“Let me try,” Tony said. He handed me his gun and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Citizens of the Garnet Cloisters! The dead are walking and they want to eat you!”
I gotta hand it to him, the man could really project his voice when he needed to.
“We are detonating the overpass your tax dollars paid for to create a blockade and keep them from devouring you and everyone you know! If you have any sense left in your bleached-out brains, you will grab what you can and get the fuck out of the neighborhood!”
“You can’t just destroy our homes!” a man shouted back.
Tony sighed. “Sir…”
The door splintered outward. I whirled around, bringing the STG up to block my face. The zombie landed on top of me and knocked me down the steps, and I landed heavily on my upper back. Its weight pushed me down, and the stench of it nearly overpowered me as it leaned down, snapping its jaws toward my nose.
“Crikey,” I gasped. I shoved my hands at it, trying to twist the rifle enough to bump it aside, but it had me pinned, and it wailed away, calling for its friends.
Tony’s boot shot over my head and struck the revenant in the face. Bits of skin and ichor rained down on me, but he succeeded in knocking the thing away. He pulled out his pistol and popped it in the head, raining blood down on the dead houseplants on the other side of the porch.
I scrambled backward.
More of them came out the ruined front door. I don’t know how many people usually lived in a house in Hastings, but there had been at least a dozen in this one, and at least half of them were tripping all over themselves in Snuggies.
Well, at least they were warm.
Tony groaned. “Forget being quiet. Just fuck ’em up.”
I opted to use the pistol on this bunch, taking careful aim and ripping off as many head shots as I could. Over the sound of bullets discharging, I could hear Tony hassling the remaining citizenry. “See what was living down the street from you?” he yelled over the din. “Thousands more of these things are coming! Now get moving.”
He helped me finish off the last of the ghouls.
A handful of people were still loitering when we reached the street again. “We don’t have guns,” a man said.
“The teenagers in 305 do,” I said. “Although I think they’re hoping to go out in a blaze of glory, so maybe avoid them.”
“What do we do?”
What do we do? What do we do? What do we do? How could we make it any more clear to these people?
“Get out of here before the dead drop in,” Tony said. “Get to the city gates. The Army’s there, they’ll handle things.”
How often had we said that today?
“But what if we can’t?”
Tony sighed.
“You have knives, don’t you?” I asked. “Kitchen knives, hunting knives, baseball bats. If it’s hard or sharp, you can use it. Just try not to let them get too close. They bite.”
“What the fuck is going on over here?”
Oh, thank the Lord. Durkee had gotten sick of us wasting time, and he jogged over to us, his expression growing steadily more enraged. “What are you doing? We don’t have time for a prayer circle!”
I gestured to him. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Durkee.”
Rather than make introductions, he pointed at the overpass. “See that? There’s C-4 all over it, which means it is going to blow the hell up very soon. I suggest you get the fuck out unless you’re really into dodging falling blocks of concrete, because that’s going to happen.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be dead?” someone asked.
Durkee looked up at the sky as if to ask some divine being for patience, then stared back at the clustered civilians. “Does it really matter? I’m still blasting this place. Get moving. And you two!” he pointed at Tony and myself. “Get to Chapman. The first of the horde’s almost here and we’re not done yet.”
Chapter Thirty-One
The dead walked.
They also shambled, staggered, and sort of jogged down Chapman Street, the mass of them moving steadily toward the little clump of the living standing in front of the overpass.
“This seems ill-advised,” I said. “There’s a lot of them.”
Durkee stood with us, seemingly unconcerned with the huge group on its way. “You only need to hold them off for a little bit,” he said. “Hammond’s team is wiring up the other side. Keep these undead fucks from getting through, and on my signal, we have to run.”
Assuming I’d gauged their numbers correctly, the actual bulk of the dead was still some distance off. The group we could see was smaller, faster, and probably even more of a pain in the ass than a regular horde.
“Ugh,” I said.
“You only need to hold them off for a couple minutes,” Durkee said. He was probably aiming for a calm, reassuring tone, but he was not entirely pulling it off.
Just for a couple minutes. Maybe I could make pigs fly while I was at it.
Tony was silent about the whole thing, which probably meant he thought we were dead meat.
“Sure,” I said. “No problem.”
They weren’t in range just yet. But they would be soon.