Chapter 384: Preparations before the attack on the Golden Nugget [4]

When Marlon finally gave the signal, everyone started moving. Not in one big push either. The groups split off the way we had planned, peeling away into the dark from different sides of the Boardwalk so we could spread around the hotel as quietly as possible and cover the State Marina too. No shouting, no dramatic last words, none of that. Just people checking weapons one last time, adjusting straps, exchanging a few low words, and then slipping off into the night like they had already accepted there was no point wasting breath on anything else.

It had to be a little past two in the morning by then.

There would still be surveillance around the Golden Nugget, obviously. Callighan’s men weren’t stupid enough to leave the place unwatched.

But at that hour, the chance of them expecting a real attack was probably low.

That was the whole point.

If we reached the hotel without raising attention too early, we had a chance to hit first and hit hard. If we made noise on the way there, if someone panicked and fired a gun at the wrong moment, if a group got spotted too soon, then the whole thing would turn into a mess before we even got close to the building.

"We should be going now," Rachel called to me.

I heard her. I just didn’t answer right away.

My eyes kept moving over the people still left around the Boardwalk. Some groups were already gone. Others were just starting to move, gathering themselves before peeling off in their own directions. A few were speaking in low voices, maybe checking the route again, maybe trying to keep each other steady before the first shot of the night. I barely paid attention to any of them.

I was looking for Maribel.

I hadn’t seen her anywhere.

With how much she hated Callighan’s men, I had been sure she would come for this. I kept telling myself maybe I had just missed her in the dark, or maybe she had already left with another group before I noticed. There were enough people moving around for that to happen.

Still, some part of me knew that might not be it.

Maybe she just didn’t want to be anywhere near me.

And honestly, after everything, I couldn’t even blame her for that.

I let out a slow breath through my nose and looked away before I kept searching like an idiot.

Why was I even trying to find her to begin with?

I didn’t have a good answer. Or maybe I did, and I just didn’t like it.

Part of it was guilt, obviously. Part of it was that I wanted to know if she was doing all right. She was a new host for a Dullahan now. It had been five, maybe six days since Atlantic Theatre, and that was long enough for the worry to settle in whether I wanted it there or not. People handled those things differently. Different bodies, different limits, different resistance before stabilization became necessary. There was no exact rule for when someone started doing badly.

So yeah, maybe I was looking for her because I wanted to see for myself that she was still fine.

Or at least still standing.

"Ryan."

Rachel said my name again, closer this time.

When I turned, she was right there beside me, her hand light on my arm, not pulling, just making sure I actually came back to the present. The others were already waiting.

"Right," I said, giving a short nod as I pushed the rest of those thoughts aside. "Let’s go."

Then we left the Boardwalk and started toward the hotel through the dark.

It was a few miles on foot, which would have been bad enough during the day. At night it felt worse. The roads were broken in places, cluttered in others, and every stretch of open ground felt exposed even when you could barely see ten yards ahead. We kept our light use to the absolute minimum. A torch would flash on just long enough to check a turn, a wrecked car, a blocked lane, then go dark again. Most of the time we moved by memory, by outline, by following the person ahead.

Marlon had made the rules painfully clear before we split up. If we ran into Infected, we dealt with them quietly. Blades only. No guns unless things went completely to hell, because one shot in the night could carry a long damn way, and we were trying to reach the Golden Nugget before Callighan’s men realized something was wrong.

To be fair, Marlon and his people had done what they could beforehand. They had cleared parts of the route, blocked off certain paths, and tried to shape the way through so groups like ours had the best chance of reaching position without getting slowed down.

That only helped so much.

Infected didn’t care about plans.

We met some anyway.

Lucy and I were at the front, so they were ours first.

She had a machete with a broad, dark blade that caught the little light there was whenever she moved. I had my hand axe. The first one came shambling out from between two abandoned cars with its head jerking wrong and its feet dragging over broken glass. Lucy reached it before it even really understood we were there. One fast step in, one short swing, and it folded with a wet crack low in its throat. I took the second one a few streets later, burying the axe into the side of its skull before it could stumble into Christopher.

We kept going.

Behind us, Christopher and Cindy stayed close enough to support if needed, but not so close that Lucy and I lost room to move. Rachel and Sydney covered our back, and Ivy kept near them, tense but keeping up. Every now and then I glanced over my shoulder just to make sure the formation held. It did. We moved in a steady line through alleys, across cracked pavement, around rusting cars, between buildings that smelled of mold, stagnant water, and the old sour stink of bodies that had been left too long somewhere nearby.

The few Infected we ran into never got the chance to make real noise.

Lucy was fast. Faster than I expected the first time I saw her fight, and by now I had stopped underestimating that. She didn’t waste movement. Didn’t show off. She just stepped in, cut, shoved the body aside, and kept walking. I matched her pace with the axe, and between the two of us there really wasn’t much for the others to do except stay sharp and watch the angles we weren’t covering.

After a while, as the shape of the hotel started becoming more real in the distance with how bright it was, Lucy eased ahead and took over the lead completely.

That made sense. She knew the Golden Nugget better than the rest of us. More importantly, she knew the way in.

She guided us off the more open street and into a narrower route that curved around the back side approach, leading us through a stretch of low concrete barriers and abandoned service lanes that kept the hotel itself out of direct sight for a while.

