Land of Dust and Bones: The Secret Apocalypse Book 7 (19 page)

To my surprise, the Evo Agent does not
muffle a scream of pain.

He is relieved.

He is almost happy.

He is breathing hard.

“Are you OK?” I ask this because I have no
idea what else to say. I move over to the work bench and remove a small knife
that was mounted on the wall with a magnetic strip. I use this knife to slice
away the plastic cling wrap that had been wrapped around the Evo Agent’s body.

“We shouldn’t be here,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“Australia. We shouldn’t be here. It’s a
lost cause. And this place. This Boneyard. It’s overrun. Infected everywhere.
It’s not safe here.”

“How do you know that?”

He closes his eyes. He closes them tight.
He is in so much pain. And I honestly can’t believe he’s still alive.

“We got reports of cannibalism from all
over,” he says. “Rumors. Guys go out on recon missions. They see these bodies.
Cut up. Some of them still alive. Missing a leg. Missing an arm. They were
being eaten alive. Slowly. Limb by limb. One pound of flesh at a time.”

He opens his eyes and looks at me. “This is
what will happen to us.”

“We need to go,” I say. “These guys,
they’re on the run for the moment. But we don’t have long.”

“You were a high priority for a long time,”
he says, ignoring me. “So was Maria. And Kenji. We studied the recordings. We
studied the rescue mission... In Sydney...”

“You studied? I… I don’t understand.”

“There was recording equipment built into
your helmets and your suits. We saw the crash landing. The nano-virus. The
infected. The mutations. Project Salvation was a failure. Some of us knew right
then and there that it was all over. But we kept going. Orders were given.
Search parties were sent out. More rescue missions were organized. For weeks on
end we searched this entire country looking for Maria. But she could not be
found. And then the mission changed. Maria was no longer a target. No longer an
objective. No longer a priority. He wants the doctors. He wants them to
continue their work. He’s already got one. That’s how I know it’s over. We’re
never going back. He’s given up on a cure.”

By ‘He’… I’m pretty sure he means Kenji’s
father.

And maybe Doctor Hunter was right. Maybe he
is no longer interested in a cure. Maybe he wants to rule the ruins.

After a while the Evo Agent says, “Thank
you. For doing that. Thank you.”

I want to say, don’t worry about it. Don’t
mention it. It was nothing. But instead I say, “What’s it like? The company.
Can you guys stop this?”

“The company is big,” he answers softly.
“It’s really big. It’s everywhere. But it’s small. Fractured. Splinter cells. I
don’t know if we’re doing any good. And I don’t know if we can ever go back.
I’m pretty sure... we’re too far gone.”

And when he says the word ‘gone’… he is
gone.

Dead.

And I can’t get over how surreal this is.
This guy, this super soldier, at one point, he was my enemy, he was trying to
kill me.

And now he’s dead.

And I hadn’t even realized that I’m holding
his hand.

I held his hand as he died.

I quickly let go and I get to my feet. I
leave the room. I leave the girl hanging by a hook. I step back out into the
hallway and as soon as I do, I freeze.

I am not alone.

There is a figure down the other end of the corridor. About halfway along. I
duck down immediately, once again hiding behind the stack of firewood that line
the walls.

Who the hell is that?

Is it Marko?

Or is it someone else?

How many goddamn psychopaths are living
here?

Maybe I was wrong about there being only
three people.

I move further behind the firewood, trying
to hide as best as I can. Suddenly, I hear the familiar sound of shuffling
feet.

A moan.

Of pain.

Anguish.

A howling scream.

It is not Marko.

It is not human. Not anymore.

It is an infected person.

Where
the hell did it come from?

They had been banging up against a door
about halfway along the corridor. Destroying it. With single minded ferocity. I
don’t think it was the room were the others were being kept. So I’m pretty sure
this means that someone else is being kept prisoner. And now this infected
person is trying to get to them. It is trying to break down the door so it can
infect them… eat them… create another host for the virus.

But now it is turning its head towards me.
It knows exactly where I am hiding. And now it is coming for me. Slowly at
first, and then faster.

A large shadow falls over me from behind. I
turn around.

Ivan is standing there, framed in the doorway
to the room of torture, standing over me. He is a giant. He looks at me. And
then at the infected. He takes one step forward. He reaches out with powerful
arms and massive hands. And if he grabs me, I won’t be able to fight him off. I
back away, further into the corner, like a wild animal. I grip the hatchet. I
prepare myself to fight, to swing this blade with every ounce of my strength.

