“Don’t touch him,” said Halverson.
“What do you mean? He’s gonna fall on his face without my help.”
“Look at his face.”
Reverend Jim’s face bore a livid complexion. His mouth hung open. The irises of his eyes appeared white. He twitched his arms at his sides fitfully as though he had little control of them.
“Daddy, sit down,” said Tanya in a worried voice. “You’ll hurt yourself. You’re in no condition to be walking around.” She bustled to his aid.
“Stay away from him,” said Halverson.
His no-nonsense tone stopped her in her tracks.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “Can’t you see he needs rest? We can’t let him walk around like this. He’s lost too much blood. He’ll kill himself.”
“He’s already dead. Look at his face.”
She searched Reverend Jim’s visage. “He looks sick. What do you expect? You’d look that way too if you’d lost as much blood as he has.” She stepped toward her father again.
“Stay away from him,” said Halverson. “He’s one of them.”
Halverson brought his MP7 to bear on Reverend Jim’s bloodless, slack-jawed, twisted countenance.
“Don’t!” she screamed.
She charged toward him.
Halverson gazed at Reverend Jim’s gaunt but still-recognizable face with its mop of frazzled white hair on top. Halverson gulped. He didn’t want to shoot Reverend Jim, but he had no other choice as he saw it. Halverson was finding out the hard way that it was easier to blow away a zombie you didn’t know than one you did.
He squeezed the submachine gun’s trigger. One shot fired. One shot between Reverend Jim’s eyes.
Reverend Jim collapsed on the floor.
“Oh no!” Tanya cried. “You killed Daddy!”
In tears, she rushed Halverson. She started pummeling him with her fists.
Halverson tried to duck her blows. Other than that, he made no move to defend himself.
Rogers sprang toward her. He snagged her arms and dragged her away from Halverson.
“You bastard!” she screamed at Halverson. “You always hated him. You wanted to kill him before, and now you did it.”
Her hands clenched into fists, tears running down her cheeks, she tried to break free from Rogers’s grasp and continue assailing Halverson. With a firm grip on her arm Rogers ushered her to the other side of the restaurant.
Tom approached Reverend Jim’s slumped body. He looked down at Reverend Jim’s dead eyes that had white irises that stared back at him sightlessly.
“This isn’t Reverend Jim,” said Tom. “He turned into one of them.” He faced the passengers. “It’s just like the blog on the Internet says. If one of those things bites you, you’ll turn into one of them. Those things are carriers. They’re all a bunch of Typhoid Marys walking around out there.”
Halverson could hear Tanya whimpering on the other side of the room. Cold comfort to her that Tom had confirmed what Halverson already knew—that her father was a zombie.
“We got company!” a guard hollered from the broken window.
“Shit, no,” said Tom. “Say it ain’t so.”
Halverson had the sickening feeling things were about to get a whole lot worse.
He pelted over to the window with Tom. Halverson peered out the hole in the shattered window.
A female ghoul with shoulder-length, shiny, straight brown hair was trudging through the wall’s entrance. The creature wore a wrinkled beige skirt and an apricot blouse. It clutched a cell phone in one of its hands. The ghoul, Halverson could see, had no idea what to do with the cell. The creature glanced at it constantly, as if consulting it, then kept walking.
To Halverson it almost seemed the ghoul was obeying the cell phone the way it frequently studied the phone.
Lemans ran up to the window. He leveled his automatic on the ghoul and blasted it three times.
“Don’t fire that gun!” Rogers yelled from behind Lemans. “It’s not silenced.”
The ghoul was still dragging its feet along. Its scuffed black pumps were falling off.
“Sue me,” said Lemans and fired again at it.
“You idiot!” said Rogers.
He spun Lemans around from behind and wrested the pistol from Lemans’s hand.
“Let go of me,” barked Lemans, fighting back.
Rogers balled his right hand into a fist, cocked it, and slugged Lemans in the face.
Lemans reeled backward. He reached for his aching face.
Halverson finished off the ghoul with two shots to its head from his silenced MP7. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Attracted by Lemans’s gunshots, a knot of ghouls stumbled through the wall’s entrance.
“They know where we are,” said Tom, his eyes glued on them. “We’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of coming out of this alive.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
“Blow those things away,” Rogers told Halverson.
Halverson switched his MP7 to full auto and peppered the ghouls marching drunkenly through the wall’s entrance.
Mildred stormed up to the window with her Mossberg shotgun. “Let me at ’em.”
“No,” said Rogers. “Don’t use the shotgun.”
“What difference does it make? They already know we’re here,” she said.
“I’m not so sure. If we’re lucky, this fun bunch here may be the only ones around.”
Mildred glared at Lemans, who was rubbing his bruised chin with his right hand. “How lucky can we be?”
Rogers turned to Tom. “Get Ray up here. He’s got a silenced MP7. Anyone else with a silencer, step right up and have at those things.”
Silenced MP7 in hand, Foster stepped up to the hole in the window and opened fire on the ghouls piling through the entrance.
Bodies started stacking up in the entryway. The ghouls had to stumble and climb over them to get inside the wall.
