Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (37 page)

“That's him!” Jake pointed behind her. “The
ugly one!”

“Yeah. You're going to have to narrow that
down a bit,” she said, eyebrows raised at the bloody, chunky forms
lying nearby. “None of these guys were really what you'd call
Chip-‘n-Dale material.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “The one missing his
leg! With the swastika tattoo!”

“Still not really helpful!”

“
On his cheek!
”

“Oh. Why didn't you say so?” Kat squatted
beside one of the corpses and began fishing through its pockets.
“Let's see here...A pouch of Red Man. No surprise there....One
handkerchief. Used. Ew... Condoms. Obviously an optimist...Got it!”
She flourished a large rabbit's foot with a single key hanging from
its chain.

“Really?” Gwen marveled, looking away from
the approaching ghouls.

“Head for the gate!” Jake snapped.

One of the second floor windows just above
them shattered outward as an office chair sailed through it and
tumbled wobbly on its way to the ground. Immediately thereafter,
Penny Carson hastened to the edge and peered out at Jake and the
others below.

“Wow! That was totally
Die Hard
!” Kat
exclaimed.

Penny looked over her shoulder, then emptied
the entire thirty-round magazine of her M-4 back into the room
before dropping the weapon (butt-first) towards the
Purifier-littered patio. She kicked the last remaining shards of
glass from the window frame, sat hurriedly on its edge, and swung
herself out below to hang from its empty housing.

“Look the hell out below!”

After releasing her grip, Deputy Carson
plunged the remaining distance to the ground. She landed on a trio
of mangled Purifier corpses. Luckily, not only was she some
distance from the feeding frenzy inside the cafeteria, the pile of
nearly-shredded Nazi assholes broke her fall.

Albeit, quite messily.

“Ow! Shit!” Penny scrambled free of the pile,
covered in some very foul substances and trailing a loop of stray
intestine from one of Kat's more dismembered targets. “I don't get
paid enough for this!”

“Oh,
gross!”
Gwen looked like she was
about to lose her lunch as Penny whipped a glistening line from
schmutz off her forearm.

“Blondie, you have no idea.” Penny shot her a
pleading look. “Please tell me I don't have any in my hair.”

“Where the hell is Laurel?” Jake began to
panic.

Carson grimaced and pulled a disembodied
finger from the back of her waistband. “We got separated, alright?
I was trying to stall those things, and when I turned around she
was long gone! The damn zombies were too close by then, so I had to
dodge them through some of the offices and got cut off from the
stairs. That's why I had to do my Spider-woman retinue just now.
How the hell is that girl able to run so fast anyway? What, did she
run marathons before the zombies came along or something?”

“There's no time! Go-go!” Jake yelled,
relieved beyond words that his redhead had listened to him and made
for the top temporary safety of the power plant's roof. He hopped
over the railing and off the edge of the patio and nearly dropped
to the gravel. His legs almost didn't hold as he landed, and a
surge of exhaustion swept through him. “Rae, we need cover! Can you
use that grenade launcher?”

George's counterpart grinned and tuned back
to the creatures approaching from the southeast. She sighted on
them, angled her weapon up slightly, and pumped a cartridge into
the chamber. “Watch me work,” she assured him.

In quick succession, the shapely woman sent a
trio of rounds towards the approaching infected. They exploded
maybe four feet in front of the first rank, and sent almost thirty
of them backwards into the amassed creatures behind them. The ones
blown back acted like bowling balls, knocking zombies here and
there and generally causing a gigantic mess of bodies. The things
were delayed further when all of them tried to rise again at once,
creating what looked like an extremely large game of Twister at a
horror convention.

The humans ran. Jake and Kat reached the
entrance first, only fifteen yards from the struggling dead. He
took out a few of the closest who'd attained vertical status, while
Cho deftly cracked the massive padlock and pulled it free. Jake
shoved her in ahead of him, not wanting her to insist on playing
rearguard. Then, after the blood-soaked Penny, Gwen, and—who was
still blowing the heads from the nearest ghouls— hurried through,
Jake rewrapped the thick chain around the gate. Kat passed the
heavy lock through its links and snapped the mechanism shut, just
before the front rank of flesh-eaters hit the fence.

