Extinction Game (17 page)

‘Onwards, gentlemen,’ said Nadia, and headed back to the SUV.

‘What about Casey and the rest?’ I asked, climbing back in. ‘We haven’t seen a flare from them, have we?’

‘Unless we missed it,’ said Nadia. Her shoulders rose and fell in a sigh. ‘Or maybe it’s just us who’ve got problems.’

We exited the motorway, and soon turned onto a broad highway that ran parallel to the nearby banks of the Pinheiros. I studied the map and saw we had already covered most of
the distance to our destination.

‘Okay,’ said Nadia, glancing sideways at the map on my knees. ‘We’re almost there. Keep your eyes peeled, both of you.’

‘This place we’re going to,’ I asked. ‘Do we know what it looks like?’

Oskar reached into the envelope Casey had given him earlier, and pulled out some grainy-looking photographs before passing them over to me. ‘Aerial drone reconnaissance,’ he
explained. ‘See that white building, about two storeys high?’ He leaned forward, reaching between the two front seats to tap at the picture.

I studied the photo, and then the map, comparing them. ‘If I’m reading this right, then Retièn’s labs are just seven or eight blocks from here, straight on
ahead.’

‘Slight problem,’ said Nadia, nodding ahead. ‘Look.’

I glanced through the windscreen, and saw that part of a building had collapsed across the street straight ahead of us, blocking the avenue.

‘We’re going to have to take a detour,’ said Nadia, pulling once more to a halt. ‘No way I can get past that. I’ll hang a right, take a route down a side street,
then come back onto this road.’

‘I
really
don’t like this,’ said Oskar quietly.

Nadia’s hands tapped out a staccato rhythm on the wheel. ‘Me neither.’

For a second I thought she was going to turn back. She glanced sideways at me, fixing me with her gaze, and I knew she was trying to make up her mind. Then she started us forwards again, first
taking a right into a side street, then a left at the next corner.

Up ahead, at the next intersection, I saw a number of bee-brains milling about in a loose mob like a sleepwalker’s convention. Then I saw they were all carrying stuff out of the gutted
shell of a shopping mall on the other side of the intersection. In their hands I saw pieces of broken furniture, desk ornaments, chairs, bricks, and pretty much anything that wasn’t too big
or unwieldy to either carry or drag after them. It was like stumbling across a fire sale in the midst of a zombie apocalypse.

‘Oh hell,’ said Nadia.

I had left the window open on my side, to alleviate the tropical heat. A cool breeze swept past us and towards the bee-brains. Almost immediately, a number of the creatures came to a halt, their
heads swivelling around to regard us. I closed the window again, afraid they were about to come running at us.

‘Nadia?’ asked Oskar. ‘Why the
fuck
are they looking at us?’

‘I don’t know.’ She grabbed the map from my lap and studied it closely, her lips pale and bloodless.

More of the creatures appeared, stumbling to a halt before raising their chins apparently to sniff at the air. ‘Why are they acting like that?’ I asked. ‘Is it because they can
smell us? Is that what it is?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is, they follow scent paths laid down by patrol leaders,’ said Oskar, without bothering to explain what a ‘patrol leader’ was.
‘Those are the ones you
really
have to avoid.’

‘I don’t know why they’re looking this way,’ said Nadia, ‘unless . . .’

She looked up, her eyes wide, and never finished her sentence. She slammed her foot down, reversing the SUV hard enough that its rear fishtailed wildly.

Oskar gasped and swore behind us, while Lucky let out a low, grumbling whine from somewhere deep inside her throat.

‘Fuck this,’ said Nadia, her voice high and tight and sharp. ‘Check your guns. Both of you.’

‘Are you expecting trouble?’ I asked as calmly as I could.

‘Something really, really doesn’t feel right,’ she muttered under her breath.

She hit the brake, spinning the wheel at the same time so that the car was spun through ninety degrees. Suddenly we were facing back the way we had come. I twisted around in my seat to look
through the rear window behind Lucky, and saw some of the bee-brains take a few faltering steps after us. After a moment they began to run, their skinny, scarred legs pumping with furious
motion.

‘I fucking
told
you something was wrong,’ Oskar yelled from behind me.

