Everyone was waiting for her mark to shoot. When ammunition was limited and most of their weapons were close-range, they couldn’t fire at this distance. It was just going to waste the little they had. Hitting the chest was as good as a miss. They had to nail the head.
Fisher dropped from the ladder and dashed down the driveway, her brown hair flying. She didn’t go to the house to take the inner door to the garage but went instead to the barn to hide. That was even less safe than the bus and Scarlett couldn’t go after her. Christ, she had dragged this kid over hundreds of miles and was going to lose her here of all places! Why had Fisher chosen the crappy barn over the garage? Maybe she’d taken some of Elena’s pills after all, and was planning to go to sleep with the animals. But that was a slow death. The girl didn’t know.
There was nothing to be done about it. They were coming.
Her arm dropped. Dave fired first, killing one in the front line that was running to the wall. A charge went through Scarlett at the deadhead falling. Those coming up behind stepped on his body. Face, groin, fingers, they didn’t notice him down there. She aimed at the grayish-brown sweep of flesh swerving around the trees and pulled the trigger. Wind came through and the smell of them hit her like a slap. Shit and decay, piss and BO, their bodies were caked in dirt and excrement and blood.
One rushing to Scarlett’s tower fell from a bullet. It was a woman who had spent five months in a maid’s uniform, although it was hardly recognizable now. The nametag was still attached, reading CRYSTAL in big red script. The logo to the side was for a Peeper Sleeper. Blackened feet stomped over her, Scarlett unable to aim and fire fast enough at the moving targets coming this way. Crystal’s head came apart from the pressure of the feet, her brain stamped into the ground and borne away as toe cheese.
A second deadhead fell, this one struck in the face when Scarlett was aiming for someone else. No matter. It was one less deadhead. Other guns blasted and chattered from the towers and ladders.
In the movies, the zombies would have been moaning or screaming for blood. In real life, they were silent. Under the blasts of the guns, the old woman chuckled at her half-dead progeny. The meaning was clear. Keep going.
Dave was mowing them down, bodies flying back and hands going up like they were surprised. The first of them passed out of Scarlett’s view on the parapet, meaning they had made the wall and were no doubt starting to climb. She stood up and leaned over. At a range this narrow, there was no way to miss. Three tumbled back from her bullets, the barbed wire ripping and catching on their skin and clothes. Others climbed over them, avoiding the wire by stepping on the bodies of their compatriots. Scarlett fired frantically and sent them down to the earth. More gray eyes looked up, mouths opening at the pretty picture of fresh meat that Scarlett made. Their teeth and tongues were black. The breath of hell came from their throats.
Jacklyn screamed. “Oh God! No!” The deadheads had taken her off the other road-facing tower. She fired down at them, thrashing helplessly in their grip. Swinging in that direction, Dave took careful aim and sent a bullet through Jacklyn’s skull. The scream cut off and Morris replaced Jacklyn on the tower.
Three deadheads were skimming up the bodies to Scarlett’s tower. Bullets sent two down and the gun clicked. Empty. The third swung over the side and she lashed out with the sword, separating his head from his body. His head toppled away. She kicked the decapitated body over the edge, where it landed on another deadhead climbing up.
Halfway between the towers, a deadhead crested the wall by the tomato beds. His foot hooked on a string of barbed wire as he tumbled over the side, catching him short. He flailed upside-down, a few inches above the ground. Stationed behind one of the pumpkin trellises, Elena aimed and fired. His head splattered on the concrete blocks.
“Huh! Huh-huh-huh-HUH.” It was the boy, the graze wound Scarlett had delivered to his scalp covered in clotted blood. He came around a tree and leaned against it casually, his eyes insolent on her. She had gotten out her second gun and was firing at the deadheads scaling the gate. They were having a harder time with that, since Bridger had greased the poles with every slimy substance they had in Plantation. The deadheads made little headway and were easy pickings for her to take down.
But there were still too many. More were trampling the fallen to climb the tower, impervious to the barbed wire ripping out the bottoms of their feet. Others stood on the dead and jumped along the walls, the taller ones getting handholds on the top and more deadheads pushing them up. Bridger had placed people all over the garden, promising them that their roles were most likely going to be unnecessary. Last night, he hypothesized that the kid’s pack would be twenty.
