Angie looked directly below and saw that the small metal platform that was supposed to be immediately below the ladder was now several feet away and also inching lower. The metal at the bottom of the staircase, already older than Angie herself by many, many years, was giving up under the abuse and buckling. Just like Angie had planned, except she hadn’t thought one of their own would still be on it when it did.
“Kim, hurry!” Angie screamed. “You can still make it.” Even as she said it, though, she realized she didn’t actually believe it. If she had, she wouldn’t still be here on the ladder. She would have gone up and out of Kim’s way, giving her a clear path.
Angie was, however, in a position to grab Kim if it came to that. Her muscles tightened, bracing her closer to the ladder as she held out a free hand to Kim. Kim saw it and, despite the weird angle of the stairs, went up them faster than Angie would have thought possible. That extra effort probably hurt her rather than helped her, though. The staircase groaned again, and just as Kim reached the top, something vital underneath gave way.
Kim jumped, reaching out for Angie’s hand as the stairwell broke down and collapsed completely, raining twisted metal on the zombies below. Kim caught Angie’s arm in the middle of her forearm. Angie grabbed back, but Kim’s arm was too thin and slick with sweat, giving Angie little to hold on to. Kim grabbed at Angie’s coat with her other hand, pulling Angie down at an awkward angle. Kim may have been light, but Angie still didn’t have the strength to hold her for long with just one hand.
“Mom!” Megan screamed and reached down through the hatch, but she could only barely touch Angie, let alone Kim as she dangled over the pit.
Angie looked down into Kim’s face and her piercing blue eyes. For a moment, she looked crazed and terrified. Then it passed, and she looked more calm and clear than Angie had probably ever seen her.
“Look away, baby,” Kim said up to Megan.
“Mom, no, we can still—”
“Megan Jean Howzer, you look away this instant, and that’s an order!”
Angie glanced up just long enough to see Megan, her face stricken, pull away from view. When she looked back down, Kim had let go of Angie’s coat.
“Kim, don’t. I can still pull you up.” Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. Despite Kim’s scrawny frame, Angie didn’t have the strength to pull her up with just one arm, let alone help her up the narrow ladder.
“I’ve seen the way you look at Megan,” Kim said. Angie almost would have expected some derision in her voice, but there wasn’t any. The woman just sounded resigned. “Promise me you’ll look after her. Even if nothing happens between you, keep an eye on her.”
There wasn’t anything other for Angie to say than, “I will.”
“Oh, and stop taking that Big Pharma crap. That stuff will kill you.”
With that, she let go and fell into the mass of squirming zombies and twisted metal.
Sixteen
Angie extricated herself from the ladder and climbed up, careful of the slightest bad movement that might slip her up and send her tumbling down to join the sounds of tearing and chewing below. Once she was through the hatch, she collapsed into the snow on the deck, breathing deeply as the adrenaline rush of everything that had just happened caught up with her. She couldn’t let the tiredness take her over yet, though. They still had the second half of the plan to execute, and it was probably going to be even more dangerous than the first half.
Still, she understood that every one of them needed to take this moment to appreciate that they had survived up to this point. And also, no matter how brief, a moment to mourn their dead.
Angie got up to her knees to see Megan, also on her knees, staring blankly at the open hatch behind Kim. Angie thought for a second that she couldn’t imagine what she was going through, but she supposed that wasn’t true. Angie remembered full well that moment she had seen her father die. Megan’s moment, however, was probably full of a lot more complex emotions.
“Megan?” Angie asked.
Megan didn’t answer. Angie became aware that she could still hear the zombies below as they ate and tore apart something wet. Angie turned to close the hatch, although she knew she would have to open it again shortly as they began the final part of their plan.
“Megan?” Angie asked again.
“I’m fine,” Megan said. The flat tone of her voice indicated to Angie that she was most likely not fine at all. She was probably in shock and denial. Angie stood up, touched Megan lightly on her shoulder as she carefully walked around her to the other side of the deck, and crouched down to get into the light room.
She did not find things going as well as she had hoped. Jasmine, Beth, and Kevin should have all been readying their rope and chain contraption. Instead, Beth was sitting on the floor, her back against the wall as she shivered furiously. It was indeed cold up here, but her pale pallor suggested more than just an adverse reaction to the weather.
“What’s going on?” Angie asked.
“Look,” Jasmine said, holding up one of Beth’s limp hands for Angie to see. She had to squint to see it in the dim light, but it was definitely there: a darker line against the pale skin of the back of her hand. A scratch. So simple. Yet from a zombie, theoretically deadly. Upon closer inspection, Angie could see that it smoked a bit, but the skin around it wasn’t taking on the same charred color as most of the full-on bites she had seen.
“I think this proves that you were right,” Jasmine said. “Those pills you gave us seem to be what kept you and Megan from turning into zombies.”
“But it hasn’t been in her system long enough or in big enough doses,” Angie said. This was a problem. A big one. The final part of their plan didn’t have any room for someone who could barely stand, let alone climb.
