Among the Living (35 page)

He sighs in relief. Had it been a bite, he isn’t sure how he would have offed himself, since the guns are outside and there is no way he is about to go retrieve them. They would have had to improvise, find another way. He’d have had to hope Angela had the guts to put him out of his misery. Probably with a knife, and man oh fucking man would that suck.

“I don’t suppose you got any of our stuff from the side of the house.”

She shrugs and looks down, but he can’t blame her. There was no time to get anything after he fell off the fence. No guns, no ammo, now what do they do? He had assumed they would get to the house and be safe for at least a few minutes, have time to plan out this escape. He thought they would have time to go over the house in more detail and take their time locating the keys for the big Escalade in the garage.

Keys, shit.

“We gotta find their keys. You start with her stuff and I’ll go upstairs.”

“What makes you think they’re up there?”

“Because that’s where John is.” He heads for the second floor before she can ask any more questions.

The sound of the grenade exploding is so overwhelming it jars her, shakes her body. The ground moves beneath her, and she feels like the earth is about to rush up and smack her in the face. She feels flushed and removed from the scene, as if it isn’t real. She is in a dream again, like the ones that take over when she has a man in a hotel room and the other Kate comes a-calling.

“That took some balls,” she mutters, her voice muffled in her own ears.

Bob is backing away from what looks like a hundred of the things. They fall to a swarm of gunfire all around the uniformed National Guardsmen. One of the trucks backs down the street, and a Hummer takes its place with a rumble. The smell of diesel rattles out like a smoke stack. The gun turret on top swivels around as a man pops out of the hatch and then opens up with the giant gun. It makes a chugga chugga noise followed by the sound of shells rattling on the top of the Humvee.

Gunpowder, acrid and hot, assaults her nasal passageways. She staggers back, moving away from the people who are going crazy around her.

The gunner stops after a half-minute, and she follows his line of sight in horror. Bob is running toward her with fear etched on his face. The walkers have reached the line of fire, and the soldiers are abandoning their post, backing away while firing indiscriminately. Bodies jerk, shuffle, stutter and fall. There are screams, but not from the dying. They are from the civilians whom the things pursue.

She scoots back as if keeping her front to them will protect her. What can she do except run? If those things reach her, she will be done for. She will be dead, and that is not acceptable. Not remotely acceptable.

The soldiers fall back, and one of them turns and runs. The man next to him follows with his eyes, fires a few more rounds, and then runs as well. Kate watches them and wants to join the retreat, but she can’t seem to look away from the carnage, from the bodies of those who fell in the path of the army of the dead. Some rise up and join them, others run ahead, and some are clearly worn out, because they are sucked into the mob. They stumble over corpses, over soldiers who are trying to back up, over parts of Ramirez where he lies on blackened asphalt.

Several of the things grow bold, faster, and more energetic as the men turn from their firing positions and run. One of the soldiers barrels past her in a flat-out sprint, gun held to his chest as if it were a newborn. She keeps backing up, eyes on the creatures that have broken through the line. One of them pounces on a soldier, then another one leaps and is on top of a woman who manages to draw her pistol and empty it into the man’s body. She panics, and as bullets punch through the deader’s body, it manages to tear into her face. She howls in pain and horror.

The Hummer opens up on the lot, smashing them to the ground, then the gunner pounds on top of the vehicle and shouts, “go go GO!” The big car shifts into gear with a grunt as if in pain and then roars backwards. The gunner has his eyes fixed on the men he killed, and Kate is pretty sure she sees tears in them.

The walking things are now running things, and they are screaming for blood, a faceless hideous mass of people who seem to be rushing to a street event. Only the event has turned into something out of a horror movie.

It’s chaos all around, and Kate is terrified. She breathes deeply, and her hands tremble as she tightens her grip on her bundle. Bob comes into view, grabs her arm and starts pulling her away from the spectacle. She follows but is unable to run. There is something she should be doing, some task she needs to complete, but she can’t wrap her mind around it. It’s the blood, the screams. It’s the pain. It’s the suffering, the anger, the pure mindless terror, and she knows why she is hesitating. She knows why she needs to stay.

She knows she has work to do.

She drops the bundled cloth from her swords and takes one in each hand. She has no way to store the sheaths, so she slips the swords out and drops the wooden holders on the cloth, then tucks them up against a corner of a curb.

The swords gleam like liquid in the sunlight. They are beautiful and they are terrible. They are razor sharp, and if she isn’t careful, she could take one of her appendages right off.

“Keep them off me.” A pair of women who were falling back take an interest in her weapons and stop to see what she will do. They stare at her as if she has gone fucking crazy. Kate stares back at them, hard. Each meets her eyes, and they must see something there, because they both nod lightly.

Kate spins and strides toward the few remaining stragglers, who seem determined to make a last stand while their comrades escape. She slips between a pair of men who are walking backwards while they fire, rifles sweeping from left to right as they pick targets. They are shouting back and forth, working as a team. “Wait, you can’t go that way!” one yells over the din of gunshots.

She ignores the men and hopes one doesn’t shoot her in the back by accident.

The first one rises up before her, and she slashes the sword up in a perfect stroke that opens the man from groin to ribcage. The shorter sword dives in and severs the vertebrae in his neck by way of his throat. It’s a beautiful blow that she continues through, pulling the short sword to the side as she passes.

“Holy shit!” the other man yells as deader guts spill onto the ground.

Then a woman is almost on her, and she steps back a half-pace and whips the katana around in an arc that takes the questing arm off at the wrist. The shorter sword sings again, moving like lightning to sever the woman’s neck.

