Plague Town (35 page)

“So you decided to reject me before I had the chance to reject you,” I countered.

“Of course not! That’s abs—”

I stopped him short with just a stare. I could feel the anger welling up in me.

“As far as you were concerned, it was okay for me to think there was something wrong with me,” I said. “
Much
better than having me think there might be something wrong with
you
.”

“That’s not—” I held up my hand, and he stopped again.

“Yes it is,” I said. “That’s
exactly
what it boiled down to. And you know it.”

“Ashley, damn it—”

I grabbed a handful of Gabriel’s hair with one hand and locked lips with him. He responded by wrapping an arm around my waist, pressing his other hand against my butt, lifting me up to set me on the edge of one of the
sinks. We continued to kiss feverishly, hungrily as if this were our last night on earth. Our hands roamed up and down each other’s bodies, finding curves and muscles, hardness and softness.

Parting my legs with his knee, he pressed himself against me, the heat and the hardness of his arousal almost enough to make me come on the spot.

I pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it on the floor. My long-sleeve thermal followed. He dipped his head down to my breasts, teasing each peak with teeth and tongue until the sensation was just short of painful, a real ‘it hurts so good’-type of feeling. I gasped as his fingers slid past the waistband of my yoga pants, slipping into my warmth with smoothness and ease, showing us both how ready and eager my body was to get down to business.

I arched against him, wanting more than his hands and fingers, as talented as they might be.

“Do you want this?” Gabriel whispered, nipping at my earlobe.

“Shut up,” I growled.

He withdrew his hand, hooking those clever fingers in my waistband as he lifted me up with his other hand and pulled my yoga pants and underwear down and off my legs and feet. They joined the growing pile of clothes on the floor.

I reached down greedily to unbutton his jeans and started to shimmy them off his hips when he pulled away.

“Wait a second,” he said

Going to the bathroom door, he flipped the lock and went to the condom machine on the wall, giving it a hard
thwack
with one fist. The little metal door creaked open and several foil wrapped condoms dropped to the floor. Gabriel scooped one up.

“We can owe them.”

He then slid out of his jeans, kicking them to the floor, and came back over to me. I watched as he approached,
admiring his physique. He was built like a classical Greek statue, rather than a gym junkie.

He stared at me just as hungrily.

We didn’t waste any time. We couldn’t indulge in a long, languorous session of hot-monkey love. We had to get back to the briefing.

We also knew that we might be dead in the next forty-eight hours.

But the moment Gabriel slid inside of me and we began rocking our hips together, the world went away for a while. Everything was centered around the heat of our bodies, the sensations building in me as I wrapped my legs around his hips, the sink cold against my butt.

His mouth trailed from my lips to my ear, where he nibbled on the lobe, moving down to my neck. A brief vision of Jake’s bloody mouth flashed into my head.

No!

I forced it away. Instead, I reveled in the feeling of his teeth gently scraping against the skin. My hips began to rock faster of their own accord, the first flickers of an orgasm starting to pulse in all the right places, spreading through my body in waves of liquid heat. My muscles tightened around Gabriel, who groaned with pleasure as the pace of his thrusts increased in speed and power.

The words ‘harder, faster’ came to mind, followed by ‘pussycat, kill, kill’ and I started laughing even as I came in a great quivering wave of pleasure.

Gabriel’s orgasm followed almost immediately, the shudders that racked his body sending more ripples through my loins along with another, smaller orgasm.

Two for the price of one.

Then his hands cupped my face. For a moment we just looked at each other, each catching our breath as the last aftershocks left our bodies.

He cocked an eyebrow, still breathing just a little heavily.

“Why did you laugh?”

I told him, figuring he might as well know how my
brain worked. A bemused smile flickered across.

“I know I’m weird,” I said, “but—”

“Yes, you are.” The smile became a grin. “But you’re sure as hell not boring.” He kissed me again, then looked at me.

“Ashley...” He stared at me so seriously it almost made me laugh again. Luckily I didn’t. “You know what I could become. You’ve seen it. Are you sure about...” He paused.