Sydney looked at her from a few steps back, suspicious as always.

"You sure you know where we’re going, right?"

Lucy didn’t even slow down.

"I know," she said. "If you want to get through the back of the hotel without pulling attention, the underground parking lot is the best way in. The doors down there are unlocked. You can get inside the hotel easily from there. Once we’re in, I can show you where the Starakian might be. Unless they moved him. And unless he isn’t there."

"No," I said, keeping my voice low as I moved up beside her. "He has to be there. Otherwise they wouldn’t have reinforced the guard around that section and kept the Nexon Battery there."

"That place is important to Callighan," Lucy replied quietly as she kept moving, her eyes fixed ahead while we slipped between rows of abandoned cars and low concrete barriers. "He knows that if he loses the State Marina, he loses the grip he has over Atlantic City. And since I’m not there anymore, he probably put even more people around it. But I can’t say for sure whether that Starakian is still being kept there."

"Callighan kept Zakthar out of Brigantine because he didn’t want an alien race close to him," I replied, keeping my own voice just above a whisper. "He’s not going to change his mind now. He doesn’t know much about them, but he knows enough to understand they’re dangerous. He wouldn’t take that risk."

Lucy glanced at me for a second, then gave a short nod.

"I suppose so," she said. Then after a moment she added, "But why do you want him so much?"

The question came out plain, without accusation, but it still made the others pay attention.

I stepped over a broken chunk of pavement and tightened my grip around the handle of my axe before answering. "Because he’s a Starakian, and he knows things. A lot of things. We can’t leave him in Callighan’s hands for long. He’s already preparing some kind of weapon for him too, and we need to know what and prevent him before he could finish it."

"You were with him for a while, right?" Sydney said, her tone instantly picking up that dry, annoying edge she always seemed to have ready. "What was it, long-term babysitting? Did you get attached to the alien? God, that’s so cliché."

Lucy’s expression hardened at once.

"I’m not attached to him," she replied, sharper now. "Far from it. And I wasn’t personally watching over him all the time."

Sydney lifted a shoulder like she had only asked because she was bored enough to enjoy being irritating.

"Then what kind of guy is he?" Cindy asked before Sydney could say something worse.

Lucy went quiet at that.

We kept walking while she thought about it. Our boots made almost no sound on the damp ground. Somewhere farther off, near another dark line of buildings, I heard the scrape of an Infected dragging its foot over concrete, but it was distant enough not to matter yet.

When Lucy finally answered, her tone had changed.

"Strange," she said. "He looks nothing like a human, obviously, but he still feels... very human in some ways. Just not in the way he thinks. He thinks differently. Talks differently too. He tried more than once to convince me to release him. He kept saying he was there to save us. To help us."

Sydney let out a faint scoff.

"Yeah, that sounds exactly like something a psycho would say. I hope you kicked him in the face at least once."

"Not everyone is like you," Christopher muttered.

Sydney snorted softly without even looking at him. "Maybe not. But maybe he’s an ally of humans in general and not an ally of the higher humans like me and Ryan."

Christopher turned his head toward her in disbelief even while still walking. "Higher human? Then what does that make people like me?"

"Lower human."

"Truly inspiring."

Cindy made a noise that was dangerously close to a laugh, then covered it with a cough when Christopher glanced at her.

Lucy watched them for a second, the faintest crease appearing between her brows, like she still wasn’t fully sure whether Sydney was joking, serious, or some exhausting mix of both. Then she looked back at me.

"That Starakian also said he was there to get rid of people like Gaspar," she said. "I’ll admit it. I hesitated a little when he told me to release him."

That made me look at her more closely.

There wasn’t much room to blame her for that. Gaspar alone was enough to make anybody think twice about what people like us could become in the wrong hands.

"Not every one of us is like Gaspar," I said.

"Yes," she replied after a brief pause. "I saw that. But I still don’t understand how there are so many of you in the same group. Did you all know each other before?"

There was real confusion in her voice now.

From her perspective, it probably looked insane. Me, Sydney, Rachel, Cindy, all ending up together in the same place, all tied in one way or another to the same thing. Anyone looking from the outside would think there had to be a reason for that. Some pattern. Some earlier connection.

But it wasn’t that simple.

And more importantly, it wasn’t something we were going to explain.

Because Lucy was looking at all of us the same way, and that wasn’t really accurate. I was the only actual Symbiote Host here. The real one. King Host of Dullahan. Sydney, Rachel, Elena, Cindy, and now Maribel only carried a fragment of Dullahan, not the whole thing. They were linked to it, yes, but not like me. Not in the full sense.

And outside of Gaspar, I still hadn’t even met another true Host. I mean I hadn’t even met him yet actually so I met no other Symbiote Host yet.

"You’re asking too many questions," Sydney said flatly before I could answer.

Lucy looked at her and understanding that none of us wanted to answer her, she didn’t push.

"Fine," she said, and turned forward again.

After that, the talking thinned out.

We kept moving through the dark with Lucy leading us, taking the narrowest streets and the routes with the most cover.

The Golden Nugget got bigger by slow degrees as we closed in.

By the time around twenty minutes had passed, we were moving fully on caution alone, every step placed carefully, every breath quieter than it should have needed to be.

Then at last we reached it.