Tony peered past the captain into the place we had all so recently occupied. “Hey, where’s Gloria and Vijay?”
“Don’t know. They got pulled out right after you left—I assumed they were fighting, too.”
Tony shook his head. “Didn’t see them.”
“We’ll find them, then.” Durkee crouched down beside the re-deceased revenant and rustled around in its pockets, seemingly unmoved by the blood and the stench. He came up with a set of keys, then barged past us and out into the hallway. He hooked a right, and led us to a locked door. He put the purloined keys to use and flung open a door, revealing a small room chock-full of guns. “You look like you could use some more weapons.”
“Oh, I love this part of video games,” Tony said, gazing into the room with something close to outright lust. “What’ve you got for us?”
“AR-15s. Nothing that’ll get you into godmode.” He registered my blank stare and smiled. “Video game term.”
Of course.
He handed us each a rifle—much lighter than my German antique—and a spare magazine, and then outfitted himself similarly. He considered the row of helmets hanging from the wall, then apparently thought better of it and went for the exit. “The Chapman Barrier. Someone wants to destroy the city.”
“The dead are attracted to noise,” Poltava said.
“Yes, they did figure that out before they threw me in here.” Durkee checked his weapons. “Chapman Street is two blocks over. The actual barrier is about a half-mile to the north—we bricked up the road between two buildings as soon as we realized what was happening with the dead. If it’s down, that’s a big street for them to come pouring down.”
Poltava asked the question on everyone’s mind: “Can we stop them?”
Durkee stared at his rifle for a moment. “I need to get a look at the situation. If we can plug the breach, yes. If not, we enact Plan B.”
“What’s Plan B?” I asked.
“Run as far away as we can.”
Short and to the point. I liked it.
“One more thing,” Tony said.
“Hmm?”
“We had other guns when we got here. Older ones. Where are they?”
Poltava started to laugh aloud before she caught herself.
“Really?” I asked. “We have big fancy machine guns and you want our old stuff?”
“I like the old stuff.”
Durkee shrugged and led us to another room. He unlocked it and pointed inside. “We put confiscated stuff in here when I was in charge. I don’t know if Keller moved things around.”
I recognized the STG immediately. It stuck out amidst a variety of seemingly random objects, ranging from huge winter coats to suitcases and even a television set.
“This is all confiscated stuff?” I asked.
“Yep.” Durkee seemed fascinated by the TV as well. “I wonder if that thing still works…”
Tony barged past Durkee and promptly snatched his shotgun and the Carbine Dax had been using. He picked up the STG and thrust it into my hands. At one point the big rifle had felt like an extension of myself, and I recalled missing it intensely while we were here in Hastings. But it was so heavy, and I had an AR and an axe and—
“It served you pretty damn well,” Tony said. “If you don’t take it, I will.”
I looked at Poltva.
“That thing saved your ass a few times,” she said.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now we were getting sentimental about weaponry. “Fine.” I stretched my hand out, closed it around the stock, and pulled it toward me. “And aren’t we going to stop finding ammo for it at some point?”
Tony grinned. “I keep hearing that, and yet it keeps turning up.”
I slung the gun over my shoulder. The weight settled against my back, bringing with it a strange comfort. Familiarity, I guess; something I knew and had grown used to. My old STG was the forerunner of the lighter rifles of the modern military, and for all I knew it had taken a long, strange path to wind up in my hands. It might well have been pried from Nazi fingers during World War II, passed from collector to collector, and finally used again on the goddamn undead.
I was glad to see it again, and the thought chilled me.
“All right, kids,” Durkee said. “Shall we see to the fence?”
“Sure,” I said, and then pointed at his ragged socks. “Gonna fight the undead in those?”
The captain looked at his feet, made a humph sound, and then looked back at me. “Good call,” he said, as if I’d merely suggested he put on a hat. “I’ll go find my boots.”
Durkee didn’t drag us immediately into zombie combat. Points to the captain for thinking things through.
Instead, he took us several stories up to the top floor of the building, then up another flight of stairs tucked behind a closet. There was no scent of decay here, no reek; the undead had never reached these floors. Of course, the stench hit us as soon as he opened the door to the roof, but the temporary reprieve of recycled air had been welcoming.