Desolation, p.8
Desolation, page 8
Empty. Of course. Because the middle of a zombie apocalypse was the right time for proper weapon storage.
I knew that at least one of the ammo packs had been the right size for shotgun shells, although I really didn’t want to see how well buckshot did against the undead. Now slugs…
I felt borderline paranoid as I reached back into the pack and started fishing for the boxes. I had to blindly open three and feel my way around until I found the right one, pulling two shells out. The entire time, the soft metallic, clinking sounds made me wince and grit my teeth harder around the flashlight.
One shell clicked into place, then the other.
I allowed myself a soft exhale of relief. At least now I was armed—
A small body came hurtling toward me with an ear-piercing shriek, seemingly out of nowhere.
There was no time to pull the trigger, let alone aim. Even registering what was happening was pushing it and only happened because I’d been dreading something like this—but I’d kind of counted on the fact that the shelf would be more of a hindrance, not the equivalent of a launch pad.
My bad. That was why I now had to deal with a three-feet-tall, thirty-pound zombie child trying to claw my eyes out!
Even light as it was, the force it collided into me with was enough to send me sprawling on my back.
If what I suspected had happened in the huts had been anything like this, I wasn’t surprised that they’d been incapable of better dealing with it.
Neither was I.
Because the shotgun had already been in my hands, I managed to wrest it up and between me and my assailant, but that was a close call. Way too close, as zombie slobber hit my cheek as the thing screamed. Its first swipe hit the flashlight, sending it tumbling into the back of the cavern, leaving my teeth aching from the force of it. That left some illumination, but by far not enough to actually see what I was doing. The light streaming in from outside didn’t help, further blinding me.
And damn, that thing was fast!
With panic—and that thing!—clawing at me, all I could do was use the shotgun like a stick held between my spread hands, blindly bashing against the onslaught. There was no room for momentum, and with me having to bash up, that wasn’t ideal, either. On the other hand, that thing was light enough that while it was a heavy weight on my chest, I could have probably flung it right off me—if it had given me a second’s respite. Which it didn’t, because it was as smart as it was vicious.
Or I was just that damned unlucky.
I considered calling out for help, but since the entrance to the cavern had hardly been large enough for me to fit—and any man squeezing through would have ended up crashing right down on and burying me underneath his weight—that wasn’t a good idea.
I also wasn’t sure it was necessary since that thing had shrieked loud enough to alert its adult brethren throughout the valley, so I figured the guys were aware that shit was going down, down below. I couldn’t even be sure whether anyone was asking what was going on because our scuffle was producing too much noise.
Pain exploded across my cheek—the saliva-sprayed one—when the nasty bugger got a swipe in, and then again across my bare upper arm.
Fuck.
Fuckfuckfuck!
Part of me noted it was a little late—or way too early—to worry about infection. That did absolutely nothing to stave off the panic shooting through me. It was as if something had tripped a live wire inside of me.
Instinct took over. With a bout of strength, I kicked my feet into the earth and pushed upward with my torso while throwing myself to the side at the same time.
I didn’t manage to fling the thing off, but at least it slid off me, and the sudden motion forced it to scramble for purchase. Sharp claws raked across my left hand, immediately making me let go of the shotgun before my mind could decide whether or not that was a good thing.
No, not good!
I tightened the grip of my other hand and yanked, dislodging its grip on the weapon.
In the panic of the moment, I didn’t even fully realize which end of the shotgun was which. It didn’t matter. As soon as I was the only one holding it, I swung it around, switching to a two-handed grip just before bashing at the undead thing like I was holding a club. Once, twice—and then it was gone, the gloom hiding it completely from my sight as it withdrew.
My rapid panting was the only sound in the cavern.
Shit! Where had that thing disappeared to?
I waited. Five seconds. Ten. Twenty.
When still nothing came for me, I decided that I’d better get out of here before it came back with a vengeance—or with backup.
The moment I hoisted the pack onto one shoulder—to somehow get it up to the hole; I was well aware that I couldn’t crawl through it with the pack on—the kid zombie was back, slamming into my free shoulder. I jumped and tried to shy away, yanking back from the assault. I felt it slide down my arm, momentary relief flooding through me—
Until that thing grabbed the shotgun and tried to wrench it from my hand.
Smart bugger. Apparently, it had taken all of a minute for it to realize where the business end of my defense—and attack—was located.
I considered letting go in hopes of being able to scramble up the slope to the exit while it was coveting its prize, but my fingers wouldn’t open where they were still clenched hard around the handguard.
This was my one loaded weapon. The one I could be most certain that I could bring to good use. The pack was full of “maybes.” This at least ranged into a score of “probably.” I couldn’t give up on that.
Something else would have to give.
I still had trouble clearly seeing the thing, but because it was holding on to the shotgun, I knew vaguely where it must be. So I let the pack slide down my other arm, caught hold of the straps, and swung it around like a wrecking ball. Since it had about half the weight of the small zombie, that should have been enough for it to at least work as a distraction.
