“Hmm?”
“I know you’re upset—”
He nodded into my neck.
“—
and you’ve probably been through a lot today—”
He nodded harder.
“But right now I need you to do me a favor.”
He looked up. “What?”
I clenched a fist in his mane and jerked his head back. “Man the hell up!”
“Oh, that’s nice!” he said, wrenching away. “That’s just great! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through?”
“No, and I don’t care.”
“You suck as a master!”
“I am not your master!” I said, pulling a rifle sling over his head and checking out the gun attached to it. Which I supposed he’d been using for a club, since it contained no actual bullets. “Where’s the ammo?”
“Like I know. I got it off a dead aide,” he said, talking about one of the Senate’s human employees. “But I couldn’t stay to frisk him ’cause there was more of those things coming—”
“What are they? Where are the Senate’s people?”
“They’re the Senate’s people! Don’t you get it?” He glanced around fearfully. “It’s like Night of the Living Dead around here, except they aren’t living.”
“Just tell me what you know,” I said, and started stuffing my pockets with grenades. And cut my finger on a freaking cleaver he had wedged up in there.
“I don’t know anything, okay? I just—” He stopped and took a deep breath, I guess for effect. Or maybe because in times of stress, old habits resurface. “I was in the break room, trying to make myself a damned cup of coffee. ’Cause Marlowe had to do something tonight and didn’t have time to yell at—excuse me, interrogate—me some more until tomorrow. But they wouldn’t let me go, not even back to your place to get a change of clothes, assuming that stupid driver ever brought back my luggage. Even with my shirttail out, it’s getting a little drafty in—”
“Ray.”
“Yeah. So they just left me here. And I was gonna make some coffee and then do a little Web surfing, maybe watch some TV. But I’m down in the kitchen and I hear this commotion outside in the hall. So I open the door and there’s one of the guards getting slammed against the wall by this guy. And the guy was like—he was messed up. Blood and stuff everywhere, all oozing and holes and—and he was dead, okay? Not our kind of dead, either, but DEAD dead. And soon the guard was, too—”
“And then he came after you?”
“No, then they came after me. The guard—he gets up, staked, brains splattered all over the wall and everything, but he freaking gets up, and then they see me and they’re fast. But I got the door shut and I know this place like the back of my hand, right? So I managed to—hey, what are you doing?”
“I’m going to need some help,” I said, grabbing his arm and dragging him back toward the door.
“What?” His eyes bugged out. “Are you crazy? I’m not going back in there!”
“I’ll protect you.”
“Yeah, right!” He jerked back. “You got a rifle with no bullets, a handgun and some grenades. And let me tell you something about the grenades—”
“They don’t work too well in close quarters.”
“They don’t work at all!” he said, pulling back as hard as he could—which was pretty damned hard. “Not against those things. They just keep coming! And then you’ve got pieces and blood and ooze and—augghh!”
I’d dragged him to the door and kicked it open, in preparation for shoving him through, but he’d grabbed one of the nearby wooden support beams and was holding on for all he was worth. “No! No, no, no! I’m not—”
“Listen to me! I just need your help for a minute. Then you can hide while I go get Radu.”