“I love you guys,” I mumbled.
Tony came up behind us. “Solidarity sandwich, guys,” he said, trying to hug all three of us at once.
“Oh,” the doctor said, his eyes widening. “Oh, this smells.”
That only made Tony squeeze harder.
Renati gagged: “Get off me, I beg you.”
“You guys are the sourdough to my bacon.”
Oh, hell, how many zombies would I kill for some bacon right now? Maybe Hammond has some bacon.
We all released each other. I chanced a look at Dax’s shoulder. Renati had hastily bandaged the wound—probably all he had time for, given the circumstances. I was willing to bet it needed a proper cleaning and stitches.
“So what happened?” I asked.
The doctor sighed, tilting his head to the sound of gunfire coming from the arena. “I don’t know. I…I started hiking up there. Logan did start shooting and then I just jumped in.” He looked at the sleeves of his coat, drenched as they were in bright red blood, and blanched.
Physicians were supposed to do no harm. I wondered if he’d have to reckon with himself over that later.
“So that was Logan who started things off?” Tony asked. “Where is he?”
Renati shook his head. “I haven’t seen him.”
Thousands of people thronged around us. Logan could be anywhere—bleeding out in the stands, blending in with the crowd, running for his life down the street. “That shootout went on for a while,” I said. “They couldn’t have gotten him…could they?”
Renati looked back toward the stadium. “We’ll have to wait until we can get back inside.”
We loitered out in front for a few moments. I did my best to clean up, wiping blood and zombie guts off on a T-shirt I found lying on the ground. I would have scrubbed up even more, but Tony nudged me. “Look alive,” he said.
Hammond himself not emerged from the stadium, looking none the worse for wear.
Again I was struck by the ridiculous urge to hug him.
“Well,” he said, “this has been an interesting day.”
Tony didn’t waste any time with pleasantries. “How many men did you bring? Keller’s still on the loose.”
The general chuckled. “Feeling antsy, are you?”
“We need to let Durkee out like, yesterday.”
His eyebrows shot upward, almost vanishing beneath his cap. “Durkee? Captain Durkee? He’s alive?”
“Mostly,” I said. “Keller left him with Gloria and Vijay…where are they?” I felt a stab of guilt run through me. I hadn’t wondered about the two of them at all—I had been so consumed with the minute-to-minute catastrophe that was our plan that I hadn’t noticed they weren’t present.
“They weren’t brought out with us,” Dax said. “I think he was going to use them for some kind of grand finale, since people at least knew them. Well…they knew her.”
The general considered us, then looked back at the stadium. “So we need to retrieve Durkee and possibly Gloria Fey and…who’s Vijay?”
“Her cameraman. Sometimes we just call him Jay.”
He nodded, his brow furrowing slightly. Hammond hadn’t been all that thrilled with Gloria reporting on our ongoing apocalypse, but as far as I knew he’d never actively tried to track her down. What would happen now? Would he leave her to her fate?
“I’m hungry,” the general said. “What’s there to eat around here?”
We looked at one another. How were we supposed to break the news to him?
“We have plenty of pastrami,” Dax said. “If you’re into that.”
“I hate pastrami.”
Oh, Hammond was probably not going to enjoy his time in Hastings.
I realized the sound of gunfire had eased. Now we just heard clean-up shots, the occasional double-tap to make sure no one got back up.
If I closed off my mind, I could almost believe order had been restored.
Almost.
That’s not how things work in the endtimes, though. There’s always another problem. Another hitch. Another zombie.
The ground shook.
I flung out my arms to keep my balance and nearly took out Renati with the axe. Tony went over immediately, landing on his ass with a shocked look on his face.
“You got another tank?” he asked Hammond.
The general turned away from me, his expression growing alarmed. “That’s…not a tank…”
The sound rocketed over a second later: the crash of something huge giving way and collapsing.
“Something big just blew,” Hammond said.
We all looked in the general direction of the sound, but it was Renati who pointed upward above the bleacher walls at a plume of dark smoke against the gray sky. “I’ll bet you anything it’s coming from the Quarantine Zone,” he said.
“Of course it did.” Hammond pinched the bridge of his nose. “We can’t have a nice day, can we? Is the Quarantine Zone what it sounds like?”
“Yes. We had to section off half the city when it was overrun.”
“What blew up?” Dax asked.