“About what? About the fact I want you so badly that I just had sex with you in the women’s bathroom?” I nodded. “Yes. I’m sure. Just promise me you’ll trust me next time.”

“Next time...?”

I shrugged.

“Next time you have some horrible secret that you think you shouldn’t tell me. I mean, I’m a mutant too, y’know?”

“Fair enough.”

He kissed me one more time, then reluctantly slid out of me. I let him go just as reluctantly, but we had serious business to attend to, and I’m sure everyone was already wondering why we’d been gone so long.

Doing a quick clean-up, we both hurriedly dressed. I splashed water on my face again and checked for any obvious signs of our activity.

“You gave me a hickey,” I said, looking at the bite marks between my neck and shoulder.

He pulled my thermal up a little higher and hid it.

“No one will notice.”

I gave a little laugh.

“Besides, Nathan already thinks you’re my boyfriend.” I unlocked the bathroom door and reached for the handle, but Gabriel grabbed my wrist and turned me around to face him.

“So. If we survive, would you like to go out some time?”

“As long as it’s not for tofu burgers, you got a date.”

We walked down the hall hand in hand, unclasping our fingers only when we reached room 217. I took a deep breath and went inside, Gabriel close behind.

Was I embarrassed? Sure. No one likes to lose it in front of friends and colleagues. But as Nathan pointed out, now wasn’t the time for high school shit, so I’d suck it up and act like an adult.

Nathan had joined Simone, Paxton, and Gentry at the table in the front of the room. Taking his place in the pack as one of the alpha dogs.

Simone looked concerned when we walked in.

“We have a swarm headed our way,” she said, and my blood ran cold. “With arrival estimated in approximately twelve hours. Nathan—” Her tone became oddly formal. “—if you’d be so kind.”

Nathan nodded.

“We have around eighty trained soldiers, fifty non-coms, two hundred civilians, and an additional thirty or so survivors who may or may not be of any use. Doesn’t sound like a lot when you think about what’s going to be coming at us.”

Sure doesn’t,
I thought, sitting back in the front row next to Lil. She sat stiffly, and didn’t say anything.

“You ever see a movie called
Zulu?”
Nathan didn’t wait for a reply, even though Tony’s hand shot up immediately. “Less than a hundred and fifty British soldiers held off between two and three thousand Zulu warriors at a place called Rorke’s Drift by erecting barricades of wagons and sacks of grain, then employing a classic military tactic.

“Stand fast, fire in ranks. Three lines.” Nathan got to his feet and started pacing. “First rank fires, drops down.
Second rank steps up while first rank reloads. Third rank fires while second rank reloads. Oh, yeah, and these Zulus—who happened to be some of the fiercest warriors in the world—were charging the Brits at a dead run, with shields, spears, and even some rifles of their own. But at the end of the day it was the English who walked away from that fight.”

Wow
, I thought. I’d been expecting something along the lines of,
They can take our brains, but they’ll never take our freedom!

He looked at us intently.

“We’ve got less than a hundred soldiers against a few thousand zombies. But the zombies don’t have weapons and will be coming at us a lot slower than the Zulus, with none of the strategy. Plus we’ll have a few other tricks up our sleeves.”

“What if it doesn’t come down like that?” Tony said. “You ever see
Zulu Dawn
? In that one the soldiers are, like, totally obliterated by the Zulus.”

Nathan just looked at him, then scanned the room.

“Anyone else got any movie trivia to share?” He came back to Tony, who pushed himself deeper into his seat.

“No? Good. So let’s discuss the rest of our assets.”

“Damn, I so want one of those.”

Tony stared enviously as Gentry walked up, carrying his flamethrower. Gentry grinned and brandished the nozzle, the tanks already strapped to his back.

“Maybe when you’re a little older, X-Box.”

“Can I have a flamethrower?” Lil poked her head up from behind a bench where she sat loading ammo into a clip. As usual, it took the promise of mayhem to get her to join the conversation. But given how devastated Mack’s death had left her, I was cautiously relieved.

Gentry patted her on her helmet. “If you’re very good,
Santa might put one in your stocking.” She answered with a dirty look.

