Affliction

45

I dug the earpiece for my phone out of one of the pockets and called Micah from the elevator. He answered on the second ring. 'Anita, vampire on this floor is dead. We're okay.'

'The morgue is not okay; I've got to help Ted contain it. I had to leave Nicky there to back him up.' As soon as I said it, I realized I was looking for absolution, someone as strong as I was to tell me that it had been okay to leave someone I loved who wasn't a cop down there with the other cops and the monsters.

'What made you willing to leave him down there with Ted?'

'Grenades and shit in Ted's car, Dev and I are fetching.' I transferred my badge from my hip to tuck it in a MOLLE strap on the front of my vest. We didn't have any uniforms or locals with us this time. I wanted witnesses to know we were the good guys.

'Because you know where the stuff is in Ted's car,' Micah said.

'Yeah,' I said, and the elevator doors opened.

Dev paused before he went through, checking to make sure it was clear; he gave a small nod and held the door for me, leaning against it with his gun already out. Most handguns wouldn't do much against zombies or rotting vamps, but Dev had never seen real combat like Nicky had, or I had, which meant he was more comfortable with handguns than long ones. I had my AR to my shoulder checking the hallway - left, right, and up. Vampires fly, or float, sometimes. The hospital ceiling was too low to really be a place to hide, but checking up was a habit that was good to have when you hunted vampires that could fly and shapeshifters that could climb.

'U.S. Marshals,' I said, for the startled nurses and doctors. 'Police.' I added that just in case. I yelled 'Police' again and kept Dev and me moving toward the outer doors. I ignored the questions, because they would slow us down too much and I didn't know what to say. Captain Jonas had said out loud that he didn't want to start a panic; if I told them what was in the basement and wandering the hallways, they might panic. They should panic and evacuate everyone they could, but I wasn't in charge, not like that.

Dev flashed them all his melt-in-your-socks smile. 'We'll be back, I promise.'

One of the scared nurses actually blushed at him. That was some good flirting.

'We're going outside,' I said to Micah, low voiced, over the headset.

'Be careful,' he said.

'I think it's safer outside, but I'll be careful,' I said, as I moved toward the outer doors with the AR snugged to my shoulder.

'I love you,' he said.

'I love you and Nathaniel. I didn't get to kiss Nicky good-bye.'

'You'll get another chance to kiss him,' Micah said, and that was it, he'd given me my absolution, my that's-okay-you-didn't-leave-your-lover-to-die pat on the ethical back.

'Thanks, gotta run. I love you.'

'I love you more,' he said.

'Love you mostest.'

He laughed, softly, and hung up.

Dev and I were outside now. I looked up at the night sky, electric-kissed with the pools of light from the hospital behind us and the light poles rearing over the cars. Nothing moved in the darkness above us. The parking lot stretched empty and so still you should have been able to hear city crickets if it hadn't been too cold for them.

'Can we run now?' Dev asked.

'Yes,' I said.

He took off like something elemental, so fast that his speed left me immobile for a heartbeat, and then I ran, too. I ran fast, going from a dead stop to making the parking lot a blur to my vision like some movie special effect. I moved and it wasn't just to be fast to save everyone and get the weapons, it was a release of tension to be able to move as fast as we could even for a few moments, to be able to RUN! I arrived at Edward's SUV to find Dev there catching his breath. My heart was in my throat, trying to creep over my tongue and into my mouth. I felt alive, full of blood and thunder; it was the kind of energy that made you want to leave the guns in the holsters and wade into a fight with your bare hands. I wouldn't do it, but I understood the urge.

Dev grinned at me, a fierce baring of teeth that still managed to be sexy and charming. I grinned back and unlocked the back of the SUV with my pulse thudding behind my own fierce smile.

Dev and I moved our gear out so I could get to where Edward kept his incendiaries. There was a reason he drove his SUV if the crime scene was close enough, or sometimes if it wasn't. He had several compartments in his truck where the really bad things were hidden. If someone broke in and stole stuff, they wouldn't get anything more dangerous than guns. Even if they stole the whole truck they'd likely never find the hidden shit unless they dismantled the truck piece by piece like at a chop shop, but even Edward couldn't plan for all eventualities. Besides, some of the hidden stuff was illegal. I hadn't known he had the European grenades. I'd read about them, seen videos of the effect, even photos of the victims. Some people in parts of Europe were using the grenades in my hands as a reason to give vampires and shapeshifters human rights, because the effects were too terrible to do to anyone, almost. No one cared about zombies, strangely. Not all dead are created equal.

Under other circumstances I might have hesitated to use something illegal while I was wearing my badge, but today ... the European grenades gave us a real chance. I grabbed all that were in the compartment, shoving them into pockets on my tactical pants and handing some to Dev to carry, too. The grenades would burn long enough to actually destroy the zombies, if we could cut them up first so that they didn't catch us, or the hospital, on fire. It was looking at Edward's extending magazines that gave me the idea. I grabbed his, and mine, and an extra cross-draw bag because Dev and I couldn't carry all of them in the pockets, or even the MOLLE straps on the vests. Usually it was overkill to travel with this many magazines for the ARs, but tonight it might just get the job done.

