by Joe McKinney
But when he looked up at Anthony, his smile was steady.
“Don’t you worry, son. Daddy’s gonna take care of you.”
CHAPTER 21
Eleanor backed away from the door. The zombies were banging on the other side, causing it to shake in the frame. Panicking, she looked around once again for something she could use as cover.
But there was nothing.
Get a grip, girl, she told herself. Slow down. Focus. Think this through.
“No,” she said aloud. “No, I can’t.”
You can. You will. You have to, Eleanor. Get a grip.
The gun was a known quantity, something she could control. In the academy, her tactics instructors had taught her to slow down, analyze the situation. When things get out of hand, you get control of one thing, really focus, and everything else will start to fall in line.
Eleanor did that now.
She ejected the M-16’s magazine and counted eleven rounds. She had those and one in the chamber and another full magazine in the back pocket of her jeans. But that was it. After that, she’d be reduced to using the rifle as a club.
How could she have made it through so much, she wondered, only to be reduced to this? It wasn’t fair. She had fought a better fight than this. Hadn’t she done everything a woman could possibly be expected to do?
The door shook with another hard hit, and this time, something cracked.
The wood was giving way. As she watched, a crack raced from just below the doorknob over to the bottom hinge. How many hands were pounding on that door, she wondered. Twelve, fourteen, more than that? It sounded as if the stairs beyond were full of the infected.
And then the door gave way.
It snapped off its hinges and fell from the door frame in two large pieces, and in the darkness beyond, Eleanor could see the faces of the damned. For a moment, they stared at her and her at them, and then they surged forward, a wave of teeth and fingernails.
She raised her rifle, the ghost ring sight centered on the lead zombie’s chest . . . and then she lowered it. Inspiration struck. She stepped over the low wall of the air-conditioning platform and onto the steeply sloping roof. There was an uncertain moment, a deliriously acrophobic moment as her stomach rolled over, and she felt as if she might faint, and then she closed her eyes and forced herself to regain control. Then she opened her eyes and started crab-walking across the roof, the shingles rough as sandpaper beneath her fingers.
She moved toward the north corner of the building, passing beneath the air-conditioning platform, and chanced a look up. One of the zombies was lunging toward her. It went over the knee-high wall and tumbled forward, down the side of the roof and over the edge.
She watched it fall, arms and legs pin wheeling wildly in the air, and she let out a cry that was part terrified whimper, part triumphant yell.
Breathing hard, she looked back up at the air-conditioning platform.
More zombies were coming over the knee-high wall around the platform. Several of them lost their balance and went over the side of the roof. But others stayed on their feet and started toward her.
Moving in a crouch, Eleanor backed away. She had maybe thirty feet left of roof behind her, but she could already tell she was going to have to stand and fight. More and more of the zombies were making their way down the length of the roof.
She raised her rifle and fired at a female up near the roof peak.
The zombie collapsed and rolled down the side, taking six others with it.
“Yeah!” she screamed, shaking her rifle at the remaining zombies.
This is going to work, she thought. It is really going to work.
But there were still others she couldn’t just bowl off the side. A fat, blond man in a blue T-shirt was closing on her. His jeans were soaked in blood, and with every shuffling step across the shingled roof, his tattered sneakers left dark smears of ichor. She stepped over the ridge and grabbed her gun by the barrel, holding it like a baseball bat.
She waited for him to step into range, and when he was close enough, she swung for his head. The blow knocked him down, but he grabbed for her at the same time, and the M-16’s shoulder strap got caught up in his fingers.
The next instant, Eleanor was struggling to maintain her balance. The zombie was sliding down the roof sheeting, but it was pulling her with it, and try as she might, she just couldn’t keep her feet. Eleanor pitched over forward, landed on her chin, and slid down the side of the roof. She saw the edge racing toward her, the yawning emptiness beyond it coming rapidly into view, and she clawed at the shingles for something to hold on to.
The next instant the zombie was tumbling over the side and falling free to the writhing carpet of clutching hands and upturned faces below. Eleanor followed after it, swinging her legs over the edge and catching herself on the eaves at the last possible instant.
She had only seen the ground below for a second, but that had been more than enough for her.
There were hundreds of zombies crowded in together down there, an infected bolus of hands and teeth and gore reaching up for her, their collective motion almost tidal.
Eleanor was delirious with panic. Her fingers were digging into the tar strip shingles, but it wasn’t enough. She was slipping, inch by inch. Her legs pumped and kicked at the empty air. Her backpack and the M-16 seemed to weigh a ton. She would have jettisoned them if she’d had a hand free, but that couldn’t happen now.
Her grip gave for just a second, and she slid four or five inches farther down, leaving only her nose and chin above the level of the roof.
A scream rose in her throat.
Above her, coming down the slope of the roof in a lurching, out-of-control trot was another zombie. This one was unable to control its descent and toppled over the edge, his fingers grazing the sleeve of her blouse as he went over top of her. But the others behind him were moving more slowly, and even in her panicked state, a part of her mind told her that at least one of those zombies would have enough control to attack her hands.
