Charlie Matthias had a length of black pipe in his hands. Eight feet long and bent in two places. He’d run up to a gap between Sam Imura and Gypsy and swing the pipe with incredible power and ferocity. Infected were hurled aside like broken dolls. He hit and hit and hit, the massive muscles flexing under his milky skin.
He, too, screamed.
The bus engines roared to life and the first of the convoy pulled out of the bay. The others woke up with terrible slowness and crept into line. All too slow, thought Trout. Too slow.
He thought, in all the confusion, that he heard another engine roar over to his right. A different engine, but it vanished again. A hallucination, thought Trout, and he wasn’t surprised that his mind was fracturing.
He hobbled forward to where Dez was reloading.
“Get into the bus,” he shouted.
She ignored him and slapped the new magazine into place, raised her weapon, but didn’t pull the trigger. Instead her eyes went as wide as saucers and she said, “What the fuck…?”
Trout heard that strange engine roar again and as he turned he saw something moving beyond the throng of dead at the gate. It was big and yellow and for a moment he thought it was another bus. Had they lost one on the way here? Had someone else come up with the same plan?
But then the front of the vehicle seemed to lift.
No, it did lift.
With a sharp whine of hydraulics it raised up as the machine smashed into the packed dead. The impact sent bodies flying, but some seemed to hang in the air. Then Trout realized they weren’t hanging, they were clinging to something. To the part of the machine that had raised up. His mind fought to make sense of it.
Then the machine turned and he understood.
It was a massive piece of construction equip
ment. Bright yellow, washed clean by the rains, and wearing a writhing coat of moaning infected, it was a front-end loader.
Monstrous and bulky, improbably heavy, riding on eight huge wheels, the machine crashed into the dead, rolled over them, ground them into bloody paste. The bucket rose and Trout could see that it was completely filled with struggling dead. The driver tilted the bucket to let them fall then brought the steel bucket down on top of them.
The dead in the parking lot seemed to be caught in a moment of indecision. Fresh meat was in front of them, but their instinct to pursue noise and movement compelled them to react to the machine. Some of them left the chase and began shuffling toward the loader; the rest turned stiffly back and continued to chase Sam and his team.
In that instant of indecision, though, Sam turned and ran, yelling to the others to move, to abandon the fight. Some of the faster zombies tore through the crowds in close pursuit. Dez moved up to offer covering fire, and Charlie Matthias shifted into the path of two running infected. He swung his pipe at the knees of the first one, sending it crashing to the ground. The second tripped over it and fell, and before it could climb back to its feet Charlie smashed its skull.
Then five more of the fast ones broke from the pack and ran straight at Charlie. They were between Dez and him; he was in her direct line of fire.
Charlie flung his pipe at the leading zombie, pivoted like a dancer and sprinted for the line of parked cars. Trout lost sight of him, and a moment later he saw Dez turn away. Charlie had either made it to safety or not.
The big front-end loader was still by the gate. The entire cab was covered in zombies like bees on a honeycomb, but the driver kept rolling forward, kept raising and lowering the heavy bucket. The movements were so erratic, though, that Trout couldn’t tell if he could ever see out of the control cab.
Dez fired at the front rank of zombies as the soldiers reached her. Then the others turned and suddenly they had a shooting line. They fired as they walked backward. The dead kept coming, and the gap between the soldiers and the infected was rapidly closing. Fifty feet.
Forty.
Thirty.
Trout could see from the looks on their faces that they knew they weren’t going to make it.
That’s when the first of the buses came hurtling past the line of shooters and plowed into the dead.
It was a wonderful, heroic, desperate move.
And it was absolutely the wrong thing to do.
School buses are tough, but they are not built for head-on collisions with masses of people. The bus struck the wall of zombies and slammed to a stop. Everyone inside was thrown forward. The driver’s airbag burst out and slammed the driver backward. The windshield cracked in a thousand places.
“Shit!” yelled Trout and he began running toward the bus.
Running hurt.