It was a little more than that. Holy shit, was it more than that! Those standing in the garden fired at the deadheads scrabbling over the walls. Scarlett nailed a girl through the ear and spotted something being carried through the hordes. It was Jacklyn’s remains, her organs exposed and ripped flesh leaking as it was borne along by a contingent of deadheads. Scarlett knew who it was from the long black hair. Set down by Baylen, the deadheads knelt down to feast and got a chuckle of reprove. They backed away and the boy reached into the opened torso. Scarlett wished the little asshole were closer so she could take a shot at him.
“Help! Someone help!” It was Wesley. People ran to assist him along the northern wall, where deadheads were coming over fast.
Baylen straightened with Jacklyn’s gun in his hand. It dripped. Aiming at Scarlett, he fired and missed since Scarlett had dived down behind the parapets.
A woman’s face appeared in a gap, her face smudged with dirt but untouched by rot. Her mouth opened and maggots fell out, the decay going on within. Scarlett jammed the muzzle right between the woman’s lips and fired. She tumbled away, revealing the boy blowing fake smoke away from the muzzle of Jacklyn’s gun.
Something boomed, rattling the ground and causing leaves to fall from the trees. The deadheads staggered. Smoke blossomed up everywhere outside the wall and obscured the view. The only thing Scarlett saw was a deadhead, who replaced the woman with the maggoty mouth at the gap.
He lashed out for her arm and knocked the gun from her hand. Scooting to the ladder, she swung onto it and grabbed for her weapon. It dropped over the side and into a planter.
Freeing the sword, she slashed at him. The blade sank into his veined arm, which burst apart in meaty strings and fluid. He forced himself up with his other hand and set a foot to the watchtower.
A gun chattered outside the wall. That wasn’t the one the kid had. Scarlett stabbed furiously at the deadhead, filling him with holes while he forced himself closer. When she nailed him through the throat (oh God, I’m sorry, Eamon, I love you), he stared at her before falling over. Blood spread in her direction, a strange shade of grayish red.
She crawled through the blood and wriggling maggots to look down. The kid was still out of sight, as was almost everything else. Where the smoke was beginning to disperse, deadheads were falling with the chatter of the gun. They hadn’t placed anyone outside the wall for obvious reasons, so she didn’t know who that was. Thinning the herd. Maybe one of the ringers was thinning the herd so there was more left for his or her own pack.
“Get back to the house! Get back!” Bridger yelled. He blew on a whistle so those at the far end of the property could hear. If they hadn’t come up here to join the fight after all this time, it meant they were under siege back there as well. Scarlett dropped from the ladder and retrieved her gun from the planter. Deadheads were swarming over the wall to the north and west now. For every one that got a bullet, four more passed over unscathed.
Fisher. Scarlett had to get Fisher, make her throw up the pills if she’d taken them and squirrel her away in the bus. Yet deadheads were coming in directly between Scarlett and the makeshift barn, and they had Wesley. Screaming soundlessly out of a torn throat, he dropped to the swarm. The only way for Scarlett to get to the barn was to dash around the house and come at it the back way.
Deadheads were coming over the wall there, too.
So what if they had killed a hundred of them? There were hundreds more.
They ran hard for the house, Bridger at the door waving them in. Dave sprinted through the vegetable beds with a deadhead coming up fast on his tail. Scarlett yelled to warn him. A rotten hand closing over his shoulder, Dave bashed at the deadhead with the butt of the gun. Out of ammo and there wasn’t more. That beautiful, expensive gun was only good for a club. Morris was still shooting at the tower, despite the whistle.
Scarlett couldn’t go after Fisher. The lure of the fresh meat inside the barn, the lamb and cows, the chickens and pigs . . . That was going to draw the deadheads. There wasn’t anywhere good to hide in that structure, the roof without rafters and the pens easy to look inside. The best the girl could do was close herself into one of the feed cans, either dying of oxygen deprivation or zombie discovery.