But then Ivan stops. He looks back at the
infected person stumbling its way down the corridor.

Ivan moves away from me. He closes the door
to the room with the bodies. He then moves back inside his personal butcher
shop of horrors, back inside the slaughterhouse.

He slams the door shut and locks it.

I can hear him barricading the door,
barricading himself, the food.

Protect
the food.

I turn around, the infected person is
almost on top of me.

It is reaching out for me, just like Ivan
reached out for me.

I’m just that popular.

And there’s no time to think.

I grip the hatchet as tight as I can.

And swing.

The hatchet lodges deep, deep inside its
forehead, deep inside its brain, its frontal lobe.

It immediately stops as life and energy
vanishes from its body, its corpse. It falls to the ground. And when it falls,
I let go of the hatchet, of my one and only weapon.

I kneel back down, hiding behind the
firewood, breathing hard. I have no idea how it got inside this hangar. No idea
where it came from. But I knew there’d be more. There’s always more.

I slow my breathing and listen for any
howling screams, for any tell-tale signs. But there are none. I move out from
my hiding place. I try and yank the hatchet out of the infected person’s skull.
But the damn thing is stuck. I pull on it again but I can’t budge it.

Suddenly about five rooms down, a door
creaks.

There is a bang. A thump.

There are infected people all over this
place. The Evo Agent was right. This Boneyard is infested.

The door flies open.

And I can’t get the hatchet out. I can’t
even budge it. And if I don’t get this damn thing out of this skull, I will be
defenseless.

Another shadow enters the hallway. It’s
only a matter of time now.

I stand up. I stand over the corpse,
placing my foot on the infected person’s face so I can get some leverage. I
grab the hatchet with both hands and I pull on it with all of my strength. The
hatchet finally comes loose and this surprises me. As a result, I fall
backwards, completely losing my balance. I fall into the stack of firewood, and
this time I knock it all over.

I scramble to my feet. I have the hatchet
and I’m ready to kill as many infected people as it takes. I turn back around.
But there is no need to kill, no need to fight. Because standing there,
standing on shaky legs, is Kenji.

I relax. I lower the hatchet and run over
to him. I help him stand up.

“Are you hurt?” I ask.

“My head is killing me,” he says quietly.
“I think… I think I’m concussed.”

That wouldn’t surprise me. Ivan nearly took
Kenji’s head off. A concussion is probably the best case scenario. The side of
his head is covered in blood.

“I was bracing myself,” he says. “Preparing
myself. I could hear the infected banging on my cell door. They had nearly
destroyed it. And I was going to go down fighting, going to go down swinging.
I’ve never punched an infected person… thought I’d give it a go. But all of a
sudden they stopped. They ran off. Something else, someone else got their
attention. And just like that, my life was spared.”

“Yeah. I got its attention,” I say. “No
need to thank me. Wish I could say I did it on purpose. But it was just dumb
luck.”

Kenji sways and nearly falls over. I hold
him up.

“Come on,” I whisper. “We need to get the
others. We need to get out of here.”

We waste no time. I find the room my friends are being held hostage in. I start
chopping away at the door with the hatchet. I concentrate on the area near the
handle and the deadlock. Eventually the wooden door breaks apart, the handle
breaks and the deadlock comes loose.

I kick the door in, miniature axe in hand.
Initially everyone is stunned and terrified. Maybe I should’ve told them it was
me who was breaking the door down.

Kim, Jack and Maria have moved to the far
corner of the room. But fear quickly gives way to relief.

“Far out,” Jack says. “That scared the hell
out of us.”

“Let’s go,” I say. “Let’s get out of here.
We don’t have long.”

“What the hell is going on?” Kim asks. She
points at the hatchet, to the blood stained blade. “And whose blood is that?”

I step inside the room, pulling Kenji with
me. I close the door as best I can.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” I answer,
struggling with the door. “The man in the gas mask is loose. He got out. And
there’s infected here as well. I don’t know where they came from. But we need
to go. Marko is on the run. Billy is hurt. They are distracted. At least, for
the moment. So we need to go.”

“Wait. He’s still alive?” Maria asks. “The
man in the gas mask? And he’s here? How is that even possible?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Marko said
he found him. Captured him. Brought him back here.”

