Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2)

by Durnin, S. P.

  The redhead didn't scream or cringe or generally freak out. She opened up on them with her carbine. Laurel fired her M-4 steadily, double-tapping the shamblers as they moved towards her all the while moaning horribly. She'd taken George's instruction to heart, and continued blowing the creature's brains across the building's interior as Penny laid down a little covering fire of her own. It was clear there were too many for them to handle even together, and Laurel called to the frozen blonde to snap out of it.

  Then it happened—so quickly that later none of their party members could have pinpointed the moment if pressed.

  That was the instant Donna, anti-gun activist and all around political-corrector, came into her own. The previously prissy woman—who hadn't wanted Jake to instruct her in the use of his M-4 rifle—transformed into a warrior.

  Donna killed over thirty of the horrors, all the while calling them everything from nutless refugees from a mortuary to formaldehyde-breathed fuck-tards. She blew their heads to bits, teeth bared in rage. Her face a mask of unreasoning and uncomprehending hate. They had eaten everything she'd ever known or cared about, and she made them pay for all the heartache they'd put her through.

  But the dead were just too numerous. They began latching onto her, biting mouthfuls of flesh from her shoulders and arms, even as she used her rifle as a club to bash half a dozen more into oblivion. She fought them hand-to-hand, kicked, and gouged out their eyes. She even bit a couple of them back. But eventually, they had her pressed helpless against the wall, and began to feed.

  “Donna! No!” Gwen cried.

  “Gwen! Don't let me come back!” Donna was being splattered with her own blood. The creatures had begun to chew on her stomach, seeking the soft organs within her body cavity.

  Her blonde-haired friend raised her weapon and tearfully put a round through the brave-little-Barbie-that-coulds forehead. Donna's head slumped forward, after the rear of her skull exploded across the unpainted, cinder-block wall. Her pain was done. She was free.

  Laurel and Penny were doing better but still couldn't manage to secure the stairwell door. For every zombie they killed, three more shuffled up. Laurel changed magazines quickly and kept firing.

  “Laurel, shut the door!” Jake bellowed.

  “I can't!” She yelled back. “There's too many bodies in the way! And don't yell at me! I'm still pissed off at you over leaving without—”

  “Later! Later! Later would be better!” Rae called and shot a trio closing on her from the right. One-two-three, she laid them out side by side on the ever more, blood-splattered floor and swung her massive weapon back, firing at the ones coming through the outer door again.

  Jake was frantic. More of the creatures were pouring in, Laurel was close to being overwhelmed, and the rest of them were about four staggering steps from becoming dinner. The ghouls were reaching out towards them, semi-skeletal hands grasping and biting at the air in the eagerness to feed. They needed to get to the Mimi—wherever that was—or find a secure...

  “Laurel! The roof! Get to the roof!”

  “What?” She yelled, and put down another pair trying to muscle through the doorway together. Their bodies clogged the opening as they fell and kept the others back briefly, allowing her some breathing room. “Are you crazy?? I'm not leaving you down—”

  “The roof!” Jake bellowed, motioning the others into the cafeteria, away from the oncoming crowd. “There's a door in the far, left corner at the end of the hall on the top floor! It's strong enough to hold them back for a while! Go! Please!”

  Laurel and Penny vanished up the stairwell with the dead in slow pursuit. They would scatter through the upper floors in search of the women before attempting the heavy security door. He'd seen it next to Poole's office when they'd taken him to meet the Nazi's leader. The barrier would buy time for his party to reach them, somehow.

  Jake and the others ran for the outside, passing through the bloody, body-covered dining area and through the shattered entryway. The dead followed but much more slowly. His group reached the edge of the outdoor patio, long before the first of the creatures even put a hand to the cafeteria door within.

  “Think, Think!” Jake mumbled to himself, as they crossed the slab. He was having problems keeping his thoughts on track with what was going on around them, and there was an annoying ringing in his ears which he couldn't explain or understand. He slapped himself in the face a few times. When that didn't work, he balled up his right fist and slammed it against his wounded shoulder.

