Chapter 24

 

Rising up from the roof, Riker took a long hard look at his surroundings. To the right, save for a couple of zombies on the lot’s periphery, the wet pavement was unoccupied.

As to what was lurking in the fire truck’s blind spot, Riker had no way of telling. With the fence so near to the rear bumper and nothing back there for them to eat, he doubted he had anything to worry about. Still, he told himself, once he committed to climbing down, if he was to keep from suffering the same fate as Luther, he’d need to keep his head on a swivel.

Peering off the truck’s left side, Riker saw evidence of Luther’s demise, but no Luther.

Near the rear tire, the black nylon sling severed, was Luther’s shotgun. That each end of the sling was frayed led Riker to believe one of the ravenous dead had chewed through it.

Riker walked his gaze the length of the boom, but still saw no sign of Luther. Establishing eye contact with Lia, he pointed to the ground and shrugged. Where did he go?

Two of the three in the basket recognized the universal semaphore for what it was. Lia and Littlewolf both pointed at the boom.

Before Riker could move forward to get eyes on the ground below the boom, Zombie Luther ambled into view, all of his attention focused laser-like on the trio in the basket. He was not even halfway to the basket and already coming up against the growing circle of zombies underneath it.

How did he turn so quickly? was the first thing to cross Riker’s mind. It was followed immediately by: Did he come back a Bolt or a Slog?

Only one way to find out.

Keeping his voice at a level he hoped would be heard by undead Luther, but not the participants of the scrum developing underneath the basket, Riker said, “Luke.”

Apparently, the warden hadn’t been joking when she had said, “Do not call him Luke. He hates it.” Because that one word froze Zombie Luther mid-stride. Fortunately, the creatures nearby remained intent on getting to the basket.

Searching for the source of the sound, Luther walked his gaze down the length of the engine.

To hasten the process, Riker got up on his knees and waved at the zombie with his free hand. Nothing. It was looking everywhere but up.

“I’m over here, Luke.”

The shell of the man who used to be an assistant pastor and good friend to his fellow jailers lifted its gaze and emitted a guttural growl.

Brandishing the firefighting tool like a baseball bat, left hand closest to the claw end, the other a few inches south of the tool’s center of balance, Riker shuffled forward on his knees. Stopping just short of the roof’s rounded edge, he took one hand off the tool, leaned out over space, and swept his arm pendulum-like in front of the driver-side window.

Locking its dead-eyed stare on the offered appendage, the newly risen corpse lowered its head and charged the fire truck.

We have a Bolt was what Riker was thinking as undead Luther reached the exact spot on the parking lot where he had died the first time. A sudden wave of remorse crashed over Riker as he withdrew his arm and watched the Bolt slam into the engine under a full head of steam.

Undeterred and uninjured, it rose up off the ground and again ran headlong into Detroit steel. Arms outstretched and its growling and grunting rising in volume, the Bolt battered the fire truck’s slab-side with its knees and elbows.

Barely a yard separated Riker from the Bolt. Drawing a breath, he said, “Oldest trick in the book, Luther.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry I pulled that on you. I’m sorry this had to happen to you. And I’m really sorry I have to do this to you.”

Blocking out everything extraneous: the idling diesel engine, the cacophony of the dead trying to reach the others in the basket, undead Luther’s vocalizing and incessant slam dancing into the truck underneath him, Riker lifted the firefighting tool over his head, its entire length parallel with his upper body, and brought it down hard as if the weighty tool was a posthole digger and he was plunging it into desert hardpan.

Undead Luther’s face was not desert hardpan. In fact, the opposite was true: It was more than forgiving. The bladed end struck the Bolt’s upturned face squarely between the eyes, splitting the skull wide open and starting a torrent of gray brain tissue spilling from the gaping fissure.

Riker released the tool and paused long enough to do three things. First, as the twice dead corpse was still settling on the ground below, Riker met Lia’s gaze across the distance and gave her their predetermined signal. Seeing Lia nod, he rose up from the roof and scanned the lot all around.

Then Riker checked on the gate crew. Though he didn’t have binoculars, he could still see the vehicles and guardhouse. The lack of movement on the opposite side of the gate told him Benny, Steve-O, and Shorty were sticking to the plan.

In the middle distance, the zombies that had been hanging around the gate were now fifty yards from the bucket and closing.

Finally checking his right flank, he saw that the handful of vehicles left behind sat all alone. The zombies that had been hanging around the static imports and minivan were on the move and had halved the distance to the engine.

With all of the possible threats pinpointed on the crude map in his head, Riker clambered down from the roof. On the ground, his Salomons fighting for traction in the pooled blood, he tugged the firefighting tool from twice-dead Luther’s skull. Sidestepping a glistening length of intestine, he bent over and snagged one half of the shotgun’s severed sling.

Since the outriggers were still deployed, he opened the panel and worked the controls. As soon as the metal legs began motoring back into their vertical housings, the compressor came online, blasting his ears with a high-decibel mechanical clatter.

Above Riker’s head, the boom was making a slow counterclockwise sweep toward the rear of the truck.

To verify that the passenger-side outrigger was in sync with its counterpart, Riker ducked around behind the engine’s rear end. The moment he came into view of the advancing zombies, the entire group altered course. While the zombies angling for him posed a serious threat, unless both outriggers got retracted, the rig was going nowhere.

Seeing the passenger-side outrigger finish its upward sweep and snug into its housing, Riker hustled forward, past the tandem axles, and went to his knees to take a look at the rig’s undercarriage and tires.

Clear. No dead things in the shadows beneath the truck. Though the tires were covered with organic matter, all ten appeared to be fully inflated.

All systems go.

