Running with the Horde (27 page)

             
“Captain, I think I’ll take you up on your offer.”

             
“What?” he looked at me confused.

             
“I said, I will take you up on your offer,” I shouted.

             
“What the fuck are you talking about?”

             
We locked eyes and I gave him a slow wicked smile. Realization hit him but it was too late. I shoved him as hard as I could with both hands sending him ass over tea kettle.

             
The helicopter touched down with a slight hop. I saw the door open and one booted leg emerge. I gave the person my best two-fingered salute and broke into a dead sprint heading for the nearest edge of the circle.

             
One of Morgan’s men was blocking my path, his gun raised and pointed at my face. He didn’t shoot me, I knew he wouldn’t. Morgan had made it clear I was the ticket inside the city. That didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to intercept me.

             
I faked left then right but he wasn’t fooled. He stood his ground like a veteran linebacker. He dropped his gun and crouched at the waist, arms stretched out to meet me in a text-book tackle. I pommel horsed him doing a painful version of the splits.

             
All he had to tackle was air as I dove headlong over the hood of a pickup truck. I toppled off the other side and twisted my ankle as I fell to the ground. With no other option, I crawled through the sonic barrier and between the legs of two zombies. The horde swallowing me whole like a kelp in the belly of a massive whale.

             
Somebody was shooting at me as I shoved my way through a tangle of sketchy arms and legs. I could hear the sound of gunfire, albeit faintly. My face was suddenly on fire as a lucky bullet passed through the crowd and made contact with my face.

             
I screamed, my fingers tipped with red as I felt the nasty burn on my cheek. This was the second time I’d been shot. It was nowhere near as painful as the bullet I took to the shoulder but I still almost fainted.

             
The distance between myself and the men behind me was growing but the chopper was searching for me as well. I could see its bright spotlight crowning the tops of dead heads as it passed over the area in a big circle. If they followed me in their vehicles as well then I was screwed.

             
With their green energy machines out of range, the zombies responded business as usual to my commands. The effort to have them adjust for me as I passed through the crowd was almost nothing.

             
A large brick building loomed ahead. If memory served me well, it was a high-end apartment building. My plan was to get inside and try to lose them there. All of the sonic devices I’d seen so far had been attached to vehicles, so I didn’t think they could follow me on foot. It was a gamble but I figured my chances at remaining free were inside with zombies occupying every inch of available outdoor real estate that my eyes could see.

Chapter 34

“Tegan’s Hope”

             
I emerged through the densely packed crowd right up to the edge of the brick building. The big picture window in the first-floor unit looked like the Kool-Aid man had run through it. I gingerly edged past the splintered remains of a barricade that had long since given up the ghost. The large room I stepped into was filled with cold, damp wintery air and the undead. I sent them out so I could have a moment to myself while I tried to catch my breath and think.

             
I was sitting on the shredded arm of a musty, water-logged sofa, as the zombies shuffled out by twos and threes through the open hole in the wall. I glanced around the room with my flashlight. It looked strangely familiar. While I had driven by this particular building a thousand times, I had never been inside. The feeling wouldn’t leave my brain, I definitely knew this room.

             
Frustration mounted as I studied the cold decrepit place. Dirty brown carpeting covered the floor. The remains of various end tables, smashed lamps and figurines were strewn about the space. A television in the far left corner of the room was mounted on a wall. Somehow it had survived the carnage unscathed. Then I saw it, a print titled,
Evocation of Butterflies
in a cheap black frame. It hung crooked on the wall next to the television. This was my dream! Daisy had been in this room sitting on the very couch my ass was currently parked on!

             
I scrambled to my feet and began searching for any sign of what happened to her. The room I was in yielded nothing but some possible blood stains that could have been Daisy’s blood but also could have belonged to anyone who had been with her when the zombies breached.

             
The rest of the main floor included a kitchen, a bathroom and a bedroom. They were a mess but I learned nothing useful in them. Back in the main room I took a moment to check outside, aside from a metric ass-ton of zombies, I saw no one else. I ducked back inside and made my way to the staircase leading up to the second floor.

             
Zombies were terrible to look at, awful to smell and could be startling on occasion but I was way past being afraid of them. Yet still I took the staircase slowly, my nerves on edge as I stepped around a few bodies on the stairs. My heart was pounding and my guts felt loose. I didn’t want to find her dead and mutilated in a dank upstairs bedroom. More than anything, I didn’t want her to be a zombie. I would rather not find her at all if that was the case but yet I needed to know. That need kept pushing me up the slick wooden staircase.