  Oh, you stupid son of a bitch! The voice in the vaults of his brain screamed at him, after O'Connor almost blacked out from the wave searing agony the blow sent up to explode behind his eyes. Stop. Fucking. Around. And focus!!

  There had to be somewhere to—

  “Jake! They're coming around!” Rae called. She stood at the corner of the slab, her huge weapon pointed down the wall of the building towards the far end, but not firing yet.

  “Over here too!” Gwen yelled. She gazed towards the opposite end of the building nervously.

  “Dammit, this is turning into a cluster-fuck!” he exclaimed, and looked back into the cafeteria. The creatures had entered the room but were temporarily distracted by the numerous dead Purifiers. They were eating the corpses. “Kat, help me out here! We need to buy time. Foster's sure to find us eventually, but we need to keep those things back!”

  “We don't have many options here!” She told him, looking around, gun in hand. “The offices are definitely out. No fire escapes or anything on the outer wall. The creatures are coming from both directions and we're butted up against the transfor—”

  “The transformer yard!” Jake cast his eyes around the surface of the patio. “The guard with the gate key is up here somewhere!”

  Kat looked back inside. The creatures within were still feeding on the bodies, but more were coming through every second. Soon they'd be pushing out onto the concrete slab, and the survivors would be screwed. “Um. He might be inside. If that's the case—”

  “That's him!” Jake pointed behind her. “The ugly one!”

  “Yeah. You're going to have to narrow that down a bit,” she said, eyebrows raised at the bloody, chunky forms lying nearby. “None of these guys were really what you'd call Chip-‘n-Dale material.”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “The one missing his leg! With the swastika tattoo!”

  “Still not really helpful!”

  “On his cheek!”

  “Oh. Why didn't you say so?” Kat squatted beside one of the corpses and began fishing through its pockets. “Let's see here...A pouch of Red Man. No surprise there....One handkerchief. Used. Ew... Condoms. Obviously an optimist...Got it!” She flourished a large rabbit's foot with a single key hanging from its chain.

  “Really?” Gwen marveled, looking away from the approaching ghouls.

  “Head for the gate!” Jake snapped.

  One of the second floor windows just above them shattered outward as an office chair sailed through it and tumbled wobbly on its way to the ground. Immediately thereafter, Penny Carson hastened to the edge and peered out at Jake and the others below.

  “Wow! That was totally Die Hard!” Kat exclaimed.

  Penny looked over her shoulder, then emptied the entire thirty-round magazine of her M-4 back into the room before dropping the weapon (butt-first) towards the Purifier-littered patio. She kicked the last remaining shards of glass from the window frame, sat hurriedly on its edge, and swung herself out below to hang from its empty housing.

  “Look the hell out below!”

  After releasing her grip, Deputy Carson plunged the remaining distance to the ground. She landed on a trio of mangled Purifier corpses. Luckily, not only was she some distance from the feeding frenzy inside the cafeteria, the pile of nearly-shredded Nazi assholes broke her fall.

  Albeit, quite messily.

  “Ow! Shit!” Penny scrambled free of the pile, covered in some very foul substances and trailing a loop of stray intestine from on
e of Kat's more dismembered targets. “I don't get paid enough for this!”

  “Oh, gross!” Gwen looked like she was about to lose her lunch as Penny whipped a glistening line from schmutz off her forearm.

  “Blondie, you have no idea.” Penny shot her a pleading look. “Please tell me I don't have any in my hair.”

  “Where the hell is Laurel?” Jake began to panic.

  Carson grimaced and pulled a disembodied finger from the back of her waistband. “We got separated, alright? I was trying to stall those things, and when I turned around she was long gone! The damn zombies were too close by then, so I had to dodge them through some of the offices and got cut off from the stairs. That's why I had to do my Spider-woman retinue just now. How the hell is that girl able to run so fast anyway? What, did she run marathons before the zombies came along or something?”