Scarlett was sorry about her parents and their fucking cancers. She was sorry about Eamon and the life they never had. Now she was going to be sorry about Fisher, another person of hers getting left behind. In her head, she kicked her way through to the barn like a superhero and bore Fisher away from the claws and teeth. In real life, she was fleeing for the house to save herself.
Morris was screaming. Scarlett pressed on, past the tomatoes and trellises packed with pumpkins, the cucumber and watermelon plants with their leaves slack from the heat. Ahead, Elena leaped the steps to the porch with the grace of a doe. Her long skirt hiked up in her hands, she flew past Bridger. Dave appeared at Scarlett’s side, bloody but alive, and they dashed over the last of the garden to the house.
Once the last of them had gotten in, Bridger slammed shut the door and locked it. Two of the younger men shoved a massive credenza into the hallway. As the old man moved aside, Scarlett helped to push the heavy piece of furniture to the door. No one was getting in that way, not without a great deal of trouble.
They charged up the staircase to the second floor, gunfire testifying that some were already up there and in position. Scarlett went down the hallway, her head swinging back and forth between the bedrooms and bathrooms to take stock of who had made it. Not Wesley obviously. Not Dakota. He had been stationed in the back. Shirley was still there, but her friend Amanda wasn’t. Fifteen-year-old Mark was covered in blood. Sitting on the floor of a bathroom, he was wrapping his arm fast with the gun laid out at his side.
Scarlett went to the big window in her bedroom and looked out to the sea of deadheads below. Terrible animal cries were coming from the barn. Oh God, Fisher. Scarlett never should have agreed to the girl fighting.
“Huh-huh-huh-huh-huh!” The gate was open, and the old woman came through.
Deadheads were smashing through the garden to get to the house. Not going around the vegetable beds, they stepped directly into them and crushed what was there. A trellis fell.
If they broke into the house, Scarlett was going to use the last bullet on herself. It was in her pocket. They could do what they wanted to her corpse.
She knew precisely what they were going to do with it.
One of the others dashed into the bedroom to give her another gun. Jerking open the window, Scarlett aimed at a deadhead and fired. He spun like a ballerina and fell to the ground, his blood soaking into the thyme growing there. An arrow zinged by from a few bedrooms over and lodged in a woman’s throat.
It wasn’t really the fault of the deadheads, or even the ringers. Scarlett didn’t know what had caused this. She was still filled with rage at how her haven was coming down, and at how she’d been stupid enough to stay. Guns blasted from the other windows, Bridger yelling, “Get that one. Silent Steve! He’s trying to climb the porch!” Bang.
Someone was still down there, a person among the zombies and it wasn’t a ringer. Scarlett shielded her eyes from the glare of the sun. Deadheads were falling at the gate, the old ringer crying out to witness it. She fell after them, her body blown back like a gust of wind had tossed her. A tall man wearing body armor and a helmet came through the gate with an automatic weapon. He fired while turning in circles to keep the deadheads from getting any closer.
Who the hell was that? It wasn’t a Plantation man, and that wasn’t one of their weapons. Scarlett fired at a deadhead jerking at the boards over a window on the first floor. That one couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. She looked back to the man mowing down the deadheads and shouted, “Hey!”
He didn’t hear her. Running into the hallway, she screamed, “There’s a man shooting the zombies out there! Make sure you don’t shoot him!”
“I see him!” someone shouted.
“The porch!” Bridger yelled in warning. Scarlett joined Silent Steve in Fisher’s room and the two of them fired repeatedly at the heads coming over the edge.
“I was a bank teller at an American Trust down in L.A.,” Silent Steve blurted in a pause. He was a pale, narrow fellow. Scarlett couldn’t help but think that he wouldn’t feed too many zombies. “You?”
“Waitress at a Yum-Yum Waffles,” Scarlett said. “Bakersfield.”
“I was married, too. We had a baby boy on Valentine’s Day. Seven pounds, six ounces. We named him Colton James, the James after my father. I just want someone to know before I die,” Silent Steve said, and stoically returned to shooting.