             
On the third step from the top I found a shriveled human ear. It had been torn crudely from its owner’s head days ago. I reached down with a trembling hand and for some reason decided to pick it up. It felt rubbery, yet brittle and smelled like fish. Yes, I put it to my nose and took a nice deep breath, to this day I couldn’t say why. I placed the ear carefully into the chest pocket of my coat and continued up the stairs.

             
I came to a darkened bullet-riddled hallway, my tiny flashlight revealed three doors and a moldy, water-damaged ceiling. There were several very dead bodies between me and the door at the end of the hall. In whatever kind of room lay beyond that door, a lone zombie was pounding away, trying futilely to get through to my side.

             
I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there, courtesy of my ZSP. I knew I would walk up and open the door and it would be her, my sweet, crazy Daisy, all zombied up. I didn’t want to see that. Dread filled my body from head to toe as I moved toward the door.

             
As I put my sweaty palm on the knob, the zombie on the other side stopped moving.

             
Shit, I didn’t want to open it.

             
I thought about what I would do if it were her. The right thing would be to put her out of her misery but I didn’t think I could do the right thing. Hell, what if she were still pregnant and there was a dead baby inside her belly? I could’ve tortured myself that way for hours but at my core, underneath all my romantic notions, I am extremely pragmatic.

             
I opened the door.

             
The man came stumbling out in a fury of bottled-up energy. He had me pushed up against the wall before I could spit but then he just held me there.

             
Relief washed through me in spite of the horror fest that was standing in front of me. It wasn’t Daisy! Unless she’d undergone a sex change operation and several plastic surgery sessions since we’d parted but I was pretty certain this wasn’t her.

             
I shoved his arms away from me and gave him a good once over. The thing in front of me looked familiar but it was hard to tell for sure if I knew him. His face and arms looked like blood-red taco meat with extra salsa. I examined him for several long moments but then it hit me. Even after a horrifying death he still maintained that same dead-eye dick stare.

             
No doubt about it, this was Tegan, the spaghetti western master, guardian extraordinaire of Fort Friendly, a place I still frequented in my nightmares.

             
He hadn’t gone easy and he’d taken more than a few of the dead with him. There were a pile of moldering corpses in the room, which at one point had been someone’s tastefully decorated bedroom. A frantic search of the bodies proved none of them to be Daisy or Rosie but I thought I recognized another man from the Rose Hill mansion.

             
Tegan had shambled in behind me. I turned to him, closed my eyes and accessed his memories. His turning had been truly awful, he fought with guns and a knife and then with just his hands and teeth at the end but eventually he was overwhelmed. Numbers will ultimately outpace anyone no matter how tenacious the individual but he did fight like a cornered animal until the very end, killing all the undead that came into the room after him.

             
He was bitten well over a hundred times before he succumbed to his injuries and collapsed on the floor. His dying army crawl to shut the door had actually been kind of heroic. His final thoughts had been filled with grim fever-pitched hallucinations in which an entire horde of zombies was clambering up the stairs from below to get him. He needed to shut that door to allow Rosie and the rest enough time to make their escape even though they had been gone several minutes by that point.

             
I watched their harrowing escape over and over again. Tegan was with Rosie in this very room. The roar of the frenzied zombie crowd outside the building was reaching its crescendo. She was screaming at him to go back downstairs and retrieve her sister.

             
She was so full of rage and panic that for a moment poor Tegan was frozen in place. A sharp slap to the face snapped him out of it and he was soon dashing out of the room down the long hallway to the head of the stairs. Just like in my dream, the zombies broke through the make-shift barrier with primal force just as Tegan made his way down the stairs four at a time as the gunfire below gave way to screams of shock and pain.

             
There was no time for him to do anything other than what he did. I don’t blame him but it was still hard to watch. The zombies were mowing through humans like brush through a wood chipper. Tegan had no chance to go all the way down the stairs to retrieve Daisy. Instead, he leaned over the railing with both arms, grabbed Daisy by the hair and began hauling her bodily off her butt and into the air.

