Death and Biker Gangs (29 page)

The doorframe provided a pretty decent bottleneck, and the bodies of the fallen began coalescing into a neat little barricade. I kept squeezing the trigger as a new head shambled into my sights. 
Ten. Eleven. 
They weren’t living people, bringing along emotions and nervous ethics to grapple with. They were dead, they were hungry, and I was in the fucking zone. 
Fourteen. Fifteen. 
Half the magazine gone, and still they came, picking their way over their fallen comrades.

Tony’s gun stopped cold, and I realized my ears were ringing. From the corner of my eye, I saw him swing it over his shoulder and switch to the old Winchester.

I picked out a new target and fired. Eleven rounds left, if I counted right.

Ten.

Nine.

Eight.

The doorframe was choked with them now, the wood bowing inward. Shit, what if the wall gave in entirely? I wasn’t about to stop and reload while they were piling all around us. 
This is bad. This is bad…

The blast from the horn cut right into my train of thought. I backed toward the door. “That’s Gloria. Let’s go!”

Tony made it about a foot before his bad leg gave out. I ducked underneath his right arm, and Dax got under his left, clutching the dog’s leash in his left hand. “Come on, Evie!”

Evie growled, but went along with us.

We limped down the back porch stairs as fast as we could, passing a recently exterminated zombie in a ballgown.

A horrific crash sounded from the house as the kitchen wall gave way. I pictured the ghouls toppling to the floor, rotten entrails spilling from swollen guts.

We reached the driveway, and all thoughts of being in the clear promptly evaporated. The news van was there, all right, and so were another dozen or so revenants, all of them quite interested in the three of us.

Tony sighed. “This is getting old.”

“You said it,” Dax muttered. “I’m out. I hope you’ve still got some rounds left in that Stormawhatever, Vibeke.”

“Yeah, me too.” Gloria had done some donuts while we were inside, leaving the smashed and pulped remains of the dead as multicolored smears in the street. The remaining ghouls were still lurching toward us, though, and I was rapidly tiring of their company.

Well, I still had ammunition, and we did have an escape vehicle waiting. “Get Tony to the van,” I said, staring at the undead. “I’ll handle this.”

Talk like a badass, and people will believe you’re a badass. The boys sent me respectful looks and started moving toward the van.

I picked off two ghouls hanging out near the front, clearing a path for Tony and Dax. Six shots left. Vijay leaped out of the passenger seat and pulled the sliding door on the side open.

Dax boosted Tony up into the van.

I took down two more ghouls. Now the rest seemed firmly fixated on me.

They were people once. They were just like me, terrified by what had happened, doing what they felt was necessary to survive. They went to their appointed emergency center to wait out the horror and wound up encountering something beyond their worst nightmares.

I didn’t have to be there to know what happened. It was written in the streets of Old Town Muldoon, scribed in the colorful bracelets dangling from gray, deteriorating limbs.

Four. Three. 
The last one came closer, jaw opening and shutting rapidly.

They were people once. They weren’t anymore.

And that made all the difference.

I shot the last one as it staggered toward me, then realized I’d run out of targets.

“Vibeke!” Tony called. “Get in here!”

I never thought I’d be the last man standing.

I climbed up into the van and ended up in the second row, sandwiched between Dax, the dog, and Tony. “Gloria, these are my friends.”

“Yeah, they introduced themselves while you were going all Rambo on the revenants out there.” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “You’re pretty good with that thing.”

“I had a pretty good teacher.” I didn’t look at Tony. His ego was entirely too big for the endtimes already. “Sorry for the detour.”

“Hell, girl.” She gunned the engine, and the van crunched over more bodies. “I’d have gone in there myself if you’d told me they were this cute.”
 

SEVENTEEN

We pulled over on the outskirts of town, ostensibly so Gloria could check her maps, but really so Vijay could engage in the time-honored ritual of proper post-apocalypse introductions. “Did anyone get bitten?” he asked, scrutinizing all of us. “Tony, why were you limping?”

“Got shot.” Tony gestured to the red blood still coating his face. “This is all Arthur’s, by the way.”

“Arthur?” Gloria swung around to look at us. “You got Arthur?”

“He’s not getting back up, either,” I said, unable to keep a little gloat out of my voice.

“But why was he after you?”

 Tony shrugged. “We had to bust the little miss out of Blair’s love nest and made a bit of a mess.”

“What the hell were you doing wandering around on foot, anyway?” Vijay asked. “Hammond must be desperate.”

“He is,” Tony said. “Hastings stopped transmitting and he flipped. Then the camp got attacked and these three ended up coming with me.”

“And you knew each other before?” Gloria asked.

I leaned back against the relatively comfortable passenger bench, just enjoying being able to sit on something that 
wasn’t 
the ground or a branch or undead. “Tony and I worked in the same building, and I met Dax the night the meteors fell.”

Vijay cleared his throat. “And Elderwood…is it still around? We haven’t heard anything, not that they ever sent exciting transmissions.”

“It got sacked by ghouls and one of those biker gangs. Not even sure if we’re on a mercy mission or if we’re refugees again.” Tony started reloading the Winchester. Where the hell had he found more ammunition?

We sat in silence for a long moment.

Vijay cleared his throat. “Is 
anyone 
bitten?”

I tugged off my jacket and pushed up my shirtsleeve just to make sure, but everything seemed to be in order. “Ralphie from 
A Christmas Story 
tried to make me into lunch, but he couldn’t get through the jacket.”

Dax snickered, but no one else seemed to get the reference.

Vijay reached over me, pinching the leather between his fingers. “Oh, you got one of the Kevlar-lined ones. Good thinking.”

