Lee flew quickly down the stairs and scooped up his rifle and pack. He told Angela and Abby to go upstairs. They grabbed the meager bit of water left and went upstairs without asking questions. Abby looked numb, but Angela was clearly terrified, clinging with a white-knuckled grip to the big black shotgun in her hands. Lee didn’t know if she’d heard the conversation or if she could just tell from Lee’s face that something was wrong. Sam followed and Tango tagged along with him.
Lee was about to follow them up when, as an afterthought, he stepped back into the dining room. Two at a time, he dragged all the wooden chairs from around the dining table and began laying them over on their sides at the base of the stairs, their legs pointing out. Crude mantraps. The stairs were a natural choke point and the only entrance to the second floor of the house.
He vaulted the banister and ran up the stairs. Angela waited at the top, looking down at him with wide eyes while Abby and Sam peered around her. Lee pointed to the bedrooms. “Guys, grab everything you can out of these rooms and throw it down these stairs. Make the biggest trash pile you can.”
“Okay!” Sam said eagerly and ran into the master bedroom.
Angela and Abby were more reserved. Angela nodded and guided her daughter into the room across from Stephanie’s old room.
“Cap’n, they’re headin’ this way,” Jack called from his lookout.
“Jack, set up over here.”
There was a crash from the master bedroom and Sam came out lugging a nightstand half his size. “Is this good?”
“That’s great, buddy!” Lee gave him a thumbs-up and Sam tossed the nightstand down the stairs where it clattered into the chairs. Lee was dismayed to watch the tiny wall of chairs shuffle as the object hit them. His wall might look big, but bricks with no mortar didn’t stand very strong.
Sam ran back into the bedroom. Angela and Abby came out simultaneously and started throwing things down the stairs. They were tossing them so fast, Lee couldn’t catch what they were. Slowly, the pile of junk at the bottom of the stairs grew. Clothes and pillows were thrown, books and DVDs, small pieces of furniture. Lee and Jack grabbed the mattress and box spring from Stephanie’s bed and shoved them down. It was a tight fit, but they would force someone to stop and negotiate over them.
Jack had run back into Stephanie’s room to glance out the window again. “Shovel Guy’s pretty much making a beeline for us.”
Angela spoke up. “How many of them are there?”
Lee didn’t specify. “Lots.”
Jack looked back at Lee. “You got any more forty mike-mikes?”
Lee nodded and held up two fingers. Jack didn’t need to explain anything. Lee shucked the two 40mm grenades out of their pouches, held one in his hand, and shoved the other into the M203 receiver. He locked back and armed the weapon as he slid quickly over to the window overlooking the front yard.
Glancing around the curtains, his stomach dropped. The image of the mass of bodies, squirming toward the house like a single entity with Shovel Guy at the lead, made Lee’s stomach churn. He felt it now—the adrenaline dump. He thought about dying, about being torn to pieces by a mob of crazies. He thought that it was the most likely outcome, and his body coursed with the nearly overwhelming desire to survive. Flee and live to fight another day. Leave all these stupid civilians behind. Save yourself.
Almost against his will, he looked at Jack and spoke. “Any chance they might pass us by?”
The words were hollow.
Jack shook his head. “They’re fixated, Cap’n. They ain’t goin’ nowhere. Hit ’em now, while they’re still all bunched together.”
Lee didn’t have to explain his concern to Jack. It was still within the realm of possibility that Shovel Guy, with the horde in tow, might poke around the house a bit, then get distracted with something else and leave, taking the group with him. But if Lee opened fire, it would send the infected into an aggressive frenzy and it would be a fight to the death.
It was clear that Jack felt their path had already been chosen for them. Now it was just time to make what they could out of it. Lee stuffed his desire for life behind his conscious decision that he wasn’t going to leave these people. Live or die, they were his problem now. He flipped up the M203 sights and jabbed the window hard with the muzzle of his weapon.
The glass shattered.
