Affliction (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter) - Laurell K. Hamilton Page 0,154

a relay race and we’d made a smooth pass of the baton. He slammed it home, and I moved back out to the circle with him on one side and the freshly armed Nicky on the other.

Dev was finally up and shooting on the other side of Nicky. When we all survived I’d talk to him about how long it took him to orient himself, and we’d have to figure out some kind of training to prepare him and any other newer guards for the serious shit, but that was later. Tonight, right now, it was just shooting zombie heads, blowing shoulders away from bodies, or shooting their legs out from under them, anything to make them immobile and disarmed.

Most of the time in a firefight you are full of adrenaline, on hyper alert, but sometimes battle becomes a grind of horrific sameness. You begin to shoot without really thinking, your body is almost on automatic, because it’s just too much – too much noise, too many visuals, too much to see, hear, feel, from the sweat that begins to trickle inside your vest, to your hands actually aching from shooting so much. I’d have changed guns just to rest my hands, but the AR was the right tool for the job, and there was a lot of job to do. But when you go to that battle haze, it’s all distant, echoing in your gun-deafened ears, your body vibrating with the force of shooting, fighting, hitting when an enemy gets too close for anything else. It’s beyond survival mode; it’s mechanical, exhausting, with moments of breath-stealing terror sprinkled like chocolate chips in a cookie, reminding you how much you want to live and how much you have to make the other guy die to do that.

It’s in moments like this that mistakes can happen; you see a face and you just fire without processing that this new stranger wasn’t a soldier, but you’ve killed so many, and had so many people try to kill you in this one breathless, horrible fight, that it’s only later you think, Wait, did I miss something? Did I shoot a face that wasn’t trying to kill me? Until you have been that exhausted, that traumatized by sheer fighting, you can’t understand how such a thing can happen. It is inexplicable to most people, because you haven’t been there, and until you wade through bodies, hands grabbing at you, teeth snapping at you, trying to kill you with whatever weapons they have left, you don’t understand that there comes a point when everybody who isn’t ‘us’ is a ‘them,’ and you just shoot them.

If you’ve never reached that moment of battle haze, then you don’t understand what’s happening, which is why when the elevator doors opened behind us, and I knew Dev was back there, I turned away from the fight to check on him, because he was my responsibility, and that’s what you do when you bring a greenhorn to a slaughter fight.

It was SWAT in full gear, and I watched Dev bring his AR to bear on them. There wasn’t time to yell, and he likely wouldn’t have heard me anyway; our hearing was blasted at this point. I aimed in front of him, between them and him. It wasn’t even a conscious thought, it was see, act; even saying I reacted was too slow for what happened in my body, because it acted before my brain caught up to the rest of me.

It made the SWAT guys aim at me, so I held a hand up to show I was okay, but it made Dev startle and look back at me. I had a moment to see his eyes refocus, and then he watched SWAT spill out of the elevator and I knew he’d be all right. I turned back to shoot more zombies, but there was nothing standing in front of me. The hallway was full of wriggling bits and pieces, but nothing left that could run at us or do much except try to grab on to our feet with dismembered hands. It was the stuff of nightmares, but it wasn’t actively going to kill us, not anymore.

It was Yancey from the police station who pulled up his face protection enough to say, ‘Looks like we missed it.’ If I hadn’t been able to watch his lips move, I’d have never known what he was saying.

‘You haven’t missed it; we still have to burn the motherfuckers,’ I said.

‘You’ll set