“She’s going to live, though, right?” Kevin asked. For the first time all night, Angie thought she heard genuine, heart-felt worry in his voice. He gently stroked Beth’s other hand, occasionally stopping just long enough to smooth her hair and give her a gentle peck on the cheek. Beth only seemed to be partially aware that any of them were there. Most of the time she just stared blankly ahead, whimpering every so often at some hallucination or trick of the dim light that only she could see.
Under any other circumstances, Angie would have answered him in the affirmative with no hesitation. But this was different. It looked like she would survive the zombie infection in much the same way Megan had, but that was no longer the number one threat against them. In the next few minutes, their biggest worries would be getting burned alive or falling to their deaths, and Megan wasn’t in the position to protect herself from either.
Instead of answering him, Angie just said, “Jasmine, get the ropes ready. I’m going to go check that everything else is in place.” She didn’t give any further instructions to Kevin. There was a very good possibility that they were all about to leave his wife behind to die, and if that was the case, Angie wanted him to have these last few moments.
Angie crawled back out onto the deck, being careful not to slip on the snowy mush and fall over the short railing. That would come soon enough, but hopefully in a lot more controlled manner. As she made her way around the round deck back to the hatch, she looked over the side, for the first time actively judging the distance from here to the ground. She wasn’t good on making estimates about height, but she thought it was about forty to fifty feet. From certain areas of the deck, there would be a shorter drop if someone fell, only about ten or so feet to the sloped roof of the house itself behind them, but that wouldn’t do any of them any good considering the state she intended the entire lighthouse to be in shortly. There had been enough snow over the last couple hours for it to start drifting against the walls, but it wasn’t deep enough that it would help break any falls. A drop from all the way up would be deadly, or in the best case scenario would break enough bones that whoever fell wouldn’t be walking away. That was the first obstacle. The second was the zombies themselves. As Angi
e followed the railing around the circular deck, she looked at the zombie concentration. From the tower, it was hard to see the area directly behind the house, but given the height, she could otherwise see everything all the way across the flat ground from the harbor on one side and the security fence on the other. Given that she’d known an entire town’s worth of zombies would be here, she hadn’t expected the area to be completely clear, but there were still more zombies roaming around outside than she would have liked. It would be impossible for a couple hundred zombies to all fit in the lighthouse, but with them crowding both the bottom and first floors, she’d hoped they would all be concentrated enough for the final part of her plan. There were enough still wandering around outside in random groups that she was no longer sure, though.
There was also no sign of Pestilence. Angie saw some footprints in the snow that might have been deeper than the others, but it was impossible to be certain with how much the zombies had been tromping it down.
Back at the hatch, Angie found Megan still kneeling. She had scooted closer to the hatch, as though she wanted to look through it for any last trace of her mother, yet knew that she really didn’t want to see. Angie put a hand on her shoulder again and gently whispered that Megan should go inside and help Jasmine. Megan wordlessly stood and went in. Angie only got the quickest view of twin lines running down her cheeks that might have been tears slowly on their way to freezing.
Angie looked back down through the hatch, hoping she wouldn’t see any of Kim’s grizzly remains. She saw some fresh blood on the walls in a few spattered places, but that was thankfully all that didn’t appear to belong to the zombies themselves. There was one piece of luck, at least, and that was the fact that much of the twisted metal from the staircase had come to a rest right near the front door, effectively blocking most of the zombies from getting out there. There were even a few still trying to crawl over the wreckage to get inside. That was good enough. Angie didn’t want to wait for much longer. If they did, the zombies could start realizing there was nothing more for them to eat in here and they might as well wander out and on to the next town. Not that Angie would be particularly upset about the loss of Ontonagon, but there were other towns beyond it that she didn’t have a long-held irrational dislike for. And once this whole thing spread, it would be near impossible to stop it. If this particular zombie apocalypse was going to be stopped, it had to happen right now, right here, on probably the last occasion where all zombies were in one place.
She went back around to the door and crouched to peer inside. “Jasmine, how’s the rope?”
Jasmine had tied their rope-like contraption around the light in the center of the room. In her moving around, she’d gotten one of the nasty strips of flypaper stuck in her hair, and rather than trying to pull it out she’d just left it there, dangling like a carnivorous ponytail that had a curious appetite for insects.
“It’s about as sturdy as it’s going to get,” Jasmine said. Judging from her expression, that wasn’t very sturdy at all. They’d cobbled it together from the ropes and chains and bed sheets, and the resulting item could be called a rope in only the loosest sense of the term. The stronger the material, the closer they’d put it to the top of the rope, with the chains wrapped around the light then going to the ropes and finally the sheets at the end. The idea was that if some part of it gave out under their weight, they wanted it to give out closer to the bottom of the tower where there was less chance the fall would kill them. They’d even found a use for the bungie cords, using all of them to further strengthen the point where the chain was tied to itself. All they needed to do now was throw the rope over the side and climb down. From there they could run.
As if it were all that simple. Angie didn’t think she’d ever climbed up or down a rope in her life. It never looked hard in the movies, but she knew better than to trust that. And they also had to take care of the zombies. Simple enough, in theory. The instrument of their own destruction was built into them. It was just a matter of using it without Angie and the others killing themselves in the process.
And then there was Beth.
“I’m not going,” Kevin said as Angie came in.
