Resurrection (Apocalypse Chronicles Part II) (30 page)

I didn’t understand why that was such an odd question.

“Doc’s on the stairwell, Kennedy. We don’t have much time.”

“Where’s Harrison?” I asked again, urgent, growing scared.

Mei ignored me, helping me to my feet. She then shoved the rifle in my hands. “Can you use your weapon?” she asked.

I nodded.

“Good, we need your aim.”

“Where are we?” I asked, stumbling after Mei.

“In a high-rise.”

“Yes, but where?”

She gave me a suspicious look. “The city, Kennedy.
Detroit
.”

Detroit?
I don’t even remember
getting
here. It must have been the misery over what happened to Christina yesterday, or maybe the fulfillment of my night with Harrison? I could still feel the pleasure of him against me…

“Where’s Harrison?” I asked again.

“We don’t know.”

“You don’t…?” The feeling of being lost washed over me, chaos and restlessness superseding my fears. “We need to find him.”

We reached the stairwell where Doc was holding them off. The Infected weaved in and out of view two flights down. The stairs below that floor, all ten flights, were covered in them, some dead, but most alive and climbing over their fallen to get to us. Their growls echoed off the walls, the metal steps clanged and vibrated. The noise filled the stairwell until I couldn’t hear Mei’s response to me.

Doc had three blades left. Apparently, I had awoken just in time. I’d have to thank Beverly for that slap.

Without anyone needing to say so, I recognized immediately that we were in a life and death situation. Never before, since the outbreak occurred or even prior to it, had I felt fear prickle so distinctly along my arms.

I went to work with the sole purpose of clearing a path and being free to exit and find Harrison. My strategy built on Doc’s, who had expended his weapons and left his position. Whether by luck or intent, he had used the stairwell as a funnel and taken down the Infected in one specific section of the stairs. Their bodies were beginning to pile up, forming a natural wall, and our primary means of defense, so I focused my efforts there.

I worked on them until Mei tugged my elbow. When I peered back, the door that Beverly had been working on was now open. Doc seemed to have finished up for her because he was pulling himself to his feet with the assistance of the knob where he’d been squatting.

I pulled the trigger twice more, completing the pile of bodies, before running for the door.

We closed it behind us and fled down the next hallway. It was obvious from Doc’s attempts at the various doors along the way that we had no designated plan.

“The rally point,” I shouted. “Where’s the rally point?”

“Overrun,” Doc yelled back.

“It’s where you hit your head,” Mei called out.

We’ve already been there? I don’t remember it. Any of it. Getting here. My injury. None of it. Why can’t I remember?

Doc tried the last door and nearly fell through it as it sprung open. On the other side, we found a secondary emergency stairwell, thankfully unoccupied, and took it to the ground floor, feeling our way down with the use of the handrails. There were two doors at the end, one of which was obstructed by several random pieces of wood. Strangely, some felt like wall panels and the legs of chairs.

Someone had secured themselves inside.

“Nice,” Beverly scoffed. “Lock yourself in with an Infected. Beautiful plan they had.”

“The Infected back there were survivors?”

“Yeah…,” Beverly replied as if I should already know it.

“They probably didn’t know the person was infec-” Mei was saying in their defense when Doc tested the other door and it swung in.

We came to a stop just inside.

A massive wooden stage stretched out before us, a few feet higher than our heads. To our right, the walls were draped in red velvet and hundreds of empty wooden clamshell seats stood in rows from one end of the cavernous room to the other. The smell of old wood permeated it.

I caught Mei furiously signaling with her hands but it was too rapid to translate. Only when she leaned toward the stairwell we’d just left, directing an ear to it, did I understand. She had been signaling, “Listen.”

We did, but all I could hear was the pounding of my pulse in my ears. I wiped the blood from my forehead again, noticing the piece of Mei’s shirt was becoming so saturated that it wouldn’t be of help for much longer. The pain was just beginning to set in but I ignored it.

“We lost them,” Doc declared.

“Think we’re that lucky?” Beverly mocked.

“We could be,” he retorted.

After a moment of stiff silence, Mei suggested, “I vote we stay here until we can come up with a plan of escape.”

“We already did, Honey,” Doc said.

“From the city, Sweetie.”

“Oh.”

Beverly rolled her eyes at them. “Fine,” she said, to my surprise. She was usually the dissenter. “Just keep your voices down.”

After the amount of time Beverly had spent with Christina, I’d forgotten how snide she could be. It flooded back then, along with the feeling that our reprieve from her attitude had ended. Still, it was solid advice, even if delivered with a sour tone. After we checked the other doors to the theater and ensured they were locked, we moved to the middle of the theater and whispered from then on.

Our discussion ranged from simply exiting the theater and making a run for it—hoping we didn’t attract the attention of those in our building or any other—to splitting up and searching for an exit route, to creating a diversion to distract the Infected so we could flee without being seen. All seemed feasible, none were good enough. There were holes in each one and holes let in the Infected.

Over thirty minutes passed before we came to a lull in our debate. We sat in our chairs, staring at the ground, when the sound of running gradually grew louder. Our first instinct was to stand, our second was to stare at the door next to the stage. I raised my rifle and took aim. But that wasn’t the one that burst open. It was the one behind us that led into the foyer.

I swung around, aiming my muzzle in its direction, but all I saw was blinding light.

Sunlight spilled in from the foyer windows, filling the theater. I didn’t even see the silhouettes moving down the aisles toward us.

