One of them spat into the dust. “What the hell kind of gun is that?”
Crap, I’d brought the Winchester. “An old one.”
“It still shoots? Shit.”
The commanding officer climbed out of the tank. “Why’d you call the…” Hammond’s expression darkened when he saw us. “Son of a bitch, you’re still here?” He climbed down from the tank, and I realized he had blood splashed across most of his uniform. “Why did you stay?”
I pointed at the building behind me. “You told us to stay!”
“And you did?” The bandage around his hand leaked blood, and he wiped it irritably against his fatigues. “You stayed here? You got any fucking idea what’s going on out there? You’re fucking nuts.”
“We’re beginning to get that impression ourselves.” Tony had the dog by the scruff of her neck.
One of the soldiers sat down heavily, resting his head in his hands. Hammond didn’t seem to notice. “You guys gotta get out. They’re a few days behind us. Maybe less if they go after Arkle’s division. But they’re coming.”
“Who?”
Tony leaned over and slapped Dax upside the head again. “Who do you think?”
“Who?” I thought Hammond might smack Dax, too. “Who? Everyone who got too close to that crater, that’s who. Thousands of them. They’re a mess. Some of them are burnt to a crisp, missing limbs, missing their minds for sure…they marched on us. Didn’t listen when we said to stop. Just kept on coming, and biting, and…” He tugged at the bandages swathing his hands—bloody, pus-soaked ruins of cloth that probably harbored infected wounds. “Arkle’s men were hit bad. We split up…but there’s not enough of us, and the radiation…they’re dead, I swear it, they’re dead, but they’re walking…Arkle was gonna chopper out the wounded, but all that shit in the air…”
So the Sea Stallion had been theirs.
The sitting soldier’s head dipped down to his chest. Another soldier crouched next to him.
“I don’t know what to tell you people.” He shook visibly, fumbling with his bandages. “All I know is that rock brought something with it when it fell out of the sky, and the dead aren’t staying dead. They’re fucking following us. Get out of here while you can.”
“Sir!” The other soldier straightened up from his fallen comrade. “He’s dead, sir.”
“Dammit.” Hammond pulled his pistol out of his belt and approached the downed man. “Let’s assemble for a second.” He waited for the other six men to gather around, then bowed his head. “Dear Father of Heaven, we commit our compatriot’s soul to your hands, or we try to, and may we say that if this is your idea of a gigantic joke, you are one fucked up motherfucking deity. Leonard, this shit was not your fault. Rest in peace.” He cocked the pistol, pointed it at Leonard’s head, and pulled the trigger.
Evie yelped and fled into the building.
Hammond holstered the weapon and gestured to his men. “Get ready to move,” he ordered, limping back to us. “I’d take you with us, but we don’t have the food and I can’t babysit three civilians. Our base in Elderwood was still around as of yesterday...we lost the communications truck, so who the fuck knows now. Head for it. But don’t stay here. They’re coming. They can break down better doors than yours.”
How many dead men did it take to completely decimate a military unit? Probably way more than I cared to face.
“Move out!”
“Lieutenant,” I began, stepping forward.
I don’t know how I wound up on the ground, but suddenly I was staring dazedly up at a very bloody, pissed off soldier. “The gates of hell have opened up, sweetheart, and if you want to live, you gotta stay two steps ahead of the devil. You’ll forgive me if I’m no longer predisposed to gallantry.”
I sat there as the men and their tank slugged forward. Dax made a strained noise and pointed; the tank’s caterpillar tracks were covered in thick, brownish-scarlet sludge, and sported hunks of…something…flesh, maybe. Bone. Hair. Rags that might have been clothing. The remains of people squished and forgotten.
A young man barely out of his teens brought up the rear. A gaping sore bled freely on his neck. “Sorry,” he said as he walked by. “Sorry we can’t help you. I really am. We tried. We did. Save one bullet for yourself. Good luck.”