The wild cards crouched on the inner side of Mount Gillette where it ran the length of the main parking lot. Gabriel was out with Nathan and the rest of the soldiers, setting up lines on the far side of the barricade. They’d built a couple of makeshift wooden ramps on either side, so our people could go back and forth with relative ease.

Most of the remaining soldiers, Alpha, Beta and assorted personnel, were already in position at various points along the barrier, watching for the swarm. Aerial recon confirmed that the majority of the zombies were approaching along the road that ran directly from town, right up into the parking lot—flat and empty, easy to cross.

Abandoned cars had been moved, parked nose to tail across the outer edge of the lot to create an additional barrier. We had sharpshooters up in strategic places to take out as many zombies as possible, and several lookouts spread around the perimeter of the campus to catch stragglers coming from other directions.

The fog lay heavy in the air again, thick and moist and cold. Once again the cosmic FX designer had given us the perfect day to battle hordes of the undead.

What’s wrong with a little sunshine?
I wondered.

The air itself smelled of eucalyptus, sea salt from the ocean, and something else—a faintly rotten taint wafting in on the currents. What breeze there was carried the moans of the damned—or was that my imagination?

It didn’t matter. The swarm was on its way, and soon enough the smell of putrefied flesh would fill our senses.

I still wanted to know what the story was with Nathan and Simone. And why was it that Colonel Paxton seemed content to have Nathan take the lead in what was his operation? But explanations would have to wait.

We’d stayed up late into the night figuring out how we were going to face what could be several thousand
zombies with a ragtag group, some of whom would be more liability than asset on the battlefield. And then there were the survivors who still hadn’t come to grips with the fact the dead had returned to life. They could barely function on a day-to-day basis, let alone fight against something they refused to accept was real. They’d stay in the secure lower floors of Patterson Hall while the rest of us fought.

If we lost, well, they’d be blissfully unaware of it right up to the moment the military dropped a tactical nuke.

For the moment, though, we had to unload the stuff we’d lugged from Nathan’s armory and divvy it up among the soldiers and those civilians who were willing and able to fight. We had little canvas backpacks piled up, each one waiting to be stuffed.

Tony and Kai dragged out a pair of battered metal cases from the cache we’d brought with us. Tony opened one that held racks and racks of tiny little metal darts, each about the size of a six-penny nail with bright red and yellow fins.

“What are these?” He held up one of the glittering little arrows. Fingers immediately plucked it from his hand.

“I call them ‘déjà vus.’” Nathan didn’t quite materialize from the fog, but his appearance was unexpected enough to make us all jump. I suspect he did it on purpose. “You can fire them from a rigged handgun like this—” He reached into the larger case and picked up what looked like a modified paintball gun.

“We’ve also got them packed into claymore dispersal platforms which we’ll plant in strategic locations. Those will launch a shitload of them all at once, sending them in a specifically aimed arc.

“Nice for crowded parties.”

He loaded the dart into the gun he was holding, took aim at the closest trashcan, and fired. There was a deep metallic
thunk
.

I raised a hand.

“Um, I hate to say it,” I commented, “but that was kind of underwhelming.”

Nathan shot me a look.

“Not done yet. Two things: One, each flechette—”

“Flechette?”

“Dart. Each dart has a little RIFD chip in it, just like the tags they use in department stores to prevent shoplifting.” He took out a small rectangular object from his vest pocket. “This is the transmitter. It sends a radio signal to activate the dart, wherever it might be, like so.

“Fire in the hole,” he added.

We dove for cover as Nathan knelt and thumbed the big red button. The trashcan vanished, blossoming into a fireball with an earsplitting explosion.

“Item two,” he said. “The dart’s fins are made of plastic explosive.”

“Okay, that’s impressive,” I said, ears ringing.

“Totally awesome,” Tony breathed.

Nathan held up a hand.

“But here’s the downside, party people. The signal strength is severely limited. You’ve got an effective range of about thirty feet, tops. So the transmitters have to be carried onto the battlefield. And that’s a suicide mission for anyone not immune to the zombie virus, what with all that hot blood and goo splattering around.