Inside, sitting motionless on a dozen folding chairs, were a dozen men dressed in plain T-shirts and khaki pants. As I blinked away smoke and gulped the poisonous air deep into my lungs, I saw that these were no ordinary men. They were decomposing. Their skin ranged from pasty white to gray and purple, and in a few cases it had started to separate from the bone. The smell hit me next, worse than anything I had ever smelled, and bile rose in my throat. Some of the men weren’t wearing shoes, the flesh swollen and splitting from the bones of their feet. The one closest to me had stains on his shirt. With a wave of nausea I realized that his torso was leaking bodily fluids.
Worst of all were their eyes. Empty, as though the souls of these men had been sucked out through the sockets.
Their heads slowly turned to me. One by one, they rose from their chairs and started toward me, arms outstretched.
They were zombies. And they were coming for me.
CHAPTER 26
FOR A MOMENT I couldn’t move, my legs still frozen in place from the shock. Then the closest zombie stumbled in front of me and its fingers scrabbled at my arm. They were crusted with black filth, and the skin covering its hands had started to separate from the bone. I screamed and backed away, but not before I saw that its eye sockets drooped with rotting flesh, that its gums had shriveled back from broken teeth, that its hair was coming out of its head in clumps. The smell was so strong that I gagged on my own vomit.
I turned and bolted for the door, but the zombie managed to grab the back of my shirt. I was yanked backward, and I realized the zombie wasn’t weakened at all by decomposition. A second gruesome hand reached for my neck and spun me around, and I saw that they were all converging on me, their hands out, their mouths slack and open.
I screamed and shoved at the reaching hands. I screamed harder when my own hands touched flesh that was wet and slick and loose. A hand snaked around my face and pressed against my nose and mouth, cutting off my air. I breathed in the stench of rot. My screams turned to fury as I fought to pull away from the bodies pressing in on me, but there were too many.
I bit down. Hard.
My teeth closed on a finger. As I threw all my strength into fighting, I heard a soggy crack and the finger separated from the hand. I spat it out and kept screaming, my voice going hoarse. I stomped on the shuffling feet around me, but there were too many. Another hand replaced the first, and then another, tugging at my hair, thumbs poking at my eyeballs.
I was going to die. The zombies had been ordered to destroy me-to destroy anyone but Bryce, I guessed. How long had he been building this ragtag army? Judging by the state of their bodies, it must have been days. Weeks, even, given what Prairie had told me about decomposition slowing. Even longer, if Bryce had been working on ways to retard it.
I was going to die, but my rage kept me fighting. My fingers found flesh, and they shoved and poked and fought, undaunted even when they sank into rotting tissue. I knew I couldn’t kill the zombies. Their pathetic bodies would keep going until all the flesh had fallen away and they were nothing but skeletons, and only when the last of the tissue had rotted would they be truly dead. I, on the other hand, would die as a human dies; they would squeeze the breath from my throat and twist and crack my limbs and take me to the floor to kick and pummel the life from me.
“Hailey!” Kaz burst through the door. He hesitated only a second, taking in the scene, and then he picked up one of the folding chairs. Wielding it in front of him, he charged the zombies. They were clustered in front of me, for some reason lacking the instinct to circle behind and surround me, and Kaz slammed into them, knocking several down right away, and then, with stunning force, going after the ones that remained. He jabbed and slammed the chair the way I’d seen him use his lacrosse stick in the park, with deadly accuracy and the force of all that hard-built muscle.
Their hands fell away from me one by one. They were slow to adapt to the change of circumstances, and they bumped into one another and hesitated, their hands closing on air, their expressions unchanged. The ones that had been knocked down were getting off the floor and coming at Kaz, and I knew I had only seconds until they adapted to the new threat.
I put all my energy into kicking and clawing. I managed to tear my arms free as I delivered a kick to the legs of the last one holding me, and its feet slipped and it went down.
“Now!” I screamed, and grabbed Kaz’s arm and pulled him toward the door. He threw the chair at the advancing zombies, and we both fell through the door as I pulled it shut hard.
“They’re locked inside,” I said, as much a prayer as a statement. Kaz grabbed my hand and we ran back into the smoky hall.
There were flames licking along the floor, and I realized that the fire would reach the server lab in seconds.
“Prairie?” I asked, choking on the smoke.
“Got her to the lobby,” Kaz said. “Try not to breathe until we’re clear.”
I took a last lungful of breath and held it. We ran until we couldn’t see through the smoke, and then we put our free hands to the walls and guided ourselves that way, following the corridors until we were running through fire. The flames licked against us, and I knew that if our clothes caught fire, we were doomed. Then, suddenly, we burst into the lobby, where the smoke was thinner, and I saw Prairie laid out along the floor near the guard desk.
She looked dead, her head lolling against her outstretched arm, and my heart plummeted.
“She’s going to be all right. I’ll get her,” Kaz managed to wheeze, and he slung her over his shoulder, much as he’d carried the guard earlier. I coughed hard, trying to clear the smoke from my lungs, and when I followed him through the doors, out into the chilly night, I breathed the sharp, cold air greedily. Before I could catch my breath, Kaz grabbed my arm and pulled me away from the building, into the shadows of the trees lining the street.
“We need to hurry,” he said.
“What about the Healer?” I said, my voice hoarse and raw. “She’s still trapped in there somewhere!”
That was when I heard the sirens.
Kaz heard them too. He looked back at the building, where flames were now pouring from every window. Then he looked at me with such pain in his eyes that I knew there was no hope. The Healer would die, alone and in agony, alongside the horrible creatures she had been forced to create.
Prairie moaned softly and stirred.
“We need to hurry,” he repeated, and I knew we wouldn’t speak of the Healer again.
By the time we got Prairie settled into the backseat, police and fire vehicles were hurtling down the block toward the lab.
I turned away from the burning building and stared out the windshield into the night as Kaz drove us away.
CHAPTER 27
PRAIRIE WOKE UP right before we reached the house. She had a wicked bruise on her scalp, but otherwise she seemed all right.
Kaz filled her in on the terrible discovery I’d made in the room behind the lab, and described how we’d escaped. I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it yet. I kept feeling those cold hands grasping at me, and I knew I would never be able to forget the sensation of my fingers sinking into the ruined flesh of my attackers.
Anna got a much-condensed version. By unspoken agreement we spared her the worst of the details. Kaz’s wounds looked like little more than scrapes now-full function had been restored to his hand, and the hole in his arm closed over-so we didn’t tell her the extent of his injuries. We skipped the zombies entirely.