I dodged between them. They were slow, packed together by the confines of the corridor. I started using the rod as a jabbing weapon, rather than just swinging. I went for the soft bits. The eyes. The mouth. The throat. Even if I didn’t quite possess the strength to knock them down with one blow, I could slow them down and get them out of my way.
Some wore military uniforms. Some wore street clothes. The undead here had come from all walks of life, converging on us days or weeks after their deaths.
Death equalizes everyone. Soldiers and civilians. Engineers and creatives. Republicans and Democrats.
I swatted, elbowed, and shoved. Bony hands grabbed me. I shook them off, wishing more than ever for my rifle, for Tony’s pistol, for something explosive I could lob into a gaping mouth and detonate. But I just had my legs and hands and the pipe, so I kept using it as a club, smashing it against rotten faces and slamming it into mouths when they got too close.
I burst out of the library door and into the gray day outside. Tony had run out of ammunition and resorted to using the pistol as a bludgeon; he crouched down over a zombie, bashing its head in with the handle.
“I got this,” I said.
Tony stared at me for a second, and then moved aside.
I hefted the the pipe high overhead and brought it down, and the zombie’s head split open with a dreadful popping crunch. Brain matter spilled onto the cement, and fuck, this guy must have been rotting internally for a while. I’d thought they smelled bad before, but holy shit, this guy reeked.
I heard more gunshots.
Tony yanked me aside, and just in time: Logan, Dax, and the dog came running out the door a second later, followed by three more zombies who clearly wanted to have a word with them.
Logan twirled around and fired off three rounds. Pop-pop-pop.
Three head shots, three kills. No more revenants.
I still had my hands wrapped tight around my makeshift club.
Evie grinned at us, her jaws stained with brackish blood.
“That’s gross,” I said to her. My voice sounded strange in my head, as if I were speaking underwater. Shit. My ears were going to be ringing for hours after this, if not days.
No other zombies came after us. We seemed to have fought them off…at least for the time being.
Logan, at least, seemed nonplussed. “Well,” he said, holstering his pistols, “at least I finally got to shoot something.”
I could hear him, at least. Not well, but our little shootout hadn’t deafened me completely.
“Bro…” Tony paused, then seemed to decide what he wanted to say. Finally, he shook his head in grudging amazement. “You are fucking wasted at that food truck.”
Chapter Sixteen
Once it became clear we were at least sort of safe, I sat down on a curb to spare my shaking legs. My arms itched, and I scratched at them furiously; though I couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with them, I was sure the dead had pressed giant red handprints into my skin.
We’re alive. We’re alive. We’re all right. You’re all right, Vibeke.
I didn’t feel all right. I was fairly sure I would never feel all right again.
Are they thinking? Do they think? Did they plan an ambush?
We needed to get out of the Quarantine Zone and return to the inhabited part of the city. We’d already been gone too long.
And somehow I had to get my shit together enough to go into work.
I put my head down and made myself breathe evenly.
After a moment, I was able to look at the others.
Dax paced back and forth. The dog followed in his footsteps, turning when he turned, shifting her weight when he shuffled his feet. It would have been kind of cute if he hadn’t been ranting: “They’re smart. They’re fucking smart zombies.”
On the plus side, I wasn’t the only one thinking it.
“Shut up, Dax,” Tony said.
On the minus side, well, smart zombies.
Logan stood quietly off to the side, reloading his pistols. His face seemed calm and collected, but his hands quivered slightly, and he had to pause before successfully getting the magazine into one of them.
“They planned that! They hid out and waited for us!” Dax’s voice went up about an octave. Tony rounded on him and managed to shut him up with just one dark stare.
“Zombies don’t plan,” he said. “They don’t plan, they don’t think, they don’t do shit. We got lazy and unlucky. That is what happened.”
Evie yipped.
Tony pointed at her. “How about instead of screaming over the dead planning an assault, you figure out why the hell your damn dog didn’t warn us about it?”
When Evie did something good, she was our dog. When she made a mistake, she was Dax’s dog. I assumed that was how parenthood worked, too.
Tony rounded on me next. “Vibeke, get up. We have to get back to civilization.”
I stood. My head swam, but I stayed on my feet.
“They did seem awfully…organized,” Logan said. “When they swarmed us at the checkpoint, they were just…there. Is this what they’re like Outside?”
Outside. He said the word like it was an actual place, and not just a mile past the big Hastings wall.