As though they were of a single mind, linked by an invisible neural connection, every head in the mob of infected simultaneously snapped up to look at the window. Lee wasn’t sure what came first, the scream of rage or the guttural THUNK of the barrel spitting out a grenade, but he watched the first round hit right in the middle of ten infected. It shredded the closest ones into body parts and meat fragments and threw the others a few yards away. Lee was quick with the reload, but the horde had already begun to run for the house, spacing out their ranks and making the blast less effective.
Lee had barely retreated from the window when he felt the house shake violently as the mob of infected hit the front door. Glass shattered downstairs and Abby started screaming. What looked like a hatchet crashed through the window and glanced off the side of Jack’s rifle just as he steadied to take aim. The two men exchanged a glance that said, Way too close.
“Lee!” Angela’s voice slipped through Abby’s piercing wail. “They’re coming through the windows!”
“Let’s go!” Lee slapped Jack on the shoulder as he turned and ran for the top of the stairs. He took a quick glance down. Daylight around the edges of the front door. It rattled on its hinges, pounded mercilessly from the other side. Flecks of wood and drywall flew off the doorframe. An arm reached through the broken sidelight and groped around for anything it could lay a hand on.
Lee grabbed Angela and the two kids in a bear hug and pushed them into the master bedroom. Before closing the door and backing into the hall, Lee caught Angela’s gaze. He pointed to the shotgun in her hands. “You take the safety off?”
Angela nodded fiercely, her hair flying in her face.
“Don’t open this door until I say it’s okay.” Lee slammed the door closed behind him. From downstairs, he heard the distinct sound of the front door giving way.
Footsteps cluttered the landing and Lee registered the hissing, moaning, screeching sounds that echoed up the walls. It made his stomach turn over. Jack looked at him and Lee thought he looked pale and scared.
He was sure he looked the same.
He dropped his pack and kicked it over to Jack as he shouldered his M4 and flipped on his red dot sight. “Get the other pistol out of there and every bullet you can find.”
Lee took a knee at the top of the stairs and pointed his rifle down. At least twenty faces stared up at him. Hands caked in dried blood reached for him. Others held makeshift weapons—crowbars, hammers, knives—and jabbed and swung at the air. Bile rose in the back of his throat, and only after the bitter taste hit his tongue did he notice the overpowering stench. Rot and body odor and feces.
The makeshift barricade creaked and moved under the weight of the horde pressing in. Lee picked his target and put the red dot of his scope on the bridge of its nose and pulled the trigger. He didn’t wait to see if his target went down. He put the dot on another head and pulled the trigger. Then another. His shots were even and paced, but panic was knocking at the back door of his mind, trying to spur his trigger finger.
He was counting rounds as he sent them downrange. One shot was a triumph. Two shots was a tragedy. It wasn’t long before he felt the bolt of his M4 lock back, indicating an empty magazine. He checked the chamber—clear—then flipped the mag out and grabbed another from his vest. How many did he have left?
His mind screamed at him to get his weapon back in the fight.
It happened so fast, Lee didn’t get a good look at the attacker. He got the impression of someone young—maybe a teenager, dressed in what he thought looked like a soccer uniform—vaulting clear over the blockage at the bottom of the stairs and landing inside the stairwell with a screech. The creature rolled and squirmed till he was on his feet again and bolted up the stairs, shrieking at Lee.
The boom of Jack’s .308 rifle was like being punched in the face.
A chunk of the soccer player’s chest went missing and he flew back down the stairs, crashing into the junk pile at the bottom and lying still.
Lee didn’t waste the time to thank Jack. He slammed in his fresh magazine, recharged his M4, and went to work. The infected were yanking at the chairs now, pulling them out of the way. Lee tried to identify and focus his fire on anyone who appeared to be messing with his blockade, but he was confronted with a new problem. The pungent sting of cordite was filling the air, and the smoke was obscuring the already-dim hallway, making his targets hard to see. He couldn’t tell where his rounds were hitting or whether he was taking anyone down with his shots. For all he knew, he might have just wasted the last ten rounds.
Panic stabbed his gut again and he forced himself to slow down and count his shots.
