Stage 3 (Book 3): Bravo Page 8

  Alejandra nodded, grudgingly and not a little disconcertedly. “Esta bien, tamarindo.”

  “Alright then,” Hansen said at last, motioning for his band of underage guerrillas to lend a hand. “Grab the shit, let's get inside, and we'll worry about tomorrow, tomorrow.”

  As always, none of Mason's group moved until Mason gave the word, and as always, Mason looked to Sarah for final confirmation. But as always, they were in total agreement. She nodded, and Mason passed it on.

  “Agreed,” he said, setting everyone in motion.

  As he turned away from Becks, he had the fleeting sensation of long, slender fingers just barely kissing his hand. But then, they were gone... as if they'd never been there at all.

  CHAPTER IX

  Mason suggested moving both vehicles as close to the Alamo as possible.

  But Hansen hissed, “Don't you fucking dare fire that monster truck up again!”

  And that put an end to it.

  The Mustang and Peterbilt were left where they were, and Alejandra, Addison, and two of the boys stood guard, while the rest of them off-loaded supplies. Five minutes later, three more echoes had been added to the body wall, and the door to the Science Building was closed behind a burgeoning group of fifteen souls.

  Bottled water and granola bars were shared, then a propane stove was brought out and placed on a lab table, and Inez marked the entire area as off-limits. But then, one of the college kids found a stash of licorice and chocolate bars in the supplies, and all she could do was laugh and let them help themselves with gentle admonishments of, “That'll spoil your appetites, kids!” To no avail.

  The new arrivals broke into two groups to explore their new environs, and the college kids were only too happy to show them around. As far as they were concerned, it seemed, this new-found alliance made them all instant friends, despite Hansen's blustering. And if those frightened young people needed anything now, it was friends.

  In truth, though, the exploration didn't take long. It was only a two-story building and there wasn't much to see. But Mason came away from it with his mind put somewhat at ease.

  There were far too many ways in and out of the Alamo for his liking, but he had to give due credit to Hansen's attention to detail. Every door had been well secured, and any room with a window lower than chest-height was sectioned off and secured. The building appeared to be well and truly safe, but it had its drawbacks as well. It was all classrooms and labs, so the accommodations were spartan. The students had long ago raided every closet and every locker for clothes and jackets, enough to fashion themselves beds of a sort. They'd also scrounged a few buckets small enough to fit into a toilet, for their sanitary needs. But still, there was one accommodation sorely lacking in this last bastion of humanity – there was precious little water. The biggest ocean on the planet was less than a mile away, and these people barely had enough to keep themselves hydrated, let alone clean.

  “There's lots of stuff in building six, but it's crawling with '50s,” one of the boys offered, wistfully. He was eighteen at best; stocky, muscular, and with a hint of peach fuzz on his chin.

  Mason could easily imagine him on the football field, but he held a spiked baseball bat as if it were second nature.

  “What's your name, kid?” Addison asked.

  “Uh... Richie, sir.”

  Addison thumbed his glasses higher up his nose. “Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Richie. But if you call me 'sir' again, I'll give you an atomic wedgie you'll be plucking out of your butt crack for a month. And believe me, kid, having been on the receiving end of many myself, I am somewhat of an expert in the field.” The boy chuckled, and Addison smiled back. “So, where's this building six?”

  “Right next door,” the other boy answered. “There's the Fireside restaurant and a coffee shop, and a book store that sells snacks. There's all sorts of stuff there!”

  “Is that the building with the bite out of it?” Mason asked.

  Again, the chuckle. “That's the one, sir… uh... Mace. It is Mace, right?”

  “It is,” came the reply. “Richie, this is Addison, Alejandra, and Beverly.”

  The freckle-faced girl had accompanied them all the way, but only now did she speak. She sidled up beside Alejandra and offered her a pretty little smile and a soft, “Hi.”

  Alejandra replied with a grunt and a jut of her chin.

  Richie introduced the two others in his group. “She's Teddy, and this is Willy.”

  “William!” The other boy reminded him with a scowl. He was the Sk8rBoy who'd met Mason's descent from the Peterbilt with the bolt of a crossbow.