We shoved everything back in the truck. Dev shut the back. I hit the key lock and without asking each other we ran back to the hospital. The world blurred past as I tried to keep up with Dev. He was a foot taller and a lot of that was leg, oh, and the whole weretiger thing, too, but I wasn't far behind as we whooshed through the doors.

The nurse who had smiled at Dev looked even paler, eyes huge in her face. 'You're not human, are you?' she asked.

'No,' I said.

'Human's overrated,' Dev said with another sex-on-wheels smile as we went for the elevators.

My phone rang in my earpiece, 'Bad to the Bone,' which had been Edward's ring tone since Nathaniel put it on as a joke back when I didn't know how to change it. I hit the button and said, 'Yeah.'

'Bring all the extra mags you can,' he said, and I could hear shooting in the background magnified oddly over the headset.

'Already have them,' I said, as we stepped into the elevator.

'You had the same idea,' he said.

'We have enough ammo to cut them into pieces and then ...'

'Use the Euros to burn them in place,' he finished for me.

'Yeah,' I said.

'Yeah,' he said, and then he laughed that deep, masculine sound that most men reserve for sex or moments more private with the lovers in their lives.

'I love the way you think, too,' I said.

He gave that date/sex laugh. I guess there was more than one reason that Donna thought I was his lover. Someone yelled, and a man screamed. Edward said, 'Gotta go,' in a voice so serious it was as if the laugh never existed.

I whispered, 'Edward,' to empty air.

'He all right?' Dev asked.

'I don't know. It sounds like the zombies are on top of them.'

Dev holstered his handgun and unhooked his AR from the back of his vest where the MOLLE straps kept it.

'A head or heart shot won't do anything but irritate a zombie. We're going to use the ammo to cut off the arms, legs, anything that makes them mobile, and then decapitate, or explode the entire head. When that's done we burn 'em.'

'You and Ted didn't discuss details; how do you know that's why he wanted the extra magazines?'

The elevator was slowing. I snugged my AR to my shoulder and said, 'I just know.' The doors opened, and a zombie fell into the elevator.

46

Dev yelled like a guy. I tried to tell him don't do it, it was already armless, but he was already pulling the trigger. He shot the zombie in the head while it was trying to bite his foot. The reverberation of the shot was actually painful in the metal box of the elevator, as if someone had stuck something sharp and hard through my ears.

His hearing was better than mine, and he wasn't expecting it. He hunched over, free hand to one ear, face grimacing with pain. I didn't bother trying to say anything; I let him have his moment of disorientation while I stepped over the armless zombie as it tried to push itself to its knees, leaving most of its brains on the floor of the elevator.

I put my shoulder against the open doors to hold them, AR snugged to shoulder, and tried to use my eyes to see what was happening in the hallway while my hearing recovered. I'd learned to push through the disorientation of that kind of noise in small spaces; it let me stand there and see the hallway while Dev was still struggling for his brain to process anything but the pain and shock.

I gave myself a second of eye-sweep to see Nicky's blond hair and Edward's white cowboy hat, upright and firing in the direction of zombies, and then I was able to take in the scene. They'd taken their stand in front of the elevator doors, but the line had crumbled to the right of the doors, because the young guard, Miller, was sitting against the wall bleeding, with the other guard holding pressure on a neck wound that gushed crimson over his hands. Jenkins had moved up to take their place in the half-circle of guns, but he had a handgun and the zombies didn't give a shit. Two of them launched themselves at him and the weak part of the circle. Damn smart for zombies.

Gonzales was there firing point-blank into their faces. He had a .45 and at that range it blew one head to pieces, so that it was just left with hands reaching blindly, but he was dry-firing into the face of the second, and it turned to him with a hungry, evil expression. I fired into its head from less than two feet away with the frangible round, and the head exploded in a fountain of blood and brains. There was bone in there, but it was always the soft, wet parts that made for the spectacular visuals.

Gonzales glanced at me with wide eyes, his naturally dark skin paled almost gray. The look was enough; he'd known he was almost out of ammo when he stepped up to shield Jenkins and the two guards. Dev was beside me; he still seemed shaken and didn't have the AR to his shoulder yet. I didn't have time to babysit him, but in that moment I realized he'd never seen combat. He'd seen action - shootings, violence, hand-to-hand, and hand-to-claw - but he'd never been in this kind of chaos. I counted him out for the fight and started shooting the zombies that were trying to pour through the gap in the defenses. I tried to take their lower faces out first, because once they couldn't bite, they were half-disarmed. I blew off most of a zombie's shoulder and arm as it reached for me with its remaining arm. The ruin of its face meant it couldn't bite me, but it could still strangle me or tear out my throat if I let it get a good grip.

Al was on the other side of me firing his own .45 into the reaching hands and gaping mouths of the zombies. The slide on his gun slid back and stayed there, showing he was out of ammo.

Gonzales moved back up beside me with the bull pup shotgun in his hands. Dev had recovered enough to start handing out the extra weapons and ammo; good.

