Plague Town (24 page)

Pretty.

“This is cool,” I whispered.

“Yeah, it’s a great place to work,” Lil whispered back. “Mom used her divorce settlement to start the shop when we moved here.” She shone her light around. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been around at all since I closed it the night before, well, before Casey got eaten. I guess Annie didn’t make it in to open the store.”

She looked around the room again, eyes bright with unshed tears, and an expression that was way too bleak.

“Ashley, do you think my mom is dead?”

“I...” I stopped, unsure of what to say. The odds were pretty good that she was, but there was still a chance. I didn’t want to raise her hopes, but I also didn’t want to dash them. I finally went middle of the road.

“She probably went looking when she didn’t find you here,” I said, trying to sound sincere. “She might have holed up with another survivor. Your best bet is to hope for the best.” I paused for a moment, then continued.

“We should get back to Big Red. The sooner they send us here to clear out the town, the sooner we might—
holy crap
!”

A loud thump from the front of the store made us both jump. A female zombie pressed up against the picture window to the right side of the front door. Long, black hair worn in a single braid, flowing, gauzy ethnic skirt and top in purples and browns. Dead white pupils stared in at us with unnatural hunger.

Lil gasped.

Oh, shit.

“Oh, no.” Horror and sorrow mixed equally in her voice. “Annie.”

I don’t know if it could hear us or it was just coincidence, but it looked up when she said its name, smacking the window with its hands as it moaned its hunger. Its hands
left dark smears on the glass. Within a few seconds it was joined by another zombie, and then another.

“We’ve got to get out of here now,” I said urgently. Lil’s expression went blank, as if she’d shut off her emotions. She shut of her flashlight, as well, and moved toward the back door.

“Give it a minute,” I suggested. “If their attention is here at the front, we’ll have an easier time sneaking out the back without being spotted.”

“Should we make some noise?” Lil asked.

“Couldn’t hurt. The old okie-doke?”

She gave a ghost of a smile. “The old okie-doke.”

I rapped on the window and shouted.

“Hey, you!”

“In here!” Lil joined me and banged on the front door. We watched as zombies peeled off from the steady stream wandering past and staggered to join the ever-increasing crowd in front of the store. I glanced at Lil, and could tell from her set expression that she was scanning the crowd for a familiar face.

One I hoped she didn’t see.

“Maybe we should—” I stopped short as the zombie that used to be Annie suddenly let go of the gate and veered off to its left, pushing through the crowd with what almost seemed like a sense of purpose.

“Okay, now that’s just weird.”

“Do you think she remembers the back door?”

A chill ran up my spine.

“We’d better get out of here now.” Lil looked worried, and I added, “Yeah. It looks like some of the others are following her.”

We hightailed it to the back of the building where Binkey and Doodle started howling again in their carrier, paws emerging through the mesh. All they needed were tin cups and a sign reading “dirty screws!”

“Shush, babies,” Lil crooned. “We need you to be quiet now.”

I snorted.
Like logic ever worked on a cat.
Then I put my left hand on the doorknob, the right holding my sword.

“You handle the cart and I’ll handle the zoms, okay? If we both need to fight, we’ll make sure the cart is between us so they can’t get to the cats.

“Ready?”

Lil nodded, gripping the cart with both hands.

I shoved the door open hard and felt it connect with something on the other side. Whatever it was hit the ground. The smell and accompanying moan told me that at least one zom had figured out there were snacks behind Door Number One.

The moon had come out from behind the cloud cover again, giving me enough light to see several figures already approaching where we stood, with more rounding the mouth of the alley. The smell of putrefying flesh was just nasty.

The zombie I’d knocked down reached around and grabbed at my ankle. I jerked away from its clawed fingers, stepped past the door and plunged the end of the katana into the back of its skull.

Sploosh.
Dead zombie.

The moans to our left grew louder and the smell grew worse as at least a dozen zombies staggered toward us. One of them was Annie. More filled the mouth of the alley.

I glanced to the right. That end was still zombie free, and I didn’t see any movement on the street beyond it.

“Go right,” I said, “then left out of the alley. Double back a few blocks down.”

