She turned to look for Mark and almost let out a scream as the room filled with gunfire. Anders shot without saying a word, no warning, no “Hey, cover your ears. I’m about to blast a shitload of ammo out of my pea shooter.”
Then she saw the movement in the shadow of the room ahead. She angled to the right, keeping her eyes fixed on the doorway. If something came through, she was going to hope it wasn’t one of the boys and put it down.
From her vantage point, it was hard to make out the room. It appeared to have a very high ceiling and a sloping wall. There were blocky shapes, and it struck her that she was looking at an auditorium. Things rose and moved toward them, reached the open door and came through in a rush. One screamed an unholy howl that sounded like a demon attempting to speak.
Kate aimed and blew one of the bastards over the back of a seat. She squeezed off a number of rounds, and Mark, like her guardian angel, joined her, taking up position to the left. Together, they put an end to the deaders.
He moved toward the room, stepping over corpses that didn’t even twitch. One to the brainpan was about all it took. Take off an arm, and they kept on coming. Shoot them in the head, and they dropped.
Another deader roared around a stairway that cut through the middle of the rows of seats and came right at her. Kate fired and hit, but the thing kept on coming. Why the fuck did they give her something that didn’t shoot fully automatic? She wanted to rip this thing to shreds with a sub-machinegun burst.
A bullet to its side spun the monstrosity to its left. It was a hulking man that must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. The deader fell back into the room as he lost whatever sense of balance he had possessed. Then he stumbled out of view.
“Fucker!” Kate said and went in after him. She held the gun high, tucked against her shoulder, eyes sweeping left and right.
The room was only dimly lit from above by a skylight. She stumbled over one of the corpses Mark had dispatched and nearly fell on her face.
The massive deader stumbled into a chair. He was much closer than she would have supposed, and she panicked, shooting wide and low. She pulled the trigger three or four times and realized she had no idea how many bullets were left in the mag.
The creature spun around yet again as the bullets found a home in his torso. As his body turned toward hers, he opened his mouth to howl, arm sweeping around in an arc, catching the barrel of her gun.
Stupid!
She tried focus and get him back in her sights, but it was too late. The deader smashed into her, knocking her into a chair. She forgot to take her finger out of the trigger guard and ended up popping another round into the ceiling.
“Kate!” Mark called from the doorway.
She wanted to call back, but the deader crashed into her. They both went to the ground, and she lost her breath as it landed on her.
Then she could think of nothing but fighting for her life.
The deader went for her face, teeth snapping a few inches from her nose. She yanked her head to the side and looped an elbow into his head. Air filled her lungs. It rattled into her chest and felt like fire. Her back hurt from the fall, and she wanted to roll over and retch.
The deader’s hand reached for her face, and she smacked it aside to a cry of frustration from the hungry monster. Then she got a hand on his head and pushed him to the side, but his weight had her trapped. She barely managed a second burning breath.
Kate’s stomach curled up under her chest.
She pistoned her knee between his knees, but he didn’t even register the blow except to rock forward. His weight dropped, and she was afraid it would pin her for good. Her hundred-and-ten-pound frame wouldn’t be able to fight that much weight. Then it would be deader city, complete with a shot to the head, courtesy of the two men with her.
His mouth reeked of rot. Blood drooled along his lips and spilled onto her chest. She delivered a few more blows to the side of his head while holding back his snapping jaws with her elbow. It was like hitting a cold pot roast.
Kate was losing. She could barely hold him back. He reared back and then dove in for a bite. She didn’t have time to get out of the way, and he slammed his head into her forehead. Stars danced over her eyes, but she managed to hold on to the thought that she had to stay away from those teeth!
More gunfire. She almost wished one of the bullets would find her head.
Kate reached over her shoulder and got her fingers on the tip of her sword, but this just provided something for him to bite. His teeth closed on her arm, and she jerked it aside. He held on, though, got a chunk of thick fabric between his teeth and shook her arm like a dog with a toy. The jacket was hot and too big, but the damned thing had saved her life.
Kate should have yelled for help, but that wasn’t her way. She didn’t ask anyone for help, especially not men.
Kate got her hand under his cold neck and managed to slide it under a roll of fat. The skin squished as she sought his jugular. With her other elbow, she kept pummeling his head. His rancid mouth almost snapped off the tip of her nose, but she drove his head back with a determined cry.
She didn’t have much left. The next time he went for her face, she wouldn’t be able to stop him. Then she would be just like one of them. But not for long, not with a couple of pros in the room.
Kate strained with everything she had to move him, to push him away. She squirmed, kicked, punched, and kneed him in a flurry. But it was no use. He was simply too heavy, and she was losing consciousness. She thought she heard a voice in the distance and wondered if all that heaven and hell shit was real. If it was, she was about to be reunited with Daddy in the bowels of a very fiery place.
The weight on top of her was suddenly gone. She inhaled so deeply that she thought her lungs would burst. Then she just panted as she rolled onto her side and saw a large pair of boots. She followed them up to find Mark with a fierce look on his face. He had the deader bent over, one hand on the waist of his pants, the other in his hair. He heaved, and the man went flying.