With the zombies still ten yards out, Riker brought the shotgun’s barrel to a ready position and retraced his steps.

The first thing Riker saw when he came back around the rear of the engine was that the boom had moved past the halfway point and the ladder was partially retracted. In the next beat, he learned that while he was away, the horde had splintered. The majority of the dead—maybe seventy or eighty of them—were still in lockstep and following the basket’s slow sweep. Having approached to within fifty feet of the fire truck, the second knot of zombies—nearly twenty strong—were already stalking him. Only explanation he could think of for their deviation from the horde was the sound made by the compressor and follow-on hiss of the outrigger’s hydraulics.

From experience, Riker knew it only took one of them taking notice of you to start a chain reaction that always led to a whole bunch of them hunting you.

While Riker had already proven to himself he could handle a Bolt or two, double or triple that if they were all Slogs, taking on twenty of the things was an entirely different story—a story whose ending was about to be written.

With thirty feet of rain and blood-slickened ground standing between Riker and the cab, and about the same distance between him and the dead, he was afraid if he was going to survive the final act, a whole lot of things were going to have to go right.

As the severity of the situation set in, so did the metronomic throbbing of a headache he knew would soon be a debilitating migraine. He’d been so preoccupied with surviving, he hadn’t even noticed the previous banger subside.

With the first wave of pain moving from the back of his head and flanking both retinas, he leveled the shotgun and backpedaled to create room to work.

Off of Riker’s left shoulder, just above his line of sight, the shouting from the bucket had turned from epithets being directed at the dead to keep them interested and on the hook to warnings meant solely for him.

“The biters are flanking you!” Flores said, stabbing a finger at the rear of the engine.

Lia was shaking her head and mouthing, “I can’t reach you with the basket.”

Don’t even try, Riker thought. That’d just bring the horde back together and drop the whole thing on my doorstep. Heeding Flores’s warning, he changed direction, crabbing sideways the length of the engine while firing the shotgun head-high into the crowd spread out before him.

By the time Riker had cycled all six shells through Carr’s pump gun, he had winnowed the dead down by four, two of them having had their skulls imploded by slugs fired from a dozen feet away, the other pair dropped in their tracks and left paralyzed by the fist-sized holes blasted through their necks.

Dropping the shotgun, Riker quickly transitioned to the Legion. No need to power on the Romeo optic: It was motion activated. Trusting that a round was chambered, he threw the safety and engaged the zombies.

Breathe in, exhale, press.

Riker saw the first couple of rounds strike exactly where the superimposed red pip indicated they should. Spirits buoyed, he continued down the side of the truck, bringing the undead entourage with him. Unfortunately, since moving and firing was not his strong suit, by the time he dumped the first spent magazine and jammed a second into the magwell, his shot to kill ratio had fallen off a cliff.

Eleven down. Nine to go.

Migraine now in full swing, vision going hazy around the edges, he thumbed the slide home and resumed pumping rounds into the dead. He crossed Carr’s pooled blood and continued to fire cross body until the mag went empty again. Out of ammunition, he holstered the Sig, scooped up the firefighting tool, and made a final push for the cab.

The three remaining zombies, all males wearing county-orange, were within arm’s reach of Riker when he made the cab. Gripping the firefighting tool like a baseball bat, he paused in front of the driver-side door and took a stance his favorite Atlanta Braves slugger, Freddie Freeman, would be proud of.

Shuffling closer, having formed up three abreast, the zombies lunged at Riker near simultaneously.

Putting everything he had into the cut, Riker beat the dead to the punch, the tool scything the air on a flat plane, right to left, head-high to the zombie on his immediate right.

Swing and a hit.

The blade edge of the tool cleaved the zombie’s left ear in two, continued on through the temporal, sphenoid, and zygomatic bones, then came to a grinding halt, the leading edge stuck fast in the inner ethmoid bone.

Taking the path of least resistance, the pulped white of the zombie’s left eyeball and a torrent of clumped gray matter shot from the collapsed eye socket. As the vibration from the impact transited the tool and shot like a bolt of lightning through Riker’s hands and arms, he actually felt deep within his chest the sickening crack.

A Freeman solo homerun.

Mimicking the All-Star slugger’s follow-through, Riker put a twist in his hips, let his wrists break, and then began the push. Tool still stuck firmly in the zombie’s misshapen skull, the monster was lifted off its feet and rocketed headfirst into the zombie to its right. The thunk of the two skulls coming together was every bit as loud and disconcerting to Riker as that of the overpass leapers’ skulls striking asphalt.

Using the momentum of the textbook swing to his advantage, Riker thrust the tool away from his body and released his grip on it. As the hundred-and-fifty-some-odd-pounds of twice-dead zombie caromed off the others, knocking them off balance and creating a precious yard of separation, Riker scrambled into the engine.

From the first press of the shotgun’s trigger to the trio of zombies sprawling domino-like away from the truck, less than a minute had elapsed.

Only when Riker had gotten the door locked, his hands on the wheel and the rig rolling forward, did the full effect of the migraine hit him. He was suddenly nauseous and gripped by cold chills.

So the gatekeepers knew that he was on the move, Riker laid on the horn for a long three-count. No sooner had the air horn gone silent than brief flashes of orange drew his attention to the side mirror, where, as improbable as it seemed, he spotted a trio of zombies break from the horde and give chase.

“What next?” he asked himself as he gave the horn another blast. “The gate still going to be closed when I get there?”

Fishing a backup plastic baggie of ibuprofen from a pocket, he threw down another handful. If a near-fatal dose of what his Eleven Bravo friends not-so-affectionately called “grunt candy” didn’t temper the pounding in his head, nothing was going to.