The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(37)

Nothing happened. No rattling, no gurgling sound surging through the reinforced pipes, nothing at all. I turned the wheel until it couldn’t budge another inch, hoping I’d cut off the system. If not, things were about to go from bad to worse.

I got to the cell just as the alarm started to whine.

I fumbled with the guard’s key ring, jamming key after key into the heavy barred door as Eric, Leroy, and Bull shouldered their way through the crowd of zombies. Leroy looked up at the sprinkler heads and grabbed the bars, rattling them as hard as he could.

“C’mon, man,” Leroy cried. “Get us out of here!”

Angus Caine’s voice boomed over the loudspeaker.

“All right, lads, we’ve got a situation gamma. Containment team to the breach point. Everyone else rally on me. Facility’s compromised, full burn. Purging the cells now.”

“Come on!” Bull shouted. I tried another key, but the lock didn’t budge. My hands shook but the next key slid in and greeted me with the smooth sweet feel of the tumblers rolling over. I slid the cell door open, and the men burst out into the hall, just ahead of…

…nothing. The sprinklers dangled over the prisoners’ heads, motionless and silent. The cutoff valve had worked after all.

“Don’t celebrate just yet,” I said. “He said a containment team was coming to the breach. I’m guessing that’s Nedry’s lab, which means they’ll be heading this way. Leroy, you said you were military, right?”

“Long time ago, yeah, but I still got it where it counts.”

I handed him the Tavor. “Here. You can use this better than I can.”

Eric frowned, probably doing the same head-math I was. He looked from the closed double doors on one end of the hall up toward the bend in the corridor about a hundred feet in the other direction.

“We’ve gotta fall back,” he said. “This is a shooting gallery. Second they come through those doors, we’re screwed.”

He was right, but I hadn’t seen anything resembling defensive cover. We could stay here and get chewed up in the hall, or run and get bottled up in Nedry’s lab. Then I snapped my fingers.

“No we’re not. They don’t know I killed the sprinkler feed, right? As far as they know, everyone behind those bars is dead. That means when they come through they’ll be looking straight ahead, not at the cell, at least for a couple of seconds. Tunnel vision.”

“So we stand just inside the bars, off to the side,” Eric said. “Let ’em pass ahead of us and hit from behind.”

Leroy checked the rifle’s magazine and flicked off the safety. “Rock and roll, baby.”

I didn’t like our odds. Four men, three of them half-starved and only two with weapons, against a team of professional mercenaries?

I hoped we didn’t lose the element of surprise, because that was the only thing standing between us and the grave.





Eighteen



Crouching behind the bars of the open cell, we waited. One of the double doors swung open.

A slim metal cylinder arced over the threshold, clattering onto the stone floor and rolling to a lazy stop. I had just enough time to take a deep breath before one end burst and clouds of voluminous white smoke hissed out to fill the corridor.

I had expected trained soldiers. I didn’t expect tear gas.

The Xerxes troops hustled in fast, four of them moving two by two, faces shrouded behind oval-eyed gas masks that made them look like a flock of hungry owls. By the time one glanced to the side and noticed the cell was full of living prisoners—and the door was wide open—it was too late for him. Leroy’s rifle erupted in a quick three-round blast and blew the back of his skull open.

Eric barreled out of the cell and into the white fog. He threw himself onto the closest mercenary, all fists and feet and violent hunger. Bull was right behind him. Leroy squeezed off another burst as the tear gas billowed and swallowed us all.

My eyes stung like I’d stuffed slivers of fresh-cut onion under the lids. My burning lungs spasmed out the poisoned air as fast as I could breathe it in. I charged into the fight. A white-hot blast of gunfire strobed to my right and chewed into the wall. Off to the left, another rifle spat fire and sent a silhouetted body slumping to the ground. I ran up behind one of the guards and threw myself on him, yanking at his mask and ripping it off his face. He pulled his trigger, firing wild and blind, and someone else grabbed him from the front, tore the rifle away, and slammed him in the gut with it.

When the toxic smoke cleared and the fighting was done, four dead men lay sprawled and shattered across the bloodstained floor. Three of theirs. One of ours.

I slumped against the cell bars. Across from me, Eric’s face was a puffy mess of tears and dried snot, and I figured I couldn’t look much better. He cradled a stolen rifle in his lap, pointed lightly at the one Xerxes merc still breathing on the floor. Leroy hadn’t come out so good. He sucked air between clenched teeth and cupped his free hand over a stain on his side that seeped red between his fingers.

Bull was facedown and long gone.

Behind me, the other prisoners mostly just lay where they’d fallen, gagging and spitting in the aftermath of the gas, but too far gone in their drug dreams to do anything but moan and hold their heads.

“It’s a through-and-through,” Leroy said, nodding down to his wound. “Hurts like a motherf*cker, but I’m still breathin’. Be all right.”