Replica(82)

“How many?” Rachel bit out as she sprayed another man in the face even as I kicked out, connecting with a woman who’d drawn too close. The woman grunted, but didn’t go down. She barely flinched, actually, and I suddenly understood why Stravinsky was making them this way. They were like the zombie werewolves—pain didn’t register.

“Two hundred. Maybe a little more.” The numbers weren’t huge at first, but they could be. And that was the key.

The sheer number of them could overwhelm even the staunchest fighters. If Stravinsky had hundreds of thousands of these creatures at his disposal, say if he released the toxin in New York City, the panic and chaos would be beyond anything the world had ever seen. But the U.S. military wouldn’t want this on American soil. They probably saw it as a way to win the war against the Middle East extremists.

I kept Rachel moving as she sprayed the antidote from side to side. “I’m almost out.”

“Us, too!” Ivan hollered over the unwieldy mob.

“Rachel—”

“I know. I know.” She bit the words out, coating them in bitterness. “This can’t happen again, goddammit.”

I deliberately kept my thoughts to myself. I cut through the straps of the tank on her back as the last drop sprayed into the face of a teenage boy.

“How many did we get?”

I lied. “All of them, I think.”

Hope filtered from her for a brief flash before fading. “You’re a shitty liar.”

We circled around the mob, Antonio and Ivan moving in tandem across from us. A trickle of light slid across the top of the village roofs. Madre de Dios, were we ever going to catch a break?

A cry that lifted the hair from the back of my neck drew my eyes to the center of the mob. The little girl who’d led the group was standing there, human once more, her tiny hand pressed to her eyes. “Al’umm!”

Mommy. She was saying mommy in Arabic.

“It worked.” I breathed the words, unable to believe what I was seeing. The villagers paused as if her cry had drawn them to her. “Oh, fuck.”

I wasn’t sure I could get us both through, but there was no way Rachel would be willing to stay behind. “Stick close, Rachel!”

I slammed my shoulder into the man nearest to me, his hooked beak whipping toward my eyes. I jammed the heel of my hand up into his chin, snapping his neck, holding off just enough not to kill him and leave him as prey and hoping it worked.

“What are you doing?” Rachel screamed at me. She hadn’t heard the child. I purposely covered my thoughts as I struggled with what to do. I could turn around, tell her I had been wrong. Save us both by pretending the people here were all dead even as they walked about us moaning.

But the desire to do the right thing, to save someone so new to the world had bled too strongly from Rachel into me. I couldn’t turn back any more than she could. Damn her and damn us both to hell.

I plowed through the villagers as if they were stick people. A few got jabs in on me, but nothing major. We reached the center of the mob and I scooped the kid up, tucking her under one arm right as two villagers dropped to their knees and swept clawed hands where she’d been.

“Oh my God,” Rachel said. “It worked.”

“Ivan, lead them away!”

“Trying,” he hollered. “You smell good; they like you two.”

Even now he was flirting. Wolves had no shame.

Rachel snorted. “You love it.”

We still had a monster problem on our hands, no pun intended. I held the howling child tightly to my chest and hunched my back. “Up, Rachel.”

She leapt onto my back and I took one deep breath before I rushed into the mob. Bodies bounced off me, and hands ripped at both Rachel and me. Several of the beaks jabbed into my arms, and one landed in the side of my neck, but the pain was minimal compared to most of the injuries I’d sustained over the last few days. We were free of the worst of them in ten seconds and Rachel jumped off. Wobbling, I dropped to one knee. My vision sparkled with dancing lights and I slapped a hand to the wound in my neck, which had closed to a tiny pinprick.

I tried to speak, but the words were at best slurred and they faded into my native tongue.

Venomous, was the only thing I could think.

“Fucking serious? Kid, come here.” Rachel took the girl from me and murmured something to her in Arabic as the cries of anguish and horror around us shifted to shrieks of terror.

“Lea, you have to get up.”

When had I lain down?

“Get up,” Rachel continued, “the antidote is working, but not fast enough. Some people are coming back—”

I’d seen them—human once more but in the midst of the monsters.