The Plague Forge [ARC] (34 page)

Something grabbed his arm. No, someone. Ana. She yanked him toward the explosion, running hard. His legs lurched into motion as if by their own free will as Ana pulled him toward the cloud of smoke and fire. His eyes were burning. How she could see anything he had no idea, but he ran.

The floor beneath him changed, sloped upward, and he knew they’d made it out into the hallway through which they entered. At the top of the corridor Ana let go of him, turned, and fired. A ball of fire and heat erupted from below. Then another, and another. Ana pulled the trigger as fast as the bulky weapon would allow, turning the portal through which they’d run through into a morass of fire, smoke, and rubble.

Her launcher clicked empty. She started to reload, the expression on her face a mixture of anger and grief. The grief was an illusion, though; the way she squinted and the streams of tears rolling down her cheeks came from the teargas. Skyler grabbed her, turned her. “Save it, keep moving.”

He took the lead, his weapon more appropriate in the tight hallways. The sensation of having needles piercing his eyeballs faded to a mere burn. He followed the same path they’d taken on the way in, hoping he remembered it correctly, but given the symmetrical layout he hoped it wouldn’t matter. The tunnels, now mostly dark, all looked the same, though. It didn’t help that his vision kept blurring, that he had to keep squeezing his eyes shut against the chemical agent. It occurred to him suddenly that the occasional holes in the floor were no longer there. Either that or he’d been extraordinarily lucky not to have tumbled into one as they’d run. He’d completely forgotten to watch for them.

“Wrong way,” Ana blurted, halfway along a narrow corridor.

“It’s this way. Right up ahead.”

“No.” She pulled against him. “We missed a turn or something; we haven’t been here before.”

He started to argue, then swallowed it. She was right. A dim light came from ahead, showing a pristine floor. Behind, he could see the evidence of their footsteps on the slightly dusty surface leading to this spot.

Skyler turned and went back down. The room below he’d rushed through without much of a glance. He studied it now and realized it was the same room they’d originally entered through, only the wide entrance had vanished. A wall like any other had replaced it.

“Open it,” he said to Ana, glancing down at her gun.

She pushed back as far as possible, guiding Skyler to stand around the corner of the hallway. He let her push him, focusing on reloading his rifle. Last clip.

She took a place next to him, leaned out, fired, and ducked back. A flash of yellow lit the hall, followed by a rush of smoke and hot air. The sound buffeted his eardrums, already ringing brightly from the fight below.

He waited next to her, and while the smoke cleared Skyler took her hand in his. Ana turned and drew his mouth down to hers, pressing her warm mouth against his own with fierce urgency.

“I love you,” she said.

“I lo—”

A subhuman’s piercing howl interrupted his words. Skyler stepped past Ana and brought his gun to bear on the hole she’d created to the outside.

In the cloud of smoke that hung there he saw a half-dozen forms moving toward him. Some upright, some down on all fours. As he aimed the air in the room changed, almost pulling him toward the creatures. The smoke suddenly lurched in unison, rushing upward into hidden ventilation crevices in the ceiling.

The creatures took no notice of this. They saw him clearly now and began to move. Skyler fired at the two closest and dropped them easily. He adjusted his aim. The next pair showed no sign of fear.

More came in from the opening Ana’s grenade had created. Only … had the hole become smaller? Skyler fired but his focus had split.

Indeed, as he watched the outer wall changed. The ragged edges spawned by the explosion smoothed out as the hole shrank. A slow, almost imperceptible movement at first, in the span of seconds it became obvious, then astonishing. The last few meters closed in the space between two gunshots.

Just like that, the hole had vanished. Ana raised the grenade launcher again, but paused when Skyler rested a hand on the thick barrel.

“Save it,” he said. “We’re trapped.”

Chapter Twenty-Two

The Flatirons, Colorado

31.MAR.2285

The white-hot pain dug into Tania’s skull like a thousand nails.

“Kill me!” she shouted. Or, she tried to. Had the words formed? Reality and imagination seemed to smear together.

She could do nothing except rock back and forth on her knees and try, try, try to focus. Focus on something, on anything. The pebble by her hand. A nearby clump of grass. Each time her eyes found something that might draw her to reality, a lance of agony would crush the world under its spiked boot.