  “Alright, William,” Mason said. “So, which one of you wants to tell me why you haven't cleared building six and liberated all of that... stuff?”

  “Are you kidding?” Richie hushed a howl. “There's gotta be a hundred '50s in there!”

  “No way there's a hundred,” Alejandra scoffed. “Not unless someone propped open every door and sang a few choruses of 'Ave Maria'.”

  “She's right,” Addison agreed. “Chances are, a few got in and ran rabid, and Officer Friendly was just too scared to go in after them.”

  “Hey!” Sk8rBoy snapped. “Gary ain't afraid of nothin'! There were twenty or thirty dumb-asses in that place who thought they knew better than him, so they stayed put. And then, one of them got stupid and the place was overrun. So, even if it was only a few that got in, they're all '50s now. Get it, Tubby?”

  At that, Addison grabbed the kid by collar, and he didn't so much as bat an eye when a crossbow came up to meet him at nose level.

  “First of all... William,” he said, as calmly and deliberately as a teacher explaining a math problem to his densest of students, “my name is not Tubby. It is Addison. Secondly, Sheriff Woody has every right to be scared when his only backup is sawed-off little shits like you, still waiting for their testicles to descend.” The boy screwed up his face as if he were about to fire back, but Addison neatly cut him off. “And thirdly, William, if a handful of alphas got into building six, most of those other twenty or thirty dumb-asses would have been turned into salsa, not more alphas.”

  “We tied the doors closed after that,” the freckle-faced girl, Teddy, hushed to Alejandra. “No one in, no one out.”

  “Good work, chica.” Alejandra gave the girl a fist-bump, and Teddy offered a poorly pronounced, “Gratzias.”

  Alejandra said nothing, but Addison cooed, “Aww, it's so cute when they try,” to no one in particular.

  They met up with their other half in short order, and from all accounts, the entire building was much the same all over. It was safe, it was secure, but it was woefully lacking in basic supplies.

  Names were exchanged all around, and Mason was finally introduced to the twenty-something punk behind the gun at his window. He was tall, thick, not as heavily-muscled as Richie, but close. The man's name was Donn. Donn with two Ns. On this point, twenty-something was most adamant, and Mason could only nod his understanding as their hands met for a single abbreviated shake.

  “Good to meet you, Donn,” he said, careful to add the second 'N' in his head, just in case the kid noticed.

  Now that Mason had a close-up view of the punk's weapon, he realized how close he'd come by calling it a scythe. It might once have started out as the cutting blade on a rider-mower, but some heavy-duty filing had turned it into a long, hooked, incredibly lethal-looking blade, and then it'd been affixed to what had probably once been the handle of a spade. The war-scythe looked heavy, but Donn with the two Ns handled it as easily as a whisk broom.

  The last boy finished the introductions. His name was Diego. He was smaller than the others, and instead of a home-made crossbow or club or war-scythe, he appeared to be armed only with a child's slingshot, albeit a little bigger than most, and with a wrist-strap for support.

  “Qué onda, muchacho,” Alejandra said to him.

  But the kid only stared back at her, looking utterly lost. “I'm sorry, ma'am,” he said, rath
er timidly. “I don't speak Spanish.”

  Alejandra scowled and said nothing.

  “I speak Spanish... um, un pico,” Teddy tried, beaming a smile.

  “No, you don't,” Alejandra told her flat out, erasing the smile.

  “Alright.” Detective Sergeant Gary Hansen put an end to the chatter. “Diego, William, I believe you're on patrol. Richie, how about you go top-watch and see how much damage our...guests' arrival had caused?”

  The man's words and tone both rankled Mason to the core, but he didn't take the bait. Instead, he offered a quick, “I'd like to see that for myself,” and followed along after Richie, sparing a moment to share a look with Becks and another with Sarah, and throwing a little half-wink to Mackenzie.

