Still of Night (Dead of Night 3)

“Get me to my goddamn plane,” was all he said.

— 13 —

We went down in the elevators. Chang and Murphy, POTUS, my team, and Torres in one car; everyone else squeezed into the other. We’d brought spare body armor and had helped the president strap it on, and I gave him my ballistic helmet. Top didn’t like that but kept it to himself. Bunny asked him if he knew how to use a gun, but the president shook his head.

When the elevator doors opened, we stepped into one of the inner rings of hell.

The barricaded door had failed. All the people who had been trying to keep the infected out were among the first to rush at us with dead eyes and bloody teeth. I heard someone in our car sob. Not sure who it was. Could have been me for all I know.

We stepped into madness.

Bunny led the way with his shotgun. It holds fifty rounds of twelve-gauge and it was a target-rich environment. Top and I flanked him while the others formed a defensive ring around the president. We waited as long as we could for the second car to arrive.

It never did.

It must have stopped on another floor, as ours had on the way up. There was too much noise and distance to hear if they were up there making a fight of it. I hoped they were alive, but I never found out. We never saw them again.

“Move, move, move,” I yelled. I had one hand on Bunny’s broad back and fired my Beretta dry with the other. Dropped the mag, reloaded, fired.

Head shots look easy in the movies. The good guys never miss on The Walking Dead. Even amateurs nail the bad guys in the sweet spot time and again, at long distances, while running. Which is total frigging bullshit. Ask any soldier who has been in a running fight about it. It’s usually a matter of putting enough ordnance downrange, and the cumulative effect does the trick. In Iraq and Afghanistan it was estimated that American soldiers—who are among the most highly trained in the world—capped off two hundred and fifty thousand rounds for ever

y enemy KIA. Yeah. How’s that for some scary math?

Now, factor in that our sweet spot wasn’t center mass but a couple of sections of the brain and brain stem that were roughly the size of a child’s fist each. If I had a .22 with light loads in the bullets maybe it would have been easier. Those rounds usually lack the power to exit something as dense as a skull and instead bounce around inside, turning the brain into Swiss cheese. My Beretta was loaded with hollow-points, so I was blowing holes in whatever I hit, but hitting exactly those spots was a bitch.

It was scary.

It was closing in on impossible.

Bunny had the smartest weapon, and I wish to Christ I’d thought to bring a shotgun. If we survived it, that would be my go-to weapon.

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

There were seven of us with guns. Most of us had never worked together, and even though the other four all had training, it wasn’t the same kind. We had to create a rhythm. We shouted “Out!” and “Reloading!” and hoped each other heard.

The fight in the lobby was a bloodbath. There were fifty or sixty of the infected. It didn’t matter that some of them were kids. It didn’t matter that they could not think and could not return fire. They rushed at us in a mob. Soldiers aren’t trained to deal with a swarm of unarmed civilians attacking with teeth and hands, or to fight enemies who did not easily go down in any conventional way.

We lost Murphy before we ever got to the door. I felt a hand on my shoulder and the grip half-turned me. I spun to see him trying to grab onto me like I was his lifeline, but there were two of the infected clamped like lampreys onto him, biting an ear and a calf. He knew he was dying but he tried to cling to life by clinging to me, to the living.

Then he was gone and we had to let him go.

The president was screaming at the top of his lungs. Shrill. I wanted so badly to hit him. But he wasn’t the only one screaming.

“Top,” I bellowed, “plow the road.”

He dipped into a pouch and came out with a fragmentation grenade. “Frag out,” he roared and hurled it underhand so that it arced over the monsters trying to squeeze through from outside.

We dropped into a momentary huddle, all of us crowding around POTUS.

The blast radius of the grenade cleared the door and showered us with bloody debris and jagged glass. I hooked an arm under the president’s shoulder and jerked him to his feet.

Bunny cleared the last of the obstructions and then we were on the valet parking ramp.

“Oh . . . fuck . . . ” breathed Torres.

The Mystery Bus was half a football field from where we stood. Fifty long goddamn yards. Between it and us were hundreds of the dead.

Hundreds.