“What’s the best way out of here?” he said.
Cassandra was feeling jittery, more than little bit nervous, but she forced her mind to focus. The courthouse was laid out in a square with an annex building on either side, one housing administrative offices and the opposite annex—fourteen stories of it— containing the county jail.
After a series of embarrassing security incidents, the city had installed security checkpoints throughout the main floor. Or, they had started to. Much like many other projects, this one had gone incomplete for three years, if Cassandra could remember correctly. The west side of the building didn’t have the security checkpoints, and though it was farther away than the exit to their immediate left, it was a straight shot that got much less traffic, and Cassandra knew it was their way out.
“We go right,” she said. “The building is laid out on a square. There’s an exit door that feeds to the front lawn. My car is there,” she said.
“Why not left?” he asked, sounding suspicious.
“It’s quicker, but more people use it, and there’s a security checkpoint that could easily get barricaded. So if we go that way, we might not find an exit,” she said.
If Cassandra didn’t know any better, she would say the man looked impressed, but in the next breath he was all business.
“Hold tight to that key. Be ready to run,” he said.
She nodded, not bothering to tell him that she didn’t need the direction or the speech.
She fiddled in her pocket, momentary panic gripping her. She usually left her keys in her briefcase, but when they had crawled out of the elevator, she had taken a moment to grab them. A moment of foresight that was one of the few bonuses of this day.
Some of the tightness that had gripped her chest loosened when she closed her fingers around the odd-shaped key fob. She kept her hand closed around the black plastic but didn’t take the object out of her pocket. She didn’t want to risk losing it in the run or having it jarred out of her hand. It would be awkward keeping hold of it as she tried to move, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“Ready?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered.
He opened the door.
To the woman’s credit, she didn’t freak out when Jack open the door. He appreciated that, but he would have felt a lot better he’d had the keys himself. He understood her worry. He wouldn’t have given them up either. He wasn’t quite hard-assed enough to take them yet, but he hoped she kept up.
He pulled the door open slowly then looked left, right, left, then right again.
That same eerie silence that had been there before was still present, and the longer it lasted, the more jittery Jack got.
Everything about this was wrong.
Even without the carnage in the hallway, it would be wrong. From what he knew about this place, the courthouse served as a hub for a large portion of the city. If it was attacked or went dark, as it seemed to have, there would have been a reaction, and a strong one.
Unless the authorities were otherwise occupied.
Jack knew it was a mistake for people to wait for help, but this place was one he would expect to be well protected. That it wasn’t told him all that mattered at this point.
And what it meant was, like always, Jack would have to rely on himself.
When he was sure that what he could see of the hallway was clear, he emerged from the room.
And then he set off at a fast walk.
The woman kept pace, but even if she hadn’t been with him, Jack wouldn’t have broken into a full run. He wasn’t sure what was better in this situation, speed or stealth, so he took the middle ground, moving at a rapid clip but not so fast that he was uncontrolled and not able to react to whatever he might confront.
As he went down the seemingly endless hall, he noticed that the blood and spatter seem to get lighter and lighter. By the time they reached the corner, the floors were a pristine white, that same shiny marble that he had seen upstairs.
And in an instant, he knew why.
The woman had said the opposite side of the hall was more heavily trafficked, which meant that whatever had done that was probably attracted to sound. The remaining people left in the courtroom trying to rush out had probably gotten caught in a bottleneck.
Jack could guess at how that had turned out.
When he reached the corner, he stopped and peeked around. When he saw it was clear, he set off again, the woman a half step behind him.
He glanced back at her and she nodded forward, gesturing toward the illuminated exit sign and the single door underneath it.
Jack saw that there were no other doors, so he focused on the exit. It appeared structurally sound and fortunately didn’t have an alarm attached to it.
Still, Jack wouldn’t allow himself to get too hopeful. Instead, he sped up just a little bit more, and he the woman reached the door about ten seconds later.
He stopped, his heart pounding, adrenaline rushing through him, but his years of training taking over.
“Which car is yours?” he asked, speaking as loudly as he dared, which was nothing more than a whisper.
“The blue one. Compact electric right out front,” she said.
“Fast,” Jack said, his voice stern.
The woman nodded, and Jack opened the door.
And stepped into a nightmare.
CHAPTER FIVE
Jack was no stranger to death, no stranger to carnage. The years and the wars had inured him to all of it.
Or at least he’d thought so until that very moment.
But nothing he had seen before had prepared him for what he saw now.
Inside, the courthouse had been quiet, eerily so, but outside was another story altogether.
The silence inside had given way to absolute chaos.
In the distance he could hear sirens, smell the acrid smoke of fires. He heard what seemed like a never-ending series of gunshots, and the occasional deep, piercing scream.
But that was just the background soundtrack to the front lawn.
What he’d seen in the hallway couldn’t compare. That had been the aftermath, but he was witnessing this live.
He looked left and saw bodies packed tightly in a circle, the wet, squishy sound of gnawing and gnashing and chewing almost drowning out the sirens and the shots and the screams.
It was dark out, but not so dark that Jack couldn’t see what this pack was feasting on.
A person.
The person’s legs were intact, his shoes oddly pristine, his pants still creased.
But were it not for those shoes and the crisp crease in the pants, Jack wouldn’t have known it was a person at all. Because where the rest of him should have been—his thighs, his abdomen, his chest—there was almost nothing.
The man had been hollowed out and eaten by the people who were on top of him, or what he used to be.
The woman’s sharp inhale snapped him out of stillness.
He drew his eyes away from the tailored pants, overlooked the other scenes that were so similar playing out in front of him, and spotted the glossy paint of the compact car she had described.
It was close, maybe fifty yards away, but in that moment, it felt like miles.
But Jack moved into action.
He’d already wasted too much time, and he didn’t know how long those things would be distracted by their current meal. Not to mention, he had about thirty others to contend with, all in little clusters on the lawn.
He remembered earlier when he had come in how he had thought the nicely manicured lawn was one of the only good things he had seen in the city.
Not anymore.
Now, that formally nicely manicured lawn was the scene of unspeakable horror.