There were sounds. Close or, perhaps, very distant. Gunshots and snarls and … birds. That was a new addition. Songs of birds. No, cries. Alarm. Thousands of birds, far off. Tania tried to look and was rewarded with a hammer blow to the center of her mind. The subhuman in her trying to break free. Her sanity, shattering.

“Something’s happening!”

Who’d said that? Who had shouted? Natalie? No, Nat had died. Collateral damage in a failed assassination.
Oh Nat
—

The coherent thought was set upon by the virus, crushed, wiped away like a deleted file.

“Tania!”

A hand grabbed her arm. She pulled away, heard herself actually growl. But the voice, it was …

Vanessa. Yes, a friend. The woman’s arms enveloped Tania from behind and forced her to the ground. Sheltering her from something.

All the while the birds screamed. Louder and louder until—

The wave hit. A pulse of something. Not air or water but … energy. Tania felt the shock wave slam into her not physically but mentally. A concussive force that rammed headlong into the thorns that gripped her consciousness, fracturing them, turning them to so much mental dust in a single, all-powerful strike. And then …

Clarity.

Quiet.

The pebble by her knee. The clump of green grass sprouting through a crack in the packed dirt. Vanessa blanketing her, sobbing.

“I’m …,” Tania said. She had to swallow first for the word came out as a croak. “I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay.”

The woman who lay on top of her shifted, rolled to one side onto her knees. “I thought you were …” The words caught in her throat and trailed off. “I was about to shoot you.”

She had a pistol in her hand, dangling from tired fingers. It fell to the ground in a dull thump. Numbly Tania noted the lack of a knife in her own hand. She glanced around, saw no obvious sign of it, and decided to accept the fact that she was unarmed.

Tania tried to rise, but despite the apparently stalled disease her head still pounded. She rolled partially onto her back instead, her air pack prevented her from going all the way over. She stared at the blue sky above. Birds were everywhere, floating in lazy circles, searching for the nests they’d just fled. Singing, now, or just silent. “What happened?” Tania asked. “Is the thing making its own aura?”

The idea made some sense. The object certainly resembled the material the towers were made of, yet clearly it hadn’t been helping her when the towers left. Maybe their departure had switched it on. Maybe it was only a few meters in size.

“I’ve no idea,” Vanessa said, picking up the gun again, “and I don’t care. You’re alive and talking clearly, and we need to go. Now.”

Tania glanced up at the sudden urgency in her companion’s voice. “Why?”

In answer she pointed. Along the tree line where the aura towers had powered their way south, Tania saw movement. People racing toward her. Some ran, some loped, others stumbled and staggered.

“God,” Vanessa said. “They’re everywhere. Tania, you have to get up.”

She tried to stand. Her head still swam with the lingering pain of the disease’s grip, but she managed to get to shaky feet and, holding Vanessa’s free hand, ran with her.

They sprinted toward the
Helios,
visible on a low rise just beyond a swath of forest to the northeast.

Tania stared at the plane as she ran.
Please let her fly. Please.

The aircraft seemed so far away, and even in that direction Tania could see the shady forms of subhumans rushing out from the trees toward them.

Something had changed about the creatures. No respite, not like Tania was experiencing, but something else. They were deathly silent. Their faces, even from this far off, were the very picture of stoic concentration, like a sprinter eyeing the red tape at the finish line, or a lion closing the last few meters on a fleeing, tired antelope. No anger now, no rage, just the focus and certainty that went part and parcel with the clarity of a goal. Something had changed them, and she had no problem believing it was the same pulse of energy that had all but banished the pain from her own mind.

The distance closed between them and the creatures. Vanessa raised the pistol she still carried and fired. A single clap from the handgun, so loud it distorted in Tania’s already ringing ears. One of the creatures fell. The next sound from the weapon was a quiet click, and Vanessa uttered a curse in Portuguese as she tossed the weapon aside.

“Slow down a bit,” Vanessa said through heavy breaths.

Tania glanced at her. “Are you kidding?”

“We can’t stop to fight them, so we need to … just, trust me, okay?”