Al fell back; I hoped to get more ammo, or another gun, and I kept shooting anything that moved outside our small circle. Nicky was beside me now; he shot the face off one zombie, then let his AR swing on its tactical strap so his hands were free, grabbed the zombie at the shoulder and upper arm, and pulled. I had a moment to watch his muscles strain, the veins on his arms raising with the force of what he was trying to do, and then he pulled the zombie's arm out of its shoulder socket. It was fresh zombie, so basically he'd just pulled a man's arm off with his bare hands. It wasn't just a matter of being fucking strong, but he'd known where to grab to disarticulate the shoulder joint. Maybe later I'd ask him how the hell he knew that.

No matter how impressive it had been, it meant Nicky was out of ammo.

Al was on my other side between me and Gonzales. Al's .45 had the slide back in place, and I didn't ask if he was locked and loaded; I knew he was. Let's hear it for grabbing all the extra ammo we could carry.

I stepped back, letting them know they needed to cover me if they could, and both of them stepped up. I opened the flap of the bag I was carrying and Nicky was close enough to reach in and get his own fresh magazine. He swung his AR on its strap, slapped the magazine home, and we started to move up again.

Edward's voice was in my earpiece. 'I'm out!'

I dropped back, and Nicky and the others moved up to cover the gap. I had the AR magazines, just like Dev had most of the handgun rounds. I reached in the bag one-handed and had an extended magazine in my hand as Edward's hand came into view. He took it like we were running a relay race and we'd made a smooth pass of the baton. He slammed it home, and I moved back out to the circle with him on one side and the freshly armed Nicky on the other.

Dev was finally up and shooting on the other side of Nicky. When we all survived I'd talk to him about how long it took him to orient himself, and we'd have to figure out some kind of training to prepare him and any other newer guards for the serious shit, but that was later. Tonight, right now, it was just shooting zombie heads, blowing shoulders away from bodies, or shooting their legs out from under them, anything to make them immobile and disarmed.

Most of the time in a firefight you are full of adrenaline, on hyper alert, but sometimes battle becomes a grind of horrific sameness. You begin to shoot without really thinking, your body is almost on automatic, because it's just too much - too much noise, too many visuals, too much to see, hear, feel, from the sweat that begins to trickle inside your vest, to your hands actually aching from shooting so much. I'd have changed guns just to rest my hands, but the AR was the right tool for the job, and there was a lot of job to do. But when you go to that battle haze, it's all distant, echoing in your gun-deafened ears, your body vibrating with the force of shooting, fighting, hitting when an enemy gets too close for anything else. It's beyond survival mode; it's mechanical, exhausting, with moments of breath-stealing terror sprinkled like chocolate chips in a cookie, reminding you how much you want to live and how much you have to make the other guy die to do that.

It's in moments like this that mistakes can happen; you see a face and you just fire without processing that this new stranger wasn't a soldier, but you've killed so many, and had so many people try to kill you in this one breathless, horrible fight, that it's only later you think, Wait, did I miss something? Did I shoot a face that wasn't trying to kill me? Until you have been that exhausted, that traumatized by sheer fighting, you can't understand how such a thing can happen. It is inexplicable to most people, because you haven't been there, and until you wade through bodies, hands grabbing at you, teeth snapping at you, trying to kill you with whatever weapons they have left, you don't understand that there comes a point when everybody who isn't 'us' is a 'them,' and you just shoot them.

If you've never reached that moment of battle haze, then you don't understand what's happening, which is why when the elevator doors opened behind us, and I knew Dev was back there, I turned away from the fight to check on him, because he was my responsibility, and that's what you do when you bring a greenhorn to a slaughter fight.

It was SWAT in full gear, and I watched Dev bring his AR to bear on them. There wasn't time to yell, and he likely wouldn't have heard me anyway; our hearing was blasted at this point. I aimed in front of him, between them and him. It wasn't even a conscious thought, it was see, act; even saying I reacted was too slow for what happened in my body, because it acted before my brain caught up to the rest of me.

It made the SWAT guys aim at me, so I held a hand up to show I was okay, but it made Dev startle and look back at me. I had a moment to see his eyes refocus, and then he watched SWAT spill out of the elevator and I knew he'd be all right. I turned back to shoot more zombies, but there was nothing standing in front of me. The hallway was full of wriggling bits and pieces, but nothing left that could run at us or do much except try to grab on to our feet with dismembered hands. It was the stuff of nightmares, but it wasn't actively going to kill us, not anymore.

It was Yancey from the police station who pulled up his face protection enough to say, 'Looks like we missed it.' If I hadn't been able to watch his lips move, I'd have never known what he was saying.

'You haven't missed it; we still have to burn the motherfuckers,' I said.

'You'll set off the sprinklers, or burn the hospital down,' he said.

'Sprinklers, yes,' I said. 'Burn down, no.'

'How?' he asked, and he was nicely skeptical.

I grinned at him, with my face still covered in zombie bits and blood. Yancey didn't flinch. 'We'll show you,' I said.

He grinned back, eyes taking in the knee-deep pile of moving corpses around us. 'I look forward to it.'

I liked Yancey; he was okay.