Torment (Soul Savers Book 6) (18 page)

“Was he really
wearing a hazmat suit?” Blossom asked. I thought he had been,
too.

“Maybe something
toxic’s in one of the cars,” Jax suggested.

“There’s
definitely something wrong,” I said, frowning as I searched the
other mind signatures that had been with us all along, but for some
reason I hadn’t really thought about. Probably because their
thoughts weren’t clear, but jumbled. Incoherent. But not
because they were drunk.

Before I could speak up
about them, we began moving again. Back the way we’d come.

“What the hell?”
Tristan muttered.

“We’re
leaving
?” Sheree asked.

“There are two
cars full of young children back there,” I blurted, perplexed
and now slightly panicked. Were those really child mind signatures?
Like nearly infants? They sure felt like it, but I couldn’t
find a single adult around, except for the engineer … who
seemed to be abandoning them.
Why?
And why did we already head
back when we’d never reached the destination?

“Well, we’re
not going back east. Better jump while we can,” Vanessa said.

Tristan nodded his
agreement and threw the door open. The train picked up speed quickly,
so we all sprang without another thought and landed on a grassy
embankment. I ran down the hill for the cars of babies. At least they
sat in passenger cars and hadn’t been piled into cargo boxes.
And when I arrived, I saw they weren’t babies. Children, yes,
but not infants. Their mind signatures had confused me.

“What’s
wrong with them?” Dorian asked as the others caught up to me
outside one of the parked cars full of children.

Several faces looked
out at us, many tear-stained. Why were they here alone? Why were we
all being left here, several miles from the city limits and the train
station? I searched outward, but found no mind signatures for miles.
No, wait. A couple lingered here and there. But with the city
landscape rising before us, there should have been hundreds of
thousands in my reach. What happened to the people?

“These kids are
disabled,” Charlotte said, answering Dorian’s question,
not mine. “Either mentally or physically.”

The truth was evident
in the disfigured faces and vacant eyes.

“That’s why
they were abandoned?” I demanded, anger rising. These poor
children!

“This doesn’t
make sense,” Tristan said.

He pushed open a door
and entered the car, then spoke to the kids in Russian. A minute
later, he came down, closing the door behind him.

“Son of a bitch,”
he growled as he kicked at a rock before returning to us. “Only
one kid in there’s capable of speaking and has a basic
understanding of what’s going on. They were sent away from
their parents when the monsters attacked. The engineer told them
their parents would come find them when it was safe. To sit here and
wait.”

“
What?
”
I asked.

“It’s
common in wartime for parents to send their children to safety. It
happened a lot in World War II,” Charlotte said.

“But didn’t
they send them
out
of the cities?” Blossom asked. “To
relatives in the country, where it was safer?”

“Usually,”
Char confirmed.

My anger began to boil.
“So why the hell are these children—more defenseless than
anyone—sent to the biggest city in Russia, by themselves, where
there are probably more
monsters
than anywhere? And then
abandoned
?”

“Was there
something wrong with the train?” Tristan asked me. “Is
that why he uncoupled these cars?”

I threw my hands up. “I
don’t know. The guy didn’t think anything about it. And
apparently not, since he took off with the rest of it. Can you even
do that with trains?”

“If there are
engines at both ends, yeah,” Owen said.

“Which means
there’s an engine at the other end,” I said.

Tristan glanced at me
and nodded. “We can at least get these kids to the station.”

We ran down the length
of a dozen cars to the engine. Tristan and Owen managed to fire it
up, and the rest of us jumped into the car right behind it. It was
stocked full of medical supplies. Why would the engineer leave this
stuff out in the middle of nowhere, too? Surely somebody with a
high-dollar contract on the delivery waited for these supplies. The
situation grew more and more bizarre. More and more disconcerting.

We stood at the door,
watching the landscape go by as it became more and more urban. We
began to slow and missed the platform by a good thirty yards by the
time we stopped, but at least we’d brought the kids this far. A
small crowd of people wearing dingy clothes, many ripped and raggedy,
poured through the station’s doors, pushing each other out of
the way as they swarmed toward the train.