“Don’t let any of them get to the restaurant’s front door,” said Rogers. “If we can cut them down before they get near the restaurant, we should be OK.”
“I told you this was a death trap,” said Lemans. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
“I have a good mind to throw you out the window for those things to feed on.”
“I’ll help you,” said Mildred.
“We’ve got to get out of here right now,” said Lemans.
“Is that why you fired your gun?” said Rogers. “So you could tip the ghouls off to where we are and that would force us to leave here?”
Lemans looked at Rogers as though he was from outer space.
“I wouldn’t put it past him,” said Mildred.
“I hate to say this,” said Halverson. “It looks like there are a lot of them out there.” He ejected a spent clip and slammed a full clip into the MP7’s butt. “They’re still coming.”
“Thick as flies,” said Foster, firing a burst at the advancing ghouls.
“We need more firepower,” said Rogers. “Where’s Ray?”
As if on cue, Ray dashed up to the window. “Tom said you needed help.”
He set to blasting away at the ghouls.
Rogers watched with concern as more and more ghouls appeared. He massaged his brow, revolving his next move.
“They’re coming in waves,” said Ray.
“It’s not looking good,” said Rogers. “All right, everybody. Open fire. There are too many of them. Let ’em have it. We can’t let them get to the front door.”
Rogers grabbed a chair and tossed it through the window to widen the hole to make room for more guns.
“Now you’re talking,” said Mildred.
She brought the Mossberg’s stock to her shoulder and drew a bead on one of the ghouls below.
“Have any of them gotten to the front door?” asked Rogers.
“We can’t see from this angle,” answered Halverson. “Somebody needs to lean out the hole in the window and check out the door.�
�
“Hold your fire,” said Ray. “I’ll do it.”
With his MP7 he knocked away the jagged fragments of glass that protruded from the base of the window. Once the base was smooth and free of glass, he got down on his hands and knees and crept toward the window’s metal sill. He craned his head out of the hole to inspect the door.
He made out two ghouls stumbling toward the locked door. He leaned as far out of the hole as he could to get an angle on them, raised his MP7, and sprayed the ghouls with automatic fire.
It was readily apparent to Halverson that Ray was lying at an awkward angle over the sill. Ray’s position made it difficult for him to aim, as he had to line up his shots upside down.
“I got ’em,” said Ray.
Halverson helped him back up through the window’s hole into the restaurant.
Wasted ghouls were piling up all over the place. Other ghouls were literally crawling over the mounds to get inside the wall, Halverson could see.
Tom looked at Halverson’s weighted-down belt. “Why don’t you lob one of those grenades at the ghouls? It’s not like we have to worry about making noise anymore.”
“No,” said Rogers. “Don’t. A grenade will make the entrance larger and let more of those things in here. There’s no telling how many of them are out there.”
“Our best bet is to stop them before they get inside the wall,” agreed Halverson.
“Come with me,” Rogers told Halverson. “I want to reconnoiter the area.”
The two of them patrolled the restaurant’s perimeter.
When they reached the rear of the restaurant, Rogers said, “There’s another entrance in the wall here.”
A thirtysomething sentry was standing near the window. He was gripping a pistol in his hand.
“Did you see any ghouls come through there?” Rogers asked, indicating the entrance.
“No,” answered the sentry.
“If memory serves,” said Rogers, turning to Halverson, “that entrance leads to a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence.”
“The fence could be keeping the things away from this entrance,” said Halverson. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking we may have to bug out of here.”
Halverson nodded. “That looks like the only way out.”
“If those things keep coming in the front, it is.”
“Is there a back door to this restaurant?”
“No.”
“That presents a problem. It’s too far to jump from this height.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. I saw coils of rope in the pantry. They’re probably there in case of fire. Most buildings have emergency escape plans in case of a fire.”
“I noticed a fire hose in the kitchen wound up on a spool.”
“Enough to reach through the window to the ground?”
“It looked like.”
“We’re on the same page. First thing we do is break the windows all around the restaurant. That’ll disorient the ghouls so they won’t know where we’re gonna make our break.”
They resumed walking around the perimeter.
“If those things get through the front door, they’ve got us cornered,” said Halverson. “We’re dead if we stay here.”
“We haven’t reached that point yet, but we have to prepare for it.”
They returned to the hole in the window overlooking the front entrance.
Lemans was waiting for them. “I’m telling you this is a death trap.”
“Listen up, everybody,” said Rogers. “Let’s break all the windows. Everybody, grab a chair and start busting glass.”
Taken aback, the passengers regarded him with surprise. To set an example, Rogers seized a nearby chair, strutted up to the window, and commenced swinging the chair back and forth slamming it through the window and shattering the glass.
The passengers looked at him like he had lost his marbles.
Halverson grabbed a chair and followed Rogers’s lead. The ghouls were looking up at the sounds of breaking glass, wondering what was happening, Halverson could see. They could not make heads or tails of it. They waited for something else to happen. But nothing did. They decided to ignore the ruckus. They kept heading for the front door.
Ray crawled to the edge of the floor, hung out over the ledge of the building, and eyeballed the front door for any activity in front of it.
