“God, I wish we had cameras on this,” I said… and then the infected who’d managed to survive my little party tricks came shambling and running down the hall, and I forgot about cameras in favor of keeping us both alive.
They were a sorry-looking bunch, even for zombies. It’s true that you can kill a zombie with trauma to the body; once they lose enough blood, or a sufficient number of major internal organs, they’ll die like everybody else. The trouble is that they don’t feel pain like uninfected humans do, and they can keep going long after their injuries would have incapacitated a normal person. Some of the zombies making their way down the hall were missing arms, hands, even feet—those stomped along on the shattered remains of their ankles, shins, or knees, giving them a drunken gait that was somehow more horrifying than the normal zombie shuffle. One had a piece of grenade shrapnel stuck all the way through his cheek, wedged at an angle that would make it impossible for him to bite even if he managed to grab us. That wasn’t going to stop him from trying.
“Becks? You clear?”
“Clear!” came the shout from behind me.
“Great,” I said, and opened fire.
The bad thing about setting up a kill chute like the one we were in is that it can just as easily turn into a “die” chute. The good thing about setting up a kill chute—the reason that people keep using them, and have been using them since the Rising—is that as long as your ammo holds out and you don’t lose your head, you can do a hell of a lot of damage without letting the dead get within more than about ten feet of you.
The injuries to our mob were extensive enough that most of them weren’t moving very quickly, and the ones who’d been shielded from the worst of the blast by the bodies of their companions were hampered in their efforts to move forward by those same bodies. The fast zombies got mired in the slow zombies, and their efforts to break free of the mob just slowed everything down a little more. Becks and I didn’t bother aiming for the fast ones. We just went for the head and throat shots, and kept on knocking them down.
“Shaun!” called Becks. “Dr. Abbey just called! They’re opening the lab door!”
“Awesome!” I shouted back, barely a second before gunfire started from the direction of the lab. I fell back several yards, pulling another gun from my waistband and holding it out behind me. “Reload?”
“Thanks.” Becks snatched the pistol from my hand, taking aim on another of the infected. “So this is fun. This is a fun time.”
“Sure.” I fired twice, taking down two more zombies. I was about to shoot a third one when Joe came bounding into my line of fire. He grabbed a zombie by the leg, shaking so hard that the entire leg came off. The gunfire continued behind him, but for Joe, the party was all out here in the hall.
It probably says something about Dr. Abbey that she named her massive black English mastiff after her dead husband and used him for illegal medical experiments. I’m not sure what it says, exactly. I just know that Joe is now functionally immune to Kellis-Amberlee—he can get sick, but he can’t go into conversion—and that meant that the enormous, angry carnivore now spreading zombie guts around the hall was on our side. Thank God for that.
“That’s disgusting,” said Becks, and shot a zombie who was continuing to advance on our position, ignoring the chaos behind him. “Oh, jeez. Is that a spleen?”
“I think that’s a spleen, yes.” I fired one more time, taking down a zombie that had gotten a little too close for comfort. Joe looked toward the sound of the shot, ears perked up questioningly, and barked once. “It’s cool, Joe. We’re not hurt.”
“How cute. The giant dog is concerned.”
“Someone’s got to be.” I leaned against the rail, watching Joe work. The gunshots from behind him were starting to taper off. Only three zombies that I could see were still making any real progress, and all of them were badly wounded. Becks raised her gun to fire. I pushed her arm gently down again. “Let him have his fun. He’s had a long day, and he deserves the chance to kill some things.”
“If you say so.” Becks looked at me, seeming to tune out the sounds of slaughter coming from the hall in front of us. She frowned. “You have blood in your hair. And on your face.”
“Great. I’ve been exposed. Dr. Abbey will be thrilled.”
The gunshots from the hall had stopped. Becks and I exchanged a look, nodded, and waited where we were for a few more minutes before starting to make our way in that direction. Joe barked again as we approached him, the sound only slightly garbled by the fact that he had most of a human throat in his mouth.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I told him. He dropped the throat, chuffing happily, and fell into step beside us. I patted his blood-tacky head with one hand. “Good dog.” There was no possible way of minimizing my exposure at this point. I might as well just go with it.