Cooper stopped again and waited. After a moment he whispered to Dale, “You see the swarm?”
Dale looked at him in shock. “Swarm? What swarm?” He was still looking into the dark, trying to see.
Cooper pointed. “About a hundred feet away. They’re coming from those warehouses and heading toward the noise. We’re safe here as long as we’re quiet.”
“You can see them? In this dark?” Dale squinted, trying to see what Cooper was pointing at.
“Well, I can barely see movement over there, but I can smell them. There’s also a very faint noise they make as they move, and it was getting louder over there.” Cooper was still surveying the area. “Let’s go this way.”
“Where are we going?” Dale asked.
“I’m keeping us downwind and away from the swarm. I’m also trying to get us closer to the structure. Should anything happen, we head for the runways.”
“If we get separated, we should meet back at that last office building we passed,” Dale whispered and stopped short. He finally saw the dead, hundreds of them shuffling past in the dark only yards away. He had to force himself not to bolt, but Cooper was standing calm.
Cooper started walking toward the parking structure. They paralleled the dead almost all the way, and Cooper was just about to stop. He knew they were getting closer to the bikers. He could see them just ahead.
§
“What the fuck?” Acid was yelling. “Hey, get the fuck outta here, guys!”
Banjo was still taunting the coon