Стефани Перри - Nemesis

an impact grenade clenched in shaking hands, the ring already pulled; Carlos realized that the man must have groaned to cover the sound, and some part of him admired the clear thinking, all in the instant before he started to back up, hands still raised. The grenade was an RG34, the same kind that Carlos had tucked in his vest, and he wanted as much distance as he could get.

Make it look good...

"I'm an excellent shot, I have a generous nature, and I floss every day," Carlos said, backing up another step, trying to appear that he was deeply afraid and covering it up with bravado.

"Such a waste this will be," Nicholai said, smiling, extending his arm.

Throw the goddamn thing!

"Why?" Carlos asked quickly. "Why are you doing this?"

Nicholai's smile stretched into a grin, the same predatorial grin that Carlos had seen him wearing on the transport, what felt like a million years before.

"I possess leadership qualities," Nicholai said, and for the first time, Carlos could see the insanity in his murky eyes. "That's all you need to know—"

"Die!"the bleeding man screamed. Carlos caught a flicker of motion behind the shelf, and then Carlos was diving sideways, trying to get behind a table as a window broke and—

—BOOM,folders and books were airborne and exploded materials rained down, wood and paper and chips of metal, the heavy shelf tipping over with a thundering creak. It slammed to the floor with a tremendous crash, and then everything was quiet, and shit was everywhere.

Carlos sat up, one arm wrapped around his throbbing rib cage, tears of pain in his eyes. He blinked them away and got to his feet, grabbing the revolver he'd dropped as he stood up.

Nicholai was gone. Carlos kicked his way through the debris to the corner, remembering that a window had shatteredbefore the grenade exploded. Although it was dark and rainy outside, Carlos could see the roof of an adjacent building one floor below.

Bam! Bam!

Carlos jumped back as two rounds hit the outer wall, hardly a hand's width from his face. He silently berated himself for sticking his head out the window, like some half-wittedbaboso. He backed away from the window and turned, only to find himself staring at the burnt, bloody remains of the grenade thrower.

"Gracias,"Carlos said quietly. He wished he could think of something else to say, but then he decided it would only be useless symbolism; the guy was dead, he wasn't hearing shit.

Carlos walked back across the room, thinking, wondering how he was going to catch up with Nicholai. It wasn't going to be easy, but there was no other choice—

—and he saw the glint of metal from the corner of his eye, and stopped. He blinked, feeling a kind of awe as he realized what he was looking at—and then scooped it up, a giant weight lifting from his shoulders and from around his heart.

He was going to be able to save Jill. The crazypen-dejo had dropped the vaccine.

* * *

Nicholai moved quickly through the rain toward the front of the hospital. Everything is fine, he's dead at the push of a button and I control it, I can shut down the power and trap him —

He laughed out loud suddenly, thinking about the containment tubes in the basement where the Hunter Gammas were stored, each floating in its own see-through womb. Shut down the power and there was automatic drainage so they wouldn't drown in the unaerated fluid.

Die, or fight and die, Carlos.Nicholai had been smart, he'd thought ahead and now all he had to do was hit a few switches and Carlos would be in the dark and the amphibious Hunters would be squelching toward him, and maybe Carlos would actually be dead before the hospital was blown apart, but he was dead no matter what

Jill was sleeping again, and she was sick. Hot and achy, and her dreams were gone, pulsing, squirming shadows in their place. Shadows with textures, rough and wet. Nausea warred with an unfulfilled emptiness, with a dying thirst and a growing heat.

She rolled to one side and then the other, trying to find relief from the crawling itch that had embedded itself in every part of her, that made the ugly shadows get bigger as she slept on.

Carlos found needles, syringes, and a half bottle of Betadine in a doctor's office on the third floor. He also found a cabinet full of drug company samples and was trying to decipher the labels, looking for a mild painkiller, when the lights when out.

"Shit." He put down the sample, trying to get his bearings in the sudden dark. It took him about a second and a half to decide it was Nicholai, and a second longer to decide he needed to get out, and get out fast. Nicholai probably hadn't shut down the power just to make him stub his toe in the dark. Whatever Nicholai was planning, Carlos thought he'd take a rain check.

He edged out of the room and into the hall, moving slowly, his hands out in front of him. Just as he reached the stairwell, the hospital's emergency backup lights hummed into soft red life. The effect was otherworldly, the light just bright enough to see by, casting everything in murky shadow.

Carlos started down the stairs, taking them two at a time, thumb on the hammer of the Python. He ignored his aching side, deciding that he'd collapse later, when he wasn't in such a hurry. He only knew of two options for getting out of the hospital—the window Nicholai had jumped from and the front door. There were certainly more, but he didn't want to waste time trying to

find them; in his experience, most hospitals were mazes.

The front door was his best bet. Nicholai probably didn't think Carlos had the nerve to charge straight out of the most obvious exit, or so Carlos hoped.

He'd reached the landing between the first and second floors when he heard a door crash open somewhere far below, echoing up the stairwell, making him freeze. The sound that followed—the furious, piglike battle cry of some distinctly mutant creature—got him moving again. His feet hardly touched the steps, but he still

wasn't fast enough; just as he was bounding down the last flight, a monstrous figure leaped in front of the exit to the ground floor.

It was giant, humanoid, tall and wide and dripping slime. Its body was a dark blue-green, almost black in the dim red light. With its webbed oversized hands and feet and its huge rounded head and mouth, it resembled nothing so much as a mammoth, hideously squashed frog.

Its powerful lower jaw dropped open, and another piercing, squealing screech filled the stairwell, rebounding throughout. Carlos heard at least three more answer the first, a fierce and freakish chorus erupting from somewhere down below.

Carlos opened fire, the first round hitting the metal door and creating a deafening tornado of sound. Before he could squeeze the trigger again, the amphibious creature was springing, squealing as it leaped toward Carlos, stretching its muscular arms wide.

Carlos reflexively dropped, firing as he slid down several steps, rolling to his uninjured side so he could follow the creature's descent. Three, four rounds plugged into the shrieking frog-thing's slimy body as it flew overhead—

—and it was dead by the time it landed, dark gouts of watery, brackish fluid spuming from its spasming body.

Carlos was on his feet running and halfway through the door even as the creature's siblings began their feral, earsplitting lament. Not too hard to kill,

maybe, but he didn't want to consider his chances

if there were three or more of them all leaping at once.

Into the lobby and he slammed the door, saw that it required a key to lock, and he turned to look for something he could use to block it—

—and instead he saw a tiny, blinking white light from across the room, its brightness drawing his gaze from the midst of a shady red ocean of trashed furniture and dead bodies.