We watched them disappear into the haze, until all I could hear was the dull cranking of the tank’s engine. I looked to the right, where they’d come from, and saw only more of the same haze and several squishy puddles that had once been the undead. Who knew what was out there?
The tank’s engine heaved once, then faded into the distance.
“Damn,” Tony muttered. “They were cut down to size.”
“Would it have made a difference if more of our armed forces weren’t overseas?” Dax asked.
Tony shook his head slowly. “No...I think the real difference is the meteor fallout. We’ve still got a sizable military presence here, but strip out air support and I guess most land support and...well, you saw what happened to them. They got munched.”
Hammond said more were coming. “Yeah, and whatever munched them is in pursuit.”
If the military couldn’t handle them, we sure as hell couldn’t.
Evie whined from the front door. I started back for the Fairway, eager to escape the smoke and ash and the smell for at least a little while.
Once we’d locked the doors and reset the alarm, Tony called a powwow in the second-floor kitchen. “I think we’ve got to make some quick decisions. Those things have followed us back each time we’ve gone out. Hammond was pretty sure he had others is following.”
“You suggesting we bug out?” Dax asked.
“Don’t know. How long can we feasibly stay here?” Tony glanced at me. “Miz EMT?”
“Uh...” Setting up for a potential siege was somewhat out of my area of expertise, but I decided to humor him. “If we heavily ration the food, starting today, we might be okay for a month. No more than that. But the water won’t last, and I’m worried about the power. The sewage lines have held up so far, but we’re already one of the last places with full electricity...”
“Which makes us a target,” Tony said.
“No, that’s not where I was going with that. I mean the plant is still working, and they keep bragging about how it can work for years, but if these tremors keep up, the lines might snap. And then our lives will get a lot shittier real quick.”
I was slightly more concerned about the sewage than the power—I wasn’t ready for a world without central plumbing—but no power meant no lights, no hot food, no news, and no way to charge my useless cell phone.
Tony drummed his fingers against the countertop. “If we decided to stay...is there any guarantee the dead will walk on by? Or will they realize we’re here?”
“I don’t know. We shoot at them whenever we see them, so that draws their attention.” I gnawed on my lower lip. “They might go past us if we lock down and stay quiet. But if they don’t...”
“If they don’t, we might not get out at all.”
Dax sat down with the dog, resting his pistol in his lap. “That military douche should’ve taken us with him.”
Tony shook his head. “Half of his men were sick, the other half were about ready to turn on him and make a run for it. Not folks we want to throw in with.”
No, definitely not. Granted, a trained soldier would fare better in all this than a music reporter, but I was sure I’d prefer a larger group setting. You know, for moral support.
Or bait.
“How far away is that base he was talking about?”
My maps were all in my car, but I vaguely remembered taking the sidestreets home when the 27 was too jammed to negotiate. “It’s about twenty-five miles south. We’d make it fine in a car, but Hammond was saying there was a lot of debris out there, and we don’t even know if the cars will run...”
“So we may end up on foot.”
On foot, and possibly surrounded by those things. This
apocalypse was really starting to blow.
Evie’s tail thumped against the tiled floor.
The earth rumbled softly. I only noticed that one because we were sitting still. Will I not notice them at all one day?
Dax twined his fingers into Evie’s fur. “So we can stay here and ready for a siege, or we can run and maybe find better shelter. I don’t like our odds.”
“Me either.”
“I’m not overly enthused, either, but those’re the cards we’ve got. We just have to figure out how to play them.” Tony straightened up. “I’m gonna go see if either of the cars downstairs will get us more than a block. You two...see if you can find anything on the radio.”
***
Evie’s cold, wet nose wacked my face again.
I swatted at her and jolted fully awake, fumbling about instinctively for my phone. “What? Quake?”
“She woke me, too,” Tony whispered. “Do you hear that?”
Do I hear what? There’s all kinds of maddening sounds going on lately. But the couch I slept on was still, and there were no helicopters or tanks in the area.
