Chapter 6: Dead End

 

“We need to head into the plaza and look,” Jarod hisses. “Why are we hiding in here?”

Tyler whirls around, fixing him with a steely glare. “Whatever fucked up that bridge could still be hanging around, Samuels. It could be something as big as that boss woman of yours.”

Britta. He’s talking about Britta. Paragon certainly changed her, made her strong enough that just one of her punches was enough to shatter tile and leave a crater right in the floor of the atrium. But could the plague really give something – or someone – enough power to destroy a whole bridge on brute force alone?

“Could be bigger,” Gabriel says, a quaver in his voice. “But Jarod’s right. We have to look. It’s what we came here for. I’ll go check.”

Jarod’s hand darts out and clasps around Gabriel’s wrist, moving faster than he ever has in his entire life. His fingers clamp and crush there, like jaws, and the shock on Gabriel’s face starts turning into discomfort.

“What the hell, Jarod. Let go.”

“I’ll go look,” Jarod says, making a conscious effort not to grit his teeth. “You stay here with Torres.”

Gabriel pulls his arm away feebly, but Jarod doesn’t let go. “This is routine by now, Samuels. Just a quick scouting trip. That’s not even ten feet. I can take care of myself.”

“No.”

Tyler clears his throat softly. “He’s right.”

“Don’t take his side on this, Torres,” Jarod growls. “It isn’t safe.”

Tyler’s eyes are cold, and calm. “I meant that you were right. You stay here, Anderson. You’re still injured.”

“Fuck’s sake,” Gabriel says, wrenching his arm free at last. He glowers at Jarod, cradling his wrist in one hand. “Go if you want to.”

“It’s okay,” Tyler says, clapping him on the shoulder. “If there’s something dangerous out there I’d much rather lose Samuels than you.”

“Hah. So funny.”

Jarod scoffs, which is really the best way for him to eject the anxiety building in his chest, by spitting it out in a puff of air. It doesn’t really work, exactly. There very well could be something awful waiting for him, but this is better than getting Gabriel into trouble. He isn’t at the peak of his abilities, not with his scars still healing.

“You stay back here,” Jarod says. “Don’t be mad.”

Gabriel folds his arms and rolls his eyes. Tyler paces forward, just to the edge of the alley, then shrouds himself in the shadow under the broken wall.

“Go for it, Samuels. I’ve got your back.” Tyler gives him a grin, the sort of expression that makes Jarod doubt exactly what he just said.

“Sure. Okay.” He gives Gabriel one last, lingering look. “I’m sorry,” he mouths silently. “I love you.”

Gabriel rolls his eyes again, but at the apex of the roll he huffs out a breath of air that lifts up a lock of his hair. It blows away from his face and settles by his cheek. With his face exposed, Jarod can detect the faintest traces of a smile in the corner of his mouth. Gabriel says nothing, but he gives a single, slow nod.

Jarod creeps out of the alley, the cement hot under the soles of his shoes, his skin quickly becoming reacquainted with the glare of the sun. Good thing he decided to do this on his own. You’re fully exposed out here, easily spotted if there should happen to be any zombies in the area. He chews on his lower lip, scanning the surrounding buildings. Okay, nothing dead, nothing shambling around. Not just yet.

He settles his gaze on the bridge, or what’s left of it, irritated at how little he can see beyond that from this vantage. He’ll have to turn the corner, which isn’t his favorite idea since that’ll only give him even less cover, but it’s not like he has a lot of other options. He presses his shoulder up against a wall, stepping cautiously forward, then leans his head in. Jarod wasn’t sure what he expected to see, but it isn’t a horde of zombies, nor a single powerful one.

The ground just past the bridge is shattered, broken in places as if destroyed by a targeted earthquake. Rubble from both sides of the river has fallen in, clogging the passage of the water, but it’s obvious even from here that clearing away the debris won’t restore the river’s flow. Not with that wall in the way.

“What the fuck,” Jarod murmurs, his eyes trailing up the sleek, perfect white of the wall sprouting up from the base of the river, looking like it grew from right out of the ground. He follows it with his gaze, five feet up, ten feet up. It’s about fifteen feet in height, and clearly manmade, but what kind of technology would allow anyone to build something this huge so quickly? He eyes the massive wall with dread, noting the seamlessness of it, the smooth perfection of its surface. There’s also the sickly, familiar starkness of its white, not quite the color of purity, perhaps closer to the color of bone. It reminds him of something from a different life.

