DECIMATED (The Nameless Invasion Book 1) Read online

  The eyeless guard stumbled back, his hand steadily going to the stick in his eye slit, wrapping his fingers around it, and squeezing so hard that it shattered, leaving a small nub sticking out. He gripped this more carefully, and started to pull it out.

  While he was doing this, I pushed past him, and to my surprise moved at more than a hobble this time, almost a speed-walk.

  I glanced down, expecting to see fresh bloodstains through my hospital gown, but the stains that were there were old, and I didn’t see any fresh blood.

  At the nurses station I quickly scanned the counter for anything that might be useful.

  All I saw was a radio and the nurse’s purse.

  I grabbed both, stuck the radio in her purse, and, feeling very metrosexual, slung the purse over my shoulder.

  But I couldn’t be picky. I needed my hands free, especially in my dilapidated state.

  I looked over my shoulder and saw the eyeless guard had gotten the broken mop handle from his eye slit.

  He dropped it, and looked up at me.

  The place where I had stabbed him had now widened, and something burned dimly behind it, like the image of the sun through one of those special telescopes, the ones that allow you to see the surface, the leaping licks of plasma looking like hell itself.

  Fuck this, I thought, and pushed the door open.

  3

  The door slammed into the nurse and she stumbled back, holding her face, blood leaking out from under her hand, a contrast to her pale skin.

  She pulled her hand away from her face and looked at her bloody fingers, then up at me. “You hurt me,” she said, stunned.

  “No time for sorries.” I grabbed her by the arm. “Come on.”

  She went with me mutely, not asking any questions.

  Damn, how hard had I hit her?

  We made it to the stairwell door.

  The nurse stood there, staring at me, her face bloody.

  “Unlock the fucking door!” I urged.

  She looked at the door, then down at the keys hanging from a lanyard at her waist. “Oh. Of course.”

  She clumsily went through keys to find the one to unlock it.

  Christ, I hoped I hadn’t given her a concussion.

  I resisted telling her to hurry up—she was probably already nervous enough—but this was taking way too much time for my liking.

  If only this place had ID cards to open the doors instead, we’d already be through.

  I heard a noise, and looked over my shoulder just as the eyeless guard exited the infirmary.

  He looked left, then right in our direction.

  His vision seemed to lock onto me, and he did a stiff about-face, then began toward us at that same measured pace he’d come after me in the infirmary at, implacably undeterred by the fact that we were running away from him.

  I didn’t like the certainty that this implied, as though no matter how fast or far we ran, he would catch us.

  His right eye now had grown even bigger around where I had stabbed it, and something orange and red was starting to spread out from the wound.

  And beyond the red, beyond the burning corona, was something of deepest black.

  “Are you coming?”

  I turned to find the nurse was in the stairwell, holding the door open and waiting on me.

  I blinked. I could’ve sworn that door opened outward, not inward.

  I glanced down at my side as I entered the stairwell and shut the door behind me, checking to see if I was losing blood.

  I didn’t appear to be.

  Strange. Adrenaline must have been stemming the flow.

  And also the pain. I barely felt any, despite the running I’d just done.

  At the next floor I stopped. “Hold on,” I said, and lifted my hospital gown to check my side.

  The bandages were stained red, but I wasn’t losing blood.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  I nodded. “What about you?” I gestured at her bloody nose.

  “Fine. It only bled for a second.”

  “Good, let’s move.” I hadn’t heard the door to the stairwell open, but that thing wasn’t human, and who knew what it could do.

  Walk through doors?

  Why not? If it was from those ships, it might be able to do a lot more.

  It was strange it had appeared in a guard’s uniform. Maybe the aliens thought it looked close enough to human to fool us. They might be monumentally different from us, and to them something with a head and four limbs—even if one of those was growing something reptilian—was close enough, not realizing just how wrong it looked.

  “Just one more floor to the A-wing housing unit,” I said. “There’ll be guards there. We’ll be safe.”

  4

  But instead of safety on the next floor, we found pandemonium.

  Monsters from nightmares were fighting each other, eating each other. Sometimes eating each other alive.

  I grabbed the nurse by the arm and pulled her back into the stairwell, carefully shutting the door, then peering through the small reinforced window to make sure nothing had seen us.

  The monsters were everywhere. Like those I’d seen on the news: horrific animals with an uncanny malevolence about them.

  And that wasn’t all.

  I hadn’t believed the news reports, but here they were, right before my eyes: things that looked like they came straight from the depths of hell.

  Hideous, distorted beings that moved with a loping fluidity that was sickening; that suggested too many, or a lack of, bones.

  I moved so I was out of view of the window, then pulled her to me so she was as well. “I put a radio in here,” I said, taking her purse off my shoulder and handing it to her. “Try to contact someone.”

  She pulled out the radio and stared at it.

  Before I could ask if something was wrong, she held it to her mouth and said in a monotone, “Aaron? It’s Emma. Are you there?” She released the push-to-talk button and waited.