My finger was already on the trigger and grappling with when to pull as I heard someone gasp and another shout, “Don’t shoot!”

People
, my mind screamed.
Healthy ones!

When the muzzle was lowered and my view cleared, I squinted through the light and found five people marching down the sloped floor. Their shapes and sizes were different but one I identified immediately.

“Harrison!” My heart leapt in my throat.

He reached me by then and pulled me to him, stopping me inches before we made contact. He went on to inspect my wound.

“Where have you been?” I asked, watching his lips turn down at the sight of my bloodied forehead.

“Trying to keep you from getting hurt. Evidently, I failed.” He effortlessly tore a piece of fabric from his shirt and dabbed my gash. Rotating his head sharply toward the rest of our team, he addressed them with a harsh tone. “I told you not to come into Detroit.”

Their mouths fell open just before they began defending themselves. I picked up phrases which, when put together, could be summed up into me having pursued Harrison here and they came along to protect me. But it was Beverly’s sharp comment at the end that stunned me.

“We will go where we want,” Beverly snapped back. “We don’t take commands from a deserter.”

Deserter?
I thought.
Harrison deserted us?
Is that why he wasn’t with us?

I was about to question him when a woman stepped forward. We’d been ignoring the others Harrison had found but she didn’t seem to care up to this point.

“Deserter or not, if it weren’t for Harrison, you’d all be assured certain death.”

“And who are you to make that claim?” Beverly demanded, crossing her arms over her chest in defiance. “You don’t even know him.”

But it seemed that she
did. The color and shape of her eyes, the features of her face were remarkably similar to Harrison’s.

“I’m Harrison’s aunt.”

Harrison’s aunt
…

Her announcement paled in comparison to the significance it held.

We were looking for someone to develop a cure. Harrison’s aunt was a biochemist, one who manufactured the virus in the first place.

Simultaneously, our jaws fell slack.

In the tense quiet that followed, she stood in the halo of light still streaming in from the foyer, angelic in form, too good to be true.

“You’re Eve?” I said, stumbling over the name in my attempt to get it out. I swung my head back to Harrison. “You found her?”

“And just in time too,” remarked a dark-skinned man with a thick Indian accent.

“They came for us,” Harrison said, referring to the group standing behind him, the one that included his aunt.

“You,” Eve corrected. “We came for you, Harrison.”

And I knew why. They were here for his blood, to formulate an antidote, to save the world.

I drew in a breath, and for the first time in months I felt the air reach the depths of my lungs.

“You must be Kennedy,” Eve said, extending her hand. She sounded nice, for someone responsible for bringing about the end of the world.

“Yes,” I said, accepting her hand and shaking it firmly. “Harrison told you about me?” Although I tried not to show it, I was touched.

“He did, but we’d heard about you earlier.”

“Heard about us?”

“You and Harrison, your group here. They know about you in Philadelphia, Atlanta, D.C.”

“They know about us?”

“About what you’ve been doing, collecting the healthy, forming a safehouse.”

“But how…?” I muttered, trying to piece it together.

“Those who left the reform school where you’re camped told someone. Those people told others. They’ve left messages along the way, which we followed.”

“Messages?” I asked, unable to shake my astonishment, unable to understand how we had made such an impact. “What messages?”

“Spray paint, mostly, on the sides of buildings, billboards, overpasses.”

“What did they say?” I could barely get the words beyond the constriction in my throat.

“Be your own hero.” Eve explained this in a way that showed she had no understanding of the importance behind it.

“We think,” the Indian man said, “it was meant to be an inspiration to others.”

Harrison replied quietly, more to himself than to the rest of us, “It was…”

Before long all eyes were settled on Harrison, and I wondered how many in the room knew they were looking at the one who was the originator of it, who had been the momentum and inspired others to fight for their lives.

In the quiet, Mei cleared her throat softly. “So you’re the team that’s going to develop a serum?”

Eve’s stare didn’t leave Harrison, as if she were assessing him. “We’re going to try.”

“Where?” Beverly asked snidely. “Here in the theater? Because this is where it’s going to have to be done if we don’t find a way out of this place.”

“Pleasant attitude,” the Indian man remarked.

“Thank you,” Beverly replied proudly, knowing full well it wasn’t a compliment.

“We’ll have to go quietly with minimal movement,” said a woman from Eve’s group. “The subjects are attracted to sight and sound.”

She said this as if we hadn’t learned it for ourselves, which was the reason behind Beverly’s sarcastic laugh that followed.

“Subjects?” Doc asked.

“The Infected,” Mei answered.

“Oh.”

“Neither of those is as much of a worry for me,” Harrison replied, taking the bloody rag from my hand and letting it drop to the floor.

Mei observed him apprehensively. “What is?”

“This,” he said, delicately touching my forehead, his eyes growing sad.

“You smelled it?” I asked.

He nodded, his hand falling away. “And if I can, then-”

“They can,” we said together.

“My God,” Mei mumbled. “We’ve been here for almost an hour…”

She glanced back at the stairwell door knowing the Infected elsewhere in the building had been tracking the smell.

Harrison’s hand came around mine as we started for the foyer. The others trailed us, eager to get away from the stench of my blood that most certainly now saturated the air inside the theater.

The foyer was devoid of life, thankfully. We marched across the tiled floor and out the glass doors Harrison had come through. Unlike earlier, by Doc’s lead, this time we moved with determination. There were no attempts at locked doors or harried route changes. Harrison knew the best direction to take based on the sights, sounds, and smells he picked up.