Thoom-thoom-thoom!
“So we’re going dumpster diving after this?” He grinned, his face comical in the green fluorescent glow. “Awesome. Although, I always pictured my first date with you being a little cleaner.”
“This isn’t the time—”
Another massive Thoom! and the desk slid back a few inches, squealing loudly as its edges dug into the tiles. Peeking out above the shorter desk, she could see the top portion of the door, opening slightly, though how the door managed to stay on its hinges was baffling since there didn’t seem to be much of a frame left.
They took another involuntary step back, then another one. She lifted her rifle, and Nate raised the Glock.
The first creature poked its head out of the right side of the desk, trying to squeeze its way through. Its slim, emaciated body moved like a skeleton draped with black flesh instead of something that was actually alive.
She shot it in the head and the creature flopped to the floor.
Nate stared at the dead (again) creature, almost as if he couldn’t believe it. “Silver bullets. Holy shit.”
“Aim for the biggest part of their body,” she said. “It doesn’t matter where you hit it, as long as you hit it with silver.”
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
Two more creatures emerged out of the left side of the door. Gaby shot the one that was almost through, while Nate put the other one out of its misery. The creatures’ bodies smacked against the floor, where they lay still — before they were jerked unceremoniously back through the door to make room for the next wave.
Another loud crash, and the desk moved backward another two inches.
Gaby slung her rifle and rushed forward, throwing her shoulder into the desk. Then Nate was there doing the same thing and they moved the desk an inch at a time back against the door.
A ghoul struggled to squeeze through the slight opening next to her, so close Gaby could smell the rancid odor seeping from its pores. She shot the creature’s arm at point-blank range, rendering flesh and snapping bone as if it were powder. The arm flew off at the elbow joint and streaked across the room.
The relentless hammering continued on the other side of the door, over and over again, pounding into every inch, top to bottom, side to side, an endless sea of blows, never ending, never pausing for even a second to let her breathe.
Thoom-thoom-thoom! Thoom-thoom-thoom!
THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!
“Push!” she grunted.
“What do you think I’m doing?” Nate grunted back.
Nate gave her a look, his face almost ethereal in the green fluorescent of the glow stick. And he did push, legs struggling desperately under him, sheets of sweat breaking out across his face. She prayed to God his stitches didn’t snap free at that very moment.
They managed to push the desk another inch back against the door, when a loud, massive hit shook both of them to their core. She didn’t know they were even capable of that kind of power, and her mind was still reeling, trying to justify it, even as she and Nate both took a stunned step back.
By the time they gathered themselves and threw their bodies back against the desk one more time, the door had reopened another two inches and one of the ghouls had managed to squeeze through the small sliver.
It leaped inside, moving so fast she only saw a blur before she heard the click-clacking of bones against the tiled floor. Its skin, stretched tight over deformed bones, made for an odd, grayish tint that looked as if it were moving slower than it really was. But her eyes were lying to her because she knew it was fast, darting from the door to the side wall.
Gaby stepped away from the door, tracking the creature with her rifle. It raced to the back of the room, toward the couch, and bounded over it. It ran with purpose, moving around the back instead of attacking head-on, each second bringing it closer to her.
“Dead, not stupid,” Will always said.
She fired — and missed!
The damn thing was actually zig-zagging across the room in order to make her aim more difficult.
So she feigned a shot, made as if to shoot by jerking the gun toward it — and got it to zig instead of zag (“Don’t shoot at where the target is, shoot at where it’s going,” was a mantra Danny had drilled into her head). She squeezed off a second shot and clipped it in the neck. Just barely. It was enough, and the ghoul stumbled and went down as if it had run into a wall.
Thoom-thoom-thoom!
THOOM-THOOM-THOOM!
Gaby spun around just as the desk and door and chunks of the wall exploded behind her. She felt rather than saw Nate stumbling back, disoriented, trying to shake off the blow, then losing his balance and crashing to the floor with a loud expelling of breath and pain.
The desk had collapsed to the floor, returning to the position originally intended for it — on its legs. The door, or what was left of it, hung from a single hinge, the frame forced free from the wall, leaving behind little more than a jagged rectangle.
She looked past all of that at the nebulous blackness moving and shifting and surging through the opening. She didn’t even have time to count how many were in the pawnshop beyond the door, or how many were clamoring over the backs of the ones in front of them, trying to be the first into the room, the first to take what they wanted from her, from Nate.
The first to taste their blood.
She flicked the fire selector on the AR-15 to full-auto and fired, the magazine emptying at an incredulous rate, the weapon recoiling against her over and over and over again. She swung it from left to right, then right to left.
They stumbled and fell and climbed over each other. Every bullet she fired pierced soft flesh and glanced off bones to kill one, two, sometimes three more behind them. She was getting good value for her money, every bullet taking down multiple ghouls, but it wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t nearly enough.
For every one that staggered to the floor and didn’t move again, two more—five more — took its place.
There were too many. There were simply too many.
And they kept coming.
And coming…
“Gaby!” Nate shouted behind her. (When had he gotten behind her?)
Gaby heard his voice only because she had stopped firing; the magazine was empty. She backed up, hitting the release switch to pull out and slam in her final magazine before looking back.
Nate was at the door, one hand on the deadbolt, the other on the lever. She could see blood soaking through the fabric of his shirt over his left shoulder, the red color spreading along his left arm. He looked deathly ill, but was somehow still standing.
“We have to go!” he shouted.
She nodded, turning around just as two ghouls came within inches of scratching her face. She didn’t have time to aim and fired from the hip instinctively, slicing them in a short burst. They fell, the bullets that killed them continuing on, knocking three more ghouls off the desk seconds after they had scrambled on top of it.
Clumps of flesh, smelling like garbage and decaying meat, along with viscous liquids made of things she’d rather not think about, splattered her shirt and neck and cheeks, and she could have sworn some got in her hair, too.
“Do it!” she shouted. “Do it now!”
She kept backing up, firing into the thick, shapeless mass of quivering flesh flooding through the door over and around the fallen desk. It didn’t matter where she fired. One section of the room was the same as the other. It looked as if the bullets were punching into an ocean. An endless sea, as deep as the universe, moving forward to take her into its final embrace.