by Jon Schafer
Bouncing up again for one last look, he rejoined his friends and said loud enough to be heard over the gunfire, “The first bomb didn’t go off. There’s too many of them back there, and we’re out of time. It looks like there’s already a shitload of them coming around from the front of the house, too.”
Heather shot into the forehead of what had once been a housewife from Dallas, and then pointed her CAR-15 at the motionless bodies of the dead that were starting to clog the opening as she said, “Looks like we’re plugging the hole, though.”
Steve considered this for a few seconds. Even with the volume of outgoing rifle fire, a few of the dead had managed to get close enough to start climbing in. As they were shot down, their bodies dropped to lie like broken sacks of meat across the window sill. As the ones behind them tried to climb over them, they, too, were shot down and added their bodies to the mass that was starting to block up the opening.
At first elated that this immediate threat was being solved, Steve’s spirits dropped at the thought that in the long run it wouldn’t matter. With the huge mob of dead coming at them from the east, and with the weak spot the window now presented, they would be overrun that much quicker when the herd arrived.
Trying to find a way to somehow turn this disaster to their advantage, a thought struck him. To have planned their escape in the way he was thinking would have been insanity, but since it was happening, he knew he had to go with it.
“We’ve got to keep them back away from the window,” he yelled. “If we block it up, it might not attract enough of them.” As the three of them moved forward, firing as they went, he said, “We can still turn this in our favor. With all the noise and the shooting, we’ll draw the ones away from the front of the mansion. Once we’ve got them clustered up back here, we head out the front.”
“We’ll be able to get to the trucks that way and -” Heather said with excitement before stopping abruptly when a thought came to her. With trepidation, she asked, “And who’s going to stay back here and keep drawing them in? No matter how many Zs we get to come to the back of the house, there’s still going to be a bunch clustered around the front. Even more if we all cut and run at the same time. We’ve seen too many times how fast they moved back to where they were when we tried to draw them off. Once everyone makes a break for it, whoever’s left behind will be cut off.”
Distracted by some of the dead that had gotten too close, she turned her attention to firing into the heads of the Zs. In the pit of her stomach, though, she had a sinking feeling she knew who would volunteer. Shaking it off, she focused on her targets and didn’t repeat the question, lest she get an answer she didn’t want to hear.
Steve considered the wall of dead flesh only feet away, knowing he had already made his mind up on who would stay. Glad Heather’s attention was taken by the dead, he considered his own demise. He knew his plan had one fatal flaw, and that was while everyone was going out the front, one person needed to stay and keep the Zs interested in the back of the mansion. His thoughts turned to when he had sat at his desk at the radio station only days after this had all started while contemplating ending his own life. Instead of putting his pistol under his chin and pulling the trigger, though, he had resolved that if it ever came to it, he would take as many of the dead things with him as he could when he went. He considered that decision every day in a world ruled by the living dead and felt that this would be the time.
Ignoring Heather’s question, he turned his head and yelled, “Brain, get everyone to the front of the house and get one of your grenades ready. We’re changing the plan. I want everyone at the top of the stairs and ready to go out the front.”
“Out the front?” he questioned. “A grenade?”
Steve said tersely, “We’re going out the front. The grenade is for the doors since we don’t have time to fuck around with pulling the boards off. Now move your ass.”
As Brain turned to go, a sudden thought struck him and he yelled for him to wait. Turning to Tick-Tock as his friend fired into the mass of dead that they had forced back a little more than ten feet from the window, he asked, “How much ammo do you have?”
Without taking his eyes off the Zs as he clenched the pistol grip of his rifle with one hand and continued to fire, Tick-Tock felt his ammunition pouches strapped to the harness he had taken from the National Guard MRAP and the cargo pockets on his pants before saying, “I’ve got about four clips left, plus the one in my rifle.”
Without having to be asked, Heather said, “I’ve got five, plus what I have in my rifle.” She fired three rounds into the massed dead, and the bolt of her rifle locked back. After switching out her empty magazine for a full one, she let the bolt slam forward before adding, “Make that four.”
“Not enough, you’re going to need all that,” Steve said. Turning to Brain, he said, “Give me all your spare magazines. Only keep two or three for yourself.”
Hearing this, and knowing her fears had become real and that Steve had decided he would be the one staying behind, Heather said, “It’s not going to be you.” She could feel the tension build in her at the thought of losing him.
Playing dumb, Steve asked, “Me what?”
“The one who stays behind,” she said abruptly before firing out the window. “The group needs you too much. I’ll stay.”
“You’re not staying behind,” Steve said. “If it’s anyone, it’s going to be me.”
Turning to glare at him with a combination of ice and love in her eyes, Heather said firmly, “No way, I’m staying.”
Next to her, Tick-Tock said with a laugh, “Well, I’m not fucking staying, so you two need to figure this shit out.”
His wisecrack broke the tension and caused Heather and Steve to break out in a burst of nervous laughter. Despite this, they both knew that a decision had to be made. As Steve opened his mouth to say they would ask for a volunteer to keep the dead’s attention at the back of the mansion while the other fled, a voice from the behind him said loudly, “Do not be afraid, I will be the one to keep the savage hordes at bay while you all escape.”