The first few zombies reached us, clutching at Lil as she pushed the cart through the doorway. I kicked the closest one, a good ol’ boy who’d drunk a few too many beers when he was alive. My foot sank into its substantial gut. The impact caused a farting sound as gas escaped through God knows where. The accompanying smell was horrific, but the kick knocked it back into two other zombies, bowling them over like nine-pins.

That bought us some space.

“Get the cats out of here,” I yelled, caution scattered to the wind. “I’ll cover you.” Lil sprinted toward the other end of the alley, the rattle of the wheels painfully loud. No way we were sneaking onto campus with that thing.

Some of the fresher zombies moved faster than the others—not running, but their shamble still covered more ground than I liked. Trading my blade for the M-4, I took aim for the closest one and fired. My shot grazed the zombie’s ear, but didn’t take it out.

Damn.
I wasn’t nearly as good as Gabriel, and right about now we needed his precision.

Well, it wasn’t gonna happen.

Fuck it.

I switched over to semi-auto and sent a spray of bullets at their legs, aiming for the knees. They fell in a writhing mass.

More zombies appeared at the mouth, blocking my view of Aspen Street beyond. Luckily for us they all still seemed to be coming from that direction. I sent another spray into the oncoming crowd to create a temporary roadblock for those behind them, then took off after Lil, who had reached Beech Street.

As she pushed the cart out of the alley, hands reached for her from the right. She yelled in surprise as a skinny male zom wrapped his arms around her shoulders, yanking her off balance. The cart wobbled as she lost her grip on it, but stayed upright. I hauled ass the remaining distance, shoving my forearm under the thing’s chin and slamming its jaw shut before it could take a bite out of Lil’s neck.

She wriggled out of its grasp, grabbed her pickaxe from the cart, and sent the business end into the zom’s skull, splattering me with all sorts of nasty brain goo.

“Oooh, sorry,” Lil said, yanking the pickaxe out again.

“I ain’t got time to barf,” I muttered, trying not to puke. If I’d had time, I would have spewed all over
the damn place, but the moans were coming from all directions as the undead residents of Redwood Grove honed in on us.

They shambled from both directions on Beech Street, dozens filtering down from Maple Street and enough coming from the opposite direction to make our escape route far more dangerous than I’d anticipated.

The alley to the back of us was impassable, seething with bodies. The alley entrance across Beech was blocked by one of those huge trucks with big-ass wheels, what I call “penis compensation trucks.” Lil and I might be able to climb over or around it, sure, but we’d have to leave the cart behind.

Shit.

“There are so many of them.” Lil looked as scared as I felt, so I tried to hide my own fear from her. This whole thing had been my idea, and I was going to get her
and
her cats back to Big Red. Or die trying. Although I preferred to do it without the dying part.

“We can still move faster then they can,” I said. “We just need to clear a few out of our way. You take the ones coming from Maple Street and the alley. I’ll clear us a path down Beech. Don’t worry about head shots, just slow ’em down!”

Lil hesitated, eyes wide with panic as the reeking corpses closed in on us, the stench nearly unbearable.

I smacked her on the arm, hard.

“Ouch!”

“Remember!” I shouted. “Ripley doesn’t die!”

This snapped her out of her deer-in-the-headlights look. While she dropped the pickaxe into the cart and unholstered her M-4, I sprayed my last few shots at the zombies coming at us from the south side of Beech Street. I ejected the magazine and slammed another one home as quickly as possible. I had one more full magazine in my belt pouch, and plenty of ammo, but no time to reload the empties. So I had to make the shots count.

We shot their legs out from under them, but more took their place. It was like trying to dig a hole in the sand before the tide filled it in. And those we’d mowed down were crawling toward us, trailing bits and pieces of themselves as they did so.

“This is
so
not good.” Lil changed out magazines, keeping herself between the oncoming zombies and the shopping cart. The cats were thankfully quiet, probably catatonic, so to speak, from the moans and the gunfire.

“We need to make a break for it.” I shot her a glance. “It’s not going to get any better, and if we don’t go now, we’re gonna get ripped to pieces. And then Gabriel’s gonna really be pissed at us.”

