by Joe McKinney
“Okay,” he said, “up you go.”
Madison scrambled over the bed frame and dropped down into the hallway.
“There’s something blocking the door on this side,” she said.
“That’s good. Here I come.”
He squeezed through next to her, and together they pushed the door closed. A small refrigerator was just under the water, wedged into the corner made by the door and the wall. Jim pushed it against the door, knowing that it wouldn’t hold the zombies back for more than a few seconds at best, and then turned to face the hallway.
He squinted into the darkness, wishing he had a flashlight. Something was dead in here. He could smell the rot mixed with an underlying note of mildew and sewage. Swallowing the lump in his throat he grabbed Madison’s hand and led her into the darkness, the only sound a faint splashing as they waded through the water.
“Daddy, I don’t like this.”
“Shhh,” he said, his own voice a stage whisper. “Check the walls. Try to find a door or a staircase. We’ve got to get to higher ground.”
Behind them, the door exploded open. Madison screamed. Jim swung around. Dark silhouettes were filling the square of light at the end of the hallway. He could see them dropping down from the bed frame and into the water, spreading out to fill the hallway once they were through the doorway. He raised the pistol, but already there were more zombies inside the hallway than he had bullets.
“Run!” he said.
Madison took off in the opposite direction. Jim rushed off after her, but they had only made it a short distance when they heard the sound of wood crunching up ahead.
Madison stopped.
Jim came up next to her.
From the far end of the hall, they heard the sounds of hands slapping against the other side of the door. There was another crunch, and both father and daughter flinched.
“Daddy!”
Abruptly, the door caved in. The far end of the hallway flooded with moonlight, and for just a moment, right before the zombies started filling the hallway, they saw the stairs leading up to the second floor. But there was no way they could reach them. Already the zombies from the front end of the building were moving past it, blocking it.
They were trapped.
“Daddy . . .”
Underwater, he thought. And then, with the same mental breath: Never work. They’re jammed in shoulder to shoulder.
“Daddy!”
The zombies were closing in on them. Jim could see a sort of maddened frenzy in their ruined faces, their hands outstretched and clutching for them. Their moaning sounded like the starving pleading for food.
“Daddy!” Madison said. She was shouting to be heard over the moaning.
There’s nowhere to go, he thought. Nowhere.
The thought was answered by Eleanor’s voice in his head: You’ve got to protect our daughter. Please, keep her safe.
Then he looked up at the ceiling.
“Madison,” he said, spinning her around to face him, “I want you to climb up on my back.”
“What?”
“Get on my back, arms around my neck. Come on, up.” He bent over and guided him onto his back. They had done this a million times when she was a little girl, her holding on while he ran around the living room making horsey sounds, but she was a lot older now . . . and so was he. He prayed he could make this work.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Just hold on, baby. We’re going up.”
He put his hands on one wall, his feet on the other. As the zombies closed in on them, he inched his way up the wall.
He didn’t stop until Madison was mashed up against the ceiling.
A moment later the zombies were right below him, their frantic, clutching hands swatting the air just inches from his face. He could feel their fingertips tugging at his shirt and his blue jeans. Water dripped from his clothes, hitting the horde below him in the eyes and in their open mouths, sending them into even wilder paroxysms of moaning.
Madison shrieked in his ears, her long hair spilling over the side of his face.
“Just hold on, baby,” he said to her.
Just hold on.
CHAPTER 20
Turning from Eleanor Norton’s dead body, Captain Mark Shaw surveyed the corpses piled up on the altar, and a growing sense of disgust rose up inside him.
Idiots, he thought. Shaw and his family had never gone to church, but even still, he had no objection to religion in and of itself. It wasn’t a bad thing. Religion was, after all, just another word for duty. Perhaps some people needed to call duty by the name of God to make its yoke tolerable; he did not. Still, he understood religion. He could understand how a man could be prepared to lay down his life for God. Hadn’t he been prepared to die in the performance of his duty, after all?
But being prepared for death and actively seeking it out were two very different things. The former required courage, the latter merely ignorance. There was no purpose in a death of the sort these people had apparently died, and that left him saddened and angry.
“Idiots,” he muttered.
“What’s that?” Anthony asked.
Shaw sighed deeply. “Nothing. Just thinking.”
Anthony didn’t respond, and Shaw was glad for that. He loved Anthony. He was so incredibly proud of him. But the boy could be shallow and just as ignorant as the dead people on this altar. A father’s love hadn’t blinded him to that simple truth, and it was that reason he didn’t want to hear the boy speak just now.
Zombies were entering the front door of the church behind him. Shaw could hear them back there, moaning, splashing around drunkenly, but he kept watching the pile of corpses, his mind turning toward Brent and the pointlessness of his death. Bitter rage flared up in him, unbidden and, for just a moment, uncontrollable. He closed his eyes and tried to force out the memory of Brent’s screams, but they echoed on.
“Dad,” Anthony said. There was an obvious note of alarm in his voice. “Dad, we need to get out of here.”
