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“Roger that, Rev,” Sarge says. “I’m coming in the front. Don’t shoot me.”
“Copy that,” I say with a grin, while I leap over bodies and flatten myself against the wall beside the back door.
“Recon, Steel,” Sarge says, “cover Rev ’til he’s inside. Then you’ll split up. Rev, you’ll corner Raptor and company on the fifteenth floor. Recon and Steel, you two will help me get that woman out of enemy hands. X-Ray, keep us posted on that other target from floor nine. Over.”
Everyone confirms Sarge’s orders, and then we’re moving into the casino, me first, rifle ready, with Recon and Steel at my back.
A short hallway opens to the casino floor in front of us. To the left is a wide passageway with a sign for the hotel. I go that way and wish the other two good luck as they go into the casino.
I reach the elevators for the hotel, and the down arrow is flickering. The number is counting down.Four, three, two, L.
The doors open.
I’m off to the side, and the millisecond I can tell it’s a man, I squeeze off a shot and drop the bastard.
“Gotcha.”
The man was alone and so dumb he didn’t even have his sidearm at the ready. According to X-Ray, Raptor and one other target are in the central core of the building and still on the fifteenth floor. Which means…I open my comm. “I just took out the second target from floor nine.”
No response comes, but that’s not surprising considering the shots I hear coming from the casino. I hope to hell our soldier friends are securing that poor woman. But I can’t let the action over there distract me. I find the stairwell and start hoofing it to the penthouse floor—I’m not going to giftwrap myself for the enemy like the poor fuck I just killed. If my guess is right, I’ll find our bird-loving friend up on the roof of this dump.
I take the stairs two at a time. Adrenaline fuels my muscles as I clear floor after floor.
“You’re mine, motherfucker.”
Cora
It’s impossible not to worryabout Scrap and Shep and everyone else, but I do my best to keep that worry on the back burner so I can search this dirty, broken-down place for Jud.
Stealth keeps us cloaked as he, Grim, and I explore the main floor.
“This is a shithole,” Stealth says.
The old hospital has certainly seen better days. Ceiling tiles dangle above our heads, revealing sagging wires and rusted pipes. The hall we’re in is cluttered with overturned hospital beds and wheelchairs from a bygone era. The floors are covered in a thick layer of dust and animal droppings, and garbage lines the floorboards, the detritus of squatters, no doubt. Even the trash is covered in dust and cobwebs, which makes me think the squatters were pre-Virus rather than recent residents.
Before Week Zero, I used to love watching ghost hunting shows. This looks exactly like the kind of place ghost hunters would spend the night with their infrared cameras and voice recorders, hoping for chilling encounters with the dead.
Thinking about all the people who likely passed away inside these walls makes a shiver crawl over me. I shake it off and keep walking.
“There are no footprints,” Grim says, scanning the floor with a flashlight.
“We find footprints,” Stealth says, “we find where they bring the prisoners in.”
A rat scurries in front of us, making me jump. When I recover from the surprise, I huff a laugh and say, “Too bad Shep’s not here. We could have asked that little guy for directions.”
“Here,” Grim says. The beam of his light is fixed on a large fixture like a welcome desk at the end of the hall. We run to it.
Stealth uses a hand on the desk to launch himself over it. On the receptionist side, he shuffles old, dusty papers around. “Look for some kind of directory or something,” he says.
“I’ve got it,” I say. There’s a plaque on the wall. I shine my light on it, and it’s an emergency evacuation chart for the floor, yellowed with age and written in a font that makes me think it was placed here in the forties or fifties. “There are stairs somewhere that way.” I point to the left.
Grim reads the plaque over my shoulder. “X-Ray said the person he saw was on a lower floor. Let’s find those stairs and go down.”
“Roger that,” Stealth says, and we head into the bowels of creepy-central.
Rev
“We’ve got two on the roof,”X-Ray says in my ear.
