Rise Again (20 page)

“Come and get it!”
she yelled, wishing she could come up with something cleverer. She fired a shot from the hip that blew a zombie’s pelvis open twenty feet away. Its bowels dumped out of its body, coiled intestines bulging through a membranous oyster-colored bag.

The zombie horde turned about to follow her.

There was a mass mind in the way the undead responded. When one of them turned to move, the next would turn to look. And so they would focus on prey. The fastest-moving prey they ignored, if there was something slower to be had. There was, if not logic behind it, at least a dim sense of the shortest odds. Some vestige of analysis still echoed inside the blackened, diseased brains of the things. Danny did not think this so much as she
knew
it as it was happening, so she forced herself to slow down.

Of Amy and the others there was no sign. As much as half of the zombies had come after Danny, a horde so immense she could not see past the first couple of ranks. How many had continued after the others, she could not guess. The most frightening thing to her was the silence of the zombies. They would break into that moan all at once, and then fall silent, and
all she could hear was the scraping of feet and the slap of thick limbs one against the other as they jostled to get close. She could hear Weaver panting for breath.

There were no more gunshots from the direction of Main Street. Her other companions might be struggling under the teeth of a hundred zombies right now, throats torn out so they couldn’t scream. Danny saw that there wasn’t much room left behind her and Weaver, or in front of them, or anywhere. They had been zigzagging toward Route 144 through gaps in the enemy, but it was a box canyon: The gaps got narrower and narrower.

“Follow me, quick,” she said to Weaver, and climbed up onto the roof of a vintage Chevy Suburban. It was no kind of place to make a stand, but they might be able to see an escape route from up there. Weaver was right behind her, gasping for breath. He was soaked with sweat and zombie gore. Danny assumed she looked the same. There was a chromed roof rack at their feet; they stamped hard on the hands that reached for them. But already a zombie had crawled onto the hood of the vehicle, following their lead, groping across the metal with fingerless, half-eaten arms. The thing looked up at her. Danny recognized its face, or what was left of it beneath the bloody yellow hair.

It was Mrs. Larry. She was back from the dead.

Danny blew the woman’s head all over the brush guards, then methodically reloaded, although her hands were shaking so much she dropped every third shell.

Amy tried to go after Danny when she hurled herself into the press of zombies. Patrick threw his arm around Amy’s neck and pulled her back as the clutching hands and bared teeth closed around Danny and she disappeared under the things. Weaver moved forward as a space appeared to their right, alongside the back wall of the station.

“Now,” he had said, and fired his weapon. The roar of the gun snapped Amy out of it. She had to move, or Danny, whether she was injured or not, would stay where she was and be torn apart in front of Amy’s eyes. But in hesitating, Amy had been the last to get out of the station doorway. The zombies that couldn’t get close to Danny had already turned to find the others, leaving Amy a narrow passage that was closing up fast. Patrick was several yards in front of her. His gun went off, once, entirely by mistake, and blew the fingers off a hand that was reaching his way. Then Amy lost sight of him and she was cut off from the others. Cloudy eyes were upon
her, a dozen zombies closing the gap. She was pressed up against the cool brick of the station wall, sliding along.

Then she was at the corner of the station at the driveway and she was as alone as Danny. Someone was screaming and crying very nearby, but Amy couldn’t tell who it was.

If she’d been on a horse, everything would be different. She could handle a horse better than most, especially on the unsure mountain trails. Ride out of here cowboy style. She even had the hat. But these things would rip the horse apart, too.
My horses
, Amy thought. She had two of her own, Gladys and Spiro, and they were in the corral. Maybe they’d kicked their way out by now. There were soft but insistent fingers closing around her arms, twining into her hair. Yellow teeth in cheese-colored faces.

Somewhere there were more gunshots. The screaming was endless.

