As he rose he continued to stare at her. “Why?”
“Because,” Dez said with a faint smile, “that’s what we’re supposed to do. Now go on. Git!”
Polk went past her, giving Dez a wide berth. He pulled the groggy machine gunner out of the crumpled turret. The man was badly banged up, but he was able to walk after a fashion. Together, he and Polk pulled the driver out of the wrecked Humvee. The man, a corporal, groaned but did not wake up. Polk and the gunner lifted him and they hobbled off at a limping pace. Dez watched them go and then turned to the wall of living dead that was coming toward her.
When the three soldiers were at the fence, Polk paused and looked back at Dez for several seconds. She was tempted to shoot him the finger, but she didn’t; and before he turned way Polk gave her a single, short nod.
Dez frowned, trying to ascribe meaning to it.
A moan drew her attention and as she turned, her bravado melted away like fog on a hot morning. There were dozens of the things. Mangled faces torn to raw meat, eyes missing, legs twisted … and with all that they kept coming. Dead things pretending to be alive, their mouths working with hunger.
The open door of the school was on the other side of them. Seventy yards. Might as well be on the moon.
“Shit. ”
Dez holstered her pistol and quickly searched through the wrecked Humvee and found two M4s. She did not have time to look for extra magazines. They had to do the job or the job wasn’t getting done.
She pulled the bag of weapons out of the Tundra, slung it over her shoulder, groaning a little at its ponderous weight. She slung one of the M4s on the opposite shoulder, worked the bolt on the other, and stepped out from behind the wreck of the two trucks. Dez took a breath, set her jaw, then set the selector switch on the M4 to semiauto and started running, cutting to the left of the leading edge.
The dead turned to follow her, but she didn’t fire. Not yet.
She moved in a wide arc, hoping to draw more of them away from the entrance so she could make a run at the doorway. They came for her, hungrier for her flesh than they were for whatever waited inside the building.
Finally, she had no choice, and she fired a
burst at the closest infected. The unfamiliar weight of her burden threw off her aim and the bullets stitched holes in the chests of the dead closest to her. She corrected, steadying the gun, and fired again. One of the monsters staggered back with two new black holes above its empty eyes. As it fell, Dez fired again and again. Some of them went down, but by the time she’d burned through the magazine, only five of them were down. With the gun bag on her shoulder she had no aim at all. Without stopping, she dropped the first M4 and unslung the other, tried to aim better, fired, fired, fired. And it clicked empty.
“Shit!”
She dropped the second rifle and pulled her Glock. The rear security door of the school was closer now and she could see a couple of the creatures standing just inside. She fired at them, dropping one but wasting three rounds on the brick doorframe trying to hit the other. The angle was all wrong.
She ran into the rain, toward the school, sloshing through the muddy grass, firing at everything that moved. She was only halfway there when her foot came down on a Frisbee lying in a puddle and she was sent sprawling onto the grass. The big bag of guns came off and went sliding away into the darkness. She kept her grip on the Sig, but the barrel punched three inches into the mud, totally clogging it.
Something moaned and she rolled onto her back as Harvey Pegg, the school’s gym teacher, lunged at her. His hands closed around the open V of her jacket and his head ducked down to bite her arm with terrible force. Dez screamed and brought her knee up into Pegg’s crotch, knocking him forward and over her. As he tumbled over, she tore her arm out of his mouth and gave it a quick, desperate look. Pegg’s teeth had scored the leather but hadn’t bitten through.
“Thank you, Billy Trout,” she said between gritted teeth.
Dez started to get to her feet even as Pegg got to his. He was a second sooner and began to rush at her, and there were three other dead behind him. Dez fired two shots and then the slide locked back.
Shit.
There was nowhere to run and no time to grab another weapon. She was done and she knew it.
Then suddenly the world was filled with bright light and noise. There was a huge crunch! as a black SUV slammed into the infected, splattering them and flinging their bodies away like rag dolls. The car slid three-quarters of the way around and its engine died with a broken rattle.
Dez stared up in total shock as the driver jumped out.
Voiceless with the impossibility of this, she mouthed his name.
“Billy?”
CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR
STARBUCKS
BORDENTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA
Goat trudged through ankle-deep mud for miles. He was not built for this kind of physical activity, and by the time he was halfway to the highway his muscles were screaming at him. He tried to buck himself up with images conjured from a thousand news stories he’d watched. Soldiers humping fifty pounds of gear through twenty-five miles of desert under relentless Arabian suns. Medical teams for Doctors Without Borders walking for days through malaria-filled jungles in order to bring medical supplies to remote villages. Stuff like that. It helped, but not much.