“Ah, screw it.” I finally said, and then bounded up the bottom two stairs of the walkout. I braced the gun on my shoulder and aimed it at the padlock straight on and turned my head, hoping that I wouldn’t get shrapnel or wood in my face. Saying a brief prayer to whatever god was listening, I pulled the trigger. The blast of the gun was tremendous in the enclosed space and all I could hear was a ringing in my ears as I chambered another round and ran up the rest of the stairs, putting my shoulder into it and heaving the doors with all my might.
They flew open, bouncing noisily against the ground as I ran out of the walkout. I did a quick 360. There were no zombies in sight, thankfully.
“All clear,” I hissed back down the stairs.
Fannie Mae came scrambling up behind me, followed by the other seven men. They spread out in a fan, checking every corner. When they were all out I turned around and looked back down into the basement. As I watched I saw a zombie skidding to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He looked like he’d surfed to the bottom. He had no legs, his torso ending in a bloody, white stump that twitched madly. It was his spine. I saw his head swivel around the basement and then come to rest on my face. He began to pull himself forward with his hands.
“Shit,” I muttered. I gripped one side of the double doors and swung it shut. Wash saw what I was doing and went and did the other. It wouldn’t hold the zombies off for long but it might confuse them for a couple extra minutes and that was really all we could ask for.
“What now?” The burly man said.
“How about we go that direction?” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from the house.
So we were off. I managed to keep me and Fannie Mae in the middle of the pack while we went off in a fast walk. You don’t want to run too fast when you’re in the middle of a zombie attack. I could just see us running like crazy and turning a corner and running smack dab into the middle of a horde. Although I was hoping against hope that we’d left most of the horde behind us. Fannie Mae only had the pistol she’d grabbed earlier and I don’t think either one of us really knew how to check it to see how many rounds were left in it. It was for last resort only and I didn’t want the others to know that she had it. She must have sensed the direction of my thoughts as she’d not once brought it to anyone’s attention.
For all we knew it only had one round left in it anyway.
We made quicker time than our little rescue party had earlier going to the car park. No rain and less caution help’s a ton. We got there in no more than a couple minutes. We stopped in front of the line of cars to rest and talk and I felt a wave of sorrow pass over me as I saw Tamara’s body. Fannie Mae looked to see where I was looking and she sighed, too, and squeezed my hand. Even though my heart was now full of ideas of me and Fannie Mae together there was still a place in it for Tamara and I wished yet again that none of this had happened. You could blame me or her or Mason Smith all you wanted, but the truth was that I was the only one still alive to shoulder the blame.
Mason was still out there somewhere but he was beyond blame now.
For a moment I flashed onto an image of Mason out there, marshalling his troops. Somehow commanding them to come attack the House or to sweep the trailers for survivors. I had no doubt there were still people huddled underneath beds and in closets. I didn’t think that Mason had any more intelligence or personality than any of the other zombies but a piece of me had a glimmer that maybe, just maybe, there was a little more to him than the others. He’d been the first.
That was the first time I had the idea that maybe if I could find and take out Mason that all of this would stop. It worked for vampires, in some movies, so why wouldn’t it work for zombies? It worked in Lost Boys, right?
Regardless, after a quick glance at Tamara’s body lying there in the dirt I turned to Washington. “What’s the plan, Wash?”
“I thought you had the plan, Duke?”
“We’re at the limits of my plan, Wash. There are nine of us. There’s nowhere to go that would hold the nine of us safely. The House was the only place that could do that. I think we need to split up.”
He looked at me incredulously. “Split up? That’s insanity, Duke. Our best defense is to stick together.” His lips continued moving after he was done speaking. My flesh crawled. He wasn’t going to make it too much longer.
The burly man laughed humorlessly.
I looked at him sourly. And then looked round at Wash and his men. “The only thing we can all do together is die together. This big of a group will attract the zombies.” I shook my head. “I don’t know if they’re attracted to the noise we make or if they can somehow sense our,” I waved my hands, trying to find the right word, “life force. Our essence. Whatever. But I think a huge group of us together is like giving them a big all you can eat buffet. They can’t stay away from it. I think if him,” I pointed at the burly guy, “and a couple of the others want to try for town they should. Maybe they can get there and send help. Then I think the rest of us should hunker down and wait til daylight. We’ll be better able to fight in the light of day.”
Wash looked hurt. “Duke? Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I laughed. “Deadly serious.”
“Fine,” the burly man said. He turned to the others. “Clark? Walter? Remy? You guys with me?”
They nodded at him. He turned to look back at me and Wash, pity on his face. “We’ll send someone back for you, if you’re still alive.”
They took off at a slow run, checking all the corners and making sure they weren’t running directly into a pack of zombies. It didn’t take more than 10 seconds for them to pass from sight. Wash stood there with his mouth open, staring off at them and alternating between looks at them and at me. You could see the surprise and confusion on his face. Somewhere in the middle back there – maybe the moment we’d left the House – he’d lost the semblance of leadership.
He finally turned to look at me fully. “There’s five of us left now, Duke. What’s the plan? Hunker down and wait to die?”
I shook my head. “No. The first part is right. We’ll hunker down. But I have no plans to die.”
I looked at the two other unknowns. Both of their faces were etched with worry. “What are your names, guys?”
The first one, shockingly tall and built like a beanpole, mousy-brown hair and a patchy beard on his face, said, “Call me Shaggy.”
“Shaggy? Seriously?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding solemnly. “It’s been my nickname since I was 14.” He grinned a mouth mostly empty of teeth at me. “It’s grown on me.”
A ghost of a grin of my own crossed my face and I looked at the other one. He was short, maybe 5’ 5”. A little thick through the middle, but his arms were as big around as car tires. He was covered in dark patches of hair and his dark eyes barely showed through his untrimmed beard. He said, “My name’s Kevin.”
“No big nickname?”
He shook his wild hair. “Nope. Nothing anyone’s ever lived to repeat.”