The body drops at her feet, but she is already past. A gunshot echoes, and a man charging from the right drops. Although Kate saw the charge in her peripheral vision, she is all too aware that she would have had trouble turning fast enough to do damage before he was on her. She silently wishes a prayer upon whoever shot him.

She is a dervish, moving into the crowd like a tornado. The katana is a trailing whisk of fire that rips into deaders, leaving her cruel mark on all she touches. The wakizashi trails it, and if one of the old masters of the kenjutsu school could see her now, he would surely nod in approval, or so she assures herself. She fights in the old style, something developed over six hundred years ago called nitōichi, or two swords as one.

“Move back!” she yells as she closes in on the remaining few. They stare at the woman covered in blood who is wielding two swords, and she is sure she hears one of them mutter, “Fucking hell.”

Kate charges the mass of people with a roar that would make her sensei proud. She dashes one way, jitters to the other and takes one down with a spinning blow to the neck. Kenjutsu taught her how to fight face to face with precise movement. Silat taught her how to get behind an opponent and screw up his day.

She lops off an arm, and then one’s leg at the knee. The man falls but seems immune to pain. Kate has to back up from a pair that has taken a liking to her, then she moves to the left, fast, slippery as a snake, and punches the razor-sharp long blade into his shoulder before the other snaps out and slashes him across the throat. Her aim becomes more precise, because she has found out the hard way that they don’t go down fast if you just wound. Every stroke has to be a killing one.

This suits her just fine.

She is one with the weapons, and she is one with death as she delivers killing strokes in force. The next opponent is much larger, but this doesn’t deter her. She shifts right, then her foot shoots out and she snap kicks him in the knee. Though she is already moving, she knows the precise time at which the blow will land and goes from a relaxed state in her hips to spinning full power. The torque carries her around, and every muscle in her body tenses with sudden rigidity. A loud “Saiii” floods past her lips. The force is concussive and snaps the bone like a twig. She moves past him, mere inches from his body, then half moon steps to the left so she can yank the katana across his back and sever his spinal cord.

He goes down without a peep.

Bloodlust, dread, cold precision, and horror. All of these feelings course through her body and are one and the same. Goose pimples flush her body at the excitement. She can do what she loves in a way she has never before been able. She can kill with impunity, with a will. She smiles and slashes another to the ground from right to left. A blow that nearly cuts the creature in half, the thing that is just a girl. A young one at that, maybe sixteen if a day, but she has been howling for blood. Mouth open, nearly panting, enraged. And when the girl falls, Kate looks down at the body and wants to feel shame, but the feeling doesn’t arrive. Then she looks up through a haze of red that is the blood pounding in her body, the adrenaline pumping though her veins, and there are more of the fucking monsters coming.

One of the soldiers had been dragged back into a mess of them, and now he comes to his feet like Lazarus him-fucking-self. Kate decides this is enough to freak her out as the guy turns, eyes blood-red, skin the color of putrid gray left to rot. He opens his mouth, and an inhuman howl erupts.

“Clarke’s a deader, kill him!” one of the soldiers behind her shouts, but she is probably in his line of fire.

The guy is huge and comes at her with considerable speed, and yet he is unsteady on his feet. She waits for him, almost patiently, as he gets one foot in front of the other. He staggers and almost goes down but manages to recover like a drunk suddenly asked to take a sobriety test.

She steps forward, left foot in front of right, slightly spread, a close fighting stance. The swords’ points hang toward the ground, and she feels like a samurai on the field of battle. But she isn’t fighting guys dressed in armor of bamboo and wood. She is fighting the dead.

She smiles.

Then he arrives like a charging bull, and she raises the swords, pivots her body to present her left side and, as he moves in, sweeps her leg in a crescent that creates an obstacle that will use his own momentum against him. As he falls, she is already moving, katana rising high then slashing down to catch him across the neck. He goes down without his hands in front to stop the fall and ends up skidding across the black road on his face. Good thing he’s dead. Fucker just lost his good looks. She takes two strides and buries the sword in his head.

Work to do, blood to spill, death to cause, she thinks, but as she shakes crimson drops off her main sword and whips the wakizashi through the air one more time to shake it clean, she realizes the people running at her are glancing back, scared. They are the living, and they are being pursued.

She falls back as one of her guardians steps up with her machine gun, slams a magazine home with the palm of her hand, slides back a little bar on the back, pulls it tight to her shoulder, and drops two of the deaders in rapid succession.

“I need to get me one of those,” she mutters, but the other, a statuesque woman with gentle lines on her face, shoots her a look. She has auburn hair that slips free of her helmet and falls around her ears. The hair is slightly curly, and there is a moment when Kate wonders what her own mother looked like before she ran away from her husband, the asshole who abused Kate into her teen years.

“Can’t have her, she’s mine.” And the other girl shoots her a look, a secret smile that Kate just gets a hint of.

“I mean the gun,” she pants.

“I know, I’m just teasing.” And the three of them turn to study the pile of bodies they have created.

The rest of the men and women in uniform have gotten things under control, and a large black helicopter arrives with a great whump whump of blades striking at the air to keep it aloft. It hovers over the chunk of road at building level with soldiers hanging out the side. One swivels a large machine gun and paints the scene with it, but he doesn’t fire, as he sees that the running folks aren’t deaders.

Another one points up the road, and the chopper lifts into the air and moves up Denny Way to investigate. He will be over Seattle Center soon, and Kate realizes with horror that the people moving in on her location were probably at the Center enjoying the sun, the rides, the food, and each other’s company. Then some of those things got in there and ruined everyone’s day.

She staggers away from the scene, weariness suddenly dragging at her body. She is in good shape, but the surge of adrenaline leaves her shaky and cold. She snatches up her sheaths and does her best to clean the swords of blood and gore.