“Please,” Irons said softly. “I’d like to be alone now.”
He sagged down into his chair, closing his eyes, his head falling back against the padded back as if in exhaustion. As simply as that, she’d been dismissed. And although she had a million questions—many of
which she thought he could provide answers for—she did think that maybe it was for the best if she just got the hell away from him, at least for now—
A soft creaking sound, behind her and to the left, so quiet that she wasn’t even sure she’d heard it at all. Claire turned, frowning, and saw that there was a second door to the office. She hadn’t noticed it before—and that soft, stealthy sound had come from behind it.
Another zombie? Or maybe somebody hiding. . . ? She looked back at Irons, and saw that he hadn’t moved. Apparently he hadn’t heard anything, and she’d ceased to exist for him, at least for the moment. He’d gone back to whatever private world he’d been in before she stumbled into his office.
So—back the way I came, or do I see what’s behind door number two?
Leon—she needed to find Leon, and she had a pretty strong feeling that Irons was a creep, whether he was crazy or not; no great loss that he wasn’t up for joining forces. But if there were other people hiding in the building, people that she and Leon could help or who might be able to help them. . . .
It would only take a moment to check. With a last glance at Irons, sagging next to the corpse of the mayor’s daughter and surrounded by his lifeless ani-mals, Claire walked to the second door, hoping she wasn’t making a mistake.
ELEVER
SHERRY HAD BEEN HIDING FOR A LONG TIME in the police station, for what must have been three or four days, and hadn’t seen her mother yet. Not once, not even when there had still been a lot of people left. She’d found Mrs. Addison right after she’d gotten there—one of the teachers from school—but Mrs. Addison had died. A zombie had eaten her. And not long after that, Sherry had found a ventilation shaft that ran over most of the whole building, and had decided that hiding was safer than staying with the grownups—because the adults kept dying, and because there was a monster in the station even worse than the zombies or the inside-out men, and she was pretty sure that the monster was looking for her. That was proba-bly stupid, she didn’t think that monsters picked out just one person to go for—but then again, she’d never thought that monsters were real, either.
So Sherry had stayed hidden, mostly in the knight room; there weren’t any dead people there, and the only way to get in—besides the ventilation shaft behind the suits of armor—was to go down a long hall guarded by a giant tiger. The tiger was stuffed, but it was still scary—and Sherry thought that maybe the tiger would scare away the monster. Part of her knew that that was dumb, but it made her feel better anyway.
Since the zombies had taken over everything in the police station, she’d spent a lot of time sleeping. When she was asleep, she didn’t have to think about what might have happened to her parents or worry about what was going to happen to her. The air shaft was pretty warm, and she had plenty to eat from the candy machine downstairs—but she was scared, and even worse than being scared was being lonely, so mostly she’d just slept.
She’d been asleep, warm and curled up behind the knights, when she’d been awakened by a tremendous crash somewhere outside. She was sure it was the monster; she’d only caught a glimpse of it once before, of the giant’s broad and terrible back, through a steel grate—but she’d heard it screaming and howling through the building many times since then. She knew that it was terrible, terrible and violent and hungry. Sometimes it disappeared for hours at a time, letting her hope that it had given up—but it always came back, and no matter where Sherry was, it always seemed to appear somewhere close by.
The loud noise that had ripped her from her dreamless sleep was like the sound a monster would make tearing the walls down, and she’d huddled in her hiding place, ready to dart back into the shaft if the sound came any closer. It didn’t. For a long time she didn’t move, waiting with her eyes squeezed shut, holding on to her good luck charm—a beautiful gold pendant that her mother had given her only last week, so big that it filled up her whole hand. As it had before, the charm worked; the loud, terrible noise hadn’t been repeated. Or maybe the big tiger had kept the monster from finding her. Either way, when she’d heard gentle thumping sounds in the office, she’d felt safe enough to creep out of the case and go out into the hall to listen. The zombies and inside-out men couldn’t use doors, and if it was the monster, it would have come for her already, clawing down doors and screaming for blood.
It has to be a person. Maybe Mom ...
Halfway down the hall, where it turned right, she’d heard people talking in the office and felt a burst of hope and loneliness mixed together. She couldn’t tell what they were saying, but it was the first time she’d heard anybody who wasn’t yelling for maybe two days. And if there were people talking, maybe it was because help had finally come to Raccoon. The army or the government or the Marines, maybe all of them . . .
Excited, she hurried down the hall and was next to the big snarling tiger, right by the door, when her excitement faltered. The voices had stopped. Sherry stood very still, suddenly anxious. If people had come to Raccoon to help, wouldn’t she have heard the planes and trucks? Wouldn’t there be shooting and bombs and men with loudspeakers telling everybody to come out?
Maybe those voices aren’t army people at all; maybe those voices are Bad People. Crazy, like that one man...
Not long after Sherry had gone into hiding, she’d seen a terrible thing through a grating that led into a locker room. A tall man with red hair had been in the room, talking to himself and rocking back and forth in a chair. At first, Sherry had thought about asking him for help, to find her parents—but something about the way he was talking and giggling and gently swaying back and forth made her wary, so she’d watched him for a while from the safe darkness of the air shaft. He’d been holding a big knife. And after a long time, still laughing and mumbling and rocking, he’d stabbed himself in the stomach. Sherry had been more scared by that man than by the zombies, be-cause it didn’t make sense. He’d been crazy, and he’d killed himself and she’d crawled away, crying because it just didn’t make any sense.
She didn’t want to meet anyone else like that. And even if the people in the office were okay, they might take her away from her safe place and try to protect her—and that would mean her death, because the monster surely wasn’t afraid of adults.
It felt awful to turn away, but there was no other choice. Sherry started back for the armor room— Creak!
• and froze as the floor shifted underfoot. The sound of the creaking board seemed incredibly loud and she held her breath, clutching her pendant and praying that the door wouldn’t come flying open behind her, that some crazy wouldn’t charge in and—and get her.
She didn’t hear anything, but felt sure that the pounding of her heart would give her away, it was so loud. After a full ten seconds, she carefully started back down the hall, stepping as lightly as she could, feeling like she was creeping out of a cave filled with sleeping snakes. The hall back to the armor room seemed
like it was a mile long, and she had to use all of her willpower not to run once she reached the turn—but if there was one thing she’d learned from the movies and TV, it was that running from danger always meant a horrible death.
When she finally reached the entrance back to the armor room, she felt like she might just collapse from relief. She was safe again, she could snuggle back into the old blanket that Mrs. Addison had found for her and just—