The pack connected with… something, about halfway to where I was aiming. I felt it give a second before a howl went up—and was quickly picked up and amplified not by one but several more voices.
Yeah, I’d so overstayed my welcome.
I didn’t really think. Since I was still swinging the pack, I kept going, turning around so I could fling it up toward the exit, hoping that I hit well enough for someone to be able to grab it and pull it out. As soon as my other hand was free, I grabbed the shotgun properly—including a few frantic seconds of fumbling around—did my best to aim down at the writhing mass of small limbs in front of me, and shot. Twice.
In the brief seconds when the muzzle flashes illuminated the room around me, I got a sense for what I was dealing with—at least five if not seven or more small bodies, spread out in a semicircle before me. Two were down by the second shot, or at least withdrawing.
Discharging a gun in close quarters is seldom a good idea. Doing so inside a small room, even less so.
Foul liquid splattered everywhere, hitting my face and bare arms as if someone had directed a garden hose with a spray attachment my way.
The sonic assault rattled my teeth and made my ears explode with agony, but there was no helping that.
Vertigo hit me hard as my brain scrambled to make sense of what was going on, momentarily overwhelmed. Add to that the residual headache from my monster of a hangover… and what was going on with me wasn’t pretty.
I might have thrown up a little—and not just in my mouth.
I sure as fuck stumbled back blindly, disoriented. Up, down—nothing made sense.
But somehow, I retained a modicum of control over my body. Enough so that I managed to catch myself before I went down. As soon as I felt like I knew which way I had to go, I flung the shotgun toward the light and started scrambling after it.
The pack was already gone, so that must have been good news.
The howls—some frightened but mostly angry—that went up behind me spurred me on, making me throw what little was left of my caution to the wind.
As I scrambled—and backslid, again and again, barely making any headway—I could feel tiny hands crawling and clawing all over my back and legs. Bony fingers wrapped around my ankles, ready to pull me back with the strength of ten adults. That it was all in my head didn’t help the wave of panic that was driving me on.
The shotgun disappeared right in front of my eyes, then reappeared, the barrel floating in the air below the exit.
Someone was holding it out to me, I realized.
The howls behind me got louder, making me increase my efforts, my breath coming in painful, pressed, ragged pants.
Just as my fingers slid over the barrel—hardly touching it, by far not enough for me to actually grab it—something grabbed my leg, claws sinking into the denim of my jeans.
I threw myself up and forward, trusting that this was my one last chance—
—And as my hands closed around the shotgun, someone else’s fingers grabbed my T-shirt from above, yanking me up hard enough that the cotton tore in several places.
More hands followed, finding actual purchase on my arms and shoulders, pulling me through the hole out into blissful, bright daylight…
…right into a fresh wave of chaos.
We were not alone anymore.
If I’d had time to consider, I should have realized that the shrieks of the kid zombies might already have been enough to draw the attention of the lurkers. Firing the shotgun—twice—had massively exacerbated that possibility.
People were running everywhere—and only a handful of them were still alive.
Equally pleasant—if not much of a surprise—was the realization that the hands that still grabbed on to me belonged to Jared, although I had to admit, when he kicked the zombie clinging to my leg right in the teeth and sent it rolling away, I was slightly mollified.
Somehow I’d figured that once he escalated whatever this was between us to actually groping me, it would happen under different circumstances.
True enough, as soon as he felt me able to keep myself upright, he let go, already turning around to… well, run, because there was zero sense in trying to fight the wave of bodies rolling down the valley toward us.
Hundreds of undead were coming, and they acted very different from the mob that we’d seen several times before.
All of them were running full-out, hurtling toward us like the lead group of a 5K run. While they might have been silent as they geared up, now they were screaming and shrieking, the sounds alone enough to set my instinct to flight mode, one hundred percent.
Suddenly, the saliva on my cheek, the scratches all over my body, and last but not least the gore splatters all over me didn’t really matter all that much.
Even if Jared was right with his seven-minutes-until-death idea, it didn’t look like I’d get to live that long.
A tiny part of me considered accepting defeat, simply because what was coming toward us was too overwhelming to intellectually deal with it. Just stand there and let it happen, and in two minutes from now, it would be all over.
Thankfully, I was way too stubborn to accept that as a valid option.
So I did the only thing that I could.
I ran.
4
Running was a good strategy—if a flawed one. It came with two prerequisites—that you were physically able to, and that you had somewhere to run to.
Neither was working out in my favor right now.
Already running high on adrenaline, my body was primed for action, but the dust I’d inhaled in the cave was once more doing wonders for my lung capacity. That, and I hadn’t been lying when I’d told Jared earlier that I wasn’t up for that level of exertion. Climbing the hill to get here had pretty much wiped out my scarce energy reserves, fatigue hitting me hard before I’d made it more than a hundred yards.
Not in a straight line, because even in that relatively short distance, I had to zig-zag at least five times around zombies coming for us out of every perceptible hiding space, now that they’d heard their angry brethren howl from every possible direction.
That we hadn’t literally stumbled across them before was miraculous.
