Still of Night (Dead of Night 3)

Bunny has an AA-12 drum-fed shotgun. He calls it Honey Boom-Boom. Bunny has some long-standing issues. He opened up and the heavy gauge buckshot did terrible work at such close quarters. There wasn’t time for the pellets to spread, so they instead hit in clusters that disintegrated snarling faces and blew everything into clouds of red, pink and gray.

I had my old M9 Beretta in a two-hand grip and backed toward the doors, firing as the infected rushed me. They fell one by one.

But then I shot one in the head and he did not fall. He kept coming. It froze the moment for us all because it seemed to change the math. I shot him again as he leaped at me. The second bullet took him below the right eye and blew out a chunk of the back of his skull.

The motherfucker did not die. He tackled me around the legs and I fell.

I twisted as I landed, putting a lot of torque into it so that he landed first. He snapped his head forward and locked his teeth on a corner of my Kevlar chest protector. Before I could swing my gun between us, Torres put the barrel of her Glock against his temple and fired. The blast knocked his head sideways and the tension vanished from him all at once.

She helped me up and while Top and Bunny kept up the barrage we stared down at the corpse.

“Three headshots,” I said.

Torres was breathing hard. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s not just the brain,” she said. “Maybe it’s a special part? Like the brain stem or something?” She shook her head. “I’ve been trying to make sense of it all the way here. I think it’s like that.”

The firing diminished and I turned to see the last of the dozen infected go down. Top and Bunny began swapping in fresh magazines as they backed toward us.

“Did either of you have trouble dropping these things with a head shot?” I asked.

Bunny shook his head, but Top nodded. “Yeah. Got to get it right. High and center. I clipped a couple and it didn’t do shit. Punched into the brain, but maybe not the sweet spot.”

“That’s what Torres thinks,” I said. “Brain stem or something else.”

It was Bunny who came up with the answer. “Motor cortex. Got to be.”

“Why’s that, Farm Boy?” asked Top.

“That’s where the control is,” said Bunny. We all looked blankly at him. “Look, the motor cortex is the part that controls the voluntary functions and like that. If the parasites have hotwired these poor bastards, then they have to be using some part of them. So, motor cortex.” He tapped the front and top of his head. “Put a hot round through here and they’ll go down. And the brain stem thing makes sense, too. Unless this is some voodoo shit, running around, biting and all that shit needs nerve conduction. That’s the cranial nerves going down through the brain stem.”

“How the fuck you know this?” demanded Top. “You ain’t cracked a damn book in years.”

“TED talks, old man,” he said. “I listen to ’em while I jog.”

“Okay,” I said, cutting in. “Brain stem and motor cortex. Christ. It’s bad enough we need headshots, now we got to be accurate as fuck.”

We turned to the people huddled behind stacked chairs and tables on the inside of the hotel doorway. A guy in a black suit and bloody white shirt came out to talk to us. He had a wire in his ear and a look of profound shock on his too-white face.

“Captain L-Ledger . . . ?” he asked in a wavering

voice. He held a gun in his hand, but the slide had locked back and he hadn’t replaced it. His eyes had a jumpy quality that told me he was standing on a windy cliff and wasn’t sure which way to step.

“Secret Service?” I asked, more to remind him of who he was rather than identify him.

“Yes, sir,” he said with a bit more certainty.

“What’s your name?”

“Murphy,” he replied. “Julius Murphy.”

“Okay, Murphy, where’s POTUS? Is he safe and can you take us to him?”

He said the president was safe and told us to follow him inside.

I looked down the ramp to where more of the infected were shambling our way. It was a surreal sight. They did not move as slow as movie zombies, but they weren’t fast, either. It was more a lack of coordination and maybe a disconnect from muscle memory. That and the injuries that had killed them. So many had chunks bitten out of their arms and legs, and that loss of muscle and tendon made them clumsy. They staggered and limped and sometimes crawled our way. You could outpace them with a brisk walk.

That wasn’t the point, though.

Despite those terrible injuries, they moved forward with a relentless consistency that spoke to an inability to fatigue, or to tire, or to stop. Sure, you could outwalk them, but for how long? It was like trying to outrun a glacier. Eventually it would catch up.