Turning, they found their host standing just inside the doorway with Thing one and Thing Two on either side of her, both of them armed with Uzi machine guns. With her MP5 machine gun in her hands and her scythe slung over her shoulder, she made a deadly figure.
“Never fear,” she said, “Delightfully Grimm is here.”
CHAPTER SIX
The Happy Hallow Insane Asylum:
When the faint noise of gunfire reached his ears, Steve faced the group gathered at the top of the stairs and said, “We’re going to try for the truck and the vans, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to make it. I need all of you to be ready for anything. Once those doors blow, Tick-Tock and I will be the first ones through. We’re going to clear any immediate threats.” Pointing to Heather, he said, “You’re going to be right behind us or on my right, depending on how big of a hole the bomb makes. Once we get through the door, I want you to clear the porch to the right while Tick-Tock gets the area to the left. I’ll deal with anything coming at us from the front. We’ll try for the trucks first, but if that’s a wash, then we head for the gate. If there’s too many of them there, we find the clearest route and head for the fence.”
Looking at the grim faces in front of him, Steve continued, “And if they’re too bunched up and everything goes to hell, Brain is going to start throwing his grenades to clear them out. Only as a last resort should we split up. If that happens, head for whatever gaps you can find in the Zs. Get over the fence and head for the woods. If you make it that far and clear the area, head east until you hit a creek. It’s in a really deep wash, so stay up on the bank. Follow it north until you come to an old wooden bridge, but make sure you don’t have a bunch of them following you. This is where we’re going to meet back-up, and I don’t want anyone leading a shitload of Zs right to us. Don’t wait any longer than three hours. If anyone’s coming, they’ll be there by then.”
&nb
sp; “And then what?” one of the women in the group asked. “What do we do?”
“We all continue on to Polk like we planned,” Steve told her, leaving out that it would be whoever was left alive, and if they had to scatter, it wouldn’t be many.
Denise appeared at the bottom of the stairs and called up to them in a slightly winded voice, “From the roof, it only looked like there was a few hundred biters left out in front of the house. I checked in with Grimm, and she said that she thinks she’s got as many as she’s going to get at the back. She’s having a hard time holding them off, and a few of the Zs even made it into the room before her and the Things cut them down. She said that if you’re going to go, then you need to go now.”
Despite her reassurances that she would be fine, Steve felt a twinge of regret at leaving Grimm behind. What finally swayed him to let her keep the dead occupied while they escaped was when she said in her eloquent voice, “You have your plans and I have mine, and my plan doesn’t include dying in this exclusive retreat for wayward oddballs. The whole time I was here, all I could think of was escape, and while the minions that run this fine establishment caught me twice when I tried, I finally figured it all out. I was just about to unroll my master plan when my children came back to life and set me on my new course. Now, I will combine my plan with your plan and give you the time to get clear.”
Steve waved for Denise to join them before turning to Tick-Tock and Heather to ask if they were ready.
Heather simply nodded.
Tick-Tock hefted his M4 assault rifle and said, “We’ve got the guns, but they’ve got the numbers.”
Steve thought about this for a second, and not knowing if this was a good or a bad thing, turned to Brain and said, “Get ready to throw your bomb as soon as everyone’s down.”
Brain hefted the misshapen, off-white mass in his hand and said, “Don’t worry, when this baby goes off, it’ll leave a hole big enough for all of us to go through shoulder to shoulder.”
Steve smiled at the exaggeration as the group took cover in the halls leading off the landing at the top of the stairs. Denise was last and found a spot between him and Tick-Tock. When they were clear, they covered their ears and opened their mouths to lessen the concussion. Every eye was on Brain as he judged the distance like a major league pitcher before going into a wind up and throwing the bomb with all his might, then dropping down flat.
Everyone scrunched their heads down and closed their eyes as they waited for the expected blast…that never came.
After a few seconds, Steve called out, “What the hell happened? Is that thing going to go off or what?”
Brain rose from the floor and looked down in question to where his grenade lay a few feet from the door. He knew he had thrown it hard enough and far enough to hit what he was aiming for, but it hadn’t gone off. After a second of thought, the answer came to him and he said, “It didn’t impact with enough force. I’ll try again.”
After retrieving the bomb, Brain stood at the top of stairs and tried again. This time, he waited long enough to make sure the bomb hit its target before dropping down.
Again, nothing.
Steve watched as Brain rose to get the grenade while Denise said from behind him, “Jesus, next time just hit it with your purse.”
His laughter turned to concern, though, when she jumped up and ran down the stairs while saying to Brain in passing, “Get behind something and watch how to throw.”
Steve started to object, but he stopped when Tick-Tock said, “Kick back and enjoy the show. She’s got this.”
Steve did just that as he watched Denise pick up the grenade and back up to a spot near the bottom of the stairs.
