“Good thinking,” Lance said, and started toward the house at a jog. Once there, we clambered up the stairs and took a moment to assess the situation.
There were far more undead than I originally thought. We had killed more than twenty of them, but three times that many slowly converged on our position, watching us as they came, outstretched hands curled into grasping claws, moans filling the air.
“We don’t have much time,” I said. Lance nodded grimly. After taking a moment to kick away the balcony’s flimsy wooden rail, we assumed seated firing positions and started shooting.
It was harder than anticipated. All my life, I had trained to shoot center of mass; headshots were something I did for fun, just to show off. Aside from the men who attacked Lauren, I had only ever shot at paper targets, never at ambulatory human bodies. If my optics had had magnification, it would have been easier. But they didn’t, so I had to make due by firing more slowly than I normally would have. Lance seemed to be having a similar difficulty.
I quickly realized the undead moved faster than their shuffling steps let on. Their gait was slow, but constant, never stopping or slowing down. It reminded me of something Tyrel had once told me about a Navy cruiser he spent a few weeks on. The average cruising speed of the ship, depending on conditions, was usually around fifteen knots, or just over 17 MPH. Which may not seem very fast, especially considering the vast distances ships have to cross, but they travel at that speed twenty-four hours a day. As a result, they can cover a lot of miles in a relatively short amount of time. The effect was the same with the undead.
I had reloaded once and was ten rounds into my next magazine when the horde, now reduced by half, reached the bottom of the stairwell and began climbing toward the balcony.
“This isn’t good,” Lance said, getting to his feet. The undead not on the stairs were now beneath the overhang where we could not get a shot at them.
“They’ll bottlenose on the steps,” I said. “Ever read about the battle of Thermopylae?”
Lance used the stock of his rifle to bust out the window of the door leading inside the house, then unlocked it. “If it looks like we’re going to be overrun, we’ll head through the house, throw whatever we can in front of the door, and try to escape on the ground level.”
I gave a single nod, then drew my pistol and knelt in front of the stairs. Lance took position beside me. “I’ll kneecap a few of them,” I said. “Try to slow them down. You take them out when they go down; I have a feeling they’ll try to crawl their way up.”
“Okay.”
We let them get halfway up the steps so they were at point blank range before we started firing. Lance let off four quick shots that toppled an equal number of undead down the stairs. For a few seconds, the tumbling bodies slowed the corpses behind them, but they quickly recovered and began marching upward again. I took careful aim and destroyed the kneecaps of four more, pitching them over face first on the steps. Lance’s pistol cracked four more times, and they went still.
Now we had a pileup. The undead began clambering over the mass of bodies in front of them, but their lack of coordination made them clumsy. I let Lance empty his magazine, then began firing while he reloaded.
Slowly, one by one, we exterminated them all. When we ran out of ammo for our pistols, we switched back to our rifles. By the time we were done, the stairway groaned and popped beneath the weight of all the bodies.
“Let’s get off this thing before it collapses,” Lance said.
We went in through the back and made our way to ground level, exiting through the front door. I almost started back toward the Jeep, then realized I had gotten so caught up killing the undead I had forgotten about Bob and Maureen. The brief moment of confusion was lost on Lance, who stood still, staring at the mess we had made.
“How many of them are there?” he asked.
“Probably about eighty or so.”
He frowned at me. “No, I mean all together. Like across the nation.”
I wiped a hand across the back of my neck. “The news said the whole East Coast is overrun.”
“More than half the country lives on the eastern seaboard,” Lance said. “There must be millions. Tens of millions.”
“Or hundreds,” I said.
For the first time, I saw genuine worry in Lance’s eyes. “I knew things were bad, but this …”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go check on the Kennedys.”
TWENTY-ONE
I knew it was hopeless when I saw the front door.
To call it smashed in does not quite do the damage justice. Shattered and brutally cast aside would be more apt.
Broken glass, bloody footprints, and expended .22 shell casings littered the floor. The infected had broken through all three windows along the front of the house, ripped down the curtains, and knocked the furniture askew. It occurred to me the moaning had been so loud I had not heard the crack of Bob’s gun. By the lack of bodies on the floor, I was guessing he was not aware of the headshot rule.
Looking upstairs, I saw red streaks along the walls and the blackened outlines of several pairs of bloody feet.
“Bob?” I shouted, standing at the base of the stairs. “Maureen? You all right?”
No answer.
I looked at Lance. He pointed upward and said, “I’ll take point.”
I let him go ahead of me, aiming my rifle at the vectors he couldn’t cover. We climbed slowly until we reached the first landing where I heard a snuffling and snorting like pigs rooting in a trough. We exchanged another glance before walking the rest of the way up.
A trail of red prints like a macabre version of an old-fashioned dance mat led to the master bedroom. Lance held up a fist for me to stop, crept to the doorway, and quickly peeked inside. His gaze lingered in the room for less than a second, then he stepped back.
I looked at him and mouthed, Well?
He shook his head sadly and made a slashing motion across his throat.
My shoulders sagged as I cursed silently, feeling as if someone had let the air out of me. I had only spoken with the old couple a few times, but they had struck me as warm, genuine, kind people. A few days before, I had stopped by to check in on them and Bob gave me a nine-pound catfish he caught that morning in the Guadalupe River. My dad and I battered and fried it, and it was damned good eating. I resolved afterward to stop by again soon and give them a vacuum-sealed tub of coffee as a show of appreciation. But that wasn’t going to happen, now. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
A warm, liquid darkness swelled at the back of my vision. The lights and colors in the hallway seemed to sharpen, growing in brightness and intensity. The grip of my rifle, once smooth, now felt impossibly rough, like low-grit sandpaper. Each individual whump-thump of my heart sang in my ears with biting clarity. I heard my teeth grind together, felt the muscles in my jaw tense, felt the air whistling in and out of my lungs.
“Excuse me,” I said as I stepped around Lance, who saw my face and took a worried step backward.
I stopped in the doorway, staring. If I had known how enduringly the memory of that moment would burn itself into my mind, I would not have gazed upon that nightmare as long as I did. I would have closed one eye, sighted across the top of my carbine, and taken six quick shots. Then I would have stepped out of the room, walked back to the Jeep, driven back to the cabin, and gotten blackout drunk.
But I didn’t know, then. So I looked.
There were four of them tearing at Bob, two more on Maureen. The old couple were almost unrecognizable, faces ripped apart, clothes rent asunder, blood splashed on walls and bed sheets and standing in puddles on the carpet. The undead had opened Bob up from chest to groin and pulled out his intestines, munching on them like plump sausages. A little girl who could have been no older than ten gnawed dutifully at the flesh of his left forearm. Maureen lay face down, the two creatures astride her ripping strips of skin and muscle from her back to reveal the red-soaked curvature of ribcage beneath. After a few seconds, one of the undead—a young woman, maybe early twenties—looked up and noticed me. Sunlight from the bay window threw off golden flashes from a diamond engagement ring on her left hand, the same hand clutching a ragged, half-chewed loop of Bob’s small intestine.