Tony shoved my shoulder. “Did you know that when you picked them out?”

Of course I hadn’t known that—I’d just reasoned that leather would be harder to bite through than our street clothes. But I’d be damned if I let them know it. “Of course,” I said smugly. “Why the hell do you think I insisted on them?”

Tony smiled lazily at our new companions. “Isn’t she hot?”

“Get a room,” Dax muttered.

“Much as I hate to interrupt this budding tryst, where are we going?” Gloria asked. “We can’t really stay in Muldoon, now that you’ve summoned every fucking dead guy in the county.”

“Sorry about that,” I said. “I’m new to this zombie cataclysm thing.”

“Man, you guys shoulda seen her up the tree.” Vijay twisted around to look at me. “Where did you think you were going to go after that, anyway?”

I shrugged. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead.”

“What do we do about the dingleberries?” Dax asked.

Our new companions stared at him for a few seconds. “Maybe some toilet paper would help?” Vijay suggested.

“It’s one of our nicknames for the…the ghouls.”

“I gathered, but…dingleberries?”

Dax pointed at Tony. “His idea.”

“I bet they burn,” Gloria said. “Set a few fires? Roast them up real good?”

Oh, God. I wasn’t sure I could take another zombie firestorm. “Someone tried that in Astra,” I said. “All it did was drive them out.”

“Yeah, and then they overran Elderwood,” Tony said.

My head snapped up at that remark. “I thought it was the brigands and the pit zombies that overran Elderwood.”

Tony shook his head, his jaw tightening. “The brigands knocked down the back gate and got into one of the tanks, but we were seeing singed fuckers for days before. They walked from Astra and there were too many of them, and…” he slumped back, staring at his bad leg. “I’d like nothing more than to barbecue the bunch of them, but I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I pawed at Tony’s arm. “Why didn’t Hammond say something?”

“Right, and cause a panic? Sharp thinking there, Vibby.”

“So we just leave them?” Gloria asked.

“That’s probably our best bet.”

Gloria sighed. Some of the iron I’d heard in her radio broadcast had seeped away, but she still sounded resolute, as opposed to resigned. “So we’ll hit up Hastings. Gimpy back there probably needs a doctor to look at his leg, and I’m getting tired of sleeping in the van.”

There was something else we hadn’t addressed, and I coughed politely to gain everyone’s attention. “I hate to pour on the bad news, but she said there’s another gangster out there named Malachi.”

Tony didn’t bat an eye, but Dax’s head shot up. “Malachi? As in the Malachi we…uh…weren’t nice to?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Why would it be the same Malachi?”

“Why the hell wouldn’t it be?” I asked. “How many people named Malachi do 
you 
know?

He shrugged. “So you think he…what? Walked out of the ammunition store after we beat him up and came down here to lord over irradiated motorcyclists?”

I shrugged right back at him. “What else is there to do after the end of the world?”

“I thought you left him for Undead Will and his kid to munch on after Vibby clocked him with the gun,” Dax said.

Tony looked out the window. “Not exactly.”

Dax’s voice sharpened. “Then what 
did 
you do with him, Tony?”

“I locked him in the basement.”

Dax looked at me. “And you went along with it?”

Malachi had spent our five minutes of acquaintanceship blathering on about the promised land and the Lord smiting evildoers. I’d had no real problem with Tony throwing him in the basement. “He creeped me out.”

“You beat him up and locked him in a basement?” Gloria whistled softly. “You guys aren’t very good at making friends, are you?”

She put the van into gear, heading southeast on Torrey Street. Tony dug around inside his jacket and pulled out a battered-looking softcover. I spotted the wide-brimmed hat and shotgun of 
Dead Mennonite Walking 
and stifled a groan. “Oh, God, do we have to?”

“Is that the new Ezekiel novel?” Vijay exclaimed. “I didn’t realize it was out.”

Oh, hell. Two zombie literature fans in the van. It was going to be a long trip.
 

***

Several hours later, we had to stop when we reached a gate and a very big, very intimidating wall.

Gloria peered out the windshield as the wipers did their best to combat the rain spewing down at us from overhead. Vijay had the camera rolling, though I wasn’t sure we still had news networks to broadcast whatever he was getting. Maybe he was just recording for posterity.

“Do any of you remember Hastings actually having a wall?” Gloria finally asked. “Because I don’t. It didn’t when I last interviewed Doctor Lattimore a couple months ago.”

I shook my head. I’d run to Behrens Memorial plenty of times as an EMT, and had run into the proverbial Hastings Wall of Traffic each time…but they’d replaced it with a real wall. And damn quickly.

Who built a wall in so short a time? Better yet, who had the resources?

Fuckers were holding out on us,
I decided.

Evie sighed, rearranging her head on my feet. At least someone was able to catch up on her beauty rest.

We needed to get her some food. Living off crackers and old cereal couldn’t be good for her.

Gloria eased us up to a guard station tucked beneath an awning. The soldier standing there looked about twelve, dwarfed by his machine gun and a pair of fatigues at least two sizes too big for him. “Who’re you?” he asked, making sure we could see that he had the safety off.

I almost laughed at him. After everything we’d been through, he just didn’t strike me as all that intimidating.

Gloria cleared her throat, then spoke in a slightly raspier voice than I was used to hearing. “We’ve got an emissary from Camp Elderwood…you guys okay?”

“
Elderwood?
” The soldier straightened up.

Tony leaned forward, placing himself into the soldier’s line of sight. “Commander Tony McKnight, here on General Hammond’s orders. Why the 
hell 
have you stopped transmitting, Private?”