I made a mental note that, should I survive this, I’d have to spend some bona fide time discussing the theory with the others that not only were they stellar at hiding, but the lurkers must have been constantly moving around us to keep us from literally stumbling onto them.
As it was, it didn’t look good for that to happen.
The way my lungs were burning—again!—I was almost glad about that.
Almost.
Story of my life.
Another lurker rearing up from what was little more than a bushel of grass right in front of me scrambled my thoughts, leaving instinct to finally take over for good.
I’d started out as part of a group—Jared and his guys, plus Osprey and me—but already, we had to spread out far enough that I could hardly keep track of where everyone was. Osprey was pretty much the only one I was sure about since I’d been following him bobbing and weaving toward the road that ran down the valley—the one open stretch of terrain where we could run well and wouldn’t break our ankles and necks because of hidden holes in the ground. I thought that was Axel over there, running with two packs slung over his shoulders—presumably his and mine—but couldn’t be sure. I hadn’t had time to ask about the pack, and I didn’t remember if I’d seen anyone with the shotgun. The only reason why I had my—way too heavy for sprinting—ax was because someone had pushed it at me just before we’d taken off.
It didn’t really matter. We were too few people for any kind of formation, so apparently, everyone was out for themselves. Hence my knee-jerk reaction to stick with Osprey, because of everyone around, I was certain that he would do his very best to stick with me. The other assholes? Not so much. Not now that I wasn’t running high on super-charged juice.
Assholes!
But what else was new?
Something slammed into my right side and threw me to the ground, and that was it for mental gymnastics.
I hadn’t seen the zombie when it came for me, but I sure got an eyeful of it now that it pounced on me just as I managed to roll onto my back. Snapping jaws came at me lightning fast. I had somehow retained the grip on my ax with my right hand, but it was way too heavy to quickly get up between me and what looked very much like the mechanism of my impending doom, so I slammed my left forearm up instead. My naked, very unprotected and fragile forearm since there had been zero time for donning my hoodie again.
It was more luck than calculation that made me aim low enough that I didn’t slam it right into the undead’s maw, which could never have been healthy. Instead, my arm passed under its chin and landed against its trachea—not hard enough to cause actual damage, but it gave me just enough of a lever to hold it back so that the terribly stained teeth snapped shut inches from my nose rather than tearing it right off.
But damn, that thing was heavy!
The impact on the ground had already pressed most of the air out of my lungs, and inhaling now with the zombie pretty much perched on my chest was hard. Impossible, as the fresh wave of panic let me know. Already, my vision was swimming with weird colored patches and was starting to darken and narrow around the edges as I kept trying to push that thing off me—or at least keep it at bay.
Against immense resistance—and with quite a lot of pain involved—I finally got the ax up, but there was no way to use it effectively. I couldn’t wedge it between us, and even though I tried to clobber it against the side of the thing’s skull, that was hardly effective, although it seemed to irritate it.
A jerk on my already straining right arm, and the ax was wrenched from my hand.
This is it, I thought to myself.
I’m dead in three… two… one…
While my mind was being dramatic, my body thankfully snapped into pragmatism mode, making me slam my now-free palm against the zombie’s forehead to push it further back.
And into perfect position for Jared to swing my ax and bury the blade into the back of the zombie’s head, hard enough that the momentum made both of my arms give in.
The zombie’s face slammed right into mine, knocking me stupid for a second.
If it still had been able to, it would have easily chewed off my cheek.
But it didn’t, because nothing was home in those filmy eyes anymore.
Jared jerked the ax back, which in turn made the thing’s head follow along until gravity pulled it off the weapon—and sent it right back down onto me.
Disgust was too soft a word to describe the visceral revulsion that rocked through me, making me want to scream, flail around, and retch my very soul out.
I had neither the time nor energy for that, so as soon as Jared gave the thing a kick hard enough to displace it from directly above me, I shoved it the rest of the way off and rose onto shaky legs.
I had a second to cross gazes with Jared.
He smirked as he held out my ax to me.
Before I could reach for it, another zombie came bowling into me, but a part of my senses that I had no direct access to must have seen that coming because I almost managed to duck away. It still slammed into my hip and side, but then fell past me rather than taking me down.
When I frantically righted myself, Jared was already on it, slamming the ax into the downed zombie’s head, hitting it perfectly.
That was a man who knew how to chop wood.
The very idea of forever referring to him as Woodchuck Jared made me burst into a fit of hysterical laughter that earned me a partly amused, partly bewildered look from him.
It cut off as suddenly as it had started, which was a good thing as breathing deeply was way more important.
My gaze fell on the weapon Jared must have dropped in favor of liberating me of mine. It looked just like a wooden baseball bat—something much more suited for my momentary physical limitations. When he saw that I was about to reach for it, Jared gave it a soft kick, sending it toward me. I was surprised how heavy it felt compared to the bat I’d started my day with, and there was barbed wire wrapped around the business end—not the reason for why it was heavier, but for sure a brilliant addition.