Weaver was at her side, pulling her so hard the sleeve tore halfway off her white doctor’s coat. He was yelling at her: “Stop screaming!” He drove the barrel of his gun into the mouth of a zombie that was leaning in to bite Amy, not two feet from her throat, and then he fired the gun, and that zombie’s head did a somersault in the air and the face of the one behind it vanished like a popped balloon, leaving behind a complicated structure of exposed nasal passages and bone, overhung with rags of brown meat. Amy recoiled as atomized blood and tissue hit her in the face. But her screaming stopped. She followed Weaver, and it was okay, because there was a way out. Weaver was making a path through the zombies. He was covered in black slime, smashing into the zombies, plowing them over. Amy remembered she had a gun, and she thought she should do her bit. More gunshots away up ahead somewhere, and behind her. So she made sure everybody around her was dead, and then aimed at the leg of an old male zombie with a chin beard. The thing showed no response, but Amy couldn’t just shoot it in the head.

That was the whole
problem
. People kept shooting each other, or bashing each other with rocks, or whatever they could do to cause pain. Amy didn’t fire. She kept going, the chin-bearded zombie lost from sight, his thin arms outstretched in a pose almost like yearning before the others crowded in between them. Weaver was still there in front of her. Amy hooked her hand in Weaver’s belt so she wouldn’t lose him. He brought the butt of his gun around, but checked the swing.

“Lemme know it’s you,” he said, in a voice hoarse with fear.

They made it to Main Street, and they could see right away where the others were. The zombies formed a dense pack in their footsteps, creating
gaps in the crowd on either side. They were so stupid, but so dedicated.
Like Republicans
, Amy thought. She wished irrelevant things wouldn’t come into her head so much. Danny was so focused. Danny was probably dead. Maybe the zombies would not be able to get their teeth into her. Danny was tough as rawhide.
Keep those dead guys rollin’, Rawhide!
A scrap of the old song popped into Amy’s head. She was losing it.

Weaver kicked a little kid in the chest, a zombie maybe four years old, then shot a slightly bigger one. Its arm flew off but no blood sprayed out. An adult zombie’s thigh burst apart behind it. Amy heard the screaming again, and she thought it might be her, so she stopped, and the screaming stopped.

“Follow them,” Weaver commanded.

He was pointing down the space the zombies had made when they bunched up in the path of the others. There were more turning toward Amy and Weaver every instant that went by. Amy was going to say something, but Weaver was already gone. She was alone in a world of the hungry dead. There was nothing to do but run.

Patrick lost his mind. He didn’t know what was happening until they turned the corner onto Main Street. The little Mexican woman couldn’t run for anything, and Patrick kept crashing into her back. Ahead of her was the girl with the blue hair, which was completely the wrong shade for her complexion.

This was the worst nightmare ever. Patrick thought a lot of things were the worst nightmare ever, but this was the real deal. This one was for the record books. The Mexican woman had a snouty pistol in her hands and she was firing it with real proficiency, picking her shots even as she ran.
She can’t hit dick
, the cool, calculating voice in Patrick’s head observed. But she knew what she was doing. Patrick was about to be devoured by monsters, and somewhere in his mind he could still spare the resources to be jealous of someone else.

It was the adrenaline. Every second was a long, complex thing to be examined and considered, even as events unfolded. But his mind was not trained to this heightened state of awareness. It was much better off ad-libbing snarky comments in front of the cameras; give him a press conference and he could outquip anybody.
This isn’t a press conference
, the voice remarked, and Patrick realized that on top of everything else he was babbling inside his head again. Weaver wouldn’t do that. Weaver was up in front, leading them to safety.

Then Weaver was going past Patrick in the wrong direction.

“Run!” Weaver shouted, and hammered his way through the zombies that were closing in behind them. Patrick saw that Maria was almost out of sight ahead, the zombies closing in like the spectators closing in around the winning cyclist of the Tour De France.

He did what Weaver said, and ran.

Danny thought they could possibly jump from roof to roof of the vehicles still parked all over Main Street and Route 144. From up on the Suburban she could see the cars like low islands in the undead river. If they could jump far enough and not slide off upon landing, and if the hands didn’t close around their limbs before they were able to jump to the next one. Weaver reloaded while Danny fired into the crowd, and they both stomped the fingers that snagged at their feet.

“Fuck,” Weaver mumbled. He was standing there looking at one of the zombies. Danny turned and sighted down the barrel of the shotgun on its head. Charred flesh, boiled eyeball. It was Mitchell Woodie, the cook from the Wooden Spoon. It didn’t look like he felt any pain—only hunger, pushing through the crowd around the Suburban, unaware of the appalling damage to his flesh. Danny knew how much that should hurt. Despite all the horrors Weaver had seen in the last ten minutes, he appeared mesmerized. The adrenaline was wearing off, Danny realized. They were in a temporary place of refuge, and he was crashing.

