She vaulted a rail on the far side of the room and exited through a gaping hole that had once been a plate glass window. She hit the ground in the midst of tangled undergrowth, broken glass and shattered tile. Looming above her, she could see the silhouette of her destination.
Nicknamed “Fujiyama,” the sixteen-story residential building was the tallest in Pripyat, and its presence was the key element of her backup plan. She dashed through the dense wooded area between the abandoned shopping center and the broken hull of the communications center, sprinted across the street and dashed up the steps of Fujiyama.
She paused at the top step and looked back. Her instinct for self-preservation told her to keep going, but she wanted to make sure the oborots followed her inside. She could not, if she could help it, leave this pack of beasts to potentially wreak havoc. Movement in the wooded area behind her told her they were coming. She fired off a shot in their direction to make sure they knew where she was, and then she dashed inside.
The interior was bare from years of looting, and she quickly found the stairs that would lead her up to the roof. She stopped at the doorway and waited for the oborots to appear. When the first one mounted the stairs, she fired off the last remaining shot in her clip and began her ascent.
By the time she reached the third floor landing, she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her legs burned and her breath came in gasps that echoed through the empty stairwell. She soldiered on, reminding herself of all the situations worse than this she’d come through, if not unscathed, then at least with life and limb intact. Over and over again, she picked her feet up and put them down, step after step flowing beneath her. The whole thing felt maddeningly like climbing up a down escalator. It was only the landings at each floor that proved to her that she was, indeed, making progress. She kept count, willing herself to keep moving.
Tenth floor…
Eleventh floor…
Twelfth floor…
As she mounted the steps at the thirteenth floor, the rotting wood gave way, and she went down hard. She could now hear the oborots clearly. They didn’t seem to be gaining as rapidly as she would have expected, and she wondered if they had run into their own share of crumbling stairs. All of them were bigger and probably much heavier than her, so perhaps the stairs that had been strong enough to support her weight had not borne the burden of a pack of oborots so well. Anything that slowed them down was fine with her.
The final haul was sheer agony, every step a supreme effort of will. She found herself grabbing onto the side rail to gain an extra boost. When she finally emerged on the roof, she had to fight off the urge to lie down and let the cool air wash over her.
Almost there, she told herself. One more leg, and then the race is run.
The door lay flat on the ground, so there was no hope of barring it and buying herself a little more time. She ran to the corner of the building, stripped off her pack, and dumped it out. What she needed now was at the bottom, and she hastily donned it before placing all the grenades in a row on the surface of the roof, stepped over the flimsy cable fence that ringed the top of Fujiyama, and turned back to face the doorway where the oborots would soon emerge. In the distance, the moonlight glistened on the surface of the sarcophagus that covered the Chernobyl reactor. In a different set of circumstances, she would find this place hauntingly beautiful, but now it was only a place of death to her.
When the oborots burst through the doorway, she started pulling pins and pitching grenades as fast as she could, careful to count down to the first detonation. The oborots did not spot her at first, but by the time she’d tossed the sixth grenade, an incendiary, they were coming for her. She pitched three more grenades, and as the first oborot leapt, she turned and hurled herself out into space.
The oborot shot past her, clawing the space she had occupied an instant before. The other oborots halted at the roof’s edge, looked at her in confusion, and then the world exploded.
Chapter 14
When she’d picked up her equipment from Deep Blue’s contact, Queen’s gut had told her to grab the wing suit, or “flying squirrel suit,” on the remote chance that she found her way to the harbor barred. At the time, she had imagined it would be Manifold agents barring her way, not a pack of werewolf-like lab experiments gone wrong, but it had been a good call.
She spread her arms and sailed through the night, feeling the pressure of the air on the ‘wings’ below her arms and the ‘tail’ between her legs as she flew. Down below, the burning building behind her cast the city in a gold-tinged orange glow.