Thump-thump-thump.
“Someone’s banging on the door,” I whispered. “Did we leave the lobby lights on?”
“Don’t think so...come on.”
He woke Dax, and each of us grabbed a rifle.
We went up, rather than down. “Not opening that door for anyone except Kate Winslet,” he said. “And there’s no reason for Kate Winslet to be hanging around here.”
“What if she’s a zombie?” Dax asked.
There was a pause. “How rotten is she? Because partially decayed Kate Winslet still tops ninety-five percent of women out there.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Vibeke excluded, of course.”
We emerged into utter blackness. The skies might be uniformly gray during the day, but at least we had some sort of visibility—we knew the sun was out there somewhere, even if we couldn’t see it. Out here, though...
A faint glint up in the sky might have been the moon. We stood there for a couple of minutes, waiting for our eyes to adjust. Once I could make out the wall, I edged across the roof, Tony, Dax, and the dog following.
Evie growled.
“Ssh.” Tony tapped the dog on the muzzle. “Ssh.”
Dead things clumped around the front door. At least, I thought they were dead; I couldn’t smell them from thirty feet up, but they didn’t knock like normal living people. It sounded like they were heaving themselves against the glass.
We crouched down behind the wall. “Think it’s three,” Tony whispered. “Vibby, you hold the dog. Dax, on my mark, turn on the flashlight. I’m going to pop them with the silencer.”
We nodded. I wrapped my arms around Evie.
The wind gusted slightly, and the pounding stopped.
“Now.”
The boys stood up and Dax’s flashlight clicked on, but for a handful of seconds there was no sound. Dax sucked in his breath. “Shit.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tony muttered. Pop-pop-pop. Two thumps; a thin moan sounded from far below. “Train it on him…thanks.”
Pop. The third body thumped down.
“See any others?”
The dog licked my face. I wiped the drool away. “She seems relaxed enough.”
“Then let’s go. It’s fucking freezing out here.”
No one made any mention of moving the dead bodies at the front door. I assumed that could wait until the morning.
“Shit,” Tony said when we got back inside. “They were looking right at us.”
“When you were shooting?” I turned the dog loose and she leaped up onto one of the couches.
“No, before. We popped over the side and they were all staring up. Like they knew we were up there.”
Dax rounded on me. “How do they know?”
“You’re asking me?”
“You’re the one with medical training.”
“They don’t teach Living Dead 101 in EMT School.”
Tony slammed his pistol down on the counter. “Some of them don’t even have eyes, so I’m betting they don’t see all that well. Could it be scent? That’s all I can think of.”
I hated to rain on his parade, but if we were going with improbable ways for the dead to track us, I had a better idea. “Or sound.”
“We were sleeping.”
I pointed at the dog. “The best hounds hear and smell. There might be some scent at work there, but I’m betting it’s sound, too…even breathing.”
What remained of Dax’s color drained away. “You’re awfully calm about this.”
I shrugged. “Force of habit. I used to pull people out of wrecked cars.”
Tony nodded. “Keep going.”
Yes, because I’m equipped to answer this question. Oh, what the hell. I gathered my thoughts as best I could. “Let’s say they can hear and smell on some level. Even if that fades with decay—and it would have to, right?—there’s other ways to detect people. We have to think beyond our regular senses. What if they can sense vibrations? They’d still detect heartbeats that way, and people moving around…actually…that makes the attack on the military unit make a whole lot more sense.”
“All that noise and vibration.” Tony sighed. “Shit. You may be right.”
“I mean, the other option is…you know…supernatural. Otherworldly. Maybe demonic.”
“I prefer the scientific method,” Dax said quickly.
Tony smirked at him. “Don’t want to consider the gates of hell opening?”
“Do you? Dead people are getting up and walking around! Do we really need to add Beelzebub to the equation?”