Only then did Shaw turn from the corpses.
He scanned the doorway and the windows along the sides of the church, considering their possible ways out.
He slid the M-16 off his shoulder.
“Okay,” he said. “Get behind me, Anthony. Let’s get out of here.”
He began to move and shoot. It was just like the standard rifleman drills in the FBI’s Close Quarter Battle School, except that he was shooting at zombies instead of targets. Of course the waist-deep water kept the zombies from moving very fast, so they were practically standing still anyway. And they never flinched. They made no attempt to evade his rifle’s sight line. They just kept coming, hands outstretched as if they were begging him for something. They might as well have been cardboard silhouettes.
He moved easily through the gathering crowd, pointing and shooting, measuring each shot before he took it. He felt absolutely calm and in control. There was no question about what would happen from here on out. They’d get the money, get back on his boat, and he would get what was left of his family out of this hellhole. Once his son was provided for, he would take whatever lumps he had coming in the court of public opinion. But his family would be provided for. That was all that counted.
“Anthony, you okay?” he asked over his shoulder.
Anthony was a few steps behind him, his pistol in his left hand. He had lost a lot of color from his face, but his eyes were still focused, still sharp.
“Yeah,” Anthony answered.
“Breathing okay?”
Anthony started to speak, but the words came out as a cough. He closed his eyes and tried again. “A little short of breath,” he said. “Can’t really feel my fingers too good.”
“Shit,” Shaw said. “Okay, come on, let’s pick it up.”
Outside the church they stopped and scanned the area in front of them. There were more zombies than he had bullets to shoot trudging through the water toward the church, attracted by the sound of gu
nfire. Even more were coming in from the east. Briefly he thought of scaling the chain-link fence with the razor wire on top, but he knew that wouldn’t work. Not with Anthony’s arm all messed up.
That left one option . . . and it wasn’t a good one.
Several shots rang out from the other side of the fence.
“Pistol shots,” Anthony said.
“Yeah.”
Shaw scanned the darkness up near the gas station, but all he could really see were the dim outlines of ruined buildings.
“I bet that’s her husband and kid,” Anthony said.
Shaw looked at his son and he realized he was probably right. Had Eleanor really lured him away so that her family could make a break for it? If so . . . Christ, he was impressed. He thought back over the few years they’d worked together and he never would have guessed she had it in her.
Well, he’d been wrong, simple as that.
“Mama bird,” he said.
“What?”
“She was a mama bird,” Shaw repeated. “A bird will fake a broken wing to lure a snake away from her nest. It’s instinct.”
“Yeah, she was no bird, though.”
“No, she wasn’t. It’s instinct when an animal does it because an animal doesn’t understand fear the way a person does. But Sergeant Norton was afraid and she did it anyway. That’s not instinct, that’s courage.”
Anthony tried to grin, but only managed to get one corner of his pale lips to turn up. “Yeah, well, courage or not, she’s still dead.”
Shaw regarded him coldly. The boy’s inability to understand the important things in life staggered him sometimes.
“Come on,” he said. “We’re going that way, through that copse of trees over there. Once we make it over the road we’ll double back on the boat, get the money, and get out of here. It’s the long way around, but it’s the only option we’ve got.”
“What about them, the husband and the little girl?”
“What do you mean? What about them?” Shaw asked.
“We can’t let them live. They know about us.”
“Listen,” Shaw said, and paused. “You hear any more shots?”
“No.”
“He was armed with a pistol, Anthony. Now look around you. We’re surrounded by zombies. What do you think his chances are?”
Anthony didn’t seem entirely convinced.
“Yeah, well, I still don’t like it,” he said.
“Anthony, your job is to do what you’re fucking told. Got it? Now move. Let’s get out of here while we still can.”
Gradually, quiet returned to the church.
Eleanor listened.
The dead bodies on top of her were wet. Some were still in rigor mortis, their bodies stiff as furniture. In others, the muscles had relaxed. They were cold and pliable, and pressed up against her with a weight that she felt not only across her chest, but in her mind as well.
She wanted out.
She wanted out right now!
“Fuck it,” she said.
She drew in two quick breaths through her mouth and pushed. The corpses sagged outward and away with an awful, almost liquid motion. Faces leered at her, the eyes utterly dead and yet accusatory. A woman’s head rolled from one shoulder to the other, so that it landed faceup and directly in front of her, the mouth open in a silent groan.
Eleanor felt her stomach roll and then convulse as she dry heaved. There was nothing left in her to throw up.
“Oh Jesus,” she muttered.
But she didn’t stop pushing, and a moment later, she was out of the corpse pile, facing the flooded church. The bodies of dead zombies floated between the pews and there was a dense cluster of them by the front door. Only a few were still moving. One or two were even still moaning. But none of them was a threat. Not anymore. The Shaws had clearly done their work well getting out.
And from what she could see out the windows, there didn’t appear to be that many outside the church, either. Had they followed the Shaws? The idea seemed reasonable enough. With Anthony wounded as bad as he was, they couldn’t have moved all that fast. There would have been plenty of time for a crowd to gather and focus on the fleeing father and son.