The SUVs tyres screeched as we emerged back onto the main avenue. I felt a deep shiver of shock at the sight of hundreds of bee-brains that had appeared from nowhere in just the last few
minutes. It looked as if the conga line I had sighted earlier had moved to cut straight across our route back to the stage. Most carried or dragged pieces of junk, just like the bee-brains
encountered moments before.

Nadia was forced to slow down to avoid a pile of twisted wreckage scattered across the road. Hundreds of bee-brains turned to watch us. I saw again how bruised and battered they all looked, how
wrinkled and scarred.

They dropped what they were carrying, and started to walk, and then to run, straight at us.

‘Fuck,’ said Oskar in a high voice.

Nadia hit the accelerator once we were past the obstruction, aiming straight at a cluster of the creatures directly before us. I yelled and put a hand up before my face as we ploughed straight
into them, the vehicle bumping and bouncing over their bodies. Hands reached out, sliding against the glass of the window nearest me, and I took a tight grip on my rifle. The thing that made it
worse was that the creatures were entirely silent, like something out of a particularly unpleasant nightmare. Their mouths opened and closed, but no sound emerged.

I saw to my horror that thousands more were pouring into the street between us and the bridge over the river, sweeping towards us in a vast tide of flesh.

‘I think,’ said Nadia, her face shiny with perspiration and her voice trembling, ‘we’re going to have to call this one a wash. Oskar, fire off a red flare. Let the others
know we’re in trouble.’

‘Seconded,’ said Oskar, grabbing hold of the flare gun once more.

‘But first,’ she said, as if to herself, ‘we’re going to have to improvise a little.’

Nadia turned the wheel, sending us down another side street. There were bee-brains here, but not in such great numbers. The map was still spread out on my knees, and by the look of things we
were now definitely outside the recommended routes. I reopened the window on my side and started to pick off the fastest and strongest of the bee-brains running towards us with my rifle.

Their heads snapped back in the moment before they went tumbling to the ground and I was suddenly very, very glad for all my recent marksmanship training.
They’re not human
, I
reminded myself, each time I looked into their blank and mindless eyes.

From behind me, Oskar cursed and muttered as he did the same thing from his side of the car.

‘Conserve your ammunition,’ said Nadia, ‘in case we really,
really
need it. There’s a lot more of them out there than we’ve got bullets.’

‘Something’s fucked up,’ Oskar shouted, gripping the back of Nadia’s seat with one hand and practically spitting his words in her ear. ‘We should have been able to
see all this with the drones. Why the hell did they send up a white flare, when they knew there were this many bee-brains waiting for us?’

‘Shut up,’ Nadia snarled over her shoulder. ‘Soon as you’ve got a clear shot, fire that fucking flare.’

‘It’s
you
,’ said Oskar, turning to me now. ‘You’ve
jinxed
us all. Right from the beginning.’

‘Are you out of your fucking mind?’ I said.

‘Oskar?’ said Nadia, without looking around. ‘I swear to God, you will shut the fuck up
right now
or I will make you walk the rest of the way back. You got
that?’

She swerved to avoid a tight knot of bee-brains. I pulled the map back across my lap from where it had fallen and studied it with shaking hands, tracing my finger along the length of the
Pinheiros. There were multiple bridges spanning it at different points. Some looked as if they were closer than the elevated motorway Nadia had taken us across, although they were certainly a long
way away from any of the designated safe routes. If we could get to one of them, maybe we could make it to the other side of the river.

I told Nadia my idea. ‘Sounds good,’ she nodded.

‘It’s taking us off the safe routes,’ said Oskar, his voice full of alarm.

‘The safe routes, as you may have just noticed,’ said Nadia, her voice terse, ‘appear to be wildly inaccurate. So I don’t think that’s going to matter a great deal,
do you?’

Nadia swung across the road, sending more bodies flying. I saw one of the creatures, her back broken and her mouth wide with pain, flailing as she struggled to pull herself upright on useless
legs. Others crawled or moved weakly. Then they were gone behind us, Nadia slaloming the vehicle from side to side to catch more bee-brains as they lurched into our path. Every time we turned into
a street too densely packed with bodies, both myself and Oskar picked off any that got too close until our ears sang from the thunder of bullets.

We swerved around yet another corner that was partly blocked by fallen masonry, but was miraculously devoid of bee-brains. I stared at the map, unable to figure out where the hell we were any
more. Nadia slowed again to negotiate her way past the debris.

