Chief Goss fell.
And Dez Fox became alive again.
“JT!” she screamed as she spun and aimed, firing at Gunther, hitting him square in the center of the chest. A certain kill shot. He went back and down to one knee. Then he climbed to his feet and kept coming forward. She fired again, a double tap, one to the sternum—which only slowed him—and one to the bridge of the nose. Gunther’s whole body rocked back, paused for a moment as if he was going to recover and keep coming, and then fell.
The other things around them moaned and hissed and snarled as they came. They all came.
Dez turned and fired at Natalie and blew away most of her throat.
Natalie kept coming, red drool dripping from her lips.
“Fuck!” Dez yelled and fired again, and again, the bullets hammering into Natalie’s body. “Fucking die, you ugly cow!”
Natalie kept coming.
Dez took the gun in two hands and aimed. Her next shot blew out the light of Natalie’s left eye and blew off the back of her head. Natalie’s next step was meaningless and she collapsed down, making no attempt to catch her fall.
Dez whirled toward JT, who was still frozen and immobile. Dez shifted her gun to her left and with her right slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Again and again, forehand and back.
JT staggered back, his lips exploding with blood.
She saw the precise moment when the vacant space behind his eyes suddenly filled again. Just as the gunshot had brought Dez back from her brink, her slaps had dragged JT back from his.
“Watch!” he barked and shoved her aside as he brought the shotgun up and fired a blast at Paul Scott. The beanbag round hit Scott in the chest and spun him in a full circle, but Scott bared his teeth and lunged again.
The second beanbag caught him on the bridge of the nose and his head snapped back so fast and so far that Dez knew that his neck was broken. Scott fell backward and sprawled like a rag doll. He did not move again.
The others were coming now.
They were not fast, but they kept coming. Lumbering, some of them limping on damaged legs, a few—those with head injuries—staggering more awkwardly. Dez fired into them, hitting everything she aimed at. Punching hollow-points through hearts and stomachs and thigh bones and groins.
“Why won’t they go down?” she bellowed.
As they came closer she raised her gun, tried for the more difficult head shots. She caught a state trooper on the cheek, tearing a huge chunk of his face away, but he kept coming. She shot him again, right over the right eyebrow and he abruptly crumpled.
She fired two more shots and the slide of her pistol locked back. She began backpedaling as she swapped out the magazines, letting the spent one fall—against all training and instinct—and slapping the fresh one in. The new mag was heavy with bullets. Reassuring.
She fired.
JT was back to back with her, firing at the things she could not see. Dez had seen the beanbag round drop Scott, but that had been a neck-breaker. JT tended to go for body shots with the shotgun. Dumb, she thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
She heard JT mumbling something over and over again.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. ”
He fired and fired.
And fired the gun dry.
“I’m out,” he said, as if surprised that a gun could commit such a heinous act of betrayal in so obvious a time of need.
“Get to the car! I’ve got a box of buckshot under the seat,” Dez said, turning, shoving him, and then they were running.
Dez did not even remember walking this far from the cruiser, but it was a dozen yards away. Some of them were in the way. All of them were closing in, some moving much faster than the others. Distantly Dez wondered if they were the more recently dead.
Another part of her mind wanted to laugh at that thought.
And still another part was whispering her three choices. Chin, temple, mouth.