The Coalition: Part 1 The State of Extinction (Zombie Series) (13 page)

The metal head wasn’t pointed precisely, and so it slammed against that wet, running skull and bounced off.
However,
it had the effect of forcing the dead one back a foot or so as it went to its knees to come at him again. In the meantime, he looked to see that indeed the other one, while not gone from the waist down, possessed a pair of truly shattered legs that would no longer allow it to stand. Cutter gripped the hammer anew and sent the metal head smashing into the thing’s puss-riven face. Two blows and it ceased to move.

Then
the other one’s hands were on Cutter again. It latched onto his right arm and he felt the hammer skid out of his fingers. Before he could do anything at all
,
he watched in horror and anger as the thing used its grip on Cutter’s forearm so that it could bend forward and bite. He watched as its teeth—
bright, straight,
and not at all yellow—crunched down on his wrist.

As always, the three layers of fabric on his body saved him from being bitten.
He would
have bruises, but he had not suffered a
skin penetrating,
and thus fatal
bite. However, his hammer was gone, lying on the sidewalk where he couldn’t reach it without leaving himself open for attack. So he reached down with his left hand and pulled his pistol free.

The gun bucked under his grip. The .45 caliber bullet flew free of the barrel, plowing into the thing’s head. Brain matter and bits of skull flew and the back of its cranium blossomed in a great petal of organic matter. The zombie fell like the sack of guts it now was.

Gasping for air, Cutter crawled forward and found his hammer. Picking it up, he stood, blinking the sweat from his eyes, feeling the salt sting of it there as it blinded him for a second.

The slouching mass of zombies that had been two blocks
away were
now much closer than he had figured. Some were moving toward him from just beyond the lengths of two pickup trucks sitting dead on deflated tires to his left. “Goddamn,” he said. Staggering, he wobbled on his feet, feeling the effects of the mortal struggle and the pounding heat of the day. Knowing that it didn’t really matter how much noise he made at this point and in this situation, he aimed the gun at the nearest of the shambling obscenities trotting toward him. The pistol barked once, twice, three times. A trio of the rotting things fell where they were hit, holes where their faces had been.

He turned and looked back the way he’d come. There were even a few zombies moving in that direction, but only a few. The empty sockets of opened doors all around were not attractive to him at this moment, so the way
he had
come was the way he was going to have to leave. Behind him, a few groans lifted and soon they became that horrible rasping roar
,
he feared more than anything else. The city of the dead was on the move; they had his scent, and they were after him.

Cutter ran. He didn’t trot and he didn’t jog. He ran flat out. Doors were opening around him. Windows were filling. The dark places and the ruined buildings were disgorging their dead and vicious tenants.

The supply, no matter how many they seemed to kill was endless.

Cutter gasped the hot, muggy air of summer. And he ran.

Wherever he looked he could see them stumbling out of shadows and from alleyways, dark tunnels that led to underground parking decks; from stores that had once housed any type of shop you could mention. They stepped out of doorways and into the hot sun.
Each
one seemed to look directly at him, those dead eyes blazing with something completely and implacably evil. Cutter was tired. He was winded and sore. Fatigue poisons were building up in his muscles. His side stitched in pain from running and gasping for breath. Zombie didn’t feel these things. Zombies didn’t seem to feel anything at all,
seemed
to fear nothing at all, and wished only for his dismemberment.

He couldn’t stop. Once
again,
he was on the run, turning over in his mind the lay of the land and trying to decide what, if any, option was opened for him. Cutter had to survive. He had to.

From his right
,
a knot of zombie lurched out of the otherwise empty and shattered trailer some trucker had dumped in panic. They were on him in an instant, their hands like blue-black claws wanting to tear into his flesh. Even though
,
all he wanted to do was keep moving, he was forced to stop, take careful aim, and pull the trigger again. Three more shots and each shot was true and there were three more stinking, putrid, disease-ridden corpses lying in the street to turn into a running paste of fluid and maggots.

Warm air filled his lungs as he gaped wide, trying to oxygenate himself, to make ready for another dash to safety. Madly, he looked around, and everywhere he
looked,
the dead were coming. But north, back toward his best home, his place of safety—that way was less dangerous than all the others. Once again
,
he was running, his boots slapping the crusted streets, grass and small shrubs slapping at his shins as he moved. In the back of his mind there was a little voice telling him to shed his pack.
Lose
the thirty pounds and you can move a little faster! Just dump it and go! But he couldn’t do that. Not yet. If he did
that,
he was all but admitting to himself that
he would
never make it back. That was the last act of desperation. That was almost total surrender. He kept his pack, felt the straps digging into his shoulders, the weight holding him,
and
slowing him down; but he wasn’t going to toss it aside.

Not yet.

But soon. In a few minutes. Maybe a few seconds. If nothing changed, then
he would
toss it aside and go. He’d leave it. Later, he could come back for it. Zombies weren’t interested in that shit. They didn’t want MREs. They didn’t want ammo clips. All they wanted was his meat and his blood.

The pack was heavy.

Maybe it wasn’t really surrendering if he dropped it.

Maybe it.

Was. Just.

Survival.