***
Denise turned the bomb in her hands over a few times before tossing it in the air to get a feel for it. Judging the distance, she didn’t even consider if she was too close. She knew how far the mound was from home plate, and this was the optimum distance to get the most impact out of her pitch. All she had to do was adjust to the size of the bomb and keep her hand a little further away from her thigh when she threw it. When she felt that she was ready, she went into the windup and underhand throw that was so familiar from college and watched as the bomb hit its target at sixty miles an hour.
Overjoyed at what she knew would have a perfect strike, the blast enveloped her so fast that she didn’t have time to feel fear before her world turned red, white, and then faded to nothing.
***
Grimm was swinging the point of the scythe down into the top of the head of an animated corpse still dressed in the remains of a pair of bib overalls when she felt and heard the blast. From either side of her, Thing one and Thing two fired short bursts of bullets into the heads of her children that got too close.
Just seconds earlier, they had been forced to abandon the room and were now holding the dead back from the doorway. While it should have been easy to keep them away from the bottleneck that the window made, the walking corpses had come at them from along the outside wall to continually claw at the edges of the window before being dispatched. In this way, they had slowly made the opening bigger as they picked away at the hole the men with the crowbars had originally made. The final decision to fall back came when numerous dead hands had pulled a large chunk of the wall to the right and below the window away before being shot down by the Thing twins’ Uzis.
As she swung her blade and beheaded one of hell’s returnees, she turned to her two minions and said, “We hold for one more minute to give Steve and his people time, and then we start backing up.”
***
Tick-Tock was the first to the bottom of the stairs when he saw Denise go down. As his boots pounded on the wooden treads, his mind screamed over and over, ‘Not again.’
Reaching her, he heaved a broken clump of plaster and lathe from her body and knelt down by her side. Putting a hand to her chest to check for breathing, he was relieved to hear her say in a faint voice, “You horny bastard. Trying to feel me up at a time like this.”
Smiling so hard that he thought the corners of his mouth would split, Tick-Tock ignored this as he ran his hands over her body while he checked for broken bones. Finding none, he asked, “Can you get up?”
Lifting her hand for help, she said, “Give me a boost.”
Seeing how shaky she was, he was gently putting one hand under her head and the other behind her back to lift her when a woman from the group appeared on Denise’s other side to help get her into a sitting position and then onto her feet.
Turning to where Steve and Heather were shooting through the gaping hole left by the bomb, Tick-Tock said, “I’ve got to go, babe. Are you going to be all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” she said as she swayed slightly. “Go help Steve. I’ll be right behind you as soon as the room stops spinning.”
Looking into the eyes of the woman who had helped them, Tick-Tock said, “Stay with her no matter what. You’re responsible for her.”
Turning to leave, he took one last look to make sure Denise was alive and that he wasn’t dreaming. He had been looking around the corner of the hall with Steve and had seen the blast from the bomb lift her off her feet and slam her into the stairs. Her body had bounced off them and propelled forward to land in a heap at their base. He’d thought for sure that she was dead before she hit the ground by the way she’d been thrown like a ragdoll to lay motionless. Recalling the sight now, he thought that this might have been what saved her from serious injury. The concussion from the blast had knocked her unconscious before she hit, so her body wasn’t tensed up as her mind told it to prepare for impact.
Hearing Steve call out for him, he ran across the debris littering the floor.
***
The mass of dead had enlarged the window in their frantic effort to get to the food that had finally appeared after so long of a wait and crowded into the room, pushing Grimm and the Thing twins into the hall. From the doorway, they had done their best to hold the dead back, but their numbers we
re too many. The final straw was when they started busting through the wall to their right when the weight of their numbers made the old plaster and lathe collapse.
Calling out to the Things, Grimm ordered them to fall back. It hadn’t been a full minute like she’d planned to give Steve, but if they tried to hold in place, they’d be overwhelmed.
***
As he stepped into the sunlight, Steve shot into the contorted face of one of the dead, not even seeing the spray of black ochre, bone and brains that flew out from the back of its head as he searched for a new target. With Heather beside him, they quickly took down ten more of the dead that were close enough to be considered an immediate threat. Dozens of bodies that had been caught in the explosion when the front doors had been blown either lay writhing or still on what was left of the porch and the lawn that grew on either side of the walkway leading up to it.
Looking around quickly, Steve could see that most of the remaining dead that were still on their feet were clustered to the front of them. Regrettably, this meant that they were also around the vans and the truck they wanted to use in their escape. Taking in the situation at a glance, he knew it would be impossible to make it to the vehicles, start them and get away before they were overrun. Making a snap decision, he called out to Heather, “We head for the fence to the right.”
Instead of hearing Heather’s voice, Tick-Tock replied, “There’s just as many Zs to the left. If we go that way, though, we’ll be closer to the path that leads to the creek and the bridge.”
Surprised to hear his friend’s voice, Steve asked, “How’s Denise?”
“Definite concussion,” he answered. “I just hope it’s not a fractured skull.”
At first, Steve had been angry when he saw Tick-Tock abandon their plan and head directly toward his girlfriend, but he had gotten over it quickly. With his anger had come the realization of how he would react if it had been Heather in a similar situation.