Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,152

in the compartment, shoving them into pockets on my tactical pants and handing some to Dev to carry, too. The grenades would burn long enough to actually destroy the zombies, if we could cut them up first so that they didn’t catch us, or the hospital, on fire. It was looking at Edward’s extending magazines that gave me the idea. I grabbed his, and mine, and an extra cross-draw bag because Dev and I couldn’t carry all of them in the pockets, or even the MOLLE straps on the vests. Usually it was overkill to travel with this many magazines for the ARs, but tonight it might just get the job done.

We shoved everything back in the truck. Dev shut the back. I hit the key lock and without asking each other we ran back to the hospital. The world blurred past as I tried to keep up with Dev. He was a foot taller and a lot of that was leg, oh, and the whole weretiger thing, too, but I wasn’t far behind as we whooshed through the doors.

The nurse who had smiled at Dev looked even paler, eyes huge in her face. ‘You’re not human, are you?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Human’s overrated,’ Dev said with another sex-on-wheels smile as we went for the elevators.

My phone rang in my earpiece, ‘Bad to the Bone,’ which had been Edward’s ring tone since Nathaniel put it on as a joke back when I didn’t know how to change it. I hit the button and said, ‘Yeah.’

‘Bring all the extra mags you can,’ he said, and I could hear shooting in the background magnified oddly over the headset.

‘Already have them,’ I said, as we stepped into the elevator.

‘You had the same idea,’ he said.

‘We have enough ammo to cut them into pieces and then …’

‘Use the Euros to burn them in place,’ he finished for me.

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘Yeah,’ he said, and then he laughed that deep, masculine sound that most men reserve for sex or moments more private with the lovers in their lives.

‘I love the way you think, too,’ I said.

He gave that date/sex laugh. I guess there was more than one reason that Donna thought I was his lover. Someone yelled, and a man screamed. Edward said, ‘Gotta go,’ in a voice so serious it was as if the laugh never existed.

I whispered, ‘Edward,’ to empty air.

‘He all right?’ Dev asked.

‘I don’t know. It sounds like the zombies are on top of them.’

Dev holstered his handgun and unhooked his AR from the back of his vest where the MOLLE straps kept it.

‘A head or heart shot won’t do anything but irritate a zombie. We’re going to use the ammo to cut off the arms, legs, anything that makes them mobile, and then decapitate, or explode the entire head. When that’s done we burn ’em.’

‘You and Ted didn’t discuss details; how do you know that’s why he wanted the extra magazines?’

The elevator was slowing. I snugged my AR to my shoulder and said, ‘I just know.’ The doors opened, and a zombie fell into the elevator.

46

Dev yelled like a guy. I tried to tell him don’t do it, it was already armless, but he was already pulling the trigger. He shot the zombie in the head while it was trying to bite his foot. The reverberation of the shot was actually painful in the metal box of the elevator, as if someone had stuck something sharp and hard through my ears.

His hearing was better than mine, and he wasn’t expecting it. He hunched over, free hand to one ear, face grimacing with pain. I didn’t bother trying to say anything; I let him have his moment of disorientation while I stepped over the armless zombie as it tried to push itself to its knees, leaving most of its brains on the floor of the elevator.

I put my shoulder against the open doors to hold them, AR snugged to shoulder, and tried to use my eyes to see what was happening in the hallway while my hearing recovered. I’d learned to push through the disorientation of that kind of noise in small spaces; it let me stand there and see the hallway while Dev was still struggling for his brain to process anything but the pain and shock.

I gave myself a second of eye-sweep to see Nicky’s blond hair and Edward’s white cowboy hat, upright and firing in the direction of zombies, and then I was able to take in the scene.