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“Listen to me,” he told her. “You have to get out of here. This room is a deathtrap with no escape—”
“I’m not leaving without you!”
Rumbling, somewhere near. Like a load-bearing wall was collapsing. “Then take me with you, but we gotta move.”
“Let us go then.” Blade bent down and stripped the guard of his gun—and a knife. “With speed.”
Daniel glanced over at the man. And then started ripping things off of himself, IVs, wires, blankets. “Take one side of me, will ya?”
“I need to be able to shoot—”
“I’ll do it,” Gus muttered as he lunged for the pillow and ripped the case off. “But let me wrap your vein up. You’re losing blood already.”
After he tied off the inside of Daniel’s elbow, Lydia and the doctor humped him to his feet, and it was a bad shuffle to the door.
“Where’s Phalen,” Daniel said just as they were going to step out.
“I’m right here,” the woman answered from behind. “And we need to go to the northern tunnel. It’s the best access point I can get us through. Left. Go left.”
Out in the smoke-filled hall, Blade led the way because he was the one with the weapons—a gun he’d evidently had with him plus the dead guard’s. Phalen, meanwhile, brought up the rear, and she was good with the navigation, steering them down the corridor in the opposite direction from the open area where the workstations were. Where the shooting and the explosions were.
Fuck. Researchers and medical staff were dead or dying…
At the end of the hall, there was a steel reinforced door, and Phalen elbowed her way forward to enter a numerical sequence on a keypad. For Daniel, everything was a blur, but he was aware enough that as they filed in and closed the heavier barrier behind their group, he thought they might have half a chance.
The tunnel ahead was lit with low-energy ceiling fixtures, the illumination dim and blinky, as if some of the power sources had been attacked or at the very least threatened by what had been detonated. He did what he could to keep up, but soon enough, Gus and Lydia were holding all his weight up by his armpits, his bare feet tickling the cold concrete floor.
At the far end was another steel door, and Phalen went ahead again.
He wasn’t sure where they were going to come out, but if they couldn’t get to a vehicle, they needed more weapons and a good barricaded position—
“It’s not working. Goddamn it, the master code’s not working.”
He glanced around Gus’s bare chest. The woman was viciously stabbing at a keypad, the little red light in the corner persisting every time she hit the # key.
“Fuck,” she said as she wheeled back around. “We’re trapped—”
Yet another explosion vibrated through the earth, and he looked up overhead. The sprinkling of concrete dust was not good news—supports were weakening throughout the subterranean lab.
He glanced at Lydia. She was terrified, but keeping it together. Gus was the same, his eyes bouncing around, but his grip steady. God, Daniel hated that he was so physically weak and they had to carry him—
“I shall go back and ensure all of your safety.”
As Blade spoke up, Daniel narrowed his stare on his old boss. “You can’t hold them off. You know what’s out there, and it’s not human.”
“As I said, I am the one they want.” The man held out the guard’s gun, handle first. “Take this, Daniel. You are the only one among them who knows how to shoot—”
Phalen snatched the weapon out of the man’s hand. With a quick series of shifts, she put the nine millimeter through its paces, checking how many bullets were in the magazine, cocking it, taking off the safety.
“No, he’s not the only one.”
Blade chuckled. “I beg your pardon, madam. Hold your position. I will attempt to get them out of the lab.”
“How,” Daniel spoke up.
“They will follow me. You all are incidental—”
“How do you know that?” Daniel held on to hisLydia a little more tightly, and thought about what he and Gus had found out in the forest, those footsteps that came from out of nowhere. “There are a lot of different people down here.”
