Another Kind of Dead Page 31

  At the ladder, I paused and scanned. A flash of black was moving toward us. I took aim at where I thought it was likely to dart next and waited.

  Milo screamed as he pitched past me and to the floor below, a wriggling, snarling creature the size of a cat attached to his back. Skele-kitty, one of the first hybrids I’d seen in the Olsmill lab. Milo hit and rolled. I braced my wrist and aimed. He rolled again, shouting. I squeezed the trigger. The thing’s bald head exploded green gore all over Milo’s back. He looked up, panting, nose bleeding, and gave me a thumbs-up.

  “The hound!” I said.

  He understood and scrambled for the ladder. The hound blurred toward him. He spun and we both fired, me from above, him from below. Blood gushed. My frags tore chunks of flesh away. It collapsed inches from Milo and lay still.

  “Hell yeah,” Milo said.

  “Stay up there as long as you can,” I shouted to the trainees. “It’s not safe for you yet!”

  Milo stumbled to his feet and started climbing back up. More shouts and gunfire erupted around us, muffled by walls in all directions, intermixed with unidentifiable noises—things breaking, being shoved, shattered, I wasn’t certain. Milo’s head cleared the balcony.

  One of the dangling trainees screeched: “Look out!”

  How come they never yelled a split second faster and gave us enough reaction time?

  A moving body slammed into me, and I pitched forward. Startled by the sudden spur into motion, I lost my grip on the damned gun. I braced for impact only to scream when four daggers pierced my right ankle and kept me from falling. No, I was moving and it wasn’t daggers. Upside down, I thrashed against whatever was holding my leg. Air beat around me, and we were flying above the obstacle course.

  Flying?

  Shit.

  I plucked a knife from one of the sheaths in my belt and slashed at the winged monstrosity hauling me around. Dark-skinned, mottled with patches of black feathers, its wings were long and stretched like a bat’s. Or a gargoyle’s, only I’d never seen gargoyle wings that long—a full ten-foot wingspan—or one that had feathers. Good God, what had Thackery created?

  My blade bounced off the thing’s thickly hided feet, and its talons tightened. Blood oozed from the small wounds in my ankle. I was getting light-headed from hanging ass over teakettle. Milo was shouting about not having a clean shot, and I’d lost my gun. The gar-bat-thing zoomed directly toward the far wall, and for one brief moment, I expected it to try to crash straight through. It veered sharply right at the last instant. My head and left shoulder smacked the wall, leaving me reeling.

  As it spun me again, I noticed the trainees were off the ropes. Smart move, now that we had airborne enemies. Gar-Bat flew right toward the ropes, heedless of their existence. Or maybe it was having too much fun hauling me around like a bag of flailing potatoes.

  I put the blade between my teeth and grabbed the rope with both hands as we passed, holding on with all my might. My palms burned. My ankle lost a little more meat, and I screamed, but Gar-Bat was yanked to a sudden halt. It turned its head and screeched at me—a head-splitting shriek that sounded like tortured baboons. Its face was unidentifiable—hints of different creature-features combined into one squashed maw that was more sea lion–ish than anything else. It was almost absurd.

  No, it was absurd. A flying sea lion–bat was attacking me. Absurd didn’t even begin to cover it.

  It beat its wings, trying to yank me off the rope. I waited for an upswing, the slightest drop in pull. Then I held with my left hand, took the knife with my right, and flung it at the creature’s chest. It struck center. It screamed and let go so suddenly I didn’t have time to grab the rope again. I plummeted to the ground.

  There were no mats, just the hard Astroturf surface that covered most of the obstacle course floor. I hit on my back, knocking the wind out of my lungs in a solid, aching whoosh. My chest constricted. Tears stung my eyes. Every frail, unexercised bone in my body ached. I lay there, desperate to suck in some air.

  I couldn’t see the Gar-Bat, but I could hear it, still screeching and wailing. On the other side of the climbing wall, maybe. At least I’d wounded it. It gave me a minute to pull myself together. I inhaled hard. Sweet oxygen filled my straining lungs, and I coughed. Inhaled, coughed out, inhaled again. My head started clearing.

