“Damn it,” I said, exasperated. This wasn’t the first time Simon had put us in danger, and I doubted it would be the last. I ran over to him, my heart pounding the second I was outside the fence, even though there was no sign of the dead in either direction. I tried to grab his arm and lift him up but Simon just went limp and his arm slithered through my hands. “Simon, come on, we have to go.”
“Busy. Busy building,” Simon said. “Vance says I can build. Vance says you have to leave me alone while I’m building.”
“Sure,” I tried, “but right now we need you to build something inside the fence.”
“I’ll do that later,” Simon said.
There was nothing for it. I just didn’t have the upper body strength to pick him up and carry him, not when he was going to fight me. I needed to get Finster to help. So I hurried back toward the gate, shouting for Finster to come help.
I don’t know if he heard me or not. He was pretty busy just then.
Tucson had come for us.
Hundreds of them. Maybe a thousand.
I hadn’t seen anything like it since the last days of Vegas.
Their clothes hung on them in tatters, and their flesh had shriveled on their bones. They must have run out of food in Tucson a while back and desperate hunger had driven them this far. Their eyes were cloudy with sun damage and their skin was covered in sores. Many of them were missing limbs, or at least fingers, but they all had their legs intact. When I saw them I understood what had happened. The fifty Vance had found in the canyons were the slow ones, the ones that didn’t keep up.
This was the crowd that could still move at a good clip. The ones that were still mostly healthy, who had gotten ahead of the rest.
You always expect them to be an unruly mob, shoving at each other and snarling at the ones who would rob them of their food. It wasn’t like that, though. They were barely aware of each other, but all of them wanted the same thing. They knew Finster and I were inside that fence. They moved in concert, pushing forward all at once. Never making the slightest sound. It was easy for the dead to take us by surprise, because they were as silent as the grave.
They hit the fence like a human tsunami. That side of the fence had been the strongest part—we had reinforced an existing fence there that had been made to keep out coyotes. The dead had no trouble with it at all. It came jangling down and they climbed over what was left.
Finster was working overtime with his slingshot, firing his giant-sized BBs one after the other, grabbing them out of a sack on his belt. He was a crack shot with that thing and he didn’t hesitate, but he didn’t waste shots either, making sure every round he fired was a clean head shot that took down his target.
I could have run up and joined him, and fired every single one of my arrows into that crowd in the time we had. Even healthy dead people move slow. I could see right away it was pointless, though. Neither of us had anything like enough ammunition. “Finster,” I shouted, “stop—you can’t get them all!”
“You have a better idea?” he asked me. His eyes looked crazed and I thought he might be hyperventilating.
“Yes! Come on, this way.” I grabbed at his arm and he followed.
“Come on. The reception office has the thickest walls, and we can get a couple of doors between us and them,” I told him, dashing around the side of the pool’s pump house. The dead were hot on our heels but we had no problem outrunning them. I rushed out onto the pool deck with my bow in my hand, an arrow already half-nocked. Good thing, too, because a dead woman in a pantsuit was already there waiting for me. She came stumbling toward me with her arms out, like she wanted to give me a big hug. I put my arrow right through her eye and jumped over her as she collapsed.
“But what then?” Finster demanded. “We just wait for them to go away?”
“No! We wait for Vance and the others to come rescue us,” I told him. Why couldn’t he see what we needed to do? I saw a dead man wearing a police uniform come stumbling through the weak part of the fence and shot an arrow through his forehead. “Just stick with me, Finster. We’ll be okay if—”
Finster screamed. The dead woman I’d put down was still moving. She had grabbed at the leg of his pants as he stepped over her.
He kicked at her furiously, even as her teeth came closer and closer to his flesh. One bite and it was all over—nobody ever survived a bite. I nocked another arrow, but couldn’t be sure of hitting her the way Finster was jumping around.
“It’s okay, I’m okay,” he shouted, as he stumbled away from her. “She didn’t get me.” She was still crawling toward him so I put another arrow in her ear. That stopped her. “I made it,” he said, gasping for breath. “I—”
He wasn’t looking where he was going. So happy that he’d escaped a fate worse than death, he didn’t watch his step, and he fell into the pool.
I rushed over to the edge of the pool and looked down. He’d fallen into the deep end and he was crying in pain. One of his legs was bent the wrong way.