Read Online Haven by Laury Falter - Free Book Online Page A

notice what Harrison already had seen. The slide was back. I was out of bullets.
    “Run, Kennedy!” he yelled, just as the noise reached my ears. The distant thundering steadily grew louder until the floor shook beneath my feet.
    It dawned on me that he wasn’t concerned about the woman; not nearly as much as those who were coming down the hall behind her.
    The woman was on her knees now, shoving herself unevenly to her feet.
    “Kennedy!” Harrison barked, but my instinct was to pull out the throwing stars from the back of my pocket and send them into the woman’s head.
    And that’s what I did.
    Her head wobbled and she stumbled back, her eyes flipping upward until they were white, as if she were attempting to see what was protruding from her head. As she fell, despite the roar of feet rapidly coming at us, Harrison stopped long enough to take hold of the stars, place a foot on her hip, and pull the two apart. His force shoved her out of the way of the automatically closing door.
    When Harrison turned to find me standing there, he shouted, “Go, Kennedy! Damn it!”
    But it wasn’t until I saw him moving, following his own instructions, that I turned and ran down the steps. The rumbling that had started as nothing more than a patter was now vibrating the walls. They had reached the door before it could close and were now inside the stairwell. I realized this on a subconscious level as I aimed my attention at taking two to three steps at a time. Harrison did the same, keeping up behind me. I had a feeling he could pass me, but he never did, remaining a buffer in case the others caught up. At the bottom, I shoved open the door, ignoring the heartbeat pounding in my head, and scanned the garage for Old Boy. He was still there, with Doc in the front seat. Mei’s eyes opened wide when she saw us, in the way mine must have when she was racing from her house. She knew what was coming.
    I literally dove into the backseat with Harrison behind me, and he slammed the door closed as Doc took off. Looking back, I watched the flood of people, all of them bloodied and frenzied, swarm from the door we’d just come through.
    In an attempt to settle my nerves, I turned away, toward Harrison, where I found him evaluating me again. “How’s your arm?” I asked because I was sincerely interested and because I felt the need for a deterrent.
    “Fine,” he said, tucking it into his stomach to keep the blood from dripping onto anything but his shirt.
    “We need to get to a hospital,” I announced.
    “What?” Doc said in a nervous, high pitched shrill. Mei turned in her seat.
    “A hospital,” I reiterated.
    “No,” Harrison muttered.
    “No?” I demanded a little louder than intended. “You need to be stitched up.”
    “The hospitals won’t be safe,” Harrison pointed out flatly.
    I stared at him, shocked. “You need stitches. You need antibiotics.”
    “It’ll heal,” he said and added in a mumble while leaning his head toward the window, “It always does.”
    I felt my mouth hanging open from shock and quickly snapped it closed.
    Overhearing my reaction, or perhaps sensing my tension, he explained, “Look around. These people are sick. Where’s the first place you go when you’re sick?”
    Even though it was a rhetorical question, Doc answered, “The hospital.”
    That was enough said on the subject.
    After a few seconds of silence, Harrison brought up a new one.
    “You should have ran, Kennedy.”
    “I did.”
    “Not when I told you.”
    Cleverly avoiding the question, I insisted, “You knew they were coming long before I did. How?”
    His eyes flicked uneasily to Doc and Mei in the front seat.
    “How?” I pressed.
    “I was closer to them.”
    “Not by more than a few feet,” I countered.
    Realizing I wasn’t going to let it go, he replied only with a stiff shrug before looking back out the window. “I have good hearing.”
    Spectacular audible range. All right, so he has a keen sense of hearing. Why