“So where is he now?” Kim asks.

“He could be anywhere. But he won’t kill
us. He’s not interested in killing us.”

I say he’s not interested in killing us,
even though killing is all he does.”

“Not interested?” Kim says. “How could you
possibly know that?”

“Because he’s hurt. He wants to escape from
this place as much as we do. He wants to survive.”

Jack limps over to the door to help me with
it. He then quickly peers out into the hallway. In the distance, I can now hear
the howling moaning scream of the infected. There’s definitely more of them.
Lots more. They are out there. Somewhere.

Jack closes the door as best he can. “I
think we need a plan of action before we go running off into the dark.”

A plan is a good idea, even though we are
completely awful and not very good at making plans. And whenever we do make plans,
absolutely nothing actually goes according to that plan. And everything that
can go wrong, does go wrong. And really, no matter what we decide, we will
ultimately be running around in the dark, running around a Boneyard. A
graveyard for airplanes. A graveyard for people.

“We need to get Sarah,” I say. “And then we
need to get the hell out of here. Sarah…” I whisper her name. “She’s locked up
in a room, she’s being guarded by one of them.”

A butcher. A giant. Ivan the Terrible.

“She’s only being guarded by one guy?” Jack
says. “We can take one guy.”

I did not share Jack’s confidence. Not
after I watched Ivan take a bullet.
A
bullet
. He was shot. He was shot at point blank range and it didn’t even
slow him down. It only made him angrier, stronger. And then he chased us
through the Boneyard. He moved quicker than a man of his size should be able to
move.

“Is he armed?” Kim asks.

“Yes. I don’t think he has any guns on him.
But then again, he doesn’t need guns. He’s got enough knives in that room…”

Enough knives to fill a slaughterhouse.

“It’s five against one,” Jack says. “We can
do this.”

“What about your leg?” I ask.

“I told you already. I’m fine. And besides,
we don’t have many options here. If what you say is true, we have to go right
now.”

There’s no time to plan an escape. We will
have to wing it. Improvise. Adapt.

We will have to make it up as we go.

And hope.

And pray.

Kenji is still standing by the door. He
opens it slightly to peek outside into the hallway.

“Anything?” Kim asks.

“It appears to be empty,” Kenji says.

A howling scream echoes through the night,
through the Boneyard. The infected are definitely on the loose. And I think to
myself that this kind of sabotage, this kind of chaos is what the man in the
gas mask excels at. This kind of warfare, this kind of attack is his primary
weapon. It is his most powerful instrument of killing, his most deadly and
effective.

“How many of them are out there?” Maria
asks.

Exactly how many of them, or what the hell
they were even doing here in the first place, was anyone’s guess. I have a
feeling that Marko and Billy had gone out into the desert and rounded them up
and then locked them up in one of the hangars. Maybe they had done this as a
kind of insurance policy. So if anyone tried to take this place over by force,
they could release the infected, using the virus as a kind of protection, or
even as a distraction.

But no one answers Maria because nobody
knows for sure.

“So we’re just going to run out there with
the infected?” she says. “We don’t have any weapons.”

“I have a hatchet,” I say. “For the moment,
this is all we’ve got.”

I look at the blood stained miniature axe.
On the one hand it is an excellent weapon. It is deadly, light-weight, easy to
carry, easy to use. But on the other hand, it is a pathetic weapon to bring to
the end of the world, to a new world. A world where mass murders have assault
rifles and sniper rifles and a slaughterhouse full of knives.

“So what’s the plan?” Maria asks. “What
exactly do you think you’re going to do with that axe?”

“I’m going to do whatever I have to do,” I
answer, trying to sound as confident as I possibly can, trying to instill
confidence in everyone else.

“We find Sarah,” Kenji says quietly. “And
then we need to find a car or a truck with a full tank. It’s no good getting
out of here on foot. We won’t last five seconds. They’ll chase us down.”

“And there’s no way we’re making it to the
town on foot,” Jack points out.

“The town is not our priority at the
moment,” Kenji adds. “Getting out of here with our lives, getting far away,
that’s our top priority. We can worry about finding the town later on. When
we’re a safe distance from this place. From these guys.”

“Get behind me,” I whisper. “We’re doing
this right now. And one way or another, we’re getting out of here. We’re not
going to be food for these psychopaths.”