  I didn’t know of any shortcuts on the obstacle course. My only way out was to go through it to the end. And I was somewhere in the middle, down on the lowest level. During training, this was where each runner climbed the rope to get a flag tacked at the very top and held on to it for the rest of the course. The only way out from here was a rope ladder angled up at forty-five degrees, anchored on hooks so it swiveled with your weight.

  I hated this one. Even when I was in peak physical shape and not sporting a chewed-on ankle, I had trouble and had fallen off more than once. I used the anchor post to stand up. My ankle cried at the pressure, and my arms were shaking. My vision blurred. Just terrific.

  Claws scrabbled against the wall separating me from Gar-Bat. It was trying to climb. I guess it was too wounded to fly out.

  I closed my eyes and felt for the Break. It was there, on the fringes of my mind, taunting me. Too far. And I was too upset. A tremor seized my spine and shook my entire body. Not the shock I got when a blocking spell was being used; this was my body protesting the idea of teleporting. No strength for it. Fuck.

  The rope ladder swayed on its own, mocking me. Climb it and escape, or wait and see if Gar-Bat makes it over the wall. Both choices sucked.

  I reached as far up the rungs as I could, looped my left ankle around a lower one, and lunged. The ladder swiveled upside down. I clung to the ropes, dangling. Hand over hand, foot over rung, I inched my way up the twenty-foot rope ladder. The floor below was more hardwood. The trainers put down mats the first two times you ran the course. If you fell after that, you ate floor.

  Having eaten enough floor for one day, I concentrated on my ascent and nothing else. Sweat dotted my hairline and upper lip. The rope seared my scraped palms. My ankle was probably leaving lovely little blood smears behind. Up, up, up, until the top anchor post was just one lunge away. Urgency almost made me reach. The unwillingness to fall two stories and start over blocked that urge, and I inched my way up. Grabbed the post with my right hand and the floor with my left and hauled ass up to the platform. I hugged the wood, polished smooth with years of hands and bodies doing just what I’d done.

  Gar-Bat screeched. Either he was getting frustrated by his own inability to climb the wall or he didn’t like my progress. Maybe both.

  I had a better vantage point over the course from here, so I sat up. Heat whizzed by my cheek, slicing the skin. I jerked back. My knife was buried in the anchor post. Hell’s bells, the thing had thrown my own knife at me!

  The next challenge made my heart sink. Six erratically spaced uneven bars were my only path to the next platform. Some trainees were gymnastically inclined and had excelled at this one. Me? Not so much.

  I looked at my palms, both weeping and scraped. Then at the ground below. The air mattresses were deflated. One more time I tested my Gift. That same brittle distance filled me. If I tried, I’d probably end up inside of something or dead from my brain exploding.

  “Fuck!” It came out like a plea and bounced around the open gym. Where the hell had Milo gone? He’d better be off saving lives.

  Screw this. One wrong move on those bars and I’d break my neck. There had to be another way. I perched my toes on the edge of the platform and leapt for the nearest bar. My grip nearly slipped. I held tight and stiffened, stopping all motion. Inched sideways until I got to the support post, shifted my grip, and shinnied down to the floor.

  The court was narrow and long, built up on all sides with two-by-fours nailed into thicker beams. Something slammed against the wall on my left. Gar-Bat was still at it. I worked my way along the opposite wall, checking for any sort of access or hatchway. The trainers had to have some
way to get around this course. I just needed to find it.

  At the end of the court, hope presented itself in the form of a square sliding door. I pried it up to reveal a crawl space barely large enough for a grown man to slither through. Good thing I was smaller than that.

  Gar-Bat shrieked, this time above me. I looked up as a shadow fell. It was perched on the platform, braced to jump. I crawled through the rabbit hole and immediately sneezed. Didn’t stop. Seconds later Gar-Bat was scrabbling at the hole, too large to follow me inside.

  I crept along the narrow path until it opened up into what looked like the interior of another raised platform. Judging from the wide spaces between the boards, it was another sort of climbing wall. I slipped through one of the wider slats and stumbled. My ankle was numb, making it difficult to walk. No sign yet of Gar-Bat.