“What?” She almost asked why, except that was obvious. Beth was breathing heavily and from the way she blinked at her husband, Angie guessed she was a little more present than she had been just before. The fact that they had all taken the pills hours earlier rather that immediately before she was scratched must have helped her, but Angie still estimated it would take her more time to fully recover than they had. They needed to go now before the zombies had a chance to break up and scatter.
“I know you’re going to leave her behind,” Kevin said. “I know why. I understand. But I’m not going without her. If she has to stay then so do I.”
The heroic sacrifice for true love. Given how much Pestilence had engineered this entire thing as an entertaining story for the Legion, Angie should have expected something like this. Yet her gut reflexively clenched against the notion. She’d already watched three people die right in front of her in the last few minutes. That should have been more than enough for an entire lifetime, yet it wasn’t even all the death she had witnessed in just this one night. And they had all been more or less under her protection. How a waitress had become these people’s protector she didn’t know, and she felt like she had been doing a rather poor job of it. Becca, Old Bert, Johnny, Rudy, Boris, and Kim. All dead because of her.
And yet, she realized, that wasn’t the whole story. Here were three people in front of her that weren’t even supposed to be there. According to Pestilence’s plan, the only people that were supposed to be in this tower probably should have been Angie and either Jasmine or Boris. Beth, Kevin, and Megan were all supposed to be dead or part of the zombie horde by now. Hell, even if she was supposed to be here Beth was still supposed to be turning into a zombie right now, and Angie’s thinking had prevented that. It had to count for something. Somewhere along the line, she had to have done something right. And she could keep doing it.
“No,” Angie said to Kevin. “You’re not staying.”
“Angie, you can’t force me to leave her. If this—”
“She’s coming with us.”
Everyone looked up at her, Kevin and Jasmine with surprise, Beth with confusion, and Megan with, despite the obvious grief still playing over her face, a look of admiration.
“How the hell do you propose that?” Jasmine asked.
“I honestly have no fricking idea. But I know I’m not losing anyone else tonight. I swear it.” She turned around and shouted out the short door into the blustery night. “You hear me, Legion? Not one more! Not one more of these people is going to die for your amusement.”
The wind howled back, as though it were interested to see if she could back up such a boast.
“Okay, but how?” Jasmine asked. “Beth’s not in any condition to hold the rope. Hell, I don’t know if any of the rest of us are.”
Angie thought about this for a second. Kevin might be the only one with the strength to carry her, but only under the most ideal circumstances. Going down a rope cobbled together from bed sheets in the middle of a snowstorm was not ideal.
“She goes first,” Angie finally said. “We tie the rope around her and lower her. The rest of us then climb down it one at a time.
“She’ll be a sitting duck if a zombie comes for her while the rest of us are still up here,” Kevin said.
“That still gives her more of a survival chance than being left up here.”
“How does that affect the rest of the plan, though?” Jasmine asked.
“Honestly, I have no fucking idea,” Angie said. “I’m playing this entire thing by ear.”
They all did their best to tie the bed sheets around Beth under her arms. She was just conscious enough of what was going on that she didn’t fight them, although she seemed completely confused and scared at the bizarre flurry of activity around her. Once she was secure (or at least as s
ecure as possible when her entire survival relied on the tensile strength of sheets), Angie dragged her out onto the deck. Everyone else ducked through the door and joined her. It occurred to Angie that, in this lighthouse that was nearly a hundred and fifty years old, this was the last time anyone would ever be in that room.
The deck was only designed to hold one person at a time, so all five of them made for a terribly crowded and terrifying experience. All it would take was for one of them to slip in the snow, maybe reflexively reaching out for one of the others and sending them both to broken necks. Angie did one last check to see the placement of zombies on the ground. There were none here on this side of the house by the tower. Perfect.
“Alright, everyone get ready to lower her over the side as soon as you hear the gunshot,” Angie said. “If it looks like any of our knots are about to give out on her, lower her faster instead of trying to bring her back up. She’ll have more of a chance to survive that way. As soon as she’s on the ground, the next person needs to climb down. Only one at a time, because I don’t think this thing can hold that much weight at once. Jasmine, you go down after Beth so you can use your gun to defend her if needed. Then Kevin, then Megan so there might be people to help if your strength goes out and you fall. I’ll go last. Everyone understand?”
There were nods all around, although their silent ascents were partially obscured as the wind blew a particularly harsh gust of snow across their faces. Angie had really hoped the storm would have calmed by this point, but she should have known better. Pestilence and the Legion would think it was much more interesting for the finale to take place in the storm.
“Okay, get ready,” Angie said. “I’m off to take care of our friends.” She went around the deck to the hatch and opened it, staring down with a faint sense of vertigo at the zombies still milling about at the bottom. They looked like they were getting restless. The promised feast was not here. They would never be getting it, either. Angie pulled the gun from her pocket, struggled to get a good grip on it with her stiff, cold fingers, and aimed it down through the hatch. All it would take was a single bullet in one of the many heads, but she aimed specifically for one that was near the mangled wreckage at the door. It wouldn’t be able to get out that way, and it would block anyone else trying to do the same.
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