The colossus. This ivory white, it’s the same color as the entirety of the research facility he once called his workplace, seen in both its interiors and the outer walls. But how? The outbreak stemmed from the facility, and everyone who was there is dead, no doubt. Unless Paragon turned some of its people. Unless – no, it can’t be.

He stares, mouth agog, only just registering the hissing from far behind him, Tyler insistently whispering for him to come back and report his findings. Jarod barely gets his legs to obey him, still flabbergasted by the impossibility of this scene, until he catches sight of the last damning piece of evidence that the facility is behind this new problem. There. At the top of the wall. Something glassy, glinting. Moving. It’s a camera lens.

The security camera turns to face Jarod, like a blank eye staring him straight in the face. Like a greeting, like a voiceless hello, it whirs, and it clicks.

They’re back. Vertex is back.

The sunlight glints off the lens, winking against the midday sky. When Jarod tilts his head he notices the other cameras, banks of them installed across the top of the wall, each of them craning their artificial necks in his direction. Even from here Jarod can detect the strange cold emanating from the wall – and the buzzing. That familiar buzzing.

This again. This awful feeling of being watched, just like it was back when he worked at Vertex. “I’ve got my eye on you.” Someone is waiting, watching, looking at him from behind those glass eyes, from the safety of some control room. He knows it isn’t some hapless employee, not some night crawler, not some member of the facility’s internal security team. It’s Hargrove. No one else but that wretched corporation’s vile CEO, that thing that wears a man’s face.

But to what end? Why is this wall even here, and why the cameras? Is Vertex surveying the area, knowing full well that there are survivors still roaming Pleasance? And why is it cutting off the water supply? It doesn’t even look intentional, the drought just an aftereffect of the wall being built straight across the river. This wasn’t a calculated move. Whoever put up this wall doesn’t care that people are still alive here, and that makes perfect sense for what Vertex is, for what it does. Either that, or they’re smoking out the last of the survivors. But again: to what end?

“What the hell is going on?” Tyler hisses.

Jarod would have jumped, but there’s enough blood pumping in his heart that there’s little else to scare him just now. He settles for stilling his breathing and focusing on the task at hand, or rather, the lack of understanding of what to do with this literal, massive obstacle they’ve just discovered.

“That,” is all he says, nodding at the wall.

The intake of breath tells Jarod that Tyler’s spotted the same thing, and after the briefest silence his voice starts up again, this time less impetuous. Maybe there’s even a bit of a tremble in how he speaks.

“What is that?”

Jarod shakes his head. “Exactly what it looks like. A wall. How it got there, I don’t know.”

“But we’ve been gone barely a week. We were here just a few days ago.”

Jarod chews his lip. “Tell me something I don’t know.” He flexes the fingers of one hand, closing the other over the handle of his bat. “But I can guess who’s responsible.”

“That company you used to work for. Vertex, was it? They did this?”

“It’s Vertex. It has to be.” Jarod squeezes his free hand again, his knuckles cracking as he does. “Look familiar to you, Anderson? All that white? Those cameras up top? It’s like the walls back at the facility.”

Silence, and a silence that’s quickly filled with dread. Jarod pauses, then looks around, behind him. It’s just him and Tyler out here.

“Torres?” Jarod blinks. “Where the hell is Anderson?”

“Back in the alley where you wanted him to stay. It’s safer there than out here, remember? You said so yourself.”

Jarod grits his teeth, his hackles rising. “But not on his own,” he says, barely exerting enough effort to keep his voice down. “You were supposed to stay with him.” His shoes scrape against the dirt as he breaks into a slow jog, something in his chest urgent, desperate to check on Gabriel.

“He’s perfectly capable, Samuels,” Tyler hisses. “He’s the best there is. He’ll be fine. Come back.”

It’s only a few yards away, and Jarod gets to the entrance of the alley soon enough. Gabriel’s right there, standing in the shadow of the broken wall, just as he left him. The thumping in Jarod’s heart starts to subside and he gropes at his thighs, taking in slow, labored breaths.

Gabriel ventures a step forward, weapon at the ready. “Jarod? Everything okay?”

“Yeah,” Jarod says, raising a hand. “Didn’t mean to startle you. Torres said he left you. Wanted to check you were safe.”

“Of course I’m safe,” Gabriel grumbles, a glower twisting his features. “I’m perfectly fine right here.” He spreads out the fingers of one hand, gesturing at the darkness of the alley behind him. “See? Nothing there.”

Then a second pair of fingers erupts from the shadows in the alley, the ragged nails on the dead gray hand clawing, reaching.