Then she caught a sound rising above all the others.
It was a scream. A young girl shrieking for help.
“Madison!” Eleanor yelled back. “Madison!”
In her mind Eleanor was absolutely certain that that sound was coming from her daughter, the way a mother will know the cry of her own hurt child above the din of dozens of others on a crowded playground.
Madison was down there somewhere. Alive. Alive but in trouble.
Eleanor kicked at the side of the building, praying for a ledge, a windowsill, anything she could use. What she found was a metal pipe. The toe of her sneaker raked across it. Frantic, she groped for it with her foot, trying to get a feel for where it was, and felt it curve upward, hugging the underside of the eaves.
Two more zombies sailed over top of her. She chanced a look down and saw them splash into the water, the zombie horde seeming to swallow them up whole.
Oh Jesus, she thought. Oh sweet Jesus. Please make this work.
Aware that she only had one chance to get this right, she reached under the eaves with her right hand and gripped the top of the pipe.
“Please,” she said. “Oh please.”
She let go of the roof and slid off the side, screaming as her weight dropped and her fingers nearly let go. But her grip did hold. Eleanor fell forward, smacking face-first into the wall. She brought her left hand up, slapping wildly at the pipe, and got her fingers around it. She pumped her feet against the wall until she got traction there and then was still. Her heart was pounding in her chest. A white hot pain shot up from her fingers to her shoulders, but she didn’t care. She was deliriously happy just to be alive and she threw her head back and let out a yell that gave way first to laughter and then to tears.
Eleanor looked down and saw a window just below her left shoe. She could make it, she thought, as long as the pipe would continue to bear her weight. Working slowly, careful to keep as much weight as possible on her feet, she started to
slide down.
When she reached the bottom ledge of the window she glanced inside.
The floor was a patchwork of puddles, dotted by glass blown in during the recent storms. Sodden furniture had turned gray from mildew. The front door had been knocked in, by zombies, she guessed, going room to room, looking for food, but there were no zombies in there now, and that was all that counted.
She climbed in through the window and sat down heavily on the ledge, exhausted down to the bone.
But she couldn’t rest and she knew it.
Madison was out there. She couldn’t hear her screams anymore, but she knew in her heart that her daughter was out there, somewhere, and that Madison needed her.
That was all it took for Eleanor.
The muscles in her arms and back ached. Standing up took a sheer act of will. But stand she did.
Eleanor turned and leaned out the window and looked down.
A blur of faces stared back up at her.
She felt suddenly sick, light-headed, and utterly empty of ideas. How was she going to get over there? And for that matter, what was she going to do if she did get over there? There were thousands of zombies down there, and all she had was a handful of bullets.
But she had to try.
From somewhere below she heard a man’s voice yelling in defiant rage. The sound was followed by the chain-saw clatter of machine-gun fire.
Mark Shaw, she thought. The fucking bastard’s still alive, still fighting.
She nearly spit on the floor in disgust, but then she stopped and thought about Captain Shaw . . . still alive, still fighting. He would fight, wouldn’t he? To the very end. That was the kind of man he was.
Maybe she could use that.
She leaned back out the window and looked down. There was a cinder-block wall down there that connected her building with the building from which she had heard Madison’s screams. She could run across that. Maybe.
And maybe Captain Shaw could help her with the zombies.
She started to scream at the crowd. She yelled at the top of her lungs, waving at them, picking up trash from the floor and throwing it out the window at them.
“Up here, you fucking bastards! Come on. Come and get me!”
Her voice stirred them up, exactly as she hoped it would. Their moans rose from a dull roar to a maddened frenzy.
“That’s it,” she screamed, slapping the outside wall below her window. “That’s it! Come on up. You want me? Come and take me!”
The crowd surged against the ground floor. They were pouring in through windows and circling around to the front of the building to enter the doorway there. But she could hear them out in the hallway, too. The ones from the roof would be coming down. Probably already were. She was pretty sure she could hear them banging around out there on the stairs, searching for her.
And then she heard gunfire again. Coming hard, coming fast.
“That’s it, Shaw,” she muttered. “Chew ’em up.”
She didn’t give herself a chance to think about what came next. There was no way she could have, and still have had the nerve to go forward. She climbed out the window, one hand on the metal pipe, and swung herself out. Then she started down the pipe, blocking out the ravenous moaning below as best she could, thinking only of Madison.
As she went lower the sound of shooting grew louder. Shaw was, exactly as she expected, putting up one hell of a good fight. And it was driving the zombies into a frenzy. They were pouring into the building now.
“Come on,” she said quietly, watching them. “Keep coming.”
She dropped onto the wall and teetered there, her arms outstretched for balance. Zombies reached up for her, slapping the wall with their bloody palms, trying in vain to climb the slime-slick walls. She swallowed once and then turned all her focus on walking the wall.
One foot after the other, she thought. One step at a time.