  There was no response.

  She went through several more channels, trying to contact someone.

  Finally, someone answered.

  “Get out of here little lady.”

  She frowned, apparently deciphering who this was. “Devon?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but it’s crazy. Everyone’s gone.”

  She said nothing.

  “Gone where?” I asked.

  She repeated my question.

  “I don’t know,” Devon responded.

  “Where are you? I will come to you.”

  “No. One of em got me.”

  “Then I am definitely coming to you.”

  “It’s too late. I feel… Wrong. Just get out of here.”

  “I’m not going to leave you.”

  There was no answer.

  “Devon? Answer me, dammit.” It was odd hearing someone swear so emotionlessly.

  After several seconds of silence, I said, “We need to get to your car. I hope like hell you keep your keys in your purse.”

  “I’m not leaving him.” The lack of emotion in her voice was starting to creep me out.

  “You heard him. It’s too late.”

  “I—”

  There was a sound from the stairwell below us.

  It was there and gone too quickly to identify, but we both heard it, even over the muted chaos going on on the other side of the door which we stood to the side of.

  “Did—” she began.

  I covered her mouth, then put a finger to my lips. I grabbed the radio from her, turned it off so it wouldn’t give us away if someone talked over it, and stowed it back in her purse, zipping this up so the radio wouldn’t fall out.

  Then I took her hand and led her up the next flight of stairs.

  It was an administrative wing.

  I checked that it was clear, then entered, pulling her behind me and quietly shutting the door.

  This floor was eerily quiet.

  I wasn�
�t sure if that was odd or not. Normally I would think it was, however with everything that had been going on—the alien ships, the reports on the news of the attacks—I imagined many workers had wanted to go home and be with their families.

  And the people who worked on this floor, the administrators, would be the first to go home when shit hit the fan.

  You could run a prison for a while without administrators. But not without guards.

  It made me wonder what kind of state the prison had been in before tonight.

  It clearly hadn’t been as bad as this, it would’ve reached the infirmary sooner if it had been, so it must have been a recent development, perhaps right after the nurse had started her shift.

  I found it hard to believe they’d evacuated everyone so quickly, including most of the guards.

  Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe those monsters had eaten them.

  “Okay,” I said. “We’re going to go for your car and get the hell out of here.”

  The nurse stared blankly at me. “He didn’t kill you.”

  “Hey.” I shook her. “Focus. Do you remember where your car is parked?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good. You got your keys in that purse?”

  She stared blankly, then nodded.

  Delayed response—she must be in shock. Or I really had concussed her.

  She unzipped the purse and dug through it. A second later she pulled out her keys.

  “Okay good. Put them back and keep it zipped up. Don’t want anything important falling out.”

  She nodded and did as I asked. “How are we going to get outside? We can’t go that way.” She gestured at the stairwell door. “The— That thing will get us.”

  “The warden’s office,” I said, the idea coming to me suddenly.

  I had only been in there once, but remembered seeing a window, and it had stuck with me, because there were no bars on it. I had thought about how easy it would be to just crawl out to freedom.

  Of course, there were still the forty-foot concrete walls and razor wire to contend with, not to mention the armed guards in the towers.

  “He has a window, doesn’t he? Leading to the outside.”

  She shook her head and shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never been in the warden’s office. I’ve never even met the warden. No, that’s not true. When I first got hired I did. Dr Marden is my boss, not the warden. I go from my car, to the infirmary, and back. Rarely do I take a detour. So I couldn’t say if there is a window in there or not.”

  “Let’s go find out, then.”

  The door to the warden’s office was, unsurprisingly, locked.

  I looked at the nurse. “Don’t suppose you have a key to this.”

  She thought for a moment, then shook her head.

  “Right.” I took a deep breath. This was going to hurt.

  I lifted my bare foot, wishing for heavy boots, felt the wound on my thigh stretch, then kicked the door where the latch met the strike plate.

  The door bulged, but didn’t give.

  “You shouldn’t be exerting yourself,” the nurse said. “You’re injured.” She still sounded shocked or concussed, as though she were reciting lines from a script.

  “We need to get in there, and you’re not gonna be able to kick it down.”

  “I did judo.” She pushed me out of the way and positioned herself in front of the door.

  “You’re gonna hurt yourself,” I said, trying to keep the pain from my voice. Though I’d only kicked the door once, my side and back were already paying for it.

  The running hadn’t hurt them, but apparently I didn’t have enough adrenaline pumping through me to mask the pain from this latest abuse.

  She kicked the door once, and it flew open with a bang, a screw from the strike plate flying loose and hitting me on the cheek.

  “Holy shit!” I said. Now I was the one in shock.

  That door flew open like a battering ram had hit it.

  She shrugged. “You weakened it for me.” Then she grinned.

  Well, at least she didn’t sound like a robot anymore, even if she kicked like one. Maybe taking action, doing something useful, had snapped her out of it.

