She wasn’t sure; didn’t think she could ever be happy again. She buried the knife deep in his left eye and hung on, exhausted.
“Remind me… never to piss you off,” Holden said. And through everything, Dana finally managed a smile.
EIGHT
Hadley was standing behind Sitterson, watching the action on the giant screens that rose before them. He’d been pacing nervously for the last couple of minutes, and Sitterson had to resist the urge to swivel in his chair and tell him to sit the hell down. Things were going to be okay. The kids were doing pretty well in comparison to other occasions, true. But they’d gone from outside to inside, and inside to down, just as was intended.
And now that they’d got the better of the huge zombie Matthew, their defenses would be lowered for a while. They’d feel a flush of success, celebrate their resilience, rejoice in their humanity. Who knew, they might even fuck. It had happened before.
“Oh yeah,” Hadley said. “Nothing to worry about. He looks dead… ”
Sitterson smiled, worked at his keyboard, and turned a dial a quarter-clockwise. A graduated display on the small screen beside the dial showed a steady increase in power.
“And what do we do when the dead guy stops moving?” Sitterson asked. He was aware of Truman standing off to their left, more enrapt than terrified now by proceedings.
That’s good, Sitterson thought. He’s learning fast.
He pushed the button beside the dial. The charge peaked, then purged and dropped to zero. And on the screen—
—Dana jerked her hand back from the knife, staring at her fingers and palm. Holden could hardly blame her. The damage she’d done to that thing, that zombie, was sickening. Whatever it was now, it had once been human.
She turned to him with a frown, hand still held out, and she was about to say something when he took her in his arms and held tight. He felt tears burning but swallowed them back. She relaxed into his embrace, her face slick with sweat and a sheen of blood down her left cheek, and he took as much comfort from the contact as she. Even the pain where her hand pressed against his injuries was refreshing, because it made him so alive.
“You smell good,” he said, remembering their tender kisses and tentative caresses.
“I stink of blood and sweat,” she mumbled against his neck. “Yeah. Blood. Sweat. Mmm.”
She felt good, as well, but he didn’t need to tell her that. Her hands pressed against his back, never quite still, and she was feeling the solidity of him just as he was with her.
“Holden…” she said, her voice quivering, and she started to shake.
He should have comforted her. The words came to his lips but when he tried to speak they emerged as a sob, and in this silent pause when violence was no longer upon them, he felt his barriers beginning to tumble.
“Come on,” she said, edging him toward the back of the room. “Come on.”
The hanging shape of the slashed-up zombie was starkly illuminated by the dangling lamp, casting a horrific shadow against the far wall. His big hands almost touched the torture room’s dirt floor. The chain wrapped around his wrist bit in deep, and the half-moon curve of the broken bear trap glistened and glimmered with fresh blood.
Holden frowned, because he wasn’t aware he’d been injured that badly. There was so much blood on there.
“Come on,” Dana said again, “we’ve got to try and—”
A rumble came from the wall, and for a moment Holden through it was another of those troubling earth tremors. But then he felt the vibration through his feet and heard the sound coming from a very definite direction.
Then a section of the wall started to fold away. “Back!” he shouted, hauling Dana behind him in some deep-set belief that he should be protecting her. She’s the one who killed the zombie, he thought, and he barked a brief, mad laugh as Dana dashed to the table and brought up a heavy, curved hatchet.
“You feint left, and I’ll get it when it goes for you,” she whispered. Holden nodded, tensed, and when the wall was fully open and the flashlight blinded him he darted to the left… straight into the thing’s arms.
“Hey!” Curt said, squeezing his shoulders. “Hey, it’s me.”
“Curt,” Dana gasped.
“Let’s move let’s move!” he said without even pausing to check out the room. Behind him, the chaotic mess of the main cellar was lit by two hanging bulbs, both swinging and dancing as Curt ducked beneath the joists for the floor above and brushed the wire with his head.
Dana followed, with Holden bringing up the rear.
Should’ve closed the door, he thought, even though he’d seen Dana doing a blade-job on the bastard thing. If it gets out—
“We’re getting the fuck out of here,” Curt said. He moved quickly across the cellar, knocking a bookcase with his thigh and spilling a slew of moldy books across the floor. Dana walked into a chandelier of fine chains hanging from an old wagon wheel, waving her hands around her head as if to shove aside spider webs. Holden went to help but she was through them, one hand fingering through her hair and bringing the dirty, bloody knots to his attention. She’s bleeding more than I thought. He wanted to embrace her again, and he promised himself that he would. Soon. They would hug soon, somewhere safe where terror couldn’t tear them apart again, and where warmth and safety replaced the stink of age and the coldness of death.
Curt stopped below the storm doors that led to the outside, looking around, kicking a heavy shelf from the wall and hefting it as a weapon. A dozen ornaments spilled from the shelf and shattered on the floor, and as he went for the three stairs leading up to the doors he crunched them into the ground.
He turned around and glanced from Dana to Holden, sizing them up.
“Hurt?”
Dana shook her head, denying the blood. Curt pointed at her nose, her scalp. “Not bad,” she said.
“I’m cut,” Holden said. He hadn’t yet explored his wounds from the bear trap, but he could still feel them leaking afresh. Once when he was a kid he’d fallen and scraped his knee, and keeled over in a faint when he looked down to see the slight dribble of blood. Since then he’d been terrified of blood— especially his own— and the last thing he needed now was to pass out.
He turned his left side to Curt, who looked him up and down without his expression giving anything away.
“Think you can you run?” he asked.
Holden nodded.
“Good. I open these doors and we go for the Rambler, okay?” Dana and Holden agreed with a nod, Curt turned to the doors and shoved them open, and darkness flooded in.
No time to talk and plan, Holden thought. This is controlled panic. None of us really knows what’s happening here.
Curt went first, the heavy shelf held across his chest ready to swing. He climbed the stairs, stood in the open beside the cabin, and looked around.
“Okay,” he said, and Dana followed him up. Holden came last, ready to stand and look cautiously into the darkness between trees, but the other two were already sprinting for the Rambler.
And this is when control gets flushed down the toilet, he thought, remembering every horror movie he’d ever seen. The creeping and peering around corners is over. Now we’re just running.
Holden’s side and back hurt more when he ran, and the cool night air was chill across his flowing blood. But he concentrated on Dana, even smiling slightly as he realized that despite all this he was still checking out her butt, and they reached the vehicle without being attacked by any of the walking dead.