Lins nodded slowly, then grinned. “I take back what I said. That’s good thinking. And we only have to split it two ways.”
The smile on his face was forced now. “Yeah, totally.” Maybe he should have shot Lococo and Lins at the same time. It wasn’t like he’d been particularly useful.
How did MHI make this stuff look so easy?
The lights were on, which meant the generator was still running. At least it would be warm inside. This place was brain numbingly cold. There were a bunch more cars this time, and he could see people standing in the entrance, and this time they had guns. They didn’t look like Feds or Hunters, though, just regular people, probably standing guard over their injured. “Well, here we are.”
“What’s that?” Lins asked, pointing toward the second floor.
His eyes flicked over just in time to see the window slide open as a large man dressed in black crawled through. “What’s that moron doing?” The man fell from the wall into the snow drift. It was a pretty significant drop. “Weird. Wonder what’s got into him?” The man immediately popped up out of the snow and limped toward them. “Stark?”
“Who?” Lins asked.
“The MCB guy,” Horst began to explain, but Stark turned, raised a pistol in one hand, and fired off several quick shots at the window he’d just jumped from. “Shit!”
Horst threw it into reverse. The tires began to spin on the ice. He looked over his shoulder, clear, and then spun back around. He nearly jumped out of his skin when Stark crashed face-first into the driver’s side window. Stark banged on the glass. Another shape came out the window, only this one didn’t even try to slow its descent. It just dived out, head-first, and disappeared into the drift.
They began to roll backward; Stark ran alongside. He was shouting something that looked like Help me. The black shape came out of the snow. Stark turned and fired several times. The shape went back down. This time Horst could hear him clearly. “Let me in!” Stark reached the back door and began tugging on the handle, but it was locked. “Let me in, you pricks!” He began to fall behind. “ Pricks! ”
“Ryan, look!” Lins shouted.
The glass front doors of the hospital were now coated in red… But there’d been men standing there just a second ago… “Whoa.” One door swung open, and a man in a big floppy wool hat spilled out, running for his life. He slipped and fell as a woman followed him out the door. She was moving weird, all crouched over, but fast. Her clothing was ripped apart and hanging off. She was on him in a second, raking him with her fingers, only they weren’t fingers at all. They were black claws. The snow all around them turned pink. “Whoa,” Horst repeated.
Fixated on the sight, he drove their back bumper right into the side of a parked truck. They lurched to a sudden halt. Horst whacked his chin on the steering wheel.
Agent Stark caught up. He shattered the backseat window with his pistol, and then reached through to unlock the door. He slid inside. “Drive! Drive, you idiot! Drive!” Horst put it in gear and gunned it. Unable to gain traction, the wheels just spun. “Not like that, damn it!” The thing that had been chasing Stark was up and coming after them. Stark shoved both hands out the window and started shooting. The gun was right behind Horst’s left shoulder. It was extremely loud.
Lins was saying something. “-slow at first. Get it rolling.”
More things were coming out the front of the hospital. One door was open, but they just crashed through the glass of the other and kept on running. They looked like people, but they weren’t. Some of them appeared more like the werewolf pictures he’d been shown in Newbie training, but not quite. It was like they were stuck inbetween the two forms, all ungainly and messed up. They weren’t hairy at all, though their skin seemed too tight, like you could see the color of their muscles through it, but they had claws and they had fangs and they were coming this way fast.
“Drive, or I’ll kill you myself!” Stark shouted in Horst’s ear while he reloaded his pistol.
It took all his self-control to do it correctly. He gently fed the Caddy gas. Easy. Slowly. Which was difficult when a horde of shrieking lunatics were heading right at you.
A tire caught, they started forward, and then they were gaining traction and speed. Horst began to laugh, but it turned into a shriek as one of the monsters landed on the hood. He was wearing a black armor suit and had a short rifle slung across his chest, though the thing seemed totally unaware of the fact it possessed a gun at all. Most of the face was missing except for a long strip of scalp dangling across the bright red skull. He still had both eyes, only they were impossibly wide, milky-white, and utterly dead. The thing opened a mouth full of long, pointy teeth but made no sound. The half-werewolf slammed a gloved fist into the windshield, shattering it right between the front seats and obscuring their view.
“Mosher!” Stark shouted. He leaned forward and stuck his pistol between Horst and Lins. He cranked off at least half a dozen deafening shots before the thing disappeared from the hood.
“What’s a Mosher?” Lins cried.
“My partner.” Stark was panting. “ Was my partner. He already changed into one of them! Infection to transformation in seconds; death followed by almost instantaneous reanimation…Oh, this is bad. This is bad.”
They were on the road. Horst checked his mirror. The monsters were running along behind, and they were keeping up. The first man that had come out of the hospital was convulsing and twitching on the ground. A second later, he popped up and ran after the rest of the pack.
Chapter 23
We were in a supposedly safe area, farther to the south. It was an actual town, with paved roads and everything. I couldn’t pronounce the name to save my life. Van had mocked me, and done a pretty good imitation of my accent in the process. There were a hundred marines stationed next door, so it was about as secure as we’d been in months. Unicorn was relaxed.
We’d picked an evacuated two-story hotel to stay in while awaiting new orders. It was ratty, but sleeping under a roof was a big improvement. As usual, the two squads had been broken up, with first being downstairs and us upstairs. It was rather silly at this point, because most of first had seen Travis, and as Destroyer pointed out to Conover, even when Travis was in “disguise” under a big blanket with eye holes cut out, he left giant hoofprints everywhere he went. But orders were orders, and Travis was honor-bound to impress the government enough to get his tribe taken off the PUFF list. Bullmen were big on the whole honor thing. I’d come to love the big shaggy goofball.
Despite Sharon’s protests about average human males, I’d often caught her batting those big eyes at Conover. They’d been spending a lot of time alone together, and the scents didn’t lie. He was a good-looking man, and unlike many of the people I’d gotten stuck serving under, I actually had a lot of respect for him. Half-siren or not, she could do a whole lot worse. Conover was a rising star in the intelligence community; for all I knew, he was just seeing if they wanted to keep working together. Uh-huh…My commanding officer had hooked up with our love-goddess. I was willing to bet that didn’t make it into the official report.
Travis and I were talking that night. I had asked if he was offended that humans ate beef. He thought that was stupid, and asked if I would be offended if he ate a monkey. That of course led into an interesting discussion on theology, since I figured I had no particular relation to monkeys. I ended up asking about the biology of the Bullmen, particularly their females. Okay, so if they’re like a half-girl, half-cow…the whole udder thing? How’s that translate over? Up high like on a human, or down low, and if so how would they walk? And are we talking two or four? Travis had told me that I needed to head out to Texas for a visit, and that if I called his girlfriend a heifer at any point, he would be honor bound to duel me to the death.