  I hobbled fast across another open floor, getting much closer to the end of the course. Two, maybe three, challenges lay between me and the end.

  My frustration at being stuck doing this was nothing compared to my anger at not being outside, part of the ongoing battle. Had they killed the rest of the hounds? How many of Thackery’s projects were loose? How many had been captured or killed? How many of our people were wounded? Dead?

  I dropped to my knee when the shadow fell, drawing the knife from my right ankle sheath. Blood dripped from above, viscous and bluish. Gar-Bat dive-bombed me. I pitched sideways at the last moment and thrust up, dragging the blade across its lower belly. More blood splashed on my hands and arms. Its rear legs lashed out and slammed me to the left even as it crashed to the floor. It thrashed and flopped, spreading its blood across the floor like a fresh coat of paint.

  The raw-sewage odor turned my stomach. I crawled away, slipped, and finally got to my feet. The stink was on my hands. I wiped them on the seat of my jeans, then repositioned the knife so the handle was clasped between both hands. Gar-Bat’s thrashing had slowed. It lay on its stomach, wings folded close to its back, the pool of blood widening around it.

  I almost felt sorry for it, whining in pain and paling quickly. It hadn’t asked to be created, and now it was paying the price. I thrust my blade down, directly into Gar-Bat’s skull. The impact jolted my wrists. Bone cracked. Matter oozed. My enemy lay still.

  “Class dismissed,” I said.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  With less haste now that I wasn’t being hunted, I limped through two more hidden hatches and crawl spaces—bypassing a grid of dangling chains one had to swing through to pass and a complicated setup of balance beams, tires, and parallel bars—and hit the finale. A mirror maze, not unlike those found at carnivals and fairs, only this one didn’t just try to fool you into hitting a dead end. The space between each panel was supernarrow, twenty inches on average, and most of the joints hid a cruel punishment—nearly invisible razors. I’d gotten my fair share of slices in the past.

  I remembered one trainee who’d barely passed the obstacle course, getting so tired and beaten up over the run of it that he’d been unsteady going into the maze. He’d stumbled out sobbing, coated in blood, but on his feet. Just barely. Too bad he’d failed the final exam.

  Desperate to skip this one, I searched for another way out. A hatch or ladder or means to climb up and over. Screaming in frustration, I sucked in a breath and went in. I hit a wall first thing. Inched through sideways. Nicked my wrist and elbow on one turn. Sliced my other elbow on another. I ignored my reflection, uninterested in how awful I must look coated in blood and gore and sweat. All I wanted was out.

  Out so I could finish helping. So I could try to save some lives today. Urgency kept goading me to speed up, but I battled to remain careful, steady. Patience wasn’t in my nature; taking it so slowly was torture. Even when the end seemed in sight, I kept up my tentative pace. One sliding step sideways, careful turns. Only a handful of cuts accompanied me outside.

  Fucking finally!

  I stumbled through the exit, into the narrow strip of open corridor that bordered the wall of the obstacle course and the wall of the gymnasium. It circled the length of it in straight sections of twenty feet or so, then sharply angled into the next. From above, it looked like a giant octagon or something, only with more than eight sides.

  I turned and started jogging back toward the ladder, or any other way up that presented itself.

  Halfway back I turned a corner and tripped over a headless corpse. Male, standard trainee outfit. I gagged at the heavy odor of blood and stepped around, only to nearly fall over two more. The three kids from the ropes. They’d made it through the obstacle course only to die here, ripped apart. Torn flesh and bits of guts made it hard to navigate without falling. My stomach twisted, and the sight sent a shock of fear through me. Whatever had killed them—likely a hound—was probably still close by, and I was down to one blade.

  Something shuffled out of sight, ahead of the turn into the next stretch of corridor. I slunk back around the last corner I’d passed, behind the sprawl of bodies, pressing close to the inner wall. I crouched and palmed my last weapon. Switched it to my right hand, angled so the blade rested on the underside of my wrist, and shifted my weight to my strong ankle. Ready to pounce. The sound drew closer, then stopped near the bodies.

  The footsteps were softer, predator-like. Over the stench of blood, I couldn’t catch a scent of the thing approaching to determine if it was human, hound, or other. I held my breath, adrenaline taking over. Attack first and ask questions later.