But Danny had an idea.

It was the blackened remains of Mitchell Woodie that clued her in. She should have thought of it before. But it wasn’t too late. She adjusted her aim.

“Gas tank,” Danny called out, and squeezed the trigger.

The explosion made the pavement vibrate under Michelle’s feet. She was running fleet as a deer through the zombies, blue hair flying. They couldn’t touch her. She didn’t know or care who was around her or behind her or anything except she knew she had to run, as fast and as far as she could. She knew how to run. She had been on the track team at school for an entire season before she realized how stupid competitive sports were and how it was just another way for the Adults in Charge to keep the more interesting kids occupied and tired so they couldn’t cause trouble.

She didn’t stop running when the explosion came, but she felt the heat on her back and the bounce in the asphalt, and a moment later there was a strange slapping sound among the zombies that were lurching up the street toward her. Not so many zombies here—she could handle it. Until a severed arm and part of a head came down and hit her and she fell and scoured the skin off both her knees. She got up again and it stung like fire, and now she was facing the wrong way and she could see the slapping sound was chunks of dead bodies raining down from the sky.

A big, greasy torus of black smoke rose into the fading sky, and below it huge orange flames jumped up from the zombie crowd.

The woman named Maria was coming up right behind her, huffing and puffing, her face blotchy. Michelle had lost her lead in the race. Maria took her by the arm and said, “Let’s go.” The gay man with the bleached hair was right behind Maria now. That was Patrick Michaels, the famous guy with a TV show about how to live in attractive and inviting spaces, just like the rich and famous, without spending a fortune.

The zombies were starting to turn in their direction, though Michelle had only fallen for a couple of seconds. Time to run again, even if her knees really, really hurt. There was another explosion, louder than the first, and something metal clanged off the building to their left. Michelle put her hands over her head. More chunks of meat were thudding down on them.

“There it is!” Maria shouted, and sure enough, the motor home was ahead of them, only a few zombies in the way. Michelle didn’t see anybody else there. She didn’t see her brother. Maybe they were all inside. She saw people behind the big windshield, waving and pointing. Troy, the nice fireman, came down out of the driver’s door with an axe in his hands and ran toward them and Michelle felt her legs turn to rubber. She fell down again and a very thin, tall zombie woman with her hair in a knot on top of her head was reaching to bite her. Her crooked smoker’s teeth were tanned pegs in a bloodless face.

Maria tried to shoot the woman, but her gun was empty. Then the woman crashed to the ground beside Michelle, the fireman’s axe sticking out of her back. She was still reaching for Michelle with the arm that wasn’t immobilized by severed muscles. Troy scooped Michelle up and carried her away from the zombie, and Patrick and Maria ran past them. Patrick had the keys. He had to make it no matter what, or they were all dead.

He did make it. Eager hands pulled them both into the RV, and Michelle felt herself lifted up, too. Her bloody knees smeared the upholstery as
people set her down inside in the back, where she saw her kid brother coming through the people to throw his arms around her. Next, Troy was up front in the driver’s seat, slamming the door on the gray, clutching fingers that wanted so badly to grasp the warm flesh packed inside the vehicle, to pull it down to snapping jaws.

Patrick clambered through the crowd to the passenger’s seat beside Troy. Michelle saw that Patrick’s hands shook with such violence he couldn’t get the keys out of his pocket.

“Pardon me,” Troy said, and dug the keys out himself. He selected the ignition key, and a moment later the enormous diesel engine rumbled to life.

The first blast knocked Weaver off the roof of the Suburban.

Danny had not expected such an explosion. She’d seen plenty of vehicles burn, and she knew they seldom blew up. And it wasn’t the car she shot that went up—it was the one right next to it. So the whole effect of the thing was ten times what she had intended. She only wanted to set fire to the zombies. They might respond to fire, that most primal fear of human beings. But even if they didn’t fear it, they would burn. Danny had a hunch that zombies on fire wouldn’t be quite as single-minded. It’s hard to go after prey with eyeballs that are melting out of your skull.