  “There's no time! Go-go!” Jake yelled, relieved beyond words that his redhead had listened to him and made for the top temporary safety of the power plant's roof. He hopped over the railing and off the edge of the patio and nearly dropped to the gravel. His legs almost didn't hold as he landed, and a surge of exhaustion swept through him. “Rae, we need cover! Can you use that grenade launcher?”

  George's counterpart grinned and tuned back to the creatures approaching from the southeast. She sighted on them, angled her weapon up slightly, and pumped a cartridge into the chamber. “Watch me work,” she assured him.

  In quick succession, the shapely woman sent a trio of rounds towards the approaching infected. They exploded maybe four feet in front of the first rank, and sent almost thirty of them backwards into the amassed creatures behind them. The ones blown back acted like bowling balls, knocking zombies here and there and generally causing a gigantic mess of bodies. The things were delayed further when all of them tried to rise again at once, creating what looked like an extremely large game of Twister at a horror convention.

  The humans ran. Jake and Kat reached the entrance first, only fifteen yards from the struggling dead. He took out a few of the closest who'd attained vertical status, while Cho deftly cracked the massive padlock and pulled it free. Jake shoved her in ahead of him, not wanting her to insist on playing rearguard. Then, after the blood-soaked Penny, Gwen, and—who was still blowing the heads from the nearest ghouls— hurried through, Jake rewrapped the thick chain around the gate. Kat passed the heavy lock through its links and snapped the mechanism shut, just before the front rank of flesh-eaters hit the fence.

  Cho pulled O'Connor back as the infected started gnawing on the industrial-strength steel, Glock pointed and ready. They were all well aware that zombies didn't feel pain, but watching as they broke their teeth on the thick metal and tore their lips while they chewed on the uncaring fence? There was no doubt in any of their minds that the things outside the transformer yard were monsters.

  They weren't people infected with a disease that could recover, if given the proper care.

  They weren't a super-weapon to be used in times of conflict, to pacify an enemy without endangering a given nation's army to danger on the battlefield.

  They weren't beings that operated on a level different from humans, who sought to find their place in the natural order or were just trying to survive.

  They didn't need to be understood, identified with, pitied, preserved or protected.

  The needed to be destroyed. Exterminated. Annihilated. Wiped away, then stricken from human memory, so that future generations wouldn't have to carry the weight of their ancestors fear, pain, and tragedy.

  Jake and the others huddled together. Clinging to one another in the face of such naked evil. The infected began to build up behind the fence, eyes and mouths wide, all wearing the same expression of unquenchable need. The need to consume every last living human on the face of the Earth.

  “How are we ever going to beat that?” Gwen whispered.

  “I don't have the first clue,” Penny admitted, trying again to wipe the worst of liquefied Purifier from her appealing extremities.

  “Head to head? We won't,” Rae told her steadily, still pointing her cannon at the faces behind the wire. “The only way people are going to win—or just survive—is to out-think them. If we try fighting the way we always have with each other? We'll just be consumed. We're going to have to come up with one hell of a plan though, or humanity isn't going to be the dominant life form on Earth for very much longer.”

  “We need to find a way out of this enclosure before we worry about saving the human race,” Cho said, looking sadly at Karen's broken body. “Speaking of which, everybody keep an eye out. There was one left walking around in here after our boy made his escape.”

  “No,” Jake choked out, and stared fearfully up at the office block. “What we need to do is figure out how to get Laurel off that roof. The fence around the yard here is industrial grade, so we have some time. If we're quick, we'll all be able to retreat up across the conduit to the generator building. Those sacks of shit can't climb, so they won't be able to get to us, but the door to the roof won't hold them off for long.”

  -Chapter Fourteen-

  Laurel leaned against one of the ventilation units and tried to slow her breathing.