Fire…
And scan…
Fire…
And scan…
Every so often the stairwell would explode as Jack pulled his trigger again. But with only five rounds, that wouldn’t last long. Another mag change. Lee watched the empty magazine tumble down the stairs.
Another, fatter infected was clawing its way over the banister and into the stairwell. Lee put one to the top of its head and the fat creature just hung there, motionless on the banister. Another determined attacker pushed the fat one out of the way and attempted to hurdle the banister. This time it was Jack’s rifle that took the shot.
Lee refocused on the ones trying to pull at his trash barricade. Though their brains were damaged by the plague, it was obvious that they were able to recognize an obstacle and formulate some plan around it in order to get to a victim. Almost as though they were following the commands of a single consciousness, one infected would step up and yank at a chair, only to be dispatched by a bark from Lee’s rifle. Before the first had even hit the ground, another was replacing the fallen infected and pulling at the chairs again. It was with a sudden scream of rage that an infected the size of a linebacker grabbed a huge mound of trash and furniture in his arms and ripped it out of the way. Despite his size, it still only took one 55-grain bullet to bring him down, but the damage was done.
The infected began pouring through the narrow opening into the stairwell, like water over a collapsing levy. The other portion of the blockade was suddenly enveloped and disappeared in a mass of bodies. Their screams suddenly intensified. The horde rushed up the stairs, too fast for Lee to choose his targets. He began pulling the trigger indiscriminately. Bodies would fall back like weeds cut down by a scythe, and—dead or only injured—they would tumble back into the others, creating a new blockage of human bodies directly in the middle of the stairs. Their progress up the stairs stalled for three of Lee’s pounding heartbeats, and then the horde pressed forward again, climbing over the bodies of their dead and injured.
To Lee’s right, the boom of Jack’s .308 changed to the pop-pop-pop of pistol fire. Lee found his back pressed against the wall, the stairs in front of him. His M4 went dry—a quick mag change and he was back in the fight—but even that brief cessation in his suppressive fire gave the infected horde a few more feet in a battle of inches.
Pop-pop-pop and Jack’s pistol went silent.
Lee edged to the left, toward the master bedroom, as Jack picked up his rifle and began swinging it like a baseball bat. Standing to the right of the stairs close to Stephanie’s room, Jack began smashing the solid buttstock into anything that popped up from the stairs.
Lee could not imagine the mound of dead infected lying at the bottom of the stairs, but the horde kept coming, kept pressing them back. Now Lee and Jack were being divided, and the oncoming attackers were reaching the top of the stairs, filling the gap between the two comrades. Lee held Jack’s gaze for a brief moment before he disappeared under a wave of infected.
“Jack!”
Lee kept firing, kept recharging his weapon after every empty magazine, but he found himself backpedaling, now against the closed door of the master bedroom. He no longer saw individuals in the oncoming mob but only a faceless, amorphous mass of sickening human flesh, all gnashing teeth and clawing hands. Lee emptied his last magazine.
He tried to figure how many were left, tried to do the grisly math—it couldn’t be many more after he’d used every last rifle magazine that he had strapped to him—and yet, there were more coming at him, though he could not determine their numbers. He could only keep fighting and hope that he had enough to outlast them.
He transitioned as fast as he could to his pistol, but it was too late. Out of the bodies clawing toward him, what looked like it used to be the leg of a large piece of furniture slammed into his left shoulder, knocking him down. For a brief second he couldn’t see. But he refused to quit, refused to get taken out like that. By a fucking piece of furniture. He felt his back hit the ground, his head and neck pressed up against the master bedroom door. He tucked his gun arm tight into his body and brought his MK23 to his chest, pointing out.
He felt someone on top of him, but he still couldn’t see past the bright sparklers going off all around his eyes. He felt arms, a shoulder, a neck. He grabbed hard around the neck with his left hand, felt his attacker’s hands clamp desperately around his own wrist as he shoved outward. It was a rough approximation, but he pushed the muzzle of his pistol into what he thought was his attacker’s chin. He shut his eyes and mouth and turned his head away, ready for the fountain, and pulled the trigger.
