Slow Burn (Book 3): Destroyer by Bobby Adair Page B

metal supports on the wall and climb around to it.”
    “Too far to reach, huh?”
    “It’s a six- or seven-foot gap over a hundred-and-twenty foot drop. You could jump it if you wanted to.” The barest smidgen of a smile crossed Dalhover’s face.
    “My balls aren’t that big,” I responded. “I was always good on the monkey bars as a kid. I’ll climb it.”
    Dalhover slipped the business end of the crowbar in the seam between the elevator doors and pried back and forth to create a gap.
    I stepped back to give him room to work.
    He got his fingers in the gap, handed me the crowbar, then used both hands to pull the doors open.
    As the narrow gap expanded from one inch to two, then suddenly a dozen, several sets of white fingers wrapped around the doors’ edges from the inside out. That took us both by surprise.
    Dalhover lost his balance and fell back.
    Infected howls poured through the gap as hands pushed the doors all the way open. The dark interior walls of the shaft were crawling with Whites.
    “Shit!” I drew my machete as a white face popped out past the door and looked down at Dalhover.
    I jumped over and hacked, cutting a diagonal chasm across its face. Blood erupted from the wound along with an enraged scream that followed the White as it fell back into the shaft.
    Dalhover yelled something, but my focus was on another White trying to climb out on the far side of the doorway. I swung the machete in an arc to the right and cleaved the infected’s hand between the fingers. The hand lost its grip and gravity pulled him down the shaft.
    Howling swelled up the shaft. The frenzy was on.
    A pair of feet dangled down from the top edge of the elevator doorway. I hacked across the ankle and blood poured out.
    Two heads came up from below. Neither survived long enough to get more than an arm through the door. I felt confident for about two seconds, believing that I could hold them off with the machete while Dalhover figured out how to fix the problem we’d just created. Movement to my left snuffed the life out of that line of thinking.
    After seeing the first elevator door slide open, I guessed that the infected had enough brain capacity to apply that same solution to opening the second set of doors in the two-elevator wide shaft. Machete time was over.
    “God damned Smart Ones,” Dalhover groused. He fired the first shots, hitting the Whites squirming through the gap between the other set of doors.
    “They’ll be coming through all of the elevator doors on these shafts now!” Dalhover shouted with the decisive authority of a man who’d been listened to his whole life. “The two floors above will get ambushed!”
    I grabbed my last hand grenade, pulled the pin, got as close to the elevator door as I dared, and tossed it underhand up into the shaft above.
    Sergeant Dalhover understood immediately my intent and the risk of it. He was already scampering away from the elevator bank when I turned to follow. I had nothing by which to gauge where in the shaft the grenade would detonate. I only knew that I didn’t want to be standing in front of the open elevator door if it happened there on its fall back down. I ran after Dalhover and just made it around the corner when the blast reverberated through the halls. Sergeant Dalhover and I immediately spun on our heels to go back.
    “I’ll hold them at the elevators as long as I can!” he shouted at me before we started to move. “You need to warn them upstairs! The Smart Ones will be coming through the elevators.”
    I sprinted back toward the nurse’s station. The halls seemed to narrow and enhance my sensation of speed. I felt like I was flying, which was exactly what I needed to be doing.
    Behind me, Dalhover’s rifle fired.
    At the T-intersection with the main hall, I looked right and left. The guards that had been at each end were running at full speed toward me and were close.
    “The infected are in the elevator shafts!” I shouted. “They’ve figured