You smash.
The closest movable object was a chair. I snatched it and swung, and the legs and frame shattered into pieces as they connected with the zombie’s torso. The ghoul stumbled to the side, knocked slightly off balance, but then it righted itself and kept on coming.
I looked at the remains of the chair in my hands. “For fuck’s sake,” I said. “They couldn’t get something a little more solid?”
“Libraries are broke,” Tony said. “Hang on, General, we have an issue…”
“What the hell is going on in there?”
Evie latched on to the nurse’s leg and gnawed at it. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead dragged her furry bulk after him.
What the fuck?
“Is there a fucking revenant in there with you?” Hammond demanded.
“Yeah. Vibeke’s dealing with it.” Tony gestured at me. “Vibeke, deal with it!”
Dealing with it involved picking up a leg from the chair and smacking the dead man across the face with it. His skin split open where I hit him, which gave him the illusion of an even wider, ghastlier smile. His teeth bore the telltale cracks of the dead—he’d opened and shut his mouth too hard, splitting them right down the middle. Broken teeth never seemed to bother them much, though to be honest I kind of wanted to see what happened once they ground their chompers down to stubs. Maybe once they did that they just gummed you to death.
Logan let out a dramatic-sounding sigh. “I’ll deal with this,” he said. “All right, Scrubs. Time to fight like men.”
He stepped in front of me, ignoring the squirming dog between us, and slammed his fist into the zombie’s face.
He immediately doubled over with his hand clutched against his chest. “Holy shit, he’s all bone!”
And that is why you never punch a zombie.
I jammed the pointy end of the chair leg up against Scrubs’s chin, but it wasn’t quite sharp enough to penetrate no matter how much of my weight I threw against it. “Goddammit!”
The revenant let out a bone-chilling howl.
“He’s calling his friends,” Dax said. “He’s calling his friends!”
“Not for long.” Logan yanked out his pistol again. Before anyone could warn him otherwise, he pressed the gun against the dead man’s head and pulled the trigger.
In the enclosed space, the pistol’s report almost shattered my eardrums. The zombie toppled to the ground. I dropped my stick and pressed my hands over my ears, trying to stave off the ringing in my head. “Son of a bitch.”
Logan pushed me out of the way and raised his pistol until it was level with the partially closed door and a fucking horde of revenants behind it.
Logan gaped for a split second. “No fucking way,” he said. “Where did they come from?”
Evie barked frantically from the center of the room.
“The door!” I said. Logan hadn’t fully shut it when he tried to spring to my rescue, and now it swung open easily, revealing a great mass of rotting faces, clacking jaws, and staring eyes.
Logan tried to slam it shut, but they had already begun their steady migration inside, and the door—and Logan—was pushed inward inch by inch. Shit. Shit shit shit.
“Shit!” Logan dug his heels into the thin carpeting, but kept getting shoved forward. “Grab something, they’re coming in!”
Evie howled. I lifted up the piece of chair I still clutched. Maybe I could put it through an eye.
“McKnight?” Hammond’s voice cut through the noise.
Oh, right. The radio.
“Hammond,” Tony said. “Hammond, we need help. Lots of help. The entire city needs help.”
“Um…” The general did sound a touch worried now. “What exactly are you doing over there?”
“Breakdancing.”
Logan lifted his pistol. “On the count of three, guys.”
“McKnight—”
“One, two…”
“I gotta call you back. There’s a gaggle of zombies here and I think we pissed them off.”
I sucked in some air and braced myself.
“McKnight—”
“Three!”
Logan leaped away from the door, swinging around to face it as he did so.
The horde spilled into the radio room.
Logan began shooting. He hit everything he aimed at, but more came piling in, moving around their dead comrades and lurching toward the rest of us.
I dove for the nearest one, angling my sad little stake toward its eye. The chunk of old wood was nowhere near slender enough to fit through the socket, and all I ended up doing was knocking the ghoul’s head to the side. It glared at me and kept moving, so I did the sensible thing and jammed the chair leg into its mouth, and then as far back as I could wedge it. The dead man stood there chewing on it like an oversized stick of gum.