Carrion (The Bren Watts Diaries #1)

Chapter 95

After taking the guards' extra ammunition, I finally loaded Kossa's pistol and Betty with a full mag; eight and seventeen rounds, respectively. I felt a little better having more ammunition before leaving the building, unsure whether the vectors were already inside the mall, but it wouldn't hurt to be more prepared. A picture slipped out of one of the dead guard's jacket, Daniel, and I caught a glimpse of four smiling faces, him standing in front of the Disneyland entrance in Anaheim with a woman and two children, which I presumed to be his family. I frowned, putting the picture back inside his pocket.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned around to find Logan standing over me. "We have a situation. Er, kind of."

"What about?" I asked.

Logan gestured for me to come along, and he led me down to a hall, stopping two doors down. "I think someone's inside the room. I heard shouting earlier, and I thought they're vectors, but I'm pretty sure they're human," he said.

I hesitated for a moment, took out my gun. I didn't know whether to shout or knock, but I ended up doing the latter. It didn't take long to hear not one but several voices inside.

"Please," the voice shouted. "Let us out!"

Peter and Charlie walked over to us. "That's the other prisoners," Charlie said.

"You said there's more than fifty of them?"

"Yeah. The troublesome ones get sent here, sometimes, to, um, re-educate them. The others are in another special building."

I tried to think about what to do with them. For a second, I thought about leaving them there, but then my gut twisted violently, and I knew I couldn't go through with it. There, I made up my mind. I picked up the keys I had seen from Daniel's belt, walked back to the door, and unlocked it.

"I need you all to stand back, okay? No funny business," I said.

Peter tugged at my arm. "Bren, what are you doing? We don't have time for this."

"I can't leave them in there. Besides, we have the keys now."

"They're dead weight."

Logan was about to intervene, but I gestured for him to stop. "They're not going with us, but I sure as hell am gonna give them a fighting chance. It's the least we could do."

I could tell by the look Peter gave me that he wanted to argue more, but he decided against it. He took a step back and equipped his rifle, and Logan did the same beside me. I opened the door.

I aimed my flashlight. Four black men stood by the far wall in a dark room, their faces sunken, stares blank and curious, white armbands wrapped around their biceps as they shrank away from the light. Only one stood his ground, a man who looked like in his late forties, studying me. He must've thought I was not a threat because his shoulders relaxed, whispered something to his companions that I couldn't hear, and they also calmed down. I caught a whiff of sewage to my right, turned, and found a bucket halfway-filled with pee and fecal matter, covered (and failing at that) by a single, flimsy sheet.

"We heard what you did. Though at first one of them did...something to the others," the man said, and something in his voice told me that it happened often than I could imagine. "Are they dead?"

"Yes. Well, the guards in this building anyway."

The man looked me up and down. "Are you here to help us?"

"We're here looking for our friends."

"Ah. The three that came yesterday."

"You know them?"