“Must be their
parents,” Tristan said as he and Owen ran up to us. “Let’s
get out of here before someone recognizes us.”

We jumped from the car
and hurried down the tracks, away from the station and the crowd.

“Why would you
bring them here?” A man with a thick Russian accent yelled from
the roof of a building on the far side of the dozens of tracks. His
voice sounded a lot like Solomon’s old buddy Evgeny, and his
mind signature confirmed it. Bullets started hitting the ground at
our feet, spraying gravel at our legs and erasing any doubt. We took
off in a sprint. “Yeah, you run, you sick fucks!”

We dashed across
several lines of tracks and then up the hill that led away from the
station and into the city. As we crested the embankment, I glanced
over my shoulder to make sure the children were okay. Something felt
off with the crowd, but I couldn’t figure it out. Well, besides
the facts that bruises and cuts covered many of them and dry blood
stained their clothes and crusted on their skin. They must have been
through hell and back with the Daemoni attacks.

Tristan and Dorian
tugged at my hands, and I ran off with them, out of the train depot,
down the street, and into the heart of a bad section of the city.
Graffiti covered the dingy gray buildings. Homeless people loitered
everywhere on the sidewalks—leaning against grime-covered
buildings, sleeping half on the curbs and half in the gutters,
wandering aimlessly with slow, bored gaits. The putrid sweet-and-sour
smell of death, urine, and feces hung in the air, stronger here than
it’d been before.

“I think we
should go back to the train station,” Blossom said, anxiety
filling her tone. She held the collar of her shirt over her nose and
mouth. “Find another train headed out the way we want to go.”

Jax snorted. “You
mean, where the bloody hunter is?”

“I have a guy
here who can get us out on a plane,” Tristan said. “He’s
on the other side of the city, though.”

He began moving quickly
down the sidewalk, and we followed closely behind, keeping our group
tight. Tristan and his guys—he had them all over the world,
able to serve in all sorts of not-quite-legal ways, from creating
false identifications to stowing us away on trains and planes.

“Something’s
seriously wrong here,” Vanessa said, her brass knuckles already
on her fists as her eyes darted around. How many times would we say
it before we really believed it? “These aren’t people.
They don’t smell right.”

I grabbed the hilt of
my dagger on my hip and thumbed the amethyst to make it appear as we
passed a homeless woman who sat listlessly against the building, her
head lolled to the side. Her skin shone a sickly greenish-gray,
making her look dead. A newborn vampire in transition? Sheree’s
claws came out, and so did everyone’s fangs. Then the bag
lady’s eyes opened, blood seeping out of them and her ears. Her
pupils were cloudy, as though she had the worst case of cataracts I’d
ever seen. Her mouth dropped open, and then she snapped it closed.
Broken bits of teeth fell through her lips.

“She smells
dead,” Solomon said even as the woman slowly pushed herself to
her feet and snapped her jaw again.

Another body that had
been lying by the curb began to move, looking up at us. Blood leaked
from his cloudy eyes, too. All the other homeless became more
animated. All of them turned toward us, all with blood leaking from
their orifices.

“Ebola?”
Char asked, and she twisted her fingers in the air. Something
invisible clamped against my face, like a mask. “Don’t
touch any of them. Tristan, we need to get out of here.
Fast
.”

Her voice sounded
muffled, and although I couldn’t see them, she must have put
masks on all of us.

“
They
sure
want to touch
us
,” Blossom squealed as one moved closer
to her and lifted its arm up, reaching for her face.

Panic overcame me as
realization hit.

“They don’t
have mind signatures,” I whispered. “Neither did the
crowd at the station.”

“None?”
Solomon asked, narrowing his eyes at me.

I shook my head. “I
didn’t sense them when the train stopped the first time, and I
don’t sense them now.”

My heart picked up
speed at the thought of what this could possibly mean.

Vanessa let out a list
of profanities. “We gotta get the fuck out of here!”

