“Andrew!” she wailed, the last syllable of his name scraping out, shrill and frantic: “Ooooooooooooo!”
“Alice, no!” he cried and dove after her, turning loose of the door and forgetting that his damn ruined ankle would no longer bear his weight. He ducked beneath the overhang of the garage door, arms outstretched as he sprang, and as he hit the floor, landing on his belly, rapping his chin hard on the concrete, he felt his fingertips brush against Alice’s.
“I’ve got you!” He scrabbled, catching her by the wrist. “I’ve got you, Alice.”
“Andrew,” she squealed, caught now in a tug-of-war as Prendick jerked her toward him. “Andrew, help me!”
“I’ve got you,” Andrew said again, fighting to keep his grasp on her arm. “Let her go!” he shouted at Prendick.
Prendick wrinkled his teeth back in a gruesome parody of grin, then whipped his tail around, striking at Andrew. Alice screeched and Andrew rolled to the side as the tip of his coccyx struck the ground. Prendick may have been injured, but he was strong as hell, stronger than Andrew had anticipated, and in that moment of distraction, Andrew nearly lost his grip on Alice when Prendick gave a mighty heave on her ankle.
She screamed, piteous and panicked, and Andrew looked wildly around for anything he might use as a weapon. He heard the whistle of wind as Prendick drove the wicked hook of his tail bone at him again, and this time when he rolled, he felt the bone scrape against his cheek as it struck the floor millimeters from his face.
Fuck, that was close, Andrew thought, not wanting to consider the sort of damage could incur if one of those vicious strikes hit home. He saw a wink of light against metal to his left—the wrench Dani had dropped when Prendick had shot her. It had skittered across the floor when it had fallen from her hand and now lay within a few feet of his own.
I can reach it, he thought, stretching out his free hand, fingers splayed wide. Shit, almost! He cut a glance at Alice, then cried out, rolling again as Prendick drove his tail toward the base of his skull. The jagged tip whipped past his ear close enough to lacerate his scalp in a stinging stripe.
“Andrew,” Alice cried.
I have to get that wrench, he thought. Another glance at Alice, into those wild, wide, terrified eyes. If I let her go…
He shook his head. There was no way he’d risk it. The only thing keeping Prendick’s attention—and most specifically, his tail—diverted from her at the moment was Andrew, and if he turned her loose, even for a millisecond, it might be all that it took for Prendick to hurt her.
“Don’t let go,” she pleaded, as if having read his mind, clutching at him desperately with both hands. “Please, Andrew!”
“I won’t,” he said, teeth gritted as he strained to reach the wrench. His fingertips fumbled against it, knocked it further beyond his reach. Shit!
“Look out,” Alice cried and Andrew tucked his head and jerked again as Prendick’s tail smashed into the concrete beside him. He’d long since battered the sharpened wedge of bone to bits, but the regenerative capabilities of the retrovirus kept refashioning it, rebuilding it anew. Now more than one point, it had grown into three, a deadly triton of bony spines, each nearly as long as Andrew’s forearm.
Shit! Andrew thought as Prendick struck at him again, then again, forcing him to scramble and flip like a fish caught on a line, struggling all the while to keep his hold on Alice. Desperately, he strained as far as that grasp would allow and grabbed hold of the wrench. He heard the whip of air as Prendick attacked, and swung the heavy wrench around like a baseball bat, smashing the triton tip aside. He heard the definitive, sickening crunch of bony, and Prendick uttered a high-pitched screech.
“Let her go,” Andrew yelled, smashing at Prendick’s intestines with the wrench, bludgeoning the thick coils, pummeling them over and over until they began to squelch open and burst. “Let her go, you son of a bitch!”
Prendick lunged forward, gnashing his teeth, and from the doorway came a sudden, thunderous burst as Dani fired the M16. Bullets plowed into Prendick’s deformed trunk, punching wet craters into the meat of his torso, splattering the twining tentacles of his guts. He shrieked and thrashed, violent and enraged, and at last, Andrew felt the resistance against Alice slacken.
“Keep shooting,” he screamed to Dani, scrambling backwards, yanking Alice away from Prendick.
“Come on!” Dani cried out over the booming reports of gun fire.
“Can you run?” he asked Alice, hooking his arm around her waist, As he stumbled to his feet, he leaned on the girl to keep from putting his weight on his maimed side.
“Can you?” she gulped back, eyes wide and frightened, all-too aware of the pain he was in.
“Yeah,” he said through gritted teeth. I have to, he thought. Furrowing his brows, he bit back a strained cry as he forced himself to try anyway, in the end dragging his right foot behind him.
“Close the door,” he yelled to Dani as he dove back onto the pavement outside, holding Alice pinned against him, her face tucked into the nook of his shoulder. “Close it. Hurry!”
Once he was clear, Dani threw the gun aside and seized the door again. Even in the dim light and heavy shadows inside, he could see that Prendick was on the move again. The deformities in his face and head as the battered tissue regrew, swelling out in protruding masses, soon swallowed any distinguishable from his silhouetted form. There wasn’t anything evenly remotely human left in that shape.
Gritting her teeth, Dani heaved with all of her might. Andrew limped upright and helped her, falling against the door, putting all of his weight against it as he pulled. With a sudden, shuddering lurch, the door came crashing down, slamming into the plane of concrete beneath it.
From the other side of the door, they heard Prendick screech, that inhuman, furious sound, then the metal plate shook as he barreled into it from the opposite side. Over and over again, he battered into the door, causing it to shake violently in its tracks.
“He can’t get through,” Dani said, her voice breathless and shaking, on the verge of hysteria. She looked at Andrew, wild-eyed and trembling, her face and clothes blood-soaked and torn, and began to laugh. “He can’t get through! Oh, my God. We did it.”
He hooked his arm around her and they crumpled together. She shuddered in his embrace, clutching at him, laughing and sobbing all at the same time. Beyond her shoulder, he could see Alice staring, glassy-eyed and shell-shocked at the garage, watching it shake with each furious blow.
“Alice.” Easing away from Dani, he reached for her, crumpling to his knees so that when she stumbled hesitantly toward him, he could fold her into his arms. She didn’t weep, didn’t make a sound, but simply shivered against him, her fingers twining anxiously against the front of his shirt.
“It’s alright.” He kept saying that over and over, mantra-like, as he rocked her back and forth. “It’s alright now, Alice. I promise. Everything’s going to be okay.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“My daddy’s dead, isn’t he?”
Alice had found the keys to one of the compound’s Humvees, and the hulking truck jostled and bounced beneath them as Dani drove them down the mountain toward the highway. As she had on the night Andrew had first met her, she sat behind the wheel, clutching it in her hands with such force, her knuckles had turned white, and the dim light from the dashboard instruments cast her face in an eerie glow.