paused, becoming introspective, and Sandy finally asked, “Did something happen to her?”

“Yeah. She got leukemia, got it bad. In less than a year, she was gone. I couldn’t even afford a nice funeral for her, but it seemed like a sign to me. Without her, I didn’t have any roots in West Virginia. I refused to work in the mines, and church... well, it suddenly seemed like a lot of shouting and noise, and I was losing my religion pretty fast. I knew if I wanted to dance, there was only one place to really be, so I moved to New York. This was about a year ago. You know, I worked as a waiter, went to auditions, and I finally got a part in a show. Turns out, it’s a big-ass hit. And somewhere along the way, on the hard streets of the city, I found God again. I don’t know when or how it happened, but I saw Him everywhere. Maybe it was my luck. I mean, how many brothers come out of little towns all over the country, untrained like me, and get a part in a musical within a year? Not many.”

“You still Baptist?”

“No, more like a city follower. I don’t know. I don’t always get to church – Sunday matinees and all – but I pray. Been praying ever since this damn train stopped.”

“Well, so have I,” Sandy answered. “I just don’t know who I’m praying to.”

“I think you’re right, Sandy,” Howard said, taking her hand. He looked at her with his large brown eyes. “God doesn’t want us to die at the hands of those things. And He can’t want us to be like them, infected and all. He must have some kind of plan for us. Else, why’d He save us so far? Why’d He save you, the one person with a military contact on the outside who could do something about us being down here, someone who might just save our skins? Hard to think He’s against people like you when He gave you contact with your girl out there. He didn’t have to let that call go through.”

She smiled. “If we get out of here, Howard, I am buying you the biggest damn steak dinner you’ve ever eaten. Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For helping me see some things a little clearer.”

“Have you gotten any word from her yet?” he asked. “Your girl?”

“No. But I know in my heart she’s on her way to us right now.”

He nodded sagely, then stood and moved over to Sylvia, who was resting horizontally on an orange plastic seat. He removed his jacket and draped it over the old woman. She looked up at him with appreciation and smiled warmly.

This is what it’s all about,
Sandy thought.
Caring, helping others. We can’t lose that bit of human compassion to some virus. We can’t lose it to anything. That would make us just as savage and bestial as those monsters.

Her gaze fell upon Craig Chew. He was concentrating attentively on Alice’s sleeping body, his eyes never moving from the girl. He was sweating, beads of liquid covering his forehead, and his eyes were halfway closed. His mouth was open, and he wiped it on the back of his hand.

Sensing he was being observed, he turned toward Sandy and bowed his head to her. She didn’t know how to read this signal. Was he acknowledging her presence or trying to tell her his intentions if the girl awoke?

We can’t lose that bit of human compassion to some virus
, Sandy thought again
. We can’t lose it to anything.

As she settled back in her seat, she saw the male lion’s ears twitch. It raised its head and blinked at the darkness around it. She waited for it to lay its head back down on its front legs, but instead it turned to the tunnel, sensing something. In a moment, it was on its feet. The female stood beside it.

They roared in outrage, creating a hellish harmony while something hidden by the shadows stirred in the darkness of the tunnel.

2:54 p.m.

Nicole was sprinting past the fountain where the dead horse lay disemboweled. She jumped on top of the spilled carriage behind it, noting the top-hatted, tuxedoed driver fallen beside the cart, his head and hat a good four feet away from his body. From her lookout site, she scouted the area as Burns flanked the carriage, using it as a shield.

There were six of the creatures heading toward them from the south end of Bryant Park, four more sprinting across the construction site, leaping over the bodies strewn haphazardly around the taped-off mud pit, and four more coming from the area of the library. They were all human Lycans, and they were hurtling toward the couple at a heart-stopping speed. Nicole was shouting out the creatures’ positions to Burns, who turned on them with his assault rifle, spewing bullets from the barrel of the M-4.

The four from the library area were the first to fall, a whole clip emptied into their bodies. They dropped into a heap of fur and claws at the edge of a café and statue. One fell forward onto a table, its long legs hanging over the end.

“South, six more,” Nicole yelled, pointing at the monsters that had dropped to all fours and were gaining speed.

Taylor Burns changed the clip on the rifle and began firing again, aiming for the head, usually hitting his targets. Two fell immediately. One tripped over a fallen comrade and tumbled across the grass. Burns continued shooting the things, which didn’t seem to understand the concept of guns or bullets. They were primitives, savages, all tooth and claw and instinct and hunger. They saw meat, and they wanted to tear into that meat.

Nicole fired at the cluster running at a diagonal across the southern side of the park. She took her time, discharging single shots, sighting them up perfectly, and nailing four of the six before Burns had finished eliminating his own targets. He spun and started firing at the new group, taking one down while Nicole finished off her last.

“I like it up here,” she said. “Kind of nice to be able to see on every side.”

“You’ll run out of bullets eventually,” Burns said.

She took aim at a stray medium-sized creature that rushed from the tree line. It looked like it had once been a German Shepherd, but its angles and teeth were all wrong. She fired, and the beast yelped in pain as it crumpled to the ground.

