Zach batted her hand away when she tried to raise it. “Lie still.” He pressed a large palm to her forehead. The pain eased, replaced by soothing heat.
She waited for him to withdraw his touch, but he didn’t. “What—”
“Quiet,” he ordered. “Brain damage is harder to heal.”
Brain damage?
Oh. Right. One of the bullets had caught her in the head.
She saw a mercenary peek around the corner several yards away. Raising her Glock, she fired.
One less mercenary.
For good measure, she continued firing into the wall behind which he had hidden, a line of bullet holes opening in the Sheetrock as screams erupted in the unseen hallway.
She smiled grimly. That’s right, assholes. Bullets go through walls.
Zach shook his head and removed his hand. I take it you’re all right?
She nodded. I’m good.
He took her hand and kissed her gloved fingers. Then let’s go see what they’re hiding down here. Rising, he pulled her to her feet, then bent down and picked up one of the automatic weapons the dead soldiers had dropped. How does this thing work?
“What’s happening?” a mercenary whispered.
“Shut up!” another hissed.
Hold it here and here, Lisette said, placing his hands in the correct position. Then point it at your target and squeeze the trigger.
He nodded.
“Why aren’t they doing anything?” someone else whispered. “Do you think we got ’em? I can’t hear—”
“Shut the fuck up!” the other hissed again.
Lisette had to admit, Zach looked good holding a gun.
A grenade flew out of the hallway, hit the wall, and bounced toward them.
In a flash, Zach teleported to the grenade and launched it back the way it had come.
“Fire in the hole! Fire in the—”
Flames and things Lisette didn’t study too closely shot out of the hallway. Acrid smoke followed, stinging her nose and making her cough.
She tugged off her mask.
“Leave it on,” Zach ordered.
Shaking her head, she tucked the mask in an empty holster. “It makes it too hard to breathe with the smoke.” She stepped into the hallway and took in the carnage.
“Hell,” Zach said at her shoulder. “They must have all been clustered together, ready to rush us.”#p#分页标题#e#
Every mercenary was down.
Beyond them, numerous closed doors lined either side of a long, narrow hallway. Each had an electronic key-code pad beside it like the vampire apartments down at network headquarters.
Zach waved a hand over one and opened the door.
Peering around his shoulder, Lisette saw a vampire manacled to the wall.
Arms stretched above his bowed head, he hung limply, knees not quite able to reach the floor. The bloodstains on the linoleum tile beneath him indicated he had been tortured. The limbs exposed by his dirty T-shirt and shorts were emaciated. The eyes that met hers, when he slowly raised his head, blazed with madness.
Zach silently ended the vampire’s misery. They checked the next room and found the same. And the next. And the next. And the next.
Lisette didn’t know how many they searched before they found something worse: a vampire manacled to a table with an IV in one arm, feeding him blood. A needle in the other drained him just as swiftly.
“Now we know where they’re getting the virus,” Zach said, the same disgust she felt evident in his voice.
“And how they’ve infected so many of their soldiers.”
This vampire too had been stripped of all sanity. Torture and harsh living conditions tended to do that.
They found more of the same in the rest of the rooms and swiftly ended the vampires’ suffering. When they finished, no heartbeats remained in the basement, so they returned to the ground floor.
Lisette’s eyes widened as she glanced through the gaping hole in the front of the building.
Chris’s men fired missiles at a tank the mercenaries had somehow managed to get moving. Another network Humvee spewed flames at vampires—willing to risk the sun in their attempts to escape Roland, Sarah, and Aidan—who stumbled out of the building that housed them.
A walkie-talkie on one of the mercenaries David had killed earlier squawked. Lisette holstered a Glock and picked it up.
“What are you doing?” Zach asked as they turned and strode down a bloody corridor, following screams and gunfire to the back of the building.
“Listening in.” She tuned it to the channel Chris had designated as the network’s, so she could hear the Seconds’ and network Special Ops’s chatter.
They stopped at the first hallway.
Empty. Or rather empty of anyone living. There were bodies aplenty.
They checked the next. And the next.
“David has been busy,” Zach muttered.
“Where’s Seth?” she wondered aloud.