“Lucky me,” she muttered.
She crossed the altar to where her body double floated faceup in the water. The poor woman’s face really had been blown clean off, and as she stood there over the corpse, looking down on it, the idea that she was looking at herself sent a shudder through her that went bone-deep.
“Thank you,” she said, and with trembling fingers she worked the backpack’s straps off the corpse and slid the pack onto her own back. With her foot she felt around the floor until she located her M-16. Then she reached under the water, pulled it up, and let the water drain out of the barrel before slipping out a side window.
No sense in going through more corpses, she figured, if she didn’t have to.
Once outside she considered going over the chain-link fence with the razor wire, but the way the blades twinkled in the starlight made it pretty much a foregone conclusion.
So instead she followed the fence line up toward the street, figuring she would cross around the front of the gas station and retrace Jim and Madison’s track down the narrow alleyway on the far side. The plan had seemed simple enough while she was thinking it, and it looked as if it was going to stay simple . . . right up until the moment she turned into the alley between the gas station and the cinder-block wall.
A group of zombies was huddled there, unable to push forward because of some obstruction and too unaware to turn around and go back the way they’d come.
Until they heard Eleanor behind them.
At that point, one of them turned around and began to utter a long, stuttering moan. The others followed suit, and within seconds, Eleanor found herself backing up toward the boats with at least fifteen zombies closing in on her.
She turned to the left and to the right and saw more emerging from the gaps between the buildings down the length of the street. They stared at her for a second, and then they too started her way.
“Shit,” she muttered.
Just then she backed against the little green metal boat Captain Shaw had used to catch up with her while she was still fighting with Anthony. The boat was empty, no rifles, no loose ammunition or magazines, but beyond it, coming from the far side of the street, were more zombies.
She threw her backpack and rifle into the boat and climbed in.
“Let’s see if you start, you mother,” she said, and pulled on the motor’s rip cord. It coughed, sputtered, but failed to start.
From behind her, she heard a man’s voice and she turned, her heart rising up into her throat for a second because she thought it might be Jim. But right away she could tell who it really was. Out beyond the narrowing ring of zombies, Captain Mark Shaw and his injured son were staring at her, their faces an almost comical mixture of rage and wounded pride and the utter shock of disbelief.
And, under different circumstances, she might have laughed. But for right now she was all business.
“Start, please,” she said, and gave the rip cord another pull.
This time it fired up with a chain-driven rattle, belching clouds of oily black smoke. A zombie threw its arms over the side of the boat and Eleanor flinched away from the motor. But it only took a moment for her to regain control. She raised the butt of her rifle over the zombie’s face and slammed it down onto the bridge of the thing’s nose. It sagged back into the water and Eleanor landed hard on her knees, the boat rocking wildly. The motion caused her to fall backwards against the hull, where she stayed, eyes wide, her breaths coming in huge painful gulps.
In the distance, Captain Shaw was yelling something, but his voice was indistinct over the sound of so many zombies moaning.
Fingers clutched her hair, and she screamed and rolled in one quick motion. Three zombies were trying to get into the boat. Eleanor spun her rifle around and fired two bursts right into their faces.
She grabbed the throttle bar and dropped the motor’s prop back down into the water. But no sooner had she got back on the seat than another zombie reached over the top of the motor, a swipe from its fingernails missing her nose by inches.
She didn’t think about what she was doing. There was no time to. If she had, she might have died. She twisted the throttle’s bicycle-type grip all the way open, throwing herself back down against the hull. The engine shuddered as the propeller cut into the zombie’s crotch and belly. Eleanor could hear the engine straining as the blades cut into its midsection, and then, for a horrible moment, leveling out to the steady burring roar of a blender on frappe as the blades entered the guts inside, churning up everything they touched.
The zombie still had its arms outstretched, as if it had every intention of bear-hugging the motor, but it was jittering now like a man being electrocuted. His mouth was open and his cheeks were shaking, ropes of bloody spit flying out to either side. But the zombie never even blinked. Even as the motor finally burned itself out, dying with a sickening crunch that might have been metal unable to cut through any more bone, the zombie stared at Eleanor with a look that was both utterly vacant and insanely hungry.
But it too died, and shortly after the engine conked out, the zombie fell face-first onto the top of the motor, uttering a breathy sigh as it collapsed.
Eleanor, on her back in the bottom of the boat, looked up at the dead zombie, horrified by what she’d just done. Her hands were shaking, her heart beating a thousand miles an hour. This was a full-blown adrenaline dump she was experiencing, and all because of what she’d somehow managed to make herself do.
Zombies were closing in on her on all sides.
Behind her, the Shaws’ voices were getting louder. But at that moment she didn’t care about any of that. The only thing that seemed real was the memory echo of the throttle bucking in her hand as it cut into that zombie’s guts and the blood that had splattered all over its face and the sickening crunch of metal on bone that had finally killed the engine and the zombie.