  They passed down a short hallway and turned into a side corridor, ending at what looked to be a closet. But this was a closet with a difference. An access ladder ran up one concrete wall, all the way to a hatch set in the ceiling. Richie stopped long enough to collect of pair of binoculars from a hook and drape them around his neck, then he took the ladder in hand and led the way up. Once at the top, he unhooked a bungee cord and cracked the hatch open for a quick peek. Then, he eased it wide open and waved Mason up.

  The view from the roof was incredible. To the west was the Pacific Ocean, as wide and calm and placid as if nothing at all had changed in the world. It was only a mile away, with a road winding down the six or seven hundred feet of the hill. All the way to the Cabrillo Highway paralleling the coast. It was a desperately beautiful sight, if one looked past the container ship run aground next to the pier, and the columns of smoke rising from a dozen different fires.

  To the south was Sweeney Ridge, a vast landscape of trees and brush that went off into the distance as far as the eye could see. A hiking trail led away from Skyline and branched off in several directions. But even without the binoculars, Mason could see bodies littering the trail and several echoes bumbling their way through the brush.

  “Mr. Goode convinced a few of the others that they'd be able to get out that way,” Richie offered, somberly. “But they were wrong.”

  Dead wrong… Mason corrected him in his head.

  To the north and east, things were just as Mason had seen since the beginning – a sheer and unrelenting horror show. He let Richie do his proper scan of the surrounding suburban Hell. Then, he gratefully accepted the binoculars to have a closer look for himself. What he saw through those lenses was proof that Hansen was right. That big thundering Peterbilt and roaring Mustang had indeed put Skyline in danger. Alphas from miles around had been drawn to the noise, and it was only Hansen's quick insistence on silencing the dinner bell that had kept the place from being entirely overrun. When the motors were turned off, any alpha outside of a whispered earshot had been left suddenly adrift, and thankfully so.

  There were hundreds. Literally, hundreds. From a mile away and right up to the college itself, not a square yard of real estate was left unoccupied. Most were in a state of vigil, heads down and standing as still as statues. But some were probing, and it was these that most concerned Mason. Probers were nothing but trouble. They would stumble along, following any sound or smell that might conceivably have come from a human, and they would follow that trail until it petered out or until the suspected prey gave itself away. If the former, they would return to vigil, all that much closer. If the latter, they would charge, and it was game over.

  And there were echoes there, too. Always, there were echoes, chasing after humans like moths chasing a flame. The more humans, the bigger the flame. So now that two smaller flames had become one, every echo in San Bruno might well be converging on that blaze.

  Richie set off along the edge of the roof to check the immediate perimeter, and Mason followed. Already, four new echoes were bumping up against the car-barrier, and a dozen others were converging on the building itself. The front of the building was still open, but it wouldn't be for long. He counted no fewer than five open corridors into the courtyard, so echoes and alphas alike were bound to get in. Indeed, when he and Richie finally returned to the hatch and hunkered down in hushed conversation, Richie confirmed as much.

  “The DBs fill the Quad every night, and we clear them out every morning.”

  DBs. More cop slang. DB was short for Dead Body. Not as emotionally charged as creeper or as poetic as echo, but it was certainly on point.

  “We tried piling up desks and tables and whatever else we could get our hands on, but it was never enough. Every time they knocked something over, the noise would bring the '50s at a run. So now, we just let them gather through the night, and when morning comes, three or four of us drop down from building eight to clean them out just as quiet as you please.”

  Now, Mason understood something he'd seen on his trip around the roof. One corner of the building came close to the corner of another, presumably this building eight. A running start might allow an able-bodied person to jump the gap, but someone had taken the liberty of laying two heavy planks across the gap, side by side, to form a bridge. He gave that other building a good look and saw three ropes hanging from the roof, all the way down into the courtyard.

  “Dangerous work,” he said.

  “So's breathin', these days,” Richie replied, and Mason couldn't argue.

  “How many?”

  “Yesterday, eight. Today, twelve. They just keep coming.”

  “And you add the bodies to the wall?”

  “Better than leaving them scattered all over.” The kid shrugged. “Might as well put them to use.”

  Again, no argument.

