Jax wrapped his arms around her waist and yanked her securely against his body before she could land on the hard, stone floor. “I got you.”
Something heavy scraped across the floor behind them, the sound echoing up to the high-vaulted ceiling. Footsteps sounded–not soft and careful like theirs, but clomping and clumsy. A trio of snickers followed.
She couldn’t judge in the cavernous space’s darkness how close the zombies had gotten or how many there were. At least three. Probably more. All the zombie speculative research she’d read hypothesized that they traveled in packs of ten to twelve. Technically brain dead, they didn’t move according to any logical pattern, instead being drawn to light, sound and movement, forever pushed onward by a hunger for brains and other internal organs. The giggling was a total new one to her.
Securely on her feet again, she and Jax tiptoed through the open doorway, searching for Antoine’s ray of light.
“Come on, Antoine, where are you?” she mumbled to herself. Her pulse jackhammered in her throat.
In the vast gloom, a faint glow appeared in the distance.
“There!” she said.
Springing forward as one unit, she and Jax hurried across the booby-trapped floor, scurrying over broken furniture and under what little remained standing upright. She clasped his hand, tethering herself to the safe reality of Jax even in the midst of all this madness.
Out of nowhere, a gangly, twelve-foot-tall zombie appeared in front of them.
His bottom lip hung by a skinny sliver of skin that wobbled when he reached out a hand with only three fingers toward them.
Goosebumps marched up Veronica’s skin. The scream escaped her mouth before she could remember her warning to Jax to stay silent.
It bounced off the walls and set off a series of giggles from the room’s hidden nooks and crannies. His compatriots’ noise distracted the zombie, who swiveled his head, toward the noise. But only for a moment before he returned his empty gaze to them. What had been a high-pitched giggle became lower, heavier. The zombie swiped his shriveled tongue across his gaping mouth.
Jax whipped out a sharpened expandable baton and, in one fluid motion, brought it down against the zombie’s neck. The blade sliced through its rotting flesh like a knife through warm butter. The head tumbled off, landed on the floor with a thud and rolled away into the shadows.
“He’s all laughed out,” Jax said.
Veronica fought to push away the fear threatening to blind her to everything else. “What about the others?”
“We just have to hope they come at us one at a time.”
“Then we kill them?”
He turned and grinned. “That sounds like my kind of plan. Let’s get Antoine and get the fuck out of here.”
Sticking to the shadows, she hustled through the obstacle course of giant-sized wreckage, following Antoine’s beam of light fifty yards ahead.
She grabbed the spongy-gripped garden shovel in her tool belt. At seven inches in length, to do any damage with it she’d have to get into close quarters with Mr. Tall, Dark and Dead but it was much better than the alternative.
Holding her breath with every step and exhaling only once she’d made it from one safe spot to the next, she made her way through the debris. Damn, what she wouldn’t give for a nice pair of night-vision goggles. And a bazooka outfitted with one big-ass silencer.
The farther they traveled into the room, Antoine’s illumination grew from a thin ray to a large swath of light. Only a few more feet and they’d be there.
“Why hasn’t he called out to us?” Veronica whispered, seeing visions of Antoine running from reanimated corpses. “Tried to find us? He had to have heard me scream.”
Jax shrugged. “We’ll find out in a minute.”
She dashed from their hiding spot behind an oversized book to a still-upright chair. Antoine’s light crept around the corner, illuminating a human-sized bloody handprint on the chair leg. Refusing to contemplate who had made it, she peeked around the curved wood.
A lone figure, too tall and thin to be Antoine, stood with its back to her in the flashlight’s golden glow. Zombie.
Stringy dishwater blond hair flowed to the middle of her back. A faded, floral print dress covered the zombie’s ashen skin. When she turned, clumps of snow white stuck between her rotting teeth.
Antoine!
“Don’t worry, love. It’s not me,” Antoine said from above her.
He perched like a cat on the seat of the huge chair, his shirt askew but he was otherwise unharmed. Relief rushed through her. She climbed the chair, Jax hot on her heels. “Are you okay?”