Jarod breaks into a sprint. “Gabriel.”

Without missing a beat Gabriel twists from the hip, his shoe scratching against the earth as he turns in a circle, bringing the full weight of his bat to bear against the thing standing behind him. Its skull explodes in a shower of brittled bone and rotted brains. The blood is almost black, melding with the shadows in the alley as it falls in thick globs. Gabriel turns his head against the spatter, retreating with small steps as he regains his bearings.

Jarod curses under his breath as he reaches Gabriel’s side. This is exactly what he was worried about. These things have only gotten smarter over time, especially since Britta and Hortega first appeared, clever enough to sneak up on the living the way this one did. Jarod grips his bat tightly as more shapes loom out of the darkness. Correction. The way these ones did. It’s an entire mob of them, somehow successful at creeping up on Gabriel, on someone who’s invariably among the most experienced and alert fighters in the Hive. The zombies, they’re learning.

More feet scuffle in the dirt and cement as Tyler rushes to join the two of them.

“We can’t cut our way back through the alleys,” Tyler warns.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Gabriel says. “I’m trying to beat them off my ass.”

Careful, Jarod thinks. Just please, be careful. He stalks forward to close the distance, to offer support, and Gabriel paces backward, swinging his nailed bat. With an eerie burst of speed, the zombie Gabriel was aiming for dodges, almost in a blur, leaning against the air with an unsteady grace. The absence of a target sends Gabriel reeling too far, putting him off-balance, just enough for one foot to twist awkwardly against the ground. Just enough for him to stumble.

“No.” Jarod stretches out to catch him by the scruff of his shirt. His fingers meet nothing.

A different set of fingers rakes at the air by Gabriel’s head, hungrily enough that they make contact. Dead fingers tangle in Gabriel’s hair. His perfect hair.

“No.”

They pull. Gabriel winces, then struggles. He thrashes like a wolverine, a shrew, flailing with the bat but making no headway with every swat. The lines of his face go tight with outrage, fury, but inside Jarod only knows fear.

The zombies close in. The one that has a hold on him, it’s sneering. It’s not the incidental way its features are frozen in its withered death mask, but a willful expression, its face twisted in something taunting and corrupt. It slavers with the black ichor that Paragon uses to infect its victims. The thing, it knows what it’s doing. “This is a thing you love,” the zombie’s ruined face says, “and we are here to take it from you.” Paragon, Vertex, a devil by any name, here to take everything.

“You don’t touch him,” Jarod roars. “You don’t fucking touch him.”

He brings the bat down like a hammer, smashing at the zombie’s skull, his vision turning ever redder when each successive strike does nothing to loosen its hold on Gabriel. The other zombies close in just as Tyler barrels forward, slashing out with his machete, deactivating a dead thing with every blow, sending them to their second deaths.

With a final slam Jarod caves the zombie’s skull in, its head imploding like a smashed egg, its jaw jutting out but still curled into that unholy grin. Gabriel tears loose at last, but as the zombie falls its iron grip rips a clump of hair from his scalp. Gabriel cries out, then stumbles away, one hand at his head. Blood. There’s blood, somewhere on him. Taking his bat in both hands, Jarod delivers a final strike, pulverizing what’s left of the zombie into the dirt.

“Enough,” Tyler says, dancing away from the thick of the horde emerging from the alley. They’re groaning now. Were they groaning the whole time, or only when they knew they’d been discovered? They’re learning. The fuckers, they’re learning. “We can’t fight this. Back to the Hive. Now.”

Gabriel nods in assent, his fingers streaked with red. His gaze flits from Tyler to Jarod, eyes heavy with guilt. Jarod’s heart pinches. What does he have to be guilty or sorry for? Tyler should have been there with him, to keep him safe. No. Jarod should have been there, to protect him the way he was meant to, the way he was trained to all those years as a Vertex employee. But he’s failed enough times at that, hasn’t he? With Nessa, with all the others, and now –

Tyler’s blow comes out of nowhere, and his palm shoved straight at Jarod’s chest knocks him out of his thoughts and the wind out of his lungs. “Samuels. On your feet. Start running. Now.”

Jarod nods uncertainly, then takes off on his heels, with Tyler hot on his tail. But this time he makes sure that Gabriel runs ahead of him. Always ahead of him, right where he can see him. The rest of the way back, Jarod makes sure that nothing else comes near him. Jarod remembers little en route to the Hive, except that he lets nothing else touch Gabriel again.