  Survive.

  Air shifted. A shadow fell. I twisted upward and lunged, knocking the body hard against the wall with my left hand across his chest and my blade against his Adam’s apple. Something cold pressed hard against my own neck, just barely slicing skin.

  Wide navy-blue eyes stared at me, round with disbelief and shock. My heart jackhammered. I gasped.

  “Stone?”

  I stepped back, my hands dropping. My neck stung from the new cut. I’d come within a millimeter of slicing Bastian’s throat. A small part of me wished I had, the traitorous bastard. He was staring at me like he thought I still might.

  “Surprise,” I said. “Your pal Thackery didn’t get the best of me after all. Disappointed?”

  Something like fear flashed across Bastian’s face. “Is he dead?”

  I wanted to slap him for being so stupid. “No, asshole, who the fuck do you think is responsible for all this?” I waved my hand sideways, toward the sprawled bodies nearby. “Thackery set off his pet projects to tear us apart. And, gee, I wonder how he knew they were here?”

  He didn’t actually say anything, but he did lose every drop of color in his face. I took a step forward, knife up. He either forgot he had his own weapon, or I was menacing enough to cow him, because he didn’t protest. He actually shrank back.

  “This is your fault, you—”

  “Get down!” he shouted, eyes going wide.

  I ducked low, and a bulky form sailed over me. It hit the bloody mess of bodies and skidded into the far wall. Bastian was already moving. I leapt up and pivoted in time to see him pull a GLOCK from a hidden back holster and unload four rounds into the flailing hound’s back. It flung itself sideways at him, roaring its anger, and sent Bastian careening into the opposite wall. He hit with a nauseating crunch and crumpled to the floor.

  My temper spiked. I scooped up Bastian’s dropped knife and, one knife in each fist, whistled at the snarling beast. “Hey, ugly, come and get me!”

  With a snarl and a sound eerily close to disdainful laughter, it charged. I raced down the corridor away from Bastian’s body, keenly aware of the hound gaining even with its multiple wounds. My ankle was still unsteady. I had one chance at this. The hound howled, and the hairs on my neck stood up straight. Hot breath puffed ripe and too damned close.

  As the next corner approached, I measured my steps. I let my wounded ankle slide beneath me and twisted my body so that I ended up on my back. Every bone and joint vibrated. The hound didn’t have time to adjust its path fo
r my roadblock and chose to leap over me. Perfect. I slashed up with both knives, and the hound’s own momentum ripped its abdomen open from ribs to nuts. Sour, suffocating blood rained down. It crashed to the floor as I rolled sideways to avoid being crushed.

  Stop, drop, and roll isn’t just for fighting fires anymore.

  I wiped my hands and knives on the hound’s fur-covered legs, fighting my gag reflex the entire time. I don’t know why their blood reeks so badly. Just another of life’s unanswerable questions.

  The corridor behind me was silent. “Bastian?” My voice bounced and pinged. No one answered. I yelled again, louder.

  I backtracked. The four bodies were still there, Bastian included. I checked for a pulse and found it weak, thready. Blood soaked his white-blond hair scarlet, oozing from a head wound I couldn’t see. Shit. I didn’t have time to wait for help, and some awful corner of my heart didn’t really care if the asshole lived or died. My compromise: I cut off a section of his shirt and pressed it against the head wound.

  I followed the length of the track past the obstacle course exit I’d come through not ten minutes ago, and beyond. I found another ladder up to the high track. Two small smears of fresh blood marked the rungs at eye level. Someone had come this way recently.

  A female scream, muffled and distant, broke the silence. I sheathed one knife, clenched the other in my teeth, and ascended the ladder. A few sprints down the upper track and I shoved through an emergency exit door. It was a different corridor from before. Half the lights were out, bathing it in shadows. There were a handful of doors, spaced pretty far apart.

  The scream came again, somewhere down the hall. I ran. The corridor ended abruptly at a T junction. The left branch led to a heavy metal door, reinforced glass, and streaming sunlight. To the right were more doors. Before I could pick a direction, the door nearest me was flung open by a sailing body.