Cho pulled O'Connor back as the infected
started
gnawing
on the industrial-strength steel, Glock
pointed and ready. They were all well aware that zombies didn't
feel pain, but watching as they broke their teeth on the thick
metal and tore their lips while they chewed on the uncaring fence?
There was no doubt in any of their minds that the things outside
the transformer yard were monsters.

They weren't people infected with a disease
that could recover, if given the proper care.

They weren't a super-weapon to be used in
times of conflict, to pacify an enemy without endangering a given
nation's army to danger on the battlefield.

They weren't beings that operated on a level
different from humans, who sought to find their place in the
natural order or were just trying to survive.

They didn't need to be understood, identified
with, pitied, preserved or protected.

The needed to be destroyed. Exterminated.
Annihilated. Wiped away, then stricken from human memory, so that
future generations wouldn't have to carry the weight of their
ancestors fear, pain, and tragedy.

Jake and the others huddled together.
Clinging to one another in the face of such naked evil. The
infected began to build up behind the fence, eyes and mouths wide,
all wearing the same expression of unquenchable need. The need to
consume every last living human on the face of the Earth.

“How are we ever going to beat that?” Gwen
whispered.

“I don't have the first clue,” Penny
admitted, trying again to wipe the worst of liquefied Purifier from
her appealing extremities.

“Head to head? We won't,” Rae told her
steadily, still pointing her cannon at the faces behind the wire.
“The only way people are going to win—or just survive—is to
out-
think
them. If we try fighting the way we always have
with each other? We'll just be consumed. We're going to have to
come up with one hell of a plan though, or humanity isn't going to
be the dominant life form on Earth for very much longer.”

“We need to find a way out of this enclosure
before we worry about saving the human race,” Cho said, looking
sadly at Karen's broken body. “Speaking of which, everybody keep an
eye out. There was one left walking around in here after our boy
made his escape.”

“No,” Jake choked out, and stared fearfully
up at the office block. “What we need to do is figure out how to
get Laurel off that roof. The fence around the yard here is
industrial grade, so we have some time. If we're quick, we'll all
be able to retreat up across the conduit to the generator building.
Those sacks of shit can't climb, so they won't be able to get to
us, but the door to the roof won't hold them off for long.”

Laurel leaned against one of the ventilation
units and tried to slow her breathing.

The door to the roof had not only been easy
to find and unlocked, but it was also secured from the
outside
by way of a pair of nice, heavy-duty bolts. She'd
left the dead far behind in the stairwell—and even had the time to
grab a twelve pack of bottled water from one of the offices she
passed along the way—but had lost Deputy Carson somewhere in the
process. She was sure the infected were fanning out inside and it
was only a matter of time before they reached the roof access, but
she wasn't too worried. They seemed to respond most readily to
sound, so all she had to do was stay quiet and wait for the others
to figure out a way to get a line up to her. Or something to that
effect. That could take a while, which was why she'd taken the case
of water. The sun was almost down and the heat of the day was
gradually receding, but if they managed to draw the horde off
before coming for her it might be a day or two. Maybe even three.
While the redhead didn't have anything in the way of food, a couple
of days on the roof in the sun shouldn't be too unpleasant. She had
plenty of water to keep herself hydrated, there were still eight
full magazines for her weapon in the vest she wore. There was every
chance Jake and the others would be able to rescue her.

Face it, girl. You're probably not getting
off this roof.

She was fairly certain she'd have the
strength to end it, if the things managed to break through. If—or
when—it came to that, well, at least she wouldn't have to walk
around eating people.