  “There's a dozen or more cars in the parking lot and a few more on the street. Couldn't you─”

  Richie cut him short. “It's not that easy. Do you know how to hot-wire a car, Mace?”

  Mason's lip curled as if he'd just tasted something decidedly sour. “It's on my list.”

  “Well, neither do we. And even if we did, modern cars have built-in antitheft technology. Unless it's an older model, even if you get the car started, the steering wheel and gearshift lock in place.”

  “Locks can be broken.” Mason gave it one last shot.

  “Not quietly,” Richie replied, and the subject was well and truly dropped.

  Mason fell silent for a few moments to wrap his mind around the problem. Barely had he begun to work through the math when Richie spoke up again.

  “Gary doesn't like you much,” he said, turning up one corner of his mouth in a half-grin.

  “No, he most certainly does not,” Mason snorted. “I assure you, the feeling is mutual.”

  “You knew him from before?”

  “I knew his daughter.”

  “Ah!” Richie tossed back his chin. “I get it now.”

  Mason narrowed his eyes. “You get what?”

  Richie shrugged. “Hey...no father is ever going to like any man who dates his little girl.”

  “Not even a college football star?” Mason quipped.

  “What, me? Naw, Mace, I can hit a baseball pretty good, but I can't throw a spiral to save my ass. Skyline doesn't even have a football team. Anyway, I came here for their Surgical Technology program, not to play ball.”

  Again, the narrowing of the eyes. “You want to be a doctor?”

  “Hell no. A surgical technologist delivers patient care before, during, and after surgery. I wanted to help people, but I've never had any desire at all to be an actual doctor.”

  Mason digested it all. Then, he gave the boy the sagest piece of advice he might ever have offered anyone in his life. “Good for you, kid,” he said. “From my experience, someone who can swing a baseball bat is gonna last a whole lot longer in this world than any doctor.”

  CHAPTER X

  “They won't be able to smell my cooking, will they?”

  Mason returned from the roof to find Inez huddled over the stove, looking like she was ready to throw herself onto it like a live grenade, if he gave the word.

  “There's a good wind coming off th
e ocean and all the windows are shut,” he reassured her with a gentle pat on the back. The contents of the pot looked a little like lumpy oatmeal. But looks were often deceiving, especially where Inez's cooking was concerned.

  “That smells great, Inez. What is it?”

  “Canned chicken, canned corn and canned milk,” she sighed. “My stars, what I wouldn't give for some fresh produce and a nice cut of beef!”

  “You and me both, sister,” Mason agreed, helping himself to a spoonful of whatever it was.

  As the others began to drift in, Inez directed them to form a line, starting at a stack of paper plates and plastic utensils to her left. Then, she carefully doled out a healthy ladleful of lumpy oatmeal onto each plate as it passed, along with a goodly pile of boiled rice.

  “If it tastes as good as it smells, Ma'am, you'll be the star of the day,” Hansen said as he passed, flipping her the most threadbare of smiles.

  “That's sweet of you to say, Sergeant Hansen. Thank you.” Inez returned the smile in full. “But my name is Inez, and you'd better use it if you don't want to find yourself going to bed hungry.”

  Through the titters of a few of the college kids, Hansen reached out a hand, and Inez took it. “Well, it's a pleasure to meet you, Inez,” he told her honestly. “Please, call me Gary. And on behalf of us all, I would like to thank you for this wonderful meal.”

  The tittering stopped immediately, and the college kids all came together in a muted chorus of hushed hurrahs, plastic forks held high in salute.

  Inez accepted the praise in her usual fashion. She cocked an eyebrow and cautioned them, “You haven't tasted it yet. You might just change your minds.” That raised another round of hushed laughter.

  Once everyone was served, Clancy included, Inez helped herself and took a stool around one of two central lab tables. As the others ate, she gently folded her hands in her lap and bowed her head in silent prayer.

  Christopher immediately bowed his head, and when the others saw what was happening, one by one, every single one of them followed suit. The last to do so were Mason and Alejandra, but when even the hard-boiled Detective Sergeant Gary Hansen finally laid down his fork and bowed his head, they shared a shrug and submitted to their fate.