The mission
Chapter 28
"You sure this is the door?" A deep voice, muffled through the wood. Leo and Duncan locked eyes immediately — Leo signaled for quiet, buying a few more seconds to listen before deciding anything. Neither of them had a real weapon in reach. Just Duncan's cast iron pan.
"This is stupid," the voice said again, irritation leaking through. The man on the other side had only recently been folded into Alejandro's crew — his camp raided, given a choice between pledging loyalty to the man who called himself king or not surviving the week. Being sent out on fetch duty like an errand boy wasn't exactly the life he'd imagined signing up for, but he kept that to himself.
"Who is it?" Leo finally asked, after the third knock. Two distinct voices outside — worth confirming before doing anything else.
"See, told you people actually lived here. Gotta learn to trust a little these days, huh?" a second voice said, thick New York accent.
"We— it's just— uh, Alejandro sent us. Looking for two guys. One's named Leo. The other one, I forgot his name — something about how he liked his shoes?" the first man said, voice coming out shaky, almost apologetic.
There wasn't much choice but to comply. Leo unlocked the door carefully, careful not to give their guests any reason to get twitchy.
"Hi there. Name's Ted. Used to work as an accountant for First Bank, downtown, before all this." He shook both their hands, overly formal in a way that didn't quite land — the kind of front someone puts on when they're more nervous than they're letting show.
"Duncan. And this is Leo." Leo cut in smoothly. "Shouldn't you be off counting stacks of cash somewhere?" — half a joke, mostly meant to put Ted at ease.
"Aren't we just chummy," the second man said, clearly annoyed at how friendly things had already gotten. Duncan sized him up fast — unwashed, messy hair, the kind of red-rimmed eyes that came with a habit, clothes picked without a second thought. Slum upbringing, if Duncan had to guess. Didn't care what anyone thought of him, and made sure it showed.
"Boss wants your help getting his prize possession across town before something bad happens to it," the second man — Dexter — said, flat and businesslike. "Says last time he gave you a job, you didn't disappoint him. Expects the same this time. Otherwise you're no use to him at all." He said it without any real weight behind it, like he was reading off a grocery list, as all four of them climbed into a black, tinted Jeep.
Neither Leo nor Duncan had realized it yet, but they'd already set a bar for themselves they weren't sure they could clear twice. Neither let it show. Last time, all they'd really had was raw grit and stubbornness. This time, at least, they had something closer to actual knowledge to work with.
Their expressions shifted the second they recognized where the Jeep was heading — straight back toward the mall. The place where they'd first faced a freak as a group.
"Oh. So you've already been here," Dexter said, catching the change instantly, smirking at it.
They parked across from the mall's main entrance, and Dexter laid out the job: somewhere inside was a blue Audi R8, and they needed to retrieve it without a scratch on it. Neither of them had the first idea where in that building it might be. The task felt impossible before they'd even stepped out of the Jeep.
As the sun dropped low, the two of them headed in on foot while the Jeep peeled off behind them, laying on the horn the whole way — deliberately, clearly meant to rattle them, and probably draw every stray set of ears in the area straight toward the mall entrance along with it.
The noise did exactly that. They ducked inside fast, met immediately by dead silence and the thick, airless stench of decay — no ventilation left running anywhere. They tied whatever scraps of cloth they had over their noses just to make it to the hardware section without gagging.
"So where do we even start?" Duncan asked. Leo was already crouched, flipping bodies over one by one.
"You see any security uniforms anywhere?" Leo asked, not really answering him. That caught Duncan off guard — now that he thought about it, there wasn't a single guard among any of the corpses they'd passed. Especially strange near the entrance, where you'd expect at least one to have died trying to coordinate the evacuation.
Curious now too, they kept flipping bodies, hoping to find one. They never did. All they came up with was an axe pried loose from a display case near an emergency fire hose.
Two gunshots cracked out from the second floor, somewhere directly above them.
Someone else was in here. They froze, staying hidden, staying quiet, waiting out five full minutes before finally working their way up the escalator — slow, careful, Leo on point, Duncan watching their backs.
The second floor was quiet when they reached it. They slipped into a clothing store, hoping for a change of clothes — right as a hand shot out of nowhere and locked onto Leo's pant leg. He kicked it loose on reflex, startled enough that it took a second to process what he was looking at.
The hand was fresh. Nothing like the decay on everything else they'd passed tonight. They pulled the body out into the open — a man, bled out from a wound in his neck, clothing from the store's own racks balled up and pressed against it, like he'd tried to stop the bleeding himself and simply run out of time.
"Guess this is the guy we heard earlier," Leo said, studying him. No other wounds anywhere they could see. Which left the obvious question hanging — what was he doing in here, and why alone — right as Leo opened his mouth to actually say it out loud.
A sound cut him off. They dropped into cover immediately as footsteps grew closer, closer, until whatever it was found the body and started feeding. They backed toward the exit in silence, careful with every step — Duncan's hand catching on a piece of bent metal along the way, drawing blood without him even noticing yet.
They thought about dealing with it properly, but they didn't know the building well enough, and the sun had already gone down completely — nothing left to navigate by except whatever moonlight made it through the skylights.
Before either of them could breathe easy, something small moved out of the dark ahead of them.
Leo reacted on instinct, shoving Duncan against one wall and flattening himself against the other, both of them going still, waiting for it to pass. It stopped instead — right in front of them, for a few long seconds.
That's when Duncan noticed the blood from his hand, and understood exactly why it had stopped.
The thing reared back and let out a shriek loud enough to carry through every hallway in the building, loud enough to wake anything still lurking in the dark.
Duncan didn't wait to find out what came after that. He drove his knife straight into its skull before the sound even finished leaving it.
It was already too late.
Somewhere deeper in the mall, a horde was already turning toward the noise.