The writhing body on top of him became dead weight.
He hugged the body close to him, felt a river of warmth running down his neck and chest, smelled the shit and piss and horrid unwashed odor, but clung tight to that body like a drowning man to a raft. Perversely, he felt comforted by the weight. A human blanket. A body shield.
He punched out with his pistol, and in the narrow section of his vision that had cleared, he began picking off targets as they rushed him. He counted rounds as they went out, a death clock on its last seconds.
Two.
Three-four.
Five.
Six-seven-eight.
The bedroom door supporting his head was suddenly gone. He felt the back of his head slap the ground and thought his head had exploded. There was white fire and sparks and a boom that he felt in his sinuses. Then another and another.
Hot shotgun shells were falling from the sky, burning his face. Angela was yelling for him to get in the room. Lee shoved the dead body off and rolled onto his hands and knees, then launched himself past Angela’s legs and into the bedroom. He was up on one knee when he heard Angela grunt and fly backward into the footboard of the bed.
Lee twisted in time to see a shovel coming down on him like an ax. He jumped forward, felt the shovelhead glance off his ankle, and recovered his position on one knee. He punched out with his pistol and put his sights on the big naked man in front of him. At the same time, Angela let loose with another 12-gauge round that ripped apart Shovel Guy’s left shoulder, nearly shearing the arm off.
The big man stumbled back with a groan, but he still held the shovel in his other hand. The shovel was big, but he whipped it around like a toy, even with just one hand. Angela ducked at the foot of the bed, and Shovel Guy waved his weapon back and forth in rapid arcs.
There was a vicious growl, and suddenly Tango was attached to the big man’s upper arm. The shovel dropped to the ground. Shovel Guy flailed and screeched, but Tango wasn’t letting go.
Lee was quick to his feet, not wanting to take the shot with Tango in the picture—it would have to be a contact shot. He closed the distance and managed to maneuver himself directly behind Shovel Guy. He put the muzzle at the base of the man’s skull, pointing upward, and pulled the trigger. The top of his head erupted like a shaken soda can and the body turned heavy and collapsed.
Tango followed the body to the ground and kept growling and ripping at the arm. Lee grabbed the dog’s collar with his non-gun hand and yanked the dog back with a sharp “Leave it!”
It was anything but silent.
Lee heard ringing in his perforated eardrums, the rasp of his own breath, Angela gasping for air, the two kids whimpering in their hiding place somewhere in the room. He could hear the blood rushing through his ears like he was standing under a waterfall. All through the house came the pathetic lilting moans of the dying.
But no one was screeching. No one was running at them. Lee knew it had only been a few short minutes, but time stretches when you’re certain you’re going to die. Lee moved quickly to the bedroom doorway and looked through, keeping the muzzle of his pistol pointed down the hall and the weapon itself tucked in close to his chest.
He first noted that Stephanie’s bedroom door was shut, which gave him hope that Jack had survived the attack by locking himself in the room. The hall that separated them was littered with corpses and those that still clung stubbornly to life. Their desperate situation did not affect their aggression. Lee watched one of the injured infected crawling over the bodies of others, unable to move its legs but still biting and clawing at the air.
He waited another long moment, listening to the sounds of the house, but there was only the constant groan. Lee called out to Jack but got no answer. He felt someone move beside him and turned to find Angela standing to his right, pointing the shotgun at the figure crawling slowly toward them.
Lee reached out a staying hand. “Don’t waste the ammo.”
She looked at him, confused. Lee holstered up and took the shovel from the ground. He turned and put his hand on the doorknob. The others did not need to see the messy cleanup. Angela looked at him with eyes as blank as any professional poker player, and Lee had to appreciate her guts.
Before closing the door, he nodded to her. “You did really good, Angela. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” was her subdued response.
Lee closed the door and faced the hallway. Dusk had cast the house in a dim gray, but he could still make out the shapes of the bodies and see the movement of the ones still twitching or clawing for him.