Cutter slowed down. The army of dead to his rear was coming on.
They had
picked up the pace and
they
were almost to a point where they were moving faster than he was. Ahead of him
,
there were more appearing from buildings, spying the race, seeing him run, hearing the moans of the soon-to-be-fed. Once again, Cutter had messed up. This world
was one
where you could never let your guard down. Not for a day. Not for an hour. Not for a single second.

Maybe.

Maybe this is best, he thought.

Maybe it’s time for it to be over.

Maybe this is the day you end.

The sound of a small caliber gun came from the intersection ahead of him. Was it Colonel Dale? He looked left to where the sound had come. At
first,
he didn’t see anyone. Had the shot come from above street level? Behind
him,
the groans had risen to that moron roar of hunger that always came when a hundred or two hundred of them thought they had a shot at a mouthful of living human. Only this was more than that. This was the roar of a thousand. The street behind him had become a seething river of dead, walking maggot-meat.

He paused to slam another clip into his .45. He reached back just briefly to touch his .220 with the tips of his gloved fingers to make sure it was there. It was security of some sort. Guns were all that was left to him these days.
Guns, ammo,
and disgust. Cutter took a step, then another
,
and looked forward, trying to see who had fired the weapon.

It came again. The little firearm popped and he recognized it immediately as .22 caliber. Someone was firing a .22, but he couldn’t tell what they were shooting at or where they were standing. Minding his own position and the advance of the enemy all around him, he jogged on, looking, peering, glaring at anything that moved, trying to figure out who was shooting and if they could be of any help at all.

Pop.
There it was again.

Why were they firing like that? One shot. A long pause. Another shot. Another pause.

Pop
. It came directly from his left and he looked to see.

Someone was backing up the street, coming toward his position. He squinted, trying to make the person out, to see if it was
someone,
he knew. Over the past few months he had come to recognize a lot of people, and knew probably a hundred of them by name. But this figure was a new one. He didn’t recognize this one at all.

From a distance of about a hundred
yards,
it looked to be a very fat man backing toward him. The guy was wearing really dark, baggy clothes. He was wearing what looked to be a sagging pair of green stretch pants, a voluminous purple sweatshirt hoody, and black gloves. Every few feet
,
the guy would stop and reach into what appeared to be a bag and load his weapon and fire. The guy was stuck with a single-shot .22 pistol! He was more fucked than Cutter!

Looking behind, Cutter raised his pistol and unloaded a barrage of shots into the pale, dead, fly-ridden mass flowing toward him. He fired five shots and three zombies fell into still heaps, their pushy brethren stumbling over their (now actual) corpses, and buying Cutter a split second or three.

“Over here!” He yelled at the retreating figure that turned to look in his direction. Cutter couldn’t make out much of anything at all beneath that flopping hoody, but he saw that what he’d mistaken for fat was a vast pouch that lay around the guy’s waist; a pouch that hung down like a pendulous gut
,
but which was, in fact, a canvas sack filled with .22 ammunition. The guy was firing, knocking the spent shell into the bag, reloading, firing, repeating the process.

Now
that Cutter had watched him over the course of four shots, he’d seen the guy plug four zombies that fell in dead heaps on the ground. The guy was a fucking
deadeye
.

“Over this way,” Cutter yelled. “Come with me and maybe we can get the fuck out of this mess!” He peered over his shoulder, saw the crowd stomping their fallen companions to the asphalt
,
and his .45 blazed again, five shots. Two zombies
toppled
over, their heads now empty of brain matter, and once
more,
the flowing river of hate behind them stumbled over
the
corpses and flopped to the cluttered street. But they weren’t stopping. They were never going to stop.

He was about to yell to the guy again, but he didn’t have to. The fatty was beating feet like nobody’s business in Cutter’s direction and in a
second,
they were standing, looking into one another’s face.

“You got a place where we can hole up?” The voice wasn’t that of a man. It was a chick!

Cutter tried to take it all in, but he didn’t have time for little details or the niceties of Continental manners. “Just stay with me,” he said, all but gasping it out. He really didn’t have a lot of air for talking just now, but there was no way around it. “You take them out ahead and I’ll pop some of this army of the fucking dead at our rear and we can make my pad,” he said.

The woman only nodded, reached into her oversized bag and popped another shell into her
peashooter
. The little gun popped and in the street in front of them--at about fifty yards!—a zombie caught the little bullet between its fish-belly eyes and fell down, sprawling in a flat heap across the hood of a Lexus.
Goddamn. This woman c
an
flat shoot
, he thought.

Taking
a
moment to look back, he picked off a couple more--and it took the rest of his clip to do it. But he made another little barricade in the river of dead folk
,
and the current veered aside for a second or two
,
as they found their ways and righted themselves as a big, smelly mass of hunger.

“You got a place near?” The voice was not only a woman,
but also
young, Cutter figured. He could make out nothing at all of her under that droopy shit she was wearing. Her accent sounded local—pure deep-fried
Carolina
—but of her features he could make out nothing at all, except that she looked dirty, her face smeared with grease or maybe just dirt and sweat. And she seemed to have nothing else on her
,
but that bag of ammo,
an
obviously empty canteen, and that little pop gun; unless she was hiding something in the folds of that sweatshirt. But no, it looked like only her fat flesh was under there.

“Yeah,” he admitted. If we can make it three more
blocks,
we have a chance. Otherwise
,
well
, otherwise
,
we just keep running or find a place to make a stand.”