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“Good work, Angel.” He gave a nod of fierce satisfaction as he surveyed the carnage, then pulled Gentry’s radio from his belt and flipped through frequencies.
My skin prickled, and I clenched and unclenched my hands. I’d come down off enough highs to know I didn’t have much longer as a superzombiebadass. I pivoted to the guy whose head I’d smashed into the wall, gripped him by the face again, cracked his skull open and scooped out his brain. I repeated this with the other two dead guards, then split one brain in half, handed one chunk to Pierce, then took the other two full brains back to the elevator. Andrew had pushed the bin forward to block the elevator door, and now sat slumped against the back of the car, eyes slightly glazed. I gave him a grin, then lifted the lid and chucked in the two full brains. Kyle lay curled on his side atop the body bag. He growled and awkwardly pulled one of the brains to him with his forearms. Brian stirred sluggishly, still heavily under the effect of the tranq. Marcus groaned and shifted but didn’t look up.
My elation shifted to worry. “Marcus?”
“Still out,” Kyle mumbled through a mouthful of brains. He swallowed awkwardly with his screwed up jaw and tongue, then bit off a piece of brain, spat it into his hand and stuffed it into Marcus’s mouth. “You take care . . . business out there,” he slurred. “I’ll take . . . care of business . . . here.”
I released a shaky breath. “Thanks.” Frustration clawed at me despite his encouragement. Marcus and Kyle still had Saberton’s experimental drugs in their systems, and I didn’t have a clue how to counter it or help them get back to full strength. More brains can’t hurt, I told myself. And I’m doing everything I can to get us out of here. That’s how I’d help them. Take care of business, just like Kyle said, and get them to Dr. Nikas.
I closed the lid then crouched against the wall beyond the elevator to wolf down the remaining brain half. My hands trembled, and a slight queasiness wanted to push back against the brains I swallowed down. Yep, definitely coming down off that incredible high. Damn it.
“You doing all right?” Pierce asked. He bit off a chunk of brain, watching me carefully.
Wiping my mouth with the back of my hand, I nodded. “Yeah. Hard crash though. Need a minute.”
He finished his brain and didn’t bother wiping his mouth. “There’ll likely be another team waiting past the next door. We need to move quickly before they realize we’ve taken these guys completely out.”
I scarfed down the rest of the brain and got to my feet. Now I was the one who felt stuck in mud, though my little snack helped a bit.
A dart whizzed past my ear. “Angel, get back!” Pierce shouted in the same instant. I flattened myself against the wall behind the corner as Pierce dove into the elevator and took cover by the number panel. “Three,” he told me, pointing down the hall. Guess they decided not to wait for us.
Well, I sure as hell wasn’t going to wait for them to come to us, not in my current non-badass condition. The sound of approaching footsteps spurred me faster as I yanked the knife and another syringe from my pocket. Pierce hissed “too soon” at me, but I ignored him. If I didn’t do it now it would be too late.
I jabbed the knife into my gut, eerily amazed that I’d reached a point where I could do so with relative ease. Shouts and more footsteps grew louder as I shoved the syringe in and pressed the plunger.
3 . . . 2 . . . 1 . . .
Delicious fire raced through my veins, and when the first man came close I stepped around the corner, grabbed his shotgun and slammed it up and into his face. As he staggered back I wrenched the gun from his hands, then swung the butt to clock the guy beside him in the temple and drop him like a stone. Something punched me in the side, and I swung around to see a third guard, a woman, still a good twenty feet away down the corridor. Fire leaped from the muzzle of the gun in her hand. I staggered back a step as the round smacked me in my thigh, but before I could shift my weight to charge her, her head snapped back in time with the sound of another gunshot, and she went down with a neat hole in the center of her forehead.
I spared a quick glance back to confirm that yes, it was Pierce’s shot that had taken her down, then turned on the one guard still standing—the one whose face I’d slammed with his own shotgun. “Jarvis,” or so his name patch read. Blood from his nose mingled with a portwine birthmark that covered the left half of his neck and disappeared under his shirt collar. Eyes wide in shock, he dropped his hands from his nose and jerked them out to his sides in a position of surrender.
“Please. Please don’t kill me.” His voice shook, high and thin, and his eyes darted around at the dead bodies. He didn’t look much older than me, for fuck’s sake. How the hell did he get tangled up in this shit?
“Get down on the floor and put your hands behind your back!” I barked at him. Or tried to bark. It came out more like a wheeze as my tanked up parasite dealt with two bullet holes, but he flung himself to the floor and stuck his wrists behind his back.
“Please don’t kill me,” he repeated, breath coming unevenly.
“Don’t give me a reason to,” I said as I ziptied his wrists together. “Stay still and be cool, and you’ll be fine.” Yeah, he was a cold-blooded asshole if he was on the special team, but that didn’t mean I had to be.
He gulped once and then went as still as a statue.
Pierce approached and made a quick examination of my two healing bullet wounds as the flesh closed. “Hang on,” he said, then moved over to the guard he shot, used the shotgun to smash her skull open, pulled the brain out and brought it to me. “Tank up again while you move. We still have to get to the van.”
I ripped the brain in half and handed him one piece with a nod toward the bin. Understanding, he slipped the brain under the lid.
Maybe there’s something to the whole concept of a zombie soldier after all? I wondered as I ate. Feeding off one’s enemies seemed to be working so far.
I was more prepared for the crash when it came this time. As the prickling began I put my hand against the wall and took several deep breaths. An urge to weep filled me as, once again, the world grew du
ll and normal, and I bit the inside of my cheek to hold it back. The urgency of our situation clawed at me, but it was still several more seconds before I could pull my hand from the wall, leaving a bloody print behind.
I forced my legs to take me over to the elevator, and by the time I’d crossed the ten or so feet, I felt almost not-crappy. I grabbed the bin handle, then saw that Andrew still sat slumped against the back of the elevator.
“You hanging in there, dude?” I pulled the bin out a few feet to give him some room to get up, but to my surprise he shook his head.
“Shot,” he said in a shaky voice then pulled his hand away from his side to reveal a red spot the size of a quarter on the left side of his shirt below his ribcage.
“Oh, shit,” I breathed and came around the bin to crouch by him and peer at the wound. “How the hell’d you get shot? You stayed down the whole time, didn’t you?”