The deader was propelled down the auditorium stairs to land in a heap. In one smooth motion, Mark drew a large handgun from his holster and pumped four rounds into the body. The deader didn’t move again.
His hands were warm on her face. She assumed he was checking for vital signs, then realized he was brushing hair off her cheek. She focused on his hand as she rasped in breath after breath.
“Is she all right?” Anders’s voice.
“I think so. Just shaken up.”
“Make sure she hasn’t been bitten. Don’t need one of them on our crew.”
“Not bitten,” Kate whispered, then wondered if her voice had come from her at all.
“Let’s get Kara and get out!” Anders yelled.
“Hold on, man,” Mark shot over his shoulder.
He took a cloth from inside his camo shirt and used it to wipe her face. He was tender, and when she felt a tingling in her stomach, she decided it was enough and slapped his hand away. Fucking asshole touching her! How dare anyone touch her?
She reached for her sword, but her arm barely worked.
“Kate, its Mark. Mark!” He was hunched over, face inches from hers, and he yelled as if she were deaf. “You’re okay. As long as it didn’t bite you, you’re okay. Oh God. Did the deader get you?” But he didn’t recoil; he just stared into her eyes intently, as if he could see something beyond the darkness that lurked there. Kate swore she could feel the Other staring back just as keenly.
Much to her surprise, she was okay. She was in pain and could barely lift her arms, but she would live. In a few minutes, she would regain her energy and be ready to shoot every deader for miles around. But for the moment, she was here with a very confused farm boy. His blue eyes regarded her like she was some storybook princess.
He reached under her and slid his hand along her back. She tensed, but he used his other hand to guide her arm over his shoulder. Then he stood up, and she was pulled along with him. She wanted to push hi
m away. He was so damn tall that she had to stand on her tiptoes to continue holding on. She cursed herself and meant to let go, but instead she just stood there in a weird half-embrace. She pressed her face, her shameful and traitorous face with its tears on her cheeks, against him to hide it. Let him think what he would. She bit her tongue rather than acknowledge the sob that tried to break free.
“It’s okay,” he said over and over.
“I’m fine. Just give me a second,” she said and let go. She looked away from him and reached for her rifle. Stupid thing was on the ground where the deader had knocked it loose.
Kate wasn’t the sort to run from her fears, so she walked to the edge of the stairs and looked down at her deader assailant. He was sprawled down half a flight, one leg hooked around the bottom of a chair, hands splayed out from outstretched arms. There was a bloody wound near his neck and one in his head. She lowered her gun and pumped three more rounds into his skull, turning it inside out. Skin and bone ripped away until she could see brain matter.
Kate turned and marched from the room.
Marshall
“Dad, I’m hungry,” Alex said for what seemed like the twentieth time. She had fair skin, like her mother, and hair the color of a sun-kissed day. She was a happy kid, and it hurt that he had to tell her there was nothing to eat.
Phillip—the oldest and the only boy—was morose. He was a smart kid who, at the grand old age of twelve, thought he knew just about everything there was to know about … well, everything. And everything revolved around darkness. If Dad turned on a light, Phil turned it off. He liked it that way.
Melinda, Melanie and Marnie all kept to their rooms. Marnie was the runt of the litter. Probably because her father was a crackhead and her mother ran off when she was two months old. She spent a lot of time in various foster homes before making her way to Marshall. He was happy to have her. Some might complain about another mouth to feed, but he liked the chaos—most of the time—and they got a lot of nice tax breaks. Funny how things changed. He had made a decent salary pushing papers at a local soda-manufacturing plant, but the economy tanked the company. Now he worked at McDonald’s and was hoping to become a McManager if everything worked out. He hated the job, but it put food on the table. Plus he was able to sneak out enough chicken nuggets each week to feed his army of kids. Someone at work complained that they weren’t even real food. He bet they would just about kill for a ten-piece right now.
They didn’t make enough money, never had, but the state covered the rest. He hated to use food stamps, but the sting went away a little bit when they started getting their monthly funding on a special debit card.
The twins, Melinda and Melanie, were fighting over a doll, yelling and screaming at a pitch that could make dogs howl. He got up from the couch and very patiently went into the room papered with Disney posters. It had enough pink and yellow to create at least six dream weddings. With a practiced move, he leaned over and took the doll. Both children stared at him, then at each other in something like a freaky telepathic link. He expected them to someday melt his brain, but right now—thankfully—they shut the fuck up and went back to drawing pictures of food.
“Thank you, girls,” he said and kissed each on the cheek, trying to ignore the smell of sweat and fear. Were they even sleeping at night? He and his wife had tried to shelter the kids from what was happening outside, but it was hard when their normal life had ground to a halt. The place was so small that the kids must have heard him and Amy when they argued. It didn’t help that he and the missus only had one volume, one set just above eleven.
He gave the kids one last Dad look, then made his way back to his comfortable couch, where he planned to sit and think about everything except food. Along the very short way, he was confronted by the love of his life, and she was not in a loving mood.
“Christ, Marshall. We have to do something about the kids. About us! We need food. Why don’t you go down to Moon’s old place and raid it?”