Lil gave a shout of surprised laughter that turned into a yell as one of the kneecapped zombies grabbed her foot, pulling her off balance. She fell on top of it, her M-4 skittering a few feet away as the thing rolled so that it was on top, gore-drenched teeth inches from her face.

Several others reached the cart, hands grabbing for the carrier as if they thought something tasty was inside.

“Shit!” I slammed the stock of my M-4 into the head of Lil’s attacker, giving her a chance to throw it off. Then I dealt with the ones trying to get at the cats, again using the M-4 stock as a bludgeon to back them off before flipping the weapon forward and firing point blank into their faces.

Lil scrambled to her feet and did a mean stomp on her attacker’s skull before retrieving her firearm.

More came at us, the moans nearly deafening and the smell overwhelming. The gap I’d made had closed again, zombies crawling and staggering from all directions.

We were so screwed.

We both backed up against the cart.

“I’m sorry, babies,” Lil whispered. She grabbed her pickaxe and swung at the nearest zombie as it reached for her.

Before she made contact, however, a shot rang out, making a loud bang as the top of the zombie’s head vanished in a spray of blood and brain matter.

What the fuck?

Another shot, and the head sheared off of what was once maybe a five year old. The little ankle biter had been about to grab me and I hadn’t even noticed.

“Over here!” It was a man’s voice.

More shots, each one resulting in a dead zombie. Lil and I looked around for the source.

“Here!”

It came from the monster truck. A man dressed in what Matt would have called “weekend warrior” style—army fatigues tucked into combat boots, black T-shirt under a matching jacket—stood on the cab of the truck, aiming a really big rifle with cool precision, another firearm slung over his shoulder. He had a bandana pulled up over his nose, covering the lower half of his face.

He looked tall and imposing standing up there—in fact, downright heroic—but honestly, I think I would
have viewed a midget the same way had he appeared out of nowhere to pull our asses out of the fire.

“Get in the truck!”

We didn’t hesitate. Lil swung her pickaxe like a melee weapon, whirling like an armed Tasmanian devil while I grabbed the cart by the handle and sprinted across the street, using it as a battering ram to knock a thankfully skinny male zombie out of the way.

The man on the truck kept taking out the zombies that posed the greatest threats. Between his precision shooting and Lil’s pickaxe of death, I made it to the truck with the cats in one piece, zombies trailing closely behind.

“Get in!”

“We’re getting!” I wrenched open the passenger door, flipped the seat forward, tossed my M-4 inside, and wrestled with the cat carrier.

“Leave it,” the man shouted, capping two more zombies.

“Are you crazy? This is what we came for!” I yanked hard and the carrier jerked upward. Binkey—or was it Doodle?—chose that moment to resume howling.

The man’s eyebrows shot up.

“I’m not the one who’s crazy here.” But he didn’t argue any further.

I muscled the carrier into the back of the cab and climbed in as Lil tossed the litter and food in after me. She then shoved the cart into a knot of ghouls, knocking them off balance long enough to allow her to jump into the front seat and slam the door shut, locking it.

Zombies immediately swarmed the windows, bloody hands slapping and clawing against them, green faces pressing to stare in at us hungrily.

The roof of the cab creaked as our rescuer jumped onto the ground on the driver’s side. The door opened and he climbed in, slamming the door shut as several enterprising zoms pulled themselves into the truck bed behind us and began hammering on the back window.

Our rescuer’s bulk seemed to fill the cab as he turned the keys that were hanging from the ignition.

“Hold on or fasten your seatbelts!”

I did both, holding onto the “oh shit” handle with one hand and stabilizing the carrier with the other. He floored the accelerator and the truck surged forward with an almost animalistic growl. The momentum jolted us all backward, including the zombies.

They flew out of the truck bed to land on the asphalt. Those clutching the sides of the truck either lost their grip or their hands as the vehicle sped north on Beech Street and across Maple.

Our rescuer didn’t slow down, and zombies thumped off the bumper like bugs hitting the windshield. They continued to trail after us even as the truck picked up speed. Once they were out of sight, I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding while Binkey and Doodle kept up their own harmony of the damned. After a few minutes they shut up. Maybe they felt more secure.