“Come on,” Burns said. “Let’s get out of the open.”

“Okay,” she said, hopping off the carriage.

“I got an idea!” Burns shouted, and he rushed to the bulldozer at the edge of the construction site. The driver’s seat was surrounded by a wire mesh, and the key was still in the ignition. “Come on,” he cried, opening the door.

Nicole hopped inside, noting that another pack of Lycans had appeared from beyond the library. Burns climbed in after her and took a seat, shutting the door behind them. Nicole sucked in a deep breath, feeling safer with the metal grates between the monsters and herself.

“Can you drive this thing?” she asked.

“Hell, girl, I can drive anything.”

He cranked the ignition, and it caught. As he put the bulldozer in first gear, it shuddered, and two of the beasts jumped onto the hood of the machine. Diesel fumes filled the air as the creatures tore at the crisscrossed grating that separated them from their targets. The metal held, and the beasts tore into it with their teeth, snapping off several fangs before the bulldozer lurched forward. One fell off and was crushed beneath the tread of the construction vehicle while the other continued to yank and bite at the metal grate. Nicole aimed through the wires and shot it in the forehead. She removed her spent clip and punched in another one from her vest pocket.

“We’ll go this way,” Burns replied. “We should be able to get farther in this baby than on foot. At least until the stalled traffic gets too bad. That’s 42nd Street, so we follow that for a block and we end up at Times Square. Once we get down into the subway station, well, that’s when things are gonna get ugly.”

He drove north across the mud hole of a construction site, passing by a row of park benches. Some of them had dead bodies on or under them. One corpse was even propped up, her head at an unnatural angle, almost as if she had merely gone to sleep – if you didn’t notice the bone sticking out of her collar.

The bulldozer creaked and moaned as it traversed the park, gears grinding, and Burns steered it toward a coffee kiosk on 42nd Street. Along the way, several Lycans attacked the machine, but the general maneuvered it so most of the beasts were crushed beneath the wheels. Once, he raised and lowered the blade of the dozer, slicing one squirming monster in half. When they reached the edge of the muddy construction area, near the Ping-Pong tables, they stared down the steps to the street below them.

“We chancing this?” Burns asked.

Nicole gave a shrug. “If we can get to street level, we could drive this clunker all the way to the subway, knock all those cars out of the way as we go.”

“Good idea.”

He grinded the bulldozer into low gear and the machine staggered forward. When the front of its treads smacked into the stairs, its nose dipped, and the dozer rattled as it skidded down the steps. Hitting a bump, it lurched to the right, threatening to tip over onto the passenger side. Nicole shouted and grabbed hold of a safety strap. The machine righted itself, but it soon sank its treads into a second hole in the steps. The tractor groaned, tilted sideways, and crashed onto its driver’s side. Nicole fell into Burns’ lap, and his head hit the wire mesh. The bulldozer continued sliding down the steps on its side, sparks shooting into the air as it scraped against the stone. With a death-rattle chug, it suddenly stopped near the bottom of the steps. Burns immediately began fumbling for the passenger door above his head.

“You all right?” he asked.

“I think so. Nothing broken, at least.”

“Well, it was a good idea,” he said, climbing up to the top of the dozer’s blade. “Even if it didn’t get us all the way.”

“Hey, it still saved us ammo,” Nicole said, following him out of the machine.

He patted the side of the sputtering mechanical monster and grinned. “Let’s move before more of them spot us. As loud as that crash was, this place’ll probably be swarming with the hairy little bastards.”

At the edge of the park, the tall buildings of downtown rose upwards, obscuring the sunlight from the alleyways. Nicole and Taylor were suddenly hyper-aware of their surroundings. As they quick-stepped forward, they shot anything that rushed at them from the shadows. Nicole noticed several dozen rats taking refuge in the alleys, their beady yellow eyes glaring out at the pair of human interlopers. The rodents kept their distance, however, maintaining their positions in the dark.

Nicole had to scoot over the hood of a Sedan that had leapt the curb and crashed into the cornerstone of a building. On the other side, she looked around, noticing for the first time how many cars were on the sidewalk or crashed into shops or windows or hotels or streetlights. It seemed as though a real panic had occurred in the streets and all the drivers had suddenly lost control of their vehicles. Either that or they had been aiming at Lycanthropes, hoping to smash a few before there were too many to take care of.

Well, too late for that,
Nicole thought.
Things are multiplying like wildfire. Whole city will be turned before long, if it isn’t already.

Burns dropped his clip from the M-4, shoving in another while Nicole blasted away at a pack of twenty or so Lycanthropes loping towards them over the cars in the street. They bounded over the spaces in between the wrecks and abandoned vehicles. One of them got too close to a burning Volvo and its fur caught on fire. It wailed as it hopped around until one of Nicole’s bullets found its skull. Burns let loose with a burst of automatic fire that sent 30 rounds of 5.56 mm carbines into the crowd at a rate of over 10 rounds a second. He dropped another empty magazine and reloaded while the pack stumbled around their wounded and another group emerged from an alley. These were smaller, probably were originally stray dogs that had banded together to form a pack.