Lucky howled softly in my ear, so close that my neck was damp from her breath. I turned to try and reassure her just as something enormous fell out of the sky, slamming into the bonnet of the
SUV and starring the windscreen’s armoured glass.

Nadia sent us accelerating backwards at speed, to try to get out of range of whatever had collided with us, but she miscalculated; the SUV hit something that sent its rear bouncing high into the
air fast and hard enough that the car came back down on its side. As the car rolled, I caught a momentary glimpse of an enormous chunk of masonry, not much smaller than the car itself, slowly
rolling to a halt.

I wondered distantly where it had come from. My seatbelt was the only thing keeping me from collapsing on top of Nadia, who was now beneath me. I coughed and swallowed, tasting blood. I had
bitten my tongue.

Lucky whimpered mournfully from behind me. When I turned to look, I saw she was half-standing on her owner, who was struggling to be free of his own seatbelt.

For a moment, I feared the worst; I had seen Nadia’s head slam into the dashboard, and she wasn’t moving. Then, without warning, she groaned and tried to sit up, her hand reaching
for the wheel.

‘Forget that,’ I said, swallowing blood. ‘We’ve got to get out of here.’

‘Can’t walk home,’ she said thickly. She pressed the ignition, but nothing happened.

I tried to push open the door on my side, but it was jammed. The only way out, then, was through the open window next to me. I pulled myself up and out of the SUV, crouching on top of the door
so I could take a look around. I glanced towards the huge chunk of masonry, and then moved my gaze up, until I saw nearly a dozen figures milling around on top of a neighbouring building.

Had the creatures been deliberately aiming at us, I wondered, when they pushed that huge chunk of concrete and rebar off the roof and on top of us? For creatures that were supposedly brain-dead,
it struck me as pretty smart.

I leaned back in through the window. ‘Get up here,’ I shouted down at the others. ‘We have to get the hell away from here before they overrun us.’

Oskar stood upright inside the SUV and managed to crawl out beside me before helping Lucky scramble up onto the side of the car. The hound dropped down onto the road with a low growl. I reached
back inside and grabbed hold of Nadia’s hand, ignoring the throbbing pain in my shoulders and back as I helped her climb out.

Oskar dropped down next to Lucky, and whistled sharply. Lucky responded by settling onto her haunches and regarding her master attentively. Under any other circumstances, I’d have been
impressed.

‘The car,’ said Nadia, her voice scratchy. ‘Need to get it upright.’

‘The damn thing’s trashed,’ said Oskar, his voice terse. ‘Besides, look over there.’

I followed the direction of his gaze, to where a number of bee-brains had come stumbling around the far corner of the street, attracted, perhaps, by the noise and commotion. I realized with a
terrible sinking sensation that we had little choice but to abandon our vehicle.

Oskar rested his rifle on top of the SUV and began firing towards the bee-brains. Nadia, despite the blood on her forehead and what may have well been an incipient concussion, did the same
– as did I, steadying my breathing before picking a target and pulling the trigger.

Bodies fell as the bullets slammed into the heads and chests of the approaching bee-brains. I hastily reloaded and started firing again.

A dark brown shape shot past me and towards the creatures. Oskar’s hound leaped towards a bee-brain, her enormous jaws clamping around the creature’s throat. The bee-brain collapsed
to its knees, blood pumping from its neck. Lucky had already moved on to savage another of the creatures.

‘Stop,’ said Nadia, sounding breathless. More than a dozen bodies lay scattered. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here before any more come.’

‘What about our supplies?’ I asked, nodding at the SUV. ‘Shouldn’t we get them out of there?’

‘No,’ said Nadia. ‘There isn’t time.’

‘I need just one thing,’ said Oskar, half-pulling himself back inside the SUV before Nadia had a chance to protest. He resurfaced a moment later with a black canvas bag.

‘Through there,’ he said, slinging the bag over one shoulder and nodding towards a nearby vacant doorway.

‘In there?’ exclaimed Nadia. ‘Are you crazy?’

‘River’s on the other side,’ he said. ‘No time to argue. Just follow me!’

He disappeared inside the doorway without another word, Lucky bounding after him. I looked at Nadia and she shrugged helplessly before following him.