The undead shook their heads, bunched together, fixed their sights on Cat and advanced. She blew her whistle several times, as loudly as she could, but the zombies ignored her, as she’d guessed they would.
Spitting out the whistle, Cat reached for a knife, only to find all of her scabbards bare. In a panic she scrabbled for her gun but that was gone too. She glanced with horror at Mr. Dowling on his throne and spotted him idly twirling the gun around. He must have smoothly removed it when he rid her of her knives, though she couldn’t remember when exactly that had happened.
Despite her desperation Cat backed up slowly, not wanting the zombies to break rank and race after her. She looked around for anything that she might be able to defend herself with but the floor had been swept clean.
There was a gap in the barrier around the ring to Cat’s left and that was what she edged towards. If she could get out of the enclosure, she would duck into the crowd. The mutants and babies might lose their composure if the pack of zombies came racing towards them. In the ensuing chaos she might be able to sneak free and escape from the tent. Of course there were the tens of thousands of zombies outside to deal with, but she would cross that bridge if she came to it. One crisis at a time.
Cat kept expecting the zombies to attack. Those she’d encountered before had always reacted the same way in the presence of the living, hurling themselves at people, in a hurry to rip their skulls open and scoop out their brains. But these creeps held their formation and closed in slowly, steadily.
Cat was almost at the gap when a couple of figures stepped forward to block her way. They were girls in school uniforms. The uniforms were ripped, bloody and dusty, but Cat recognized the colors and the crest. They were from her old school.
Cat drew to a halt and stared at the pair of grim-faced zombies who had blocked her way. She’d spent a lot of her time since the fall of civilization remembering these faces, so she identified the girls immediately.
They were two of the students she had thrown to the zombies in the laboratory at her school.
With a soft moan of understanding, Cat cast her gaze over the rest of the zombies in the ring. She hadn’t focused on their faces before this, simply assuming them to be random members of the undead, as the other performers on the night had been. But now that she studied them she realized they were all people she had knocked aside and left for the living dead when making her own escape.
There was another of her students, one who had almost made it to the exit, who Cat had slammed into a wall and left behind, dazed and lost.
A man in a suit who’d taken shelter in an apartment close to her hiding hole in a tower block in the days before she had decided to avoid such buildings. She’d woken to sniffing noises downstairs one night–she was a light sleeper, which had saved her on more than one occasion–and snuck into his room to tie him up and leave him behind as a distraction for the zombies while she climbed up onto the roof and waited there for morning.
A woman a few years older than Cat. They’d both been foraging one day and had been spotted by a young, fast zombie. As they fled side by side, Cat stuck out a leg and tripped up the woman. Her screams had chased Cat down the road, but not for long.
Cat sank to the floor in a broken heap, staring at the zombies as they crowded in above her, fangs glinting in the spotlights, fingers flexing. She recognized every face, each one of them a person who had paid with their life following a run-in with the ruthless ex-teacher.
If zombies ate the brains of all their victims, none of these people could have come back to haunt Cat Ward. But as she’d noted before, the undead had some sort of built-in mechanism that programed them to convert more people than they killed, and these had all been transformed rather than devoured.
“I’m sorry,” Cat whispered, but in truth she didn’t mean it, and even if she had, it would have served no purpose. It was far too late for apologies.
Cat knew there was no way that she would be spared. These zombies were set to kill mode. They were going to smash open her skull, pull out every last sliver of her brain and tuck in. She wasn’t sure if they had any idea that they would be eating the brain of the woman who had cost them their lives, but she wondered if on some subconscious level they would feel at least a little glow of satisfaction.
Then the finger bones of the undead were upon her, digging into her head as she screamed her final scream, and the last thing she thought before she passed beyond the world of thinking, was that even if there were no second chances in life, the revenge that these zombies were enjoying was proof that sometimes, in death, there were.
THE END
For more great reads and free sampleres, visit
LBYRDigitalDeals.com
and join our communities at:
Facebook.com/LittleBrownBooks
Twitter.com/lbkids
theNOVL.com