  The door to the roof had not only been easy to find and unlocked, but it was also secured from the outside by way of a pair of nice, heavy-duty bolts. She'd left the dead far behind in the stairwell—and even had the time to grab a twelve pack of bottled water from one of the offices she passed along the way—but had lost Deputy Carson somewhere in the process. She was sure the infected were fanning out inside and it was only a matter of time before they reached the roof access, but she wasn't too worried. They seemed to respond most readily to sound, so all she had to do was stay quiet and wait for the others to figure out a way to get a line up to her. Or something to that effect. That could take a while, which was why she'd taken the case of water. The sun was almost down and the heat of the day was gradually receding, but if they managed to draw the horde off before coming for her it might be a day or two. Maybe even three. While the redhead didn't have anything in the way of food, a couple of days on the roof in the sun shouldn't be too unpleasant. She had plenty of water to keep herself hydrated, there were still eight full magazines for her weapon in the vest she wore. There was every chance Jake and the others would be able to rescue her.

  Face it, girl. You're probably not getting off this roof.

  She was fairly certain she'd have the strength to end it, if the things managed to break through. If—or when—it came to that, well, at least she wouldn't have to walk around eating people.

  Now that she had a moment which didn't involve shooting ravenous, blood-thirsty zombies that were trying to eat her, Laurel felt a weight fall from her shoulders. Jake was alive. Granted he'd been hurt, there had been deep circles under his eyes, his left shoulder was bandaged and bloody and—from the little she'd seen—he was moving stiffly, but he was alive. She was torn between joyous relief at seeing him still among the living, and blazing anger over his decision to engage in an early-morning suicide mission in an attempt to rescue Karen. When she learned of the selfless way he'd agreed to trade himself for the girl, it almost stopped her heart. He had to have known Poole and those of his ilk weren't to be trusted, but she could understand why he'd done it. He felt responsible for not being there to protect Karen when the young woman had been taken, and he felt he had to do everything in his power to buy her freedom.

  It was called, being a leader. Someone who protected the people in his charge, which was basically what all of them—with the possible exception of George—were. His people. Real leaders, real heroes knew that leadership could be defined by two words. Those words being, Follow. Me. Real leaders never asked their people to do anything they couldn't or wouldn't do themselves, either because they didn't possess the ability to do so, or because it might be really dangerous. It meant they lead from the front. From the grit and the grime and the mud and the blood, bullets flying past thei
r ears if need be. Not sitting miles away, drinking cafe-latte, absently directing people like chess pieces. Those individuals were called politicians and most of them had gotten their asses eaten in the first month of the outbreak.

  She could never see Jake sitting safely on his butt, all the while letting others take the risks. In the brief time they'd known one another, he'd come for her on the day all the madness started, kept them all from going stir-crazy during their exile in Foster's safe-house, freed Gwen and Donna from their captors, escaped from the grainery with Deputy Carson in tow, and finally rescued Allen and Maggie from the Purifiers murderous hands. Now, to top it all off, Jake had turned himself over to their leader in a last-ditch effort to free a girl who didn't have any family left in the world, and basically thrown himself to the wolves in an attempt to protect them all.

  No. Jake O'Connor was the real deal.

  And Kat was with him! They'd all believed her roommate had stowed along for the ride somehow, but when she'd contacted them via the Hummer's shortwave it had actually given Laurel a glimmer of hope. There was no way the Purifiers would find the stealthy ninja-girl as she stalked around their compound. Kat was just that good. She'd managed to briefly give them the basic layout of the pseudo-fortress, and even a reasonably safe location to observe the Nazi's activities, before signing off to cause some havoc. There hadn't been much time for her to go into detail during the minute-long conversation. The beautiful Asian had merely said they'd know her signal when they saw it, and told them to be ready to 'ride into the rescue' within the next hour or so. Sure enough, somehow—just over one hour later—she'd managed to free Jake, and even take a big chunk of Poole's little band of killers out in the process.

  The redhead had been pretty pissed at her friend over the course of that hour-long wait. She didn't like the fact that Kat hadn't informed them exactly what the details of her plan were. In retrospect, however, Laurel couldn't bitch about its results.

  Jake was alive.