“Guys,” I said, “we can figure out how they exist later. I think they just answered one of our earlier questions, though.”
The tension in the room abruptly dissipated, only to be replaced by something heavier: dread. “You mean they knew we were here.”
“Yeah. And if the Three Stooges out there figured out we were inside…”
Thousands were coming, Hammond had said. Thousands chasing his platoon down Industrial Road, probably picking up stragglers as they went. If we’d been enclosed in an all-cement building, I might not have worried so much, but our boarded-up first floor windows didn’t seem too reassuring in the face of an undead horde. I was pretty sure the combined weight of five thousand zombies would smash them in eventually.
The looks on the guys’ faces suggested they were thinking the same thing.
Dax folded his arms. “So what do we do?”
I looked at Tony. “You’re the one with all the ideas.”
He laughed, but it had a cold, hollow sound to it. “If it seemed like the military was getting a grip on things, I’d say lay in for a siege. But Hammond’s group got shredded, and if those things surround the place, there’s no getting out, unless one of you kids can sprout wings.”
Dax and I both shook our heads. Whatever radiation we’d been exposed to hadn’t managed to mutate us to our benefit yet.
“So we leave,” I said, because someone had to say it, had to make the suggestion—no, the decision. “Take our chances out on the street rather than wait for them to pin us down here.”
“I like your description better,” Dax said. “Mine was run out and die rather than stay here and die.”
I shrugged. “I’ve reviewed some shitty albums in my day. I learned to put a positive spin on things.”
EIGHT
Tony’s truck refused to start, so we took my old Honda for one last drive into town.
I’d purchased it right after college, and the thing had been a piece of shit even then. Now…well, now I guess it fit into the whole post-apocalyptic scenario.
“Drive down to Byrd Street, then make a right at the light,” Tony said. “There’s a Harley shop there, or used to be. We can pick up the parts.”
“Byrd Street’s closer to the impact site.” And closer to those things.
He glared at me from the p
assenger seat. “Do you know a closer store?”
I kept the speed under ten miles per hour, hoping to spare the Honda’s engine the beating the Ford’s had taken. We puttered along in relative silence, passing empty, ash-covered cars and the occasional ghoul wandering around.
We ignored them. Usually they would turn toward the car, or stretch out a hand, but most didn’t try to follow us.
Not while we watched, anyway. Considering how many of them had managed to show up at the Fairway, I was pretty sure they’d have no problem tracking us.
Visibility dampened considerably after we passed Ribbon Street. I tried running the air, but a puff of ash and God knew what else spouted out of the vents, and that idea was shot down quickly. So I ground my teeth, gripped the steering wheel, and tried not to run anything over.
At Byrd Street, the haze thickened into a wall. I braked at the corner and glanced to the left out of habit, then slammed my foot down. “Holy shit.”
The boys and the dog all leaned to the left.
Byrd Street hosted South Harkin’s lone freeway onramp, and from the looks of it, pretty much all of the city had tried to make a run for it either just before or right after the meteor hit. A veritable wall of wrecked cars, trucks, and minivans clumped up on both sides of the street, all of them aiming for the freeway. From what I could see, more than a few were trashed, burned-out hulks—the victims of fiery crashes, I assumed—but still others were only dented, or had hit their brakes in time.
For all the good it did them.
“Oh, shit,” Dax whispered. “Look inside.”
The car nearest us was an old Volkswagen of some sort, and its windows hadn’t been blown out when its driver rear-ended a Ford.
The Volkswagen’s occupants stared at us from behind those windows.
I tried to dismiss it as the way the bodies had ended up after the crash, but their eyes were wide open, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up. Evie whined softly, backing up across the backseat and winding up in Dax’s lap.
Tony swung around. “You’re supposed to bark at zombies, dog. Don’t get useless on us now.”
“Why aren’t they rotten?” Dax asked quietly. “Shouldn’t they be gray? Or have droopy eyes? Or look…you know…dead?”
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