There was more gunfire then, coming from the stairwell.
Lisa screamed.
Near where the body of the first soldier lay, a white and skeletal hand swung up and over the ledge, a rabid pulling itself up onto the roof. It was hard to say whether it was a man or a woman.
Lisa looked over the ledge and saw chaos.
The parking lot and courtyard below were a hive of activity.
There were assault vehicles with searchlights scanning the night, scanning the building. Hordes of rabids were attacking groups of soldiers and there were the continual reports of machine guns and small-arms fire. Grenades were bursting and flamethrowers spitting out streams of flame. A lot of dying and screaming and madness. The stink wafting up from down there was the smell of crematory ovens—thick, pungent, and nauseating.
But it was hardly the worse thing.
For the façade of the municipal building was actually alive with creeping, slinking motion as rabids scaled the walls. They were crawling upwards like spiders. Literally hundreds of them fighting for space. The building was infested with them. Some fell, only to be replaced by three or four others.
Many were very near the top.
As evidence of this, two or three more of them made it over the ledge, hissing and angry.
“Jesus Christ,” Johnny muttered.
Thirty or forty others were creeping over the peaked roofs, dragging the bodies of dead soldiers with them. The only thing all of this had in common was that they were all making for the same place: the section of roof Johnny and the others had once considered a safe haven.
More soldiers came through the doorway.
Ruby Sue’s body jerked as slugs swept across her chest.
Johnny watched, squeezing off shots as did Lisa now.
But who to shoot at?
Rabids?
Soldiers?
They were all congregating here for the final, apocalyptic battle as the building burned and the town raged and death hung in the air like a shroud.
Ruby Sue got to her feet and dropped two soldiers, despite the fact that she was badly wounded. There were fifteen or twenty soldiers on the roof now and more coming from the mouth of the stairwell all the time.
A cloud of flame inundated both Ruby Sue and a pair of rabids closing in on her. They stumbled into each other, human candles, greasy black smoke coming off them in churning plumes.
Johnny and Lisa shot alternately at rabids and soldiers until they were just out of ammunition.
Rabids swarmed over the ledge.
Many were gunned down or lit on fire before they stepped onto the roof, but they kept coming, a human wave attack of the damned.
The air was black with smoke and the stink of cremated meat and fresh blood.
The rabids that had come over the rooftops dove on the soldiers.
Others formed themselves into ranks atop the maintenance sheds. In a grisly, almost cartoonish display, they pelted the soldiers with the only things they had at their disposaclass="underline" body parts. They dismembered the bodies of their kills and heaved heads and legs and arms at the white-suited troops. Entire trunks spun through the air and flattened troopers.
The confused soldiers were firing in all directions, dropping rabids and their fellow soldiers as well.
Lisa and Johnny stayed down low and fought on.
Johnny picked an M-16 up off a dead soldier and cut down an advancing wave of rabids, catching two, three white suits in the process. He felt a stray round rip through his shoulder and then another pulverize his right kneecap.
Lisa had the sidearm of a fallen trooper—a 9mm auto—and she was shooting pretty much at anything that moved.
The rooftop was a perpetual motion machine of fire and bodies and shooting and blinding smoke and howling rabids.
She dropped a rabid that beat a soldier to the ground with a severed limb.
Then she heard a high, whining sibilance like the buzz of a pissed-off hornet.
She spun around and a rabid whose face had been blasted right down to the bone clawed out at her. She kicked out, catching him in the thigh and knocking him momentarily off balance. She blocked another lunge, felt a spray of drool splatter against her face, and put two rounds in his chest. He fell back and was replaced by two, three others and she just kept shooting until there was nothing left to shoot.
The rooftop was a gray, spiraling haze of smoke and flames and she couldn’t tell any longer where the rabids and the soldiers were.
It was a free-fire zone.
The flames were eating away at the building and occasional muffled explosions rocked everyone to the ground. The fire was advancing through the city and Lisa could hear something in the distance like an air raid siren. But it was nearly blotted out by the confused shrieks of the dying and the screeching of killers and the sounds of blaring loudspeaker horns and gunfire.
A rabid was on top of Johnny—a naked, barking woman with a cleaver in her hand.
She was bringing it down in lethal arcs.
He was blocking its edge with his rifle, but stroke after stroke, she was whittling through it.
Lisa ran over there and pounded the woman’s head with the butt of the empty automatic. She kept at until the maniac dropped her cleaver and her head was pulped and bleeding.
But it didn’t stop her.
She wrapped her fingers around Johnny’s throat despite the blows he rained into her face. Lisa dug her fingers into the woman’s cold neck and screamed as the flesh peeled away in strips like flaking dough.
Johnny cracked the woman in the face with the butt of his Remington and both she and Lisa went over in a fighting heap.
Lisa fought free and pulled Johnny to his feet.
His body jerked as bullets shredded through it.
His hand brushed Lisa’s face and then more slugs ripped into him and he fell back over the ledge and into the night.
The soldiers were losing.
Most of them were dead and the rabids were still coming on, driven into a manic feeding frenzy like sharks in a bloody sea. They mutilated soldiers and bit the flesh from their faces, stripped away containment suits and skin in the process. A woman was sucking at the bleeding throat of a fallen soldier as a man raped her from behind. And that seemed to be all they wanted to do or were interested in doing in this stinking envelope of scorched bodies: feeding, killing, and fornicating.
Beneath the sinking moon, they celebrated this night of festival with feasting and fucking.
Lisa took up a gun and killed a few, but it was all really quite pointless.
A bloody leg slammed into her face and she fell back against the ledge, nearly going right over and not really making much of an attempt to stop herself, knowing it would be better that way.
And then they were on her, too, three of them.
They fell on her and teeth sank into her throat and fingers gouged valleys into her flesh. She propped her foot against the side of the maintenance shed and, drawing upon every remaining bit of energy that pulsed in her veins, she kicked off with everything she had.
She and her host of rabids flipped over the edge, careening down.
Still they held her, though, biting and pulling at her.
They were in free fall, the four of them, flipping over and over through the air, and then Lisa was riding atop them and they began to smash through the upper limbs of a tree. Their bodies took the impacts, breaking and crushing beneath her. And then the final resounding, jarring impact as they slammed into the grass below.
Lisa was knocked numb and senseless, but unbroken.
After a time, she crawled away from the human wreckage, away from the burning building and the attacking rabids and the peals of machine gun fire. Uninjured except for bites and scratches and numerous lumps and bumps, she crawled like a baby through the grass over mutilated bodies and into the darkness.