Chapter 45
Nick laid on the bed, his body drained of physical and emotional energy.
The light of dawn crept over the landscape, illuminating a gentle fog that had settled in.
The time approached when the other guards would awaken.
Nick lay with the mask over his face. Even with the base of the helmet plunging into the back of his neck and his hot breath recirculating back to him, he felt he could fall asleep.
While Nick willed his brain to analyze and plan, weariness usurped his thoughts, which created a strange onslaught of images.
The bonfire from the junkyard flickered in his mind, along with the faces of Jeff and David.
Tatum’s dark eyes glowing with a ruined childhood reminded Nick of a younger version of Kate.
Just as sleep started to pull the curtain closed on his ruminations, an image of Tatum thrusting a knife into his center made him jump.
Nick sat up in bed, wishing he could rub his eyes or run his fingers through his hair. Instead, he leaned the helmet against his hands and let out a long, shaky breath. He was losing control, and if he did not reign himself in, everyone he cared about was at risk.
A scream rang out, echoing through the warehouse. A woman’s scream. Nick bolted from the bed, slinging the rifle around himself, and ran down the corridor. His thoughts were on Kate as he rushed to her cell door, fumbling with the keys to the lock.
“It’s Avery!” Kate shouted from the other side, and Nick cut short his efforts on her door, sliding over to unlock the one next to it. Three guards were sprinting down the hall, stopping behind Nick as he pushed Avery’s door open.
Avery was cowered in the corner of the room nearest the door, gawking at the wall.
She pointed to the side of the warehouse that met the outside with a trembling finger.
A shiver went down Nick’s spine as something scraped against the metal.
The sound made his fingernails ache. Muffled laughter bounced against the walls as the creatures scratched and banged on the metal.
“Fucking Laughers,” a guard groaned, then left the room with the others in tow. Nick knelt beside Avery.
“It’s okay. We’ll go take care of them.”
Nick exited the warehouse, catching up to the other men. As suspected, six Infected were bashing their limbs against the side of the warehouse.
The men armed themselves with the bladed weapons they had on hand and started slicing into the group of monsters. Nick clutched one of the creatures by the throat, plunged his hunting knife into its skull, and let the body collapse to the ground, ready to move on to the next.
A guard raised his blade, preparing to stab into one of the creatures. The Infected caught his hand in mid-air, holding resistance against it as the creature leaned into the man’s face.
The Infected’s black eyes bore a hole into the guard, and it let out a raspy yowl—the air from its mouth blew the strands of hair around the man’s ears.
The guard was cemented in place by terror, so Nick drove his knife into the creature’s neck.
The Infected’s hand slipped from the guard’s raised arm and it fell in a heap on the ground.
The plagued creatures lay under the cloak of death, no longer posing a threat to the warehouse.
Nick readied a question on the tip of his tongue, wanting affirmation that the guards involved were unharmed.
Before he could speak, a gunshot sounded off from the edge of the woods.
Worried that more guards were engaged in a struggle, the men took off toward the sound.
Nick’s legs carried him effortlessly across the field surrounding the warehouse, and he had to remind himself to slow down.
He matched the other men’s paces, not making a show of his superhuman speed.
At the treeline, a figure leaned over something in the dirt.
Closing in, Nick recognized it was Luke.
Luke stood with his pistol relaxed in his hand. The thing he stood over was a slumped body, face down on the ground. An exit wound from a bullet left a burnt hole in the back of its head. At first, Nick assumed it was an Infected that had trailed in after the others—late to the party.
“Caught this fucker creeping around the property. Probably led the Laughers straight to us,” Luke explained. Luke tipped the toe of his boot into the body and pushed it over. The corpse lay face up, eyes painted wide in its last expression of death.
Nick clenched his jaw and fought off the urge to drop to his knees.
Every section in Nick’s brain became dedicated to regulating his breathing and controlling his reactions.
The body on the ground belonged to a boy, just barely a man with skin of an olive hue.
Someone Nick knew. Someone who was now dead because of him.