             
He must have been a strong son of a bitch because while Daisy wasn’t heavy, she was scared, pissed and flailing away in pain. This incensed the zombies and those closest collectively rushed the two of them, ignoring Daisy completely and lunging for Tegan’s outstretched arms. One particularly athletic zombie with a decent free-standing vertical, leapt up and took a small but nasty-sized portion of Tegan’s forearm showering the zombie and Daisy’s upturned face with Tegan’s blood.

             
He screamed in pain but didn’t let go of her. In fact, the bite so enraged him, he soared with adrenaline and hauled Daisy up and over the railing like she weighed no more than a small sack of laundry. She landed painfully on her ass and back. I worried momentarily for her safety and that of the baby, whose presence was now becoming evident because of the small baby bump growing in her belly.

             
I froze the moment for a long time just so I could look at her. She looked tired and dirty and maybe a little sad but otherwise just as beautiful as I remembered. I longed to stroke her cheek or touch her hair but alas, this was just another man’s memory. A rather brutal one at that. I could wait. I would find her. Then I would touch her again, if she still wanted me to that is.

             
I restarted the action to watch in first person as Tegan literally dragged a screaming Daisy up the stairs by the hair. The crowd of zombies were temporarily bottlenecked at the bottom as they fed on people and tripped over each other.

             
Rosie and four others were providing cover support with a few machine guns as they made their way down the hall and shut themselves into the bedroom. The group shoved a heavy dresser and the bed against the door but there wasn’t much else to barricade with. The zombies were soon hammering away. The people inside were starting to panic.

             
Rosie was staring up at the sky out of the room’s only window looking or waiting for something.

             
“Come on! Come on!” she shouted repeatedly.

             
Daisy was sitting on the edge of the bed bouncing slightly every time the zombies rattled the door. She was resigned, all screamed out I guess. I couldn’t study her too intently with Tegan flailing about like a madman. He and Rosie were embroiled in a rather heated argument.

             
I was so focused on a very forlorn looking Daisy that I had to ‘rewind’ the memory twice before I could follow their words.

             
“I’m fucking bit, Rosie!” he screamed, gripping Rosie by the shoulders. She wasn’t having it.

             
“We’re not leaving you behind,” she wailed. “When that rope comes down you’re going up with the rest of us!” her face was red as she shouted at him.

             
She knock his arms off her shoulders with an angry shoulder shrug. She followed that with a brutal shove and my vantage point changed abruptly as Tegan hit the floor.

             
She was on him in an instant with a flurry of wet, snotty kisses and unintelligible words which must have been apologies. This lasted about ten seconds before Tegan gathered himself and pulled them both to their feet. He held her tight as she sobbed into his chest, the top of her head was a tangled mess of sweaty brown hair.

             
He whispered urgently into her ear as a thick rope ladder suddenly appeared in the open window behind Rosie.

             
The noise from the hallway grew noticeably louder.

             
“There’s no more time, baby, I’m bit and you know what that means. You take your sister and get up that ladder before it’s too late.”

             
“No, I’m not leaving you,” she replied into his chest.

             
“Yes you are, Rosie, you’re gonna take your sister out of here and you’re going to survive. I’ll hold them off as long as I can. That’s all I have left now, to see you up that ladder. Don’t make my sacrifice mean nothing. I’m already dead, you crazy little bitch.”

             
She giggled and took his face in her hands with a smile and tears streaming down her face.

             
“You’re the only man I’ll ever let call me that you big stupid asshole,” she told him through choked sobs. Then she gently slapped his face.

             
I couldn’t see it but it was obvious he was smiling. Her forehead grew nearer as he planted a final goodbye kiss above her eyebrows.

             
“I never knew true love and pain until I met you, Rosie Flowers,” he told her gently. “Now go before I change my mind and make you stay here and die with me.”

             
With that he gently pushed her toward the window, grabbed his rifle from the bed and started barking orders at the remaining people who stood waiting around the room. He put his back to the bed and anchored his feet to the floor to add his weight to the flimsy blockade.

             
Filled with resolve, Rosie began ushering people up the rope ladder where they disappeared out of view beginning with an almost catatonic Daisy.

             
Soon the last man made his way out and it was just Rosie left sitting on the window sill with one arm and leg on the ladder and the other still in the room, she stared with resigned longing at Tegan, a look of purest terror on her face.

             
The zombies were making serious progress as I could see Tegan’s boots sliding toward the window. His vision was going blurry.