She was right. They needed food, but Moon’s probably wasn’t the first place to start looking. Still, if none of the other neighbors had caught on that they were deader chow, there might be something over there. If he couldn’t go out and find something to eat, as was his duty as the hunter-gatherer, he should at least make an attempt to steal. Sure, a few other residents had gone out and met untimely demises, but he didn’t know where they lived and didn’t feel like knocking on doors.
Marshall heaved himself out of his seat and walked toward the door. He stepped on an old beat-up Cabbage Patch Kid that was missing an arm. He foot squished a Stretch Armstrong, and he wondered where in the world the kids had conjured up that monstrosity.
He avoided a pair of skates, then kicked some shoes out of the way, because he was done being Mr. Nice Guy with the damn toys.
He kissed Amy on the way to the door. Might as well. He didn’t know what was waiting for him outside.
“Be careful, honey,” she sing-songed.
“I’ll try not to get eaten,” he cooed back.
Jesus, he might just walk into a swarm of deaders, and then it was goodbye, Marshall unless he learned some truly amazing ninja shit between now and then … or sprouted a pair of machineguns from his arms.
He stepped into the darkened hallway and slunk past doorways that were quite firmly shut. Sometimes Peters in 604 liked to leave his door open and watch porn while lounging around in his tighty-whities. Right now, he had the door closed, but Marshall still picked up the sound of fake orgasms through the heavy wood.
Moon’s door was locked, but that didn’t mean much. Marshall was a keen observer of drug addicts in the building. They all had little hidey-holes, and Moon was no different. Just above the light fixture over the doorway was a tiny slit in the wallpaper. He looked up and down the hallway to be sure it was clear, not that anything should have changed in the last half-second since his eyes swept back and forth. Peters wasn’t about to march away from his porn with a hard-on and a grin.
He slipped the copper-colored key out of the tiny slit in the wallpaper and slipped it into the lock. He knocked lightly first, to be polite, but he knew no one was home. Marshall was always surprised when Moon’s shit hole wasn’t on fire, much less populated with the skeletal forms of its inhabitants.
The door opened with a creak that sounded loud enough to wake everyone on the floor.
“You fucking home, Moon?” Marshall called in a voice that came out in a throaty gasp. It sounded tiny and scared in his ears. He wasn’t scared, though, not one bit. He was out here to fulfill his role, and he was going to gather some goddamn food if he had to dump the drawers all over the kitchen floor.
Moon’s television was on. The morning news was the same shit they had been talking about for two days straight. The red-eyed assailants were dead. No, they were sick. That wasn’t it at all; they were simply crazy people let out of the home. Or was it a gas leak? Marshall thought about picking up the television and tossing it onto the street below. Instead, he walked to the set and clicked it off. The picture faded out in a burst of snow.
“Christ, Moon, you didn’t even manage to steal cable like everyone else in the building?”
Marshall went to the porch and looked down. The streets were a milling mass of misery. It was bad enough when just a few of the deaders were shambling around like drunks. Now the streets were filled with them, and some of them weren’t exactly slow. A few even resorted to going to all fours like dogs.
He went to the kitchen, which was just slightly less of a disaster zone than the rest of the apartment. Old pizza boxes and discarded beer cans lay everywhere. A glass ashtray held a vertiginous pile of cigarette butts. Marshall poked around, but he didn’t find a decent one. He’d given up smoking a year ago, but he missed it terribly. If he had his way, he’d still be puffing.
“Left me any smokes, Moon?” he wondered out loud.
He wouldn’t mind part of a butt, just something to take the edge off.
When he didn�
�t find something that wasn’t smoked to the filter, Marshall dumped the cigarettes in a childish huff. They scattered across the coffee table in a puff of ash.
He went to the kitchen and opened the fridge.
What did Moon have in here? Aha! A pickle jar containing a single vegetable that more closely resembled a turd than a cucumber. How the hell long did you have to leave something in vinegar for it to look like shit anyway? He scanned the rest of the shelves. That didn’t take very long. Whole lot of nothing in there. A small container of milk awaited his nose, but when he picked it up, he could already tell it was full of chunks.
Out of morbid curiosity, he opened it anyway. It was a huge mistake.
A noise startled him. His head whipped up, and his eyes were drawn toward the door. A shape stood there, someone long and lean. The figure was in shadow, because the hallway was dark and the room was bright. Damn Moon for never changing his light bulb.
Lester
Lester looked down at his ratty clothes, the same he had worn for almost a week. He’d put them on the day he and Angela made their escape. There were old bloodstains from shooting deaders in the face. There were grass stains on his jeans from falling off the roof of his long-gone home. There were probably remnants of Angela on here somewhere.
When this was all over, maybe he could get back in the drug game. If he saved a shitload of money, maybe they could clone her like in Jurassic Park. Sure, make an Angie-saur. There was also a chance that a golden pig would fall from the sky and whisk Lester to a warm place that served rum in pitchers.
Les laughed at the thought. Angie with tiny arms and huge boobs.
Then he realized why he’d looked down in the first place. He had no weapon. Not even a pocket knife. He has his drug stash, what remained of it, but he had nowhere to go to enjoy it.
Among the Dead Book 2 (Among the Living) Page 12