Inside the master bedroom, Angela stood like a statue. Her only response to the sickening sound of the steel shovel crushing bone was a blink of her eyelids.
Cleanup was a messy business. It took more than one strike to dispatch most of the crawlers. To be sure he hadn’t merely knocked them unconscious, Lee put the point of the shovel to their necks and stomped down, severing the spinal column. The stench was overpowering, and Lee felt sick to his stomach doing the work. These people who littered the ground, they were less than animals to him now. He was killing the wounded with no more thought than he would give to crushing a bug.
Twice he retched but produced nothing. His stomach was empty. After taking out five of them, he made it to the closed door of Stephanie’s bedroom.
He didn’t want his head blown off trying to open the door, so he tapped it first and called out to Jack, hoping to God he would answer.
“Jack, you with me? Talk to me, buddy.”
The response was strained. “Yeah.”
Lee threw open the door and found Jack sitting against the far wall. He was covered in blood from head to toe, but Lee couldn’t tell if it was his or from the three dead bodies at his feet. Lee needed to check, but he thought he could guess which it was. Jack looked bad, but he was still holding a big KA-BAR knife that he had produced from somewhere.
Lee stepped over the bodies to get to Jack and knelt down. “You look shitty, devil dog.”
Jack grimaced and Lee saw blood staining his teeth.
“Where’d they get you?”
“Eh…” Jack grunted and leaned forward. “I’m fine.”
“You’re bleeding.”
Jack just gave Lee a look. “Yeah, I know.”
Lee nodded. “Where’s the blood coming from?”
“One of them was swinging a hammer around and nicked me in the mouth… knocked out a few teeth.” The older guy slumped and was silent for a long moment. “And one of ’em bit me.”
For a perverse moment, Lee thought Jack was kidding. Surely it was a joke. Then Lee scanned Jack’s arms for wounds. The older man was holding his right forearm with his left hand. He withdrew the hand and Lee didn’t have to ask the question he was thinking: Did it break the skin? On Jack’s forearm there was a near-perfect circle of teeth marks, gouged well into the skin. It could have just been the trauma to the wound, but Lee thought it already looked red and swollen.
Lee wanted to swear, but he controlled himself.
Jack immediately saw the look on Lee’s face. “You don’t gotta pussyfoot around it, Lee. I know I’m fucked.”
Lee noticed it was the first time Jack had called him by his first name. “Not necessarily.… I mean, even if you are, you won’t show symptoms for a while.”
“So what?” Jack snorted. “You’re just gonna keep me around, getting sick and going crazy, ’cause you don’t have the stones to do the job?”
Lee gritted his teeth. “I’m not gonna kill you, Jack.”
“Fuck…” Jack was quiet. “You have to shoot me.”
“No.”
“Shoot me, Lee.” Jack’s eyes got fierce. “Don’t play this whole comrades-in-arms, never-leave-a-man-behind bullshit with me! I don’t even know you, motherfucker! Put me down! Do it before I start losin’ my mind! Fucking shoot me!”
“I’m not—”
Jack cut him off by lunging for Lee’s pistol. “Gimme that!”
Lee swatted his hand down. Jack grabbed for Lee’s collar, but Lee slammed him back into the wall and shook him hard. His face was red. “Fuck you!” he shouted in Jack’s face. “You’re not the only person trying to survive here!”
“I’m gonna die anyway!” Jack twisted away.
Lee slammed him against the wall again. “We’re all gonna fucking die!” Jack glared. A few heartbeats passed in intense silence. “We’re all just a step away from it. But right now we are closer than ever and there’s a woman and two children and they’re on the fucking brink!” Lee took a few deep breaths in silence, then lowered his voice. “I need every working trigger finger I can find to help me get them out of here and into someplace safe. You wanna die? Do it yourself. But don’t ask me or anyone else in this group to lessen our chances of survival.”
Lee stood up and grabbed the shovel.
Before exiting the room, he stopped and turned. “We need to wash the blood off.”