She knew before it happened what it would do.
It grabbed her hair and began to yank.
She managed to hook her feet on the edge of the hatch and held onto the edge of the roof.
“Gawddammit, Ed,” Bill shouted from inside the bus.
Jenni pushed back from the edge of the bus with her hands, the pain from her hair being pulled making her gasp. She tried hard to wrestle free, but the zombie was holding tight.
She heard a window slide open beneath her, then a shout, followed by two gunshots. Her hair came free and she fell back onto the roof of the bus. Grabbing up her rifle, she steadied herself as the bus came to a stop. She immediately aimed at the other zombies heading toward them.
More gunfire from those within the bus chorused with her shots.
One by one, the zombies fell to the ground. A few persistent ones kept jumping up and down, reaching up toward the branches of the tree.
Now that they were close enough, Jenni saw an emaciated young woman and a boy hardly older than Jason clinging to the high branches.
Jenni efficiently took out the zombies at the base of the tree and then looked down into the bus. “We need to move fast. ” She blinked as she saw blood splatter all over one side of the interior of the bus, then saw the body of a woman whose name she kept forgetting. She had been shot in the head. It took Jenni another moment to realize the woman’s hand was bitten. It was more like a graze, but it looked like a zombie bite.
“She was trying to shoot the one that had your hair through the window. She fell against the grill and it bit her,” Bill answered her unspoken question.
In this world, a bite was an instant death sentence. They all knew it, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with. Besides Ashley in the hotel, the fort had witnessed two other people turn into zombies before actual death. No one was sure why this sometimes happened, but they could take no chances.
Jenni blinked back tears, then nodded. “We need to get the kids out of the tree. ”
Ed pulled the bus up close to the tree, trying not to get cornered up against the trailer or the trees. The boy scrambled out onto a limb, clutching precariously to it.
“Jump down!” Jenni motioned to him.
“They got my sister and mom,” he yelled down to her.
“The zombies?”
“No, some guys! They came and kicked in our door and grabbed my Mom and sister. I was in the back room with Annie and we went through the window. ”
“Jump down!”
The boy motioned to his sister, who shook her head, still clinging to the trunk of the tree.
“Annie, c’mon,” the boy said.
She shook her head again.
“Jump down,” Jenni ordered.
“Annie, please come with me,” the boy insisted.
The girl once more shook her head, terror in her eyes.
Jenni fastened her gaze on the girl and felt sick to her stomach. Was this the way she looked when Katie had first seen her, shell-shocked and dazed? If so, too damn bad. “Annie, get your fuckin' ass down here now! Otherwise, you’re gonna have to sit in that damn tree until the zombies figure out how to climb or you get so weak and fall. Now, if you want to die that way, be my guest, but I am taking your brother and we’re getting the hell outta here. ”
Annie blinked, then began to cry. Trembling, she slowly crawled out onto the thick limb to her brother. With infinite care, her younger sibling helped lower her down to the top of the bus, then dropped down beside her.
Jenni blinked at the utter reek of them, but shoved that out of her mind. “The men who came here…why did they leave you in the tree?”
The girl disappeared through the hatch into the bus, Bill carefully lifting her down.
The boy rubbed his nose and shook his head. “I don’t know. They kept trying to get us down, saying all sorts of sick shit. But we kept climbing higher. I knew we couldn’t make a run for it with the zombies around. Anyway, they were even telling me stuff…about… you know…doing me in the…” The boy took a breath. “Anyway, one of the guys in a truck started yelling about a gun store and they all just went crazy. They told me and Annie that they would come back for us later if the zombies didn’t get us first. ”