Behind them, Bridger was using Fisher’s bed to load up the last of the ammo. The strange man below continued his whirling dance of death, getting closer and closer to the house with every revolution. Then he slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and brought out two handguns. Chuckling filled the air, the brat on some other side of the house, but deadheads responded by turning to the man. Pounding on the wall beneath the window, Scarlett shouted, “Hey, you! Mister! Run!”
How was he going to get up here? The front door was blocked and the windows boarded. She motioned to Silent Steve and they crawled out through the window to the roof of the porch. Lying flat on their stomachs, they peeked over the side. A dozen deadheads were bleeding and motionless below. Some of the barbed wire was still wrapped around the poles.
The guy saw them. Scarlett checked around for Baylen, worried that he was going to take his chance and shoot. All she saw was rags and rot, most of it looking with laser focus on the new man. He nailed one after another, but couldn’t take them down as fast as he could with the AK-47. In the other windows, people concentrated their fire at the deadheads around him, clearing a path. The guy ran to the porch and swung up on the railing. When his arms came over the top, his gloves torn from the wire, Silent Steve and Scarlett hauled him up. They slipped back through the window one at a time.
“Who are you?” Scarlett said in bafflement.
“Not a good time,” the man grunted. There had never been a worse time to ask that question. She was just so gobsmacked to see an unfamiliar face. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, with nice features yet tired brown eyes. Those were eyes that had seen too much, the way hers looked when she glanced in a mirror. Going to the bed, he snatched up what he needed to reload one of his Glocks. Then he scanned the rest. “Is this all you got?”
“Afraid so,” Bridger said. “This all you got?”
“Yeah. There was more in the van, a little more, but they’ve gotten to it.”
Hands and another head came over the porch. Scarlett put a bullet in a partially exposed brain. Silent Steve and Bridger ran to another room in answer to a cry for help. The arrows were running out. Everything was running out.
Someone was pounding on the wood of the garage doors. There was no second-story window that offered a good view of it. God, don’t let these freaks find the bus. Those inside the garage had to be quaking at all of this noise, the adults no doubt struggling to keep the children quiet.
“HUH! HUH! HUH! HUH!”
The man joined Scarlett at the window. Pigs streaked in panic through the deadheads, many breaking free from Plantation altogether and running away for all they were worth to the road. The de
adheads couldn’t catch the pigs, not in the maze of vegetable beds and bodies.
Humans wouldn’t be so hard to catch. It was just a matter of when, not if, the rest of them were killed. The ringers had timed this well. The next sleep cycle wasn’t until tomorrow, hours and hours away, and it wasn’t possible to hold out until then. Scarlett fingered the bullet in her pocket. Not yet. If she were a better person, she’d use it on Doug as a mercy. But she wasn’t that person. This bullet was going in her head when they ran out of options. That time was coming up fast.
The new man fired at a head rising over the porch. Their predicament played out in Scarlett’s head like a math problem while she fired at another one. If you have two dozen bullets and three hundred zombies to kill, how long will it take for them to eat you? Round to the nearest minute. She was afraid to work out the solution.
“What’s that?” Scarlett asked when the man pressed a black tube into her palm.
“Pepper spray. Last resort. Blind them and get away.” He had two more in his palm, which he slid back into his pocket. Bridger came back with a grim expression. The weapons now were boards with nails on the end, the samurai sword, kitchen knives and axes.
“We should have left,” Scarlett blurted to both of them. “I wanted to keep this place. That was stupid. And selfish. Now we’re all going to be zombie meat.” She hadn’t ever had a place of her own, not a real one. She’d just had a string of shitty apartments with balconies covered in plants to make something gray and brown into green. That made her grab onto this land tightly and refuse to let go.
“Don’t dig your grave yet,” the man said.
No one was going to be digging her grave. When this ended, Scarlett would be borne away in hundreds of bellies. Taking aim at a deadhead, she fired and thought but not yours.
Chapter Four
For a few minutes back there, he’d just been amazed at the sheer number of deadheads. This was going to be a tale to carry back to Crosica. The other hunters had to be warned that zombies were capable of this, deadheads combining forces under their ringers into armies that numbered near a thousand.
Zombie Tales Box Set [Books 1-5] Page 7
