“With two squads?”
Polk didn’t answer. Instead he grabbed for the radio and called in a situation report to his commanding officer, Captain Rice. Each squad was composed of two four-man fire teams. That gave him sixteen men to hold a gate and the road. It was ugly math, but at least the infected seemed to be focused on the school. None of them had noticed the vehicles sitting at the base of the long entry road.
At least for now.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
SWEET PARADISE TRAILER PARK
Dez landed too hard, the heavy bag driving her into the mud with so much force that her legs screamed in pain and buckled. She went down to her knees in the rain, but she kept the shotgun barrel out of the mud, and, as the first of the dead turned toward her, Dez fired.
There had to be forty of the monsters clustered around her trailer.
Dez fired and fired.
Each 12-gauge shell was packed with nine lead pellets. The blast caught a woman in a bathrobe full in the face and blew half her head away. The dead man behind her caught some of the pellets and one went down with a hole through his eye.
Dez forced herself to her feet and fired, turned and fired, spun and fired. Rainwater hissed on the barrel as it flared hotter with each blast.
The dead were so close to her that she barely had to aim and couldn’t miss. Not every shot was a kill, though. Her own awkward gait as she slogged through the mud and the twitchy shamble of the dead threw wild cards into the point of impact. She blew the left arm off of Donny Phelps and caught Lisa Davis on the shoulder. Seven of them went down before the magazine went dry. Dez kicked one of the dead in the thigh, knocking him back as she reached for a second mag and swapped it out. This was worse than her worst day on the Big Sand. This was a different kind of hell.
Rempel’s Tundra was parked thirty feet away, in the slip by the office, but there were so many of the infected, and more were coming from the other trailers, drawn by the blasts of the shotgun. She fired and fired, and the dead fell away, their faces splattered, their bodies pirouetting sloppily as they fell.
Tears ran down Dez’s cheeks but she didn’t know it. She tried not to name the dead as she killed them. She knew that to allow them to be her neighbors, to be the people she knew, was going to kill her. The process had already begun. So she opened her mouth and roared out an incoherent bellow of rage and grief and need and kept firing.
Then Rempel himself was there, and he was the last one between her and the Tundra. His Tundra. As Dez pulled the trigger to fire the last round in the second magazine, she remembered something from that morning. After the hot water had cut off in her shower Dez had thought that she could put a bullet into Rempel’s brainpan without a single flicker of regret.
The blast caught Rempel on the bridge of the nose and the top of his head leapt off with a geyser of blood and gray matter, and Rempel was falling.
“God!” Dez screamed as she leapt over him. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry … God I’m sorry!”
She reached the Tundra.
Which was locked.
Of course it was locked.
Dez dropped the heavy bag of weapons, whirled and charged back, swapping in the last magazine for the shotgun, firing at the McGill twins and old Mr. Peluzzi, destroying them, erasing their faces while burning their names into her mind.
She knelt by Rempel, trying not to look at his ruined head, and fished in his pockets as the dead drew closer and closer, their moans louder than the rain. The keys rattled in his left front pants pocket and Dez dug into it, scrabbling at them with one hand while pointing the shotgun at the approaching monsters with the other. Then she had then and was scrambling away. She put the leather key ring between her teeth and took the shotgun in both hands, firing as one of them reached over Rempel’s corpse to grab her. The blast caught Max Scheinhert in the throat, pitching his body backward but dropping his head right in the mud between Rempel’s outstretched legs.
Dez gagged as she got to her feet and fired again, walking backward, killing the ones closest to her, trying to buy a second’s room to breathe.
Then the gun was empty. Dez threw it in the face of the closest infected person, then she leapt for the door of the Tundra, jammed the key in the lock, opened it, threw the bag inside, and climbed in as cold fingers began clawing at her thighs. She kicked at them and jerked the door shut.
She put the key in the ignition and it roared to life without hesitation. Dez pawed tears from her eyes, put the truck in gear, turned the wheel, and smashed her way through a line of things that had been her neighbors.
“I’m sorry,” she said with each sickening impact. “I’m sorry…”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
BEAVER ROAD
STEBBINS COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA
Billy Trout’s panic eased down one notch but not any further. His narrow escape from the National Guard had made him far more cautious, but it also filled him with equal parts rage and hopelessness.
They don’t even want to know if we’re infected.