Harem Apocalypse: My Seed is the Cure?!

Chapter 351: Atlantic Theatre [4]

Hall 1 was not an improvement on the corridor.I had my back pressed against the double doors, both hands braced against the push bar, feet planted against the floor as the Infected on the other side worked at it, not smart, not coordinated, just persistent weight and momentum that didn’t get tired and didn’t stop. I could hold it. My strength wasn’t the issue.

The issue was the dozen or so already inside the hall with us.

The room stretched back in tiered rows, two hundred seats rising up in the dark toward a screen that hadn’t shown anything in a long time. Moving through those shadows, climbing over seats, stumbling down the narrow stepped aisles toward us, were the ones that had been waiting in here long before we arrived.

Maribel stood a few feet in front of me, steel rod raised in both hands, Glock in her other while also having positioned her small torch light around.

"We need to get out of here," she said, eyes tracking the closest ones coming down the aisle steps.

"Don’t use the bullets yet," I said, keeping the pressure on the doors.

"Then what exactly is the plan?! Because I’m counting at least ten of them and I have a metal stick!"

"Give me the rod."

She turned slightly to look at me, one eyebrow raised, the expression of someone trying to decide if they’d misheard.

"The rod. Hand it to me," I said, reaching out.

She held my gaze for a moment, then passed it over without further argument.

I took it and immediately turned to the doors, sliding the rod horizontally through the handles in one smooth motion. The diameter was almost exactly right, it caught snugly in the narrow gap between both handles and sat flush, effectively locking the doors from this side without a lock. The doors shuddered as the Infected pushed again. The rod flexed slightly but held. The doors themselves were solid, thick wood with metal reinforcement along the frame.

It would hold, long enough, hopefully until they lose interest and leave.

I stepped back carefully, watching it for a moment, then turned to face the hall.

"I don’t have a weapon now," Maribel pointed out from behind me.

"Stay back. I’ll handle them, just keep the light on me."

She didn’t argue, which told me the situation had her more rattled than she was letting on.

I moved up the aisle toward the first one, a heavyset Infected in what used to be a jacket, stumbling down the steps with that lurching, graceless momentum they all had. I stepped into it and swung the axe in a clean horizontal arc. One motion, one result. Blood caught the dim light as the body dropped between the seat rows, folding awkwardly against the armrests.

I was already moving to the next one.

They weren’t grouping up, which helped. The layout worked against them, the narrow rows, the fixed seats, the stepped levels all broke their movement up and forced them toward me one or two at a time rather than in a mass. I worked through them, moving up and across the tiers, clearing row by row. A few had gotten themselves wedged between seats, stuck in the dark, unable to extract themselves properly. Those were easy. The ones on the open aisles were less so, but not by much.

By the time I reached the front stage and dealt with the last one, caught between two seats in the front row, snarling uselessly at me until it wasn’t, I was done. I stood there for a moment in the sudden quiet of it, the only sounds the muffled banging from the corridor outside and my own breathing.

Then I turned, walked back down to the front row, and sat down in one of the seats.

I let my arms rest, felt the ache in my right shoulder from the wind punches in the corridor, and exhaled slowly.

Maribel came down and settled into a seat one over from mine, leaving a single empty chair between us. For a moment neither of us said anything.

"The doors are holding," she said, glancing back toward them.

"Yeah." I watched the rod flex slightly with each push from the other side, then settle. "Good thing you brought that instead of something wooden. Wood would’ve snapped by now."

"Right?" A small smirk crossed her face. "Here you were complaining."

"I did not really complain."

She was about to say something but something moved across her features as her eyes settled on my face. She lifted her hand slightly, hesitated, and pointed toward my cheek rather than touching it.

I reached up and felt it myself. The blood had tracked down from the graze and dried along my jawline, and where the bullet had caught me the flesh was simply gone, a shallow channel of raw tissue.

Now that I was catching up breath and the adrenaline was gone, I felt some pain and along irritating with my sensitive flesh in contact of the air.

"It’s fine," I said, dropping my hand. "It closes up quickly for me."

Maribel was quiet for a moment, still looking at it.

"A few inches," she said. "That’s all. A few inches and you’d have a hole straight through your face."

"And you’d have been spared babysitting duty for the rest of the week," I said.