  Action, not reaction, I heard the old man say in my mind.

  I scanned the warden’s office. Finding it empty of any monsters, I motioned the nurse in, then closed, but couldn’t lock, the door she had just busted open, so I dragged a big chair from one side of the warden’s desk and propped it against the door handle.

  I gestured at the window. The unbarred window. “Hallelujah.” I headed to it, and pulled it open.

  It opened without protest, and there wasn’t even a screen to block our egress.

  What there was, however, was about a thirty-foot drop to the ground.

  There was no ledge below us, nothing to hop onto to shorten the drop. “Fuck.”

  I poked my head out and looked to either side.

  A sheer wall greeted me. Not even a stucco one, but smooth concrete. Absolutely nothing to grip onto.

  It might not have been a problem for Spider-Man, but anyone else was screwed.

  I pulled my head back in. “Look for something to make a rope with,” I told her.

  We searched the office, but other than a spare suit shirt and a hat rack, there was nothing to aid our escape.

  “There has got to be stuff in the other offices,” she said.

  I nodded, and headed for the door.

  She darted in front of me, putting a hand on my chest to stop me. “No. You need to stop moving around. You haven’t healed yet. You’ll reinjure yourself. You’re no good to me dead. Stay here.”

  “But—”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll come running back if I need your help.”

  I glared at her.

  She rolled her eyes, another sign the shock had worn off. I was just glad I hadn’t given her a concussion, though she still had dried blood on her face. “Fine, you search the office across the hall, I’ll look in the others. But don’t exert yourself too much. I don’t even have any medical supplies to treat you with.”

  “I’m surprised you care so much about a felon.”

  “You’re not a felon to me.”

  “What am I then?”

  She was silent for a moment, and I thought she might have reverted back to her robot ways. Then she said, “You’re my patient. My responsibility. And I’m not about to let one of my patients die. I’ve never had one die on me, and I don’t plan on ever having one die on me. That’s a life goal.”

  “So I guess you don’t plan on ever taking care of the elderly then.”

  5

  I looked down the hall at the door to the stairwell. I didn’t see the eyeless guard, and I got the impression he wasn’t the kind of person—the kind of thing—to lie in wait.

  I also got the impression that there was something else more important he had to do. Something that involved going down, not up.

  I shook my head.

  Keep it together, Gage, I told myself. Don’t go thinking you can read an alien’s mind.

  The office across from the warden’s was similarly empty. Except it didn’t even have a chair on the other side of its solitary desk.

  I did find an unopened bottle of water and several candy bars in one of the drawers. I lifted the front of my hospital gown and dropped the water and candy there, creating a makeshift kangaroo pouch.

  Exiting the office, my search of it coming up with nothing but the candy and water, I saw the nurse approaching, holding a bundle of towels in her arms.

  She stopped when she saw me, looked me up and down, then walked into the warden’s office.

  I followed her.

  She dropped the towels she was carrying onto the floor beside the window.

  “Where’d you get all those?” I asked, setting the water bottle and candy bars down on the desk.

  She bent over and picked one up, shaking it out, then holding it up so I could see it.

  On the front was
a line of colorful text.

  It took me a second to realize it was upside down. I tilted my head to the side, trying to make sense of it, which caused her to spin the towel around and look.

  She grunted, flipped it around, and held it right-side up for me.

  “Finley Prison?” I read. “Are you kidding me? They had prison towels made?”

  She shook her head. “Probably some advertising company sent them. They do that all time. Pens and T-shirts usually. Coffee mugs. I’ve seen towels. Mostly hand towels, a couple beach towels. Never seen towels like this though. Not sure what they hope to accomplish by it. But their loss is our gain. They were sitting in a box in—” She stopped, staring blankly at me. “—in Mary’s closet. Mary and I are friends. We go drinking sometimes. Not really drinking, but to a restaurant where we get drinks and appetizers. Anyway, she’s head of advertising.”

  “Prisons have advertising departments?”

  “Not advertising departments, just people. At least ours does.”

  I shook my head. “Whatever. It’s good timing.”

  I propped the chair against the door again and we worked together to tie all the towels end to end.

  When we were done, I looked down at our work. “This might not be enough.”

  “It’ll have to be,” she said.

  I looked up at her, and found myself smiling. “You know, I think I like you.”

  “Good. If you don’t die on me, maybe I’ll like you too.”

  “You’ve got a deal.”

  We pushed the warden’s desk next to the window, and tied one end of the makeshift rope to it, then tossed the other outside.

  It wasn’t quite long enough to reach the ground, going only about twenty feet down.

  “I don’t know about this,” she said. “You’re still injured. A drop like that could really hurt you. So could climbing.”

  “Staying here could really hurt me.”

  “That’s another thing. You’re technically breaking out of prison. And I’m helping you. I’m not supposed to do that.”

  “No, we’re running away from monsters. No one’s going to care. I think that’s well within reason. If there was a flood, would I be escaping if I tried to not drown?”