“
Run!
”
I shoved on Tristan’s back while grabbing Dorian’s hand.
We sprinted down the block, jumping over motionless bodies, snaking
around standing ones, all of them seemingly asleep, or even dead, but
coming to consciousness as we passed. We rounded a corner to find a
large crowd two blocks down.

Someone yelled
something in Russian, a man’s voice coming from our right—one
of the few mind signatures I’d picked up on earlier. Not the
hunter, thank God. Tristan stopped in his tracks, and the rest of us
plowed into him.

“He said they’re
all sick down there,” Tristan said. The man, sitting at a
second story window over the shop next to us, continued talking, his
voice rising with panic. “He says we need to get out of the
streets. Everyone’s sick. This entire part of the city came ill
within days, and it’s been quarantined. No, wait. He says …”
He paused and looked back at me with his brow furrowed. “He
says they’re dead, not just sick.”

My heart went from
racing to a full stop. My eyes felt like they’d popped out of
my face. That explained the lack of mind signatures. “Zombies,
Tristan? He’s saying they’re freaking
zombies
?”

“The psychopath
actually did it,” Vanessa muttered under her breath, but I was
still stuck on what Tristan said to ask what she meant.

“You said there
was no such thing as zombies!” I accused my husband. I’d
actually asked him once.

“I said there’s
no such thing unless the Daemoni decide to create them,” he
corrected.

“And Lucas did
it.” Vanessa’s voice filled with a mixture of disbelief
and … awe? I spun around to stare at her. “He’d
had mages working on special strains of super-contagious viruses,
like Ebola, adding necromancy magic to the mix. I never thought he’d
use it. Looks like he actually released something here, though.”

The man in the window
said something.

“He says it
started down there,” Solomon said, and our eyes followed to
where the man pointed, toward the crowd. Beyond them rose a large,
non-descript gray building. “Russia’s equivalent of the
CDC.”

We didn’t have
time to figure out what this meant. As though it possessed a hive
mind, the crowd down the street began moving toward us all at once.
The ones we’d passed moments ago came around the corner, joined
by many more. And once these zombies, or whatever they were, got
moving, they didn’t lurch along, slow and klutzy. They moved
nimbly—and with speed.

“The children,”
I shrieked. “We left them!”

“Flash,”
Charlotte said, and I thought for the first time ever, I heard panic
in her voice. “We
have
to flash out of here.”

“We’ll get
trapped, though!” Blossom screeched.

The zombies charged at
us from all directions, their stinking, rotting flesh right in our
faces now. My stomach heaved, and my heart flew into a gallop at the
same time. We were already trapped, I thought as I slammed my dagger
into one’s skull, and the body dropped, only to be replaced by
another animated corpse. My blade slid into this one’s eye
socket, but again, when it fell, another began climbing on top of it
to get to me. Their breaths smelled of days-old death. Air rattled in
their rotting throats and lungs. I sliced and jabbed, killing them
once and for all, but too many had amassed for us to keep up with. We
twisted and waved our hands, and several flew away, but there were
always more sprinting down the roads at us. Tristan’s paralysis
power didn’t work on them, and the mages’ spells had no
effect, either. The dark necromancy magic made them immune.

“No choice,”
Tristan said as he grabbed my free hand while looping his arm around
Dorian. “Follow my trail.”

“Wait!” I
tugged on his hand. “What about those children?”

He flashed without
answering me, taking Dorian with him and leading me. We appeared back
at the train station. The passenger cars where the children had been
sat empty. A crowd of zombies kneeled on the ground now, tearing
bloody chunks of flesh from bone. My brain tried to make sense of the
scene, noticing the bones seemed too long to belong to those
children, but my stomach didn’t care. It churned, and I had to
break away from our group to throw up.

“Something’s
not right,” Owen said as he surveyed the train cars with those
three lines between his brows.

I wiped my mouth. “You
think?”

“I mean—”

The rumble of a jet
sounded in the distance, quickly approaching. We all looked up as
several planes descended, barely missing the tops of the tall
buildings. Rivers of fire streamed from their tail ends, shooting
into the city around us, and the sounds of inhuman screeching filled
the air.