She made it halfway across before one of the zombies managed to get a hand on her shoe. Eleanor wasn’t sure how it had happened, whether it had jumped or simply scaled over the backs of the others, but the end result was the same. Its mangled hand clamped down over the toe of her sneaker and didn’t let go. As the zombie tumbled back down into the water below, Eleanor pitched over. The pack shifted on her back. The M-16 slipped off her shoulder and she reached for it clumsily, barely regaining control of the weapon in time to prevent one of the zombies from grabbing it.
She was on her knees now, struggling to get back up. Faces swam below her, indistinct and hostile. The noise was tremendous. But she had her balance back, at least for the time being. Would it help, she wondered? The tendons in her ankles felt limp as wet spaghetti. Her legs were burning. Eleanor rose slowly, painfully, to her feet, straightened the pack and the weapon, and started walking again.
She rushed her final steps and actually lunged for the wall, catching the metal pipe that ran up the side of the building as if it was base in a game of tag. And maybe, she thought, in a way, it kind of was. She had made it across the courtyard. She was close now. Very close.
The window to her right led into a second-story efficiency apartment. Eleanor had to kick in the window to get inside, and once she did, she ran to the door and listened to the hallway outside. With so many voices moaning, screaming, it was hard to focus on exactly where they were coming from . . . behind her, below her, above . . . she couldn’t tell.
Eleanor took a chance and opened the door a crack.
The hallway beyond was dark. She listened, and couldn’t make out any footsteps. If this building was anything like the one she’d just left—and she didn’t see why it wouldn’t be; from the outside they appeared to be twins—there would be staircases at the front of the building and another in the back. She went out into the hallway and crossed to the stairs.
Looking down into the gloom below she could see zombies pushing against each other, trying to make their way back to the back of the building. At the same time she heard Madison screaming. She was very close.
“Madison!” she gasped.
Down below, several pairs of eyes turned toward her. They started up the stairs, a renewed hunger in their moaning, and soon a dozen or more were coming for her.
“Oh shit,” she said, backing up.
She looked up. The stairwell twined up four stories, just like in the other building. There was room to retreat.
But when she looked back down the stairs, she realized that the number of her pursuers had grown. From an original dozen or so, a swarm had formed. They were pushing against each other, some falling onto their faces as the stronger ones behind them clambered over their backs in their rush to overtake her.
“That’s it!” she screamed at them. “Come on up, you bastards! Come and get me.”
She backed up the stairs, careful to keep just a few steps ahead of the lead zombie, calling out to them the whole time.
“Don’t stop,” she yelled. “Come on.”
When she reached the third-floor landing she broke away from the stairs and sprinted down the central hallway to the back of the building. Here she had to be quick. She brought her M-16 up and worked her way quickly down the stairs, scanning every corner to make sure she wasn’t stepping into a crowd of them.
She passed a dead and mostly eaten body on the second-floor landing, but no zombies, and she was thankful for that.
But then she jumped into the water at the ground floor and turned the corner.
And there, less than ten feet in front of her, was Jim . . . hanging from the ceiling . . . and Madison on his back.
Eleanor couldn’t believe it. He had his hands on one wall, his feet against the opposite wall, his body like an arch over the floor, and below him, a swarm of zombies groped the air and tugged at his shirt.
“Leave him alone,” she said, her voice just a notch above a whisper.
The zombies turned toward her. One by one their hands dropped from the air, and they came for her.
Eleanor felt something cl
ick inside her. Some important part of her was coming into focus and everything seemed to slow down. She saw every face in that zombie crowd, and as she raised her rifle and started firing, she felt utterly calm and completely in control. The zombies went down one by one, and when the last empty cartridge shell flew from the weapon’s breach, the water was choked with bodies. Nothing moved but the water. It lapped against the walls and rocked the dead bodies gently.
They were alone now.
Eleanor looked up at her husband, at the ashen, sweat-soaked expression on his face, and said, “Jim?”
He dropped from the ceiling then. He and Madison landed in the water with a dull splash.
Madison let out a startled cry that was silenced by the water.
Eleanor ran forward and scooped her up and squeezed her so hard Madison began to choke.
“Mom,” she gasped.
“Oh baby,” Eleanor said. “Oh my sweet baby.”
She held Madison at arm’s length then, barely believing that she was holding her again. Madison’s dirty face was lined by tear tracks. The whites of her eyes stood out with startling clarity.
“Mom, I was so scared.”
“I know, baby. Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
Madison could only shake her head no, and then she started to cry. Eleanor pulled her close and hugged her and thought there was no way under the sun she was going to let that little girl go again.
Until her gaze met Jim’s.
Eleanor had seen exhaustion before. She’d seen it as a girl in the faces of the rescue workers during Hurricanes Rita and Ike. She’d seen it in the faces of her fellow cops after the Westheimer riots five years ago. And she had seen it in the eyes of the refugees who waited up on the Beltway for their turn to go through the military’s checkpoint. But she had never seen exhaustion like she did in her husband’s eyes. The man had been pushed to his very limits, and yet he continued to hold on. She could only imagine what it must have been like, supporting himself and Madison both up on the walls. How long had been like that, twenty-five or thirty minutes?
“Oh, Jim,” she said, and she let Madison go and reached for him.