The Apocalypse Emperor

Chapter 16: The man who ran beside me

"Run."

The voice was Adrian's own.

Footsteps thundered through the darkness. Adrian caught Evelyn's wrist and dragged her toward the service entrance while Hale stumbled behind them, swearing. Something slammed into a wall. Somewhere, metal shrieked against metal.

He didn't look back. He had seen his own face at the end of that corridor, and he had heard it say one of us has to lose.

"Left," Evelyn gasped.

"You know the way?"

"I know this building." She sounded certain, and that bothered him more than doubt would have. "Left. Then the stairs."

His phone light swung across abandoned examination rooms, overturned trolleys, cabinets hanging open. Under the dust and disinfectant lay something sour.

He slowed.

A hospital bed stood in the middle of the hall. Restraints hung from its rails, their buckles stained brown. A sheet covered something beneath.

The sheet moved.

A hand slipped out, fingers twitching, then curling around the railing. A wet, shallow breath rattled under the cloth.

"Keep moving," Hale said.

"Someone's alive."

"Or something wants you to think so."

Adrian knew that sound. He had heard it in the first winter, from lungs filling with fluid while a body kept moving after the person was gone. But the world wasn't supposed to sound like that yet.

He swept the light across the bed. A plastic bracelet lay on the pillow, the print faded but legible: PARTICIPANT 0007. ADMITTED 09/11.

Three days ago.

The figure under the sheet bucked against the restraints. The bed shrieked across the tile, and a muffled scream rose from beneath the cloth.

"Adrian!" Evelyn pulled his sleeve.

They ran.

Behind them, a door banged open. A flashlight beam raked the corridor.

He shoved Evelyn through a door marked STAFF ONLY. Hale slammed it behind them, and they dragged a rusted filing cabinet across it. Something hit the other side and the frame shuddered.

"Stairs," Evelyn said.

They went down. At the third step, Hale stumbled. Adrian caught him and felt warm blood soak through his jacket.

"Your side."

"I'm aware."

"You'll tell me if you're about to die?"

"I'll make it a surprise."

The basement was black. The emergency lights had failed, and Adrian's phone was the only glow. A steel door stood at the end of the corridor under a green EXIT sign.

Locked.

He pried open the manual release panel with his knife and hauled the lever. A click echoed inside, but the bolt didn't move.

"The backup system's controlling it," Evelyn said.

"Then tell it to open."

"I'm a virologist."

Footsteps entered the basement behind them, slow and unhurried.

Adrian raised the knife.

"You're making this harder than it needs to be." His own voice drifted out of the dark.

"Don't answer," Evelyn whispered.

"Why?"

"I don't know what he'll do."

"Evelyn." The voice sounded almost gentle. "Tell him what happens when he remembers."

She flinched, and he saw it. Not fear of the man. Fear of the sentence.

"What happens when I remember?" Adrian demanded.

"You see?" the other Adrian said. "She still chooses what you get to know."

Adrian opened his mouth.

A crash rang from the corridor behind the stranger. The voice stopped. When it came again, it had changed, sharp and urgent.

"Get away from the door."

"What?"

"Get away from the door!"

Adrian threw Hale to the floor and Evelyn against the wall a heartbeat before the steel door buckled inward with a deafening bang. A second impact tore it from its hinges.

Cold air and daylight poured into the basement.

Beyond it lay the ambulance bay. A black vehicle idled outside with its headlights on, and two armed men in unmarked jackets climbed out from behind it.

"Security! Hands where we can see them!"

Adrian didn't think. He seized Evelyn's arm and hauled her toward a narrow maintenance passage beside the doorway. Hale crawled after them.

Gunfire cracked. Concrete exploded above Adrian's head, and a fragment of it opened a hot line across his forearm. He swore through his teeth, dropped the phone, and left it spinning on the floor with its flashlight pointed at the ceiling.

No time.

They burst into a courtyard of weeds and discarded wheelchairs. A chain-link fence separated them from the street. A padlock held the gate.

Adrian beat it with the handle of his knife. Once. Twice. The metal bit his palm.

"Move!" Evelyn shouted.

On the third blow, it broke.

They spilled onto the pavement. A delivery truck swerved around them, its driver shouting through the window. Adrian kept running until the hospital vanished behind a row of warehouses, and only then did he stop and breathe.

Hale slid down a wall, clutching his side. Evelyn bent over her knees, panting. Blood ran down Adrian's wrist and dripped from his fingertips.

Nobody had followed them out.

The men had never given chase. They'd fired just enough to drive them through the door, and the door had been torn open from the inside by the one person who was supposed to want them dead.

"He saved us," Adrian said.

"Or he wanted us out in the open," Hale rasped.

"Those are both true," Evelyn said. "That's what terrifies me."

Adrian looked down at his empty hand. The phone was gone, and so was the flashlight. Somewhere in that building, Participant 0007 was still straining at his restraints.

"Seven," he said quietly. "Admitted on the eleventh. Hale, what is a patient doing in a facility that's been closed for eleven years?"

Hale didn't answer.

"Hale."

"I don't know," he said, and for once it sounded like the truth.

"Adrian," Evelyn whispered. "Don't turn around."

He turned around.

Across the street, a man stood beside a parked car, hands loose, shoulders squared. Same height. Same face. Same scar over the left eyebrow.

But when he lifted his right hand, the wrist was bare.

No band. No pale line where one had been.

He held it up so Adrian could see, turned it slowly in the light, then tapped his bare skin twice.

His lips moved.

Wrong one.

A bus rumbled between them.

When it passed, the man was gone.