Apocalypse - Keith R. A. DeCandido [19]
—and one zombie.
When his family lived in Dallas, Carlos had taken a martial arts class. He never got to finish it, but one thing he’d mastered in nothing flat was the spinning heel-kick. After seeing someone do one in one of the old movies he and Jorge saw in Lubbock, he was determined to learn how to do it himself. So in the class it was the first thing he learned, and he got real good at it before papí’s latest screwup necessitated a move to Austin.
One of those spin-kicks took down the zombie, snapping its neck with a satisfying crack.
In his earpiece, he heard Nicholai scrambling the rest of the team. They’d be down with him on the roof in a minute.
He turned to see if the woman was okay. She was cradling one arm with the other one and standing perilously close to the edge of the roof—not far from where the man who’d shut the door in her face had climbed down.
“You’re okay,” he said slowly. “Come away from the edge.”
The wind was still pretty fierce—Carlos could see why Lipinski didn’t want to land the Darkwing—and he was half-afraid that a gust would take the woman over the side.
However, the woman wouldn’t budge. She turned to look down over the edge of the roof. It was at least twenty stories down—a fall would surely kill her. There were enough dead people in Raccoon City today; Carlos saw no reason to add to the tally.
“Step over to me,” he said. “Everything’s okay.”
“No,” the woman said in a hollow voice, “it’s not.”
She held out her arm. Carlos could see the bite marks on her forearm and wrist. He felt his stomach clench at the sight.
“I’ve seen what happens to you once you’re bitten. There’s no going back.”
Behind him, Carlos could hear the rest of his team rappelling down from the Darkwing, as expected.
“We can help you.” Carlos tried to sound reassuring, but he wasn’t sure he could pull it off. Their mission objective was to contain anyone who was infected but not yet in the zombified state. With Cain, Carlos couldn’t be a hundred percent sure that they’d be treated well, but at least they’d have a chance.
The woman shook her head and took a step backward.
Carlos found himself moving in slow motion. The woman moved so deceptively fast, just stepping backward like that, that he was caught off guard. But no matter how fast he moved, it was already too late.
He got to the edge of the roof barely a second later, but it might as well have been an hour for all the good it did. He peered over the side to see the broken, shattered body of this woman whose life he thought he’d saved.
And he didn’t even know her name.
“My God.”
The voice was Nicholai’s. The big man was standing next to Carlos, his usually grim look replaced with one of horror. Askegren was right behind him, his toothpick falling out of his mouth as it hung open.
Carlos suspected that the same look was on his own face.
“Definitely not a good vacation,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Nicholai asked.
Shaking his head, Carlos said, “Nothing. Let’s get a move on.”
Nine
For the second time in recent memory, Alice Abernathy woke up naked.
This time, though, instead of a shower curtain, she was dressed in a flimsy hospital gown that barely covered her. Also this time, she remembered who and what she was, and what had happened to her.
Instead of a running shower, she was being pelted with something else.
No, not pelted. Attached.
Wires. They’d put wires into her. They were in her legs and her torso and her arms and her head.
She sat up.
PAIN!
Awful horrible mind-numbing excruciating searing boiling pain that ravaged every fiber of her being.
She ripped one of the wires out of her left arm.
The process of ripping out the wire made the pain infinitely, impossibly worse.
But then it subsided.
That emboldened her to tear out the ones in her right arm.
Same thing: worse pain at first, subsiding to something almost resembling tolerable.
She saved the two attached to the sides of her head for last.
As horrendously, wretchedly bad as the pain had been when she first woke up, the pain she felt