Now that she had a moment which didn't
involve shooting ravenous, blood-thirsty zombies that were trying
to eat her, Laurel felt a weight fall from her shoulders. Jake was
alive
. Granted he'd been hurt, there had been deep circles
under his eyes, his left shoulder was bandaged and bloody and—from
the little she'd seen—he was moving stiffly, but he was
alive
.
She was torn between joyous relief at seeing him
still among the living, and blazing anger over his decision to
engage in an early-morning suicide mission in an attempt to rescue
Karen. When she learned of the selfless way he'd agreed to trade
himself for the girl, it almost stopped her heart. He had to have
known Poole and those of his ilk weren't to be trusted, but she
could understand why he'd done it. He felt responsible for not
being there to protect Karen when the young woman had been taken,
and he felt he had to do everything in his power to buy her
freedom.

It was called, being a
leader.
Someone
who protected the people in his charge, which was basically what
all of them—with the possible exception of George—were. His people.
Real leaders, real
heroes
knew that leadership could be
defined by two words. Those words being,
Follow. Me
. Real
leaders never asked their people to do anything they couldn't or
wouldn't do themselves, either because they didn't possess the
ability to do so, or because it might be
really
dangerous.
It meant they lead from the front. From the grit and the grime and
the mud and the blood, bullets flying past their ears if need be.
Not sitting miles away, drinking cafe-latte, absently directing
people like chess pieces. Those individuals were called
politicians
and most of them had gotten their asses eaten in
the first month of the outbreak.

She could never see Jake sitting safely on
his butt, all the while letting others take the risks. In the brief
time they'd known one another, he'd come for her on the day all the
madness started, kept them all from going stir-crazy during their
exile in Foster's safe-house, freed Gwen and Donna from their
captors, escaped from the grainery with Deputy Carson in tow, and
finally rescued Allen and Maggie from the Purifiers murderous
hands. Now, to top it all off, Jake had turned himself over to
their leader in a last-ditch effort to free a girl who didn't have
any family left in the world, and basically thrown himself to the
wolves in an attempt to protect them all.

No. Jake O'Connor was the real deal.

And Kat was with him! They'd all believed her
roommate had stowed along for the ride somehow, but when she'd
contacted them via the Hummer's shortwave it had actually given
Laurel a glimmer of hope. There was no way the Purifiers would find
the stealthy ninja-girl as she stalked around their compound. Kat
was just
that
good. She'd managed to briefly give them the
basic layout of the pseudo-fortress, and even a reasonably safe
location to observe the Nazi's activities, before signing off to
cause some havoc. There hadn't been much time for her to go into
detail during the minute-long conversation. The beautiful Asian had
merely said they'd know her signal when they saw it, and told them
to be ready to '
ride into the rescue'
within the next hour
or so. Sure enough, somehow—just over one hour later—she'd managed
to free Jake, and even take a big chunk of Poole's little band of
killers out in the process.

The redhead had been pretty pissed at her
friend over the course of that hour-long wait. She didn't like the
fact that Kat hadn't informed them exactly what the details of her
plan were. In retrospect, however, Laurel couldn't bitch about its
results.

Jake was alive.

She smiled, adjusted the strap of her M-4,
and pushed away from the fan's housing. After hefting the
plastic-wrapped case of liquid, she moved towards the rear of the
roof. Nearing the drop-off, Laurel sat the water down in the shade
under the power plant's satellite dish and trotted to the edge.
Jake, Kat and the others had to have circled the building by now.
The moans of the dead rose in volume when she neared the lip,
lending caution to her steps as she edged up to the five story
plunge. Looking down, the red-haired woman saw the gap behind the
office block was full of the creatures. They flowed towards the
center from both directions, and were stumbling out of the
cafeteria she'd passed on her way through the building too. That
was a bit odd. Granted the battle in the turbine room had caused
quite the ruckus, but the horrors wouldn't have any reason to
concentrate...

Then she saw them. The others were trapped
inside the fenced transformer yard, not far behind the office
block. While their minimal barrier held the zombies back, but there
were more coming every minute. Eventually, there would be enough of
them to either force open the gate, or simply topple the fence
entirely. Once that happened, the dead would flow unstoppably into
the enclosure. Laurel's tasted fear as she pictured her friends
being dragged down by cold, lifeless hands, and consumed before her
eyes. Just like Donna.