Tania slowed her pace to a jog, matching Vanessa. The tactic seemed ridiculous, yet what else could be done? She had no weapon now. The knife, the bloody knife, she’d dropped somewhere without even remembering.

What she had was herself. Her training, over the last year, in an Israeli street-fighting technique. A year of welts and bruises and a hardening of body. Tolerance for pain, instinct for inflicting it. And she had Vanessa, who’d spent decades studying jujitsu.

The immune angled them toward the space vacated by the one subhuman she’d shot. Those to the left or right still rushed onward, and that gap Tania suddenly realized had become a corridor.

“Now,” the woman said, “run!”

She surged ahead and Tania did her best to follow. She wished she’d ditched the entire suit and not just the helmet. Though formfitting, the material had a weight to it, a stiffness that made her feel lethargic. Compounded with the intense exhaustion she already felt … 
no, no. No excuses. Run, dammit. Keep up. Survive
. She simply had to. For Pablo and Jake. For Skyler. For Zane. For Karl and everyone else that had fled Darwin to follow her toward a goal even she did not quite grasp.

And for Tim. Big-eared, goofy Tim, who’d been there every time she needed someone to be there.
Run
.

She ran, ignoring the beings in front of her. Only now they were beside her. Then, behind. Tania felt a rush of adrenaline as she realized Vanessa’s simple tactic had worked. They’d increased their pace at exactly the right moment, and the simple-minded animals couldn’t turn fast enough. Some even slipped on the damp shin-high grass and fell. Others tripped on those and went down, too. Most stayed on their feet, though, but ended up behind, adjusting and losing ground in the process.

The forest loomed ahead like a dark curtain of brown and green. She followed Vanessa as the woman plunged into that cold place, not daring to look back. She and Vanessa might have run the gauntlet, but she could still hear the beings behind them, and of course there were those already chasing from that direction. The subhumans were close, a dozen meters, maybe less.

Tania ducked under a branch and around the trunk of a pine, leapt over an exposed root, and raised her arms to protect her face as she crashed through the branches of two adjacent saplings. As complex a path as she could manage.

There were subhumans in the forest. Shadows glimpsed through the gaps between trees. Hunched, silent, and driven. On an instinctual level Tania knew they were all, every last one of them, after her. Or rather, the object Vanessa carried so awkwardly on her back.

I could die here,
she thought. This thought she’d had many times already, but this time it came more as an inappropriate bit of self-introspection.
I could die for this slab of graphene circuitry or whatever the hell it is. I should be dead already, or at least one of these creatures, chasing Vanessa instead of running next to her.

A shadow in front of her.

As she tried to dodge her foot snagged on a root. She fell as a snarled face, teeth bared, emerged before her. Tania tucked in her shoulder and rolled on instinct. She crashed into the being’s knees and heard it huff in surprise as it hit the ground behind her. Tania came up in a fighting stance and her breath caught in her throat. There were so many, all rushing toward her.

The one she’d knocked over stood, bared its teeth, and struck a stance so savage, so animalistic that she could, for once, no longer see the human it had once been. She just saw a creature.

It stepped forward and reached for her.

Vanessa leapt in from Tania’s right. She moved in close, beguiling the creature’s natural instincts of how prey would fight back. The sub tried to raise its hands but Vanessa was too quick. She barred both hands with her left arm held low. At the same time she raised her right forearm up under the creature’s chin, ending its effort to bite at her as she drove in. On the last step in Vanessa planted one foot behind the backpedaling creature. They were falling together, and in landing Tania imagined more than saw the result: Vanessa’s knee coming down on the thing’s stomach, her forearm still across the Adam’s apple. Something crunched. The creature did not cry out. Its limbs jerked once, then nothing.

The immune wasted no time. She was up, turning, moving back to Tania and pulling her back to her feet. Once again her lighthouse in this ocean of terrors, pulling her toward the goal. Tania hardly noticed. She couldn’t break her gaze from the pack that converged. With each pounding pulse of blood in her temples the subhumans drew nearer. They struggled to weave through the forest as she had. Many fell, many tripped on the fallen, but despite this their numbers staggered her.