“More ghouls at the door,” he said.
“Take them out,” said Rogers.
Ray trained his MP7 on the creatures. “It’s hard to get a shot at them from this angle.”
Halverson crawled to the ledge and hung over it. It was as Ray had said, as Halverson had expected. Shooting from here was no cakewalk. Halverson’s head was upside down. Perforce he had to hold his weapon upside down and aim through the sights upside down. He felt the blood rushing to his head.
“I don’t want to hit the door, especially the doorknob,” said Ray, hanging next to him.
“I hear you,” said Halverson. “A stray shot to the doorknob might break the lock.”
“Any shots through the door will weaken the integrity of the wood.”
Three ghouls were pressing against the door. They pounded on it with their open hands.
Despite the difficulty of the shot, Halverson squeezed off single shots at the creatures’ heads. He hit one of the creatures in the neck, which did not even slow the creature down. Two more shots struck that same creature’s back with the same results. Unfazed, the creature bashed the door with his hands.
The creature was a portly black bald male in a bus driver’s blue uniform. He was wearing spectacles with tortoiseshell plastic frames.
Halverson fired another shot. This one hit home. The bullet entered the back of the creature’s skull and exited through the face. A softball-sized chunk of the face blew out of the head and plastered the door. A mulligan stew of brains and bone spalls slid down the door’s surface.
Halverson’s eyes were blurring courtesy of the blood rushing to his upside-down head.
“There must be a better way,” he said.
With his arm he jacked himself back from the restaurant’s rim.
Ray continued taking potshots at the ghouls.
After the blood drained from his face, Halverson leaned out over the edge again.
Another creature was joining the assault on the door. This one was a blonde female in its late twenties with a haughty visage that in its previous life had no doubt been considered beautiful. The creature was wearing an elegant Christian Dior bespoke silk ebony dress that was shredded in several places down to the hem. The dress was pretty much a filthy, tattered rag at this point. A twenty-four karat gold ring or a diamond cabochon ring adorned each of the ghoul’s fingers.
The ghoul’s putrescent suppurating face had flakes of decayed skin sloughing off it. Halverson wondered what the ghoul had to be haughty about. Then he shot it in the temple.
He wasted another ghoul banging against the door.
Hanging upside down he began to feel dizzy with the blood rushing to his head. He pulled back from the ledge and sat up.
“Too many of them,” he said.
Ray sat up, too, his face flushed. “This angle’s no good. If we didn’t have to hang upside down like fucking bats, we could whack the whole kit and caboodle.”
“That door’s not gonna hold.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“I told you this was a death trap,” said Lemans, accosting Rogers. “Why didn’t you listen to me?”
Halverson was getting sick and tired of listening to Lemans’s told-you-so, broken-record routine.
Tom fired his pistol at a ghoul outside the window. “Shut up.”
So was Tom, Halverson realized.
“We need a new leader,” said Lemans.
“Like who?” Tom smirked. “Like you, I bet.”
“We need you to shut up,” Rogers told Lemans. “We need to contrive an escape route.”
“What ab
out the front door?” said Lemans, his lips dripping with sarcasm.
Halverson and Ray were standing up now, firing their MP7s at the ghouls near the front wall.
“If you had followed me in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” said Lemans.
Mildred fired her Mossberg out the window. “You know everything, don’t you?”
“I know more than flyboy. He had his chance. Now we need somebody in charge who knows what he’s doing.”
“Like I said before,” said Rogers, “we need to bust apart all the windows around the restaurant.”
“Why? Are we gonna sprout wings and fly out the window?”
“What good will that do?” asked Foster.
“There’s rope in the kitchen,” answered Rogers. “If those things get in here, we can rappel down the ropes and get out of here.”
“To where? Those things are all over the place down there.”
“The last time I looked, the back was clear. There’s a rear entrance in the wall. We go through there.”
Tom thought about it. He stroked his cheek. “They’ll come after us as soon as they see us hit the ground.”
“They aren’t in the back. How will they be able to see us?”
“We don’t have a whole lot of choices,” said Halverson.
“For one thing, we’re running out of ammo,” said Ray, displaying his MP7.
He ejected a spent clip to the floor for emphasis. The empty magazine clattered on the floor near his feet.
“If they break through the front door, we’ll be able to cut down some of them as they enter the stairwell,” said Halverson. “We can use it as a chokepoint.”
“We can’t hold them there forever,” said Ray.
“Exactly,” said Rogers. “That’s why we have to have our escape route planned out ahead of time.”
Mildred fired another load of lead shot at the ghouls outside. “What’s Mr. Know-it-all’s plan?”
Lemans said nothing.
“Then let’s bash out those windows,” said Rogers.
Not overjoyed at the prospect but seeing no other options, most of the passengers latched onto chairs, hauled them to the window, and fell to smashing the glass to smithereens.
Soon, jagged fragments and shivers from the entire window strewed the pavement outside. All that remained intact was the window frame that stretched from the ceiling to the floor around the circumference of the restaurant like a metal skeleton.
Zombie Apocalypse Page 12
