Cutter snatched off his belt. He went to the gate post and handed his Glock to Samantha. She emptied the magazine into the milling undead, cutting a swath through the corpses so that Cutter could lunge forward and loop the belt around the post and gate fixture, sealing them in.
They stood back, face-to-face, with uncountable undead with just the church fence between them. The ghouls had spread along the length of the fence, shaking themselves against the iron bars and spitting thick brown gore until the slime of it covered the grass.
Cutter spun round quickly. Other undead were sweeping towards the side fence near the headstones. He watched them hurl themselves against the barrier and recoil in maddened frustration.
Cutter showed Samantha his hands. They were colored with dry paint dust, as if he had dragged his hand across the side of a house.
“It’s paint,” he said slowly, as the realization began to dawn on him. “I thought it was rust. I thought the fence – this whole church was an abandoned, ruined shell,” he said. Then he shook his head slowly. “It’s not. Samantha, it’s Hos’s fortress. He camouflaged the church and the grounds to look like it was abandoned and rusted out. It’s all a mask.”
Samantha stared down at Cutter’ hands. She smeared some of the dry paint off and rubbed it on his shirt, then smiled up at him. Her face was pink, her eyes wide and wild with adrenalin and relief.
“Well if Eden was going to be anywhere, Cutter, then surely a church is the most fitting place in the world.”
* * *
Cutter and Samantha patrolled the perimeter of the church fence for an hour before Cutter finally relaxed. It was solid. Under the mask of paint, the wrought iron was shiny silver, and the posts along the border were as thick as a man’s wrist and footed in concrete. The undead threw themselves against the barrier in a relentless moaning wail of anger and frustration – and the fence held firm.
Cutter shook his head. “Hos hid his fortress well,” he admitted. “He hid it where no one would ever think to look. In plain sight.”
They couldn’t force the front doors of the church: they were locked from inside and impossible to break open. Cutter went to the rear of the building. Under a small porch cover he found a second wooden door. It was bolted and hung with a heavy brass padlock.
Eventually Cutter ripped the boards off one of the windows and smashed the stained glass. He hoisted Samantha in through the opening and waited impatiently on the front steps for several minutes until the heavy doors were suddenly flung open.
Samantha was smiling.
“It’s all here,” she said, her voice a mingle of excitement and relief. “Everything we could ever need.”
Built into the polished timber floor of the church was a square hatch, and beneath it a set of solid stone steps that led down into a dark Aladdin’s cave. Cutter reached for the lighter in his pocket.
The area was about thirty feet square, with shelves lining each wall, divided and sorted – and even labeled. There were rifles and pistols and snub-nosed machine guns with boxes of ammunition for each. And there were the basics of survival: cartons of bottled water, rows of canned and dry food, water purification tablets and even packets of seedlings. There were tools and some basic farm equipment. And there was a generator alongside jerry-cans of fuel.
Cutter found a flashlight on a shelf and swept it around the room. The final wall of shelves was stacked with blankets and lanterns, pillows and sleeping bags.
Cutter went to the shelf and pulled two of the thick sleeping bags down. He offered one to Samantha.
“Where do you want to sleep?”
She took it with an impish smile, but there was something altogether more smoldering and womanly in her eyes.
She looked around them at the supplies that would give them life and hope in their new home – the new Garden of Eden – and she reached out for Cutter’s hand and pressed it against the heat of her body. “Together,” she said.
The End.
Ground Zero: A Zombie Apocalypse Page 18