"Do you find our situation funny right now?" She turned the torchlight directly into my face, which was less than appreciated.

I turned away from the beam.

"You shouldn’t have followed me here," I said.

"I didn’t follow anyone. I made my own choice to come," she replied.

"Marlon sent you and you should have said no," I said. "You still should have said no."

"I am so tired of hearing that." Her voice had an edge to it now, real irritation cutting through. "You know what’s actually annoying? You. Sitting there acting like everyone around you needs to be wrapped up and kept somewhere safe. It’s suffocating."

I tightened my grip on the armrest slightly.

I knew what I was about to say was going to land badly. I knew exactly how it would sound. But I had to say it anyway because this place had something to it that I didn’t like.

"You understand that you’re a burden right now. Don’t you."

Silence fell following that.

Romero’s group had come here, for a reason, which meant whatever was deeper in this building was worse than what we’d already seen. Every floor we went up, every hall we pushed through, the danger wasn’t going to decrease. It was going to compound. And I had no clean exit to offer her, no guarantee, nothing except the knowledge that if something went badly wrong in here I could probably survive it and she almost certainly couldn’t.

I needed her gone. I needed her somewhere that wasn’t here.

I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake I did with Jasmine.

I...was scared of repeating the same mistake and going through that again.

But I’d clearly chosen the worst possible word to say that with, and the look she gave me confirmed it.

A very withering glare in fact.

"You really can be a piece of trash when you want to be," she said quietly, standing up.

"Maribel—"

"Fuck off." She cut me off cleanly and walked away, taking herself several rows back into the dark of the hall, dropping into a seat with her arms folded, her back not quite turned to me but close enough.

I didn’t go after her. I leaned forward, put my head in my hands, and focused on the low throb building behind my eyes. The adrenaline was fading and the headache was moving in to fill the space it left. I let myself sit in it, breathe through it, rest what little I could while the Infected outside continued their dull rhythmic assault on the doors.

Gradually, over the course of maybe half an hour, the banging thinned out. The pressure against the door eased. The Infected were losing interest, drifting elsewhere, drawn by something else or simply wandering the way they did when there was nothing immediate to fix on.

The hall went quiet except for the two of us.

I stood up and looked back at Maribel. She was still sitting with her arms crossed, expression set, not looking at me.

"Let’s move," I said.

She said nothing. Just stood up.

I crossed to the doors, slid the steel rod free from the handles, and tossed it back to her. She caught it without a word.

"We move fast. Straight to the stairs," I said.

A short nod. That was all I was getting.

I pushed the door open, took one breath, and went.

The corridor had thinned out but not emptied. I dealt with the ones remaining quickly, right arm doing the work, short controlled bursts, sending bodies skidding back against the walls. Faster than the axe, easier on the clock. We moved through the gap and hit the stairwell.

I slowed at the base of the stairs, scanning left. No sign of Romero’s group on this level. The corridor that way was empty of people, which meant they’d already pushed upstairs. I didn’t love that. Following in their wake meant walking into whatever they’d already stirred up and hadn’t finished dealing with. But the alternative was leaving Theo and and the other two there.

We went up.

The first floor landing split ahead of us, left toward Halls 3 and 4, right toward Halls 5 and 6. I made the call in a second, eyes dropping to the floor of the right-hand path. Infected bodies scattered along it, freshly put down, a trail of Romero’s progress. And further along, something larger crouched over a shape on the ground, several Infected feeding, slow and absorbed, the body beneath it in a state I didn’t look at too closely. One of Callighan’s men, maybe.

That path had already been through something. Something was still in it.

"This way," I said, turning left.

We came around the corner and I pulled up short.

The corridor to Halls 3 and 4 was packed. Infected filling the width of it, too many to punch through cleanly without noise and time we didn’t have. I was already calculating, already letting the wind build in my arm—

Then my eyes caught something at the far end.

There was no way I could miss it and wouldn’t feel it either.

Standing with its back to us, but enormous. Head nearly brushing the ceiling. Shoulders wider than the frame of a door. Not moving the way the others moved, slower and heavier.

A Hybrid.

Every calculation I’d just been running stopped dead.

I grabbed Maribel’s arm without a word, wrenched the nearest door open, the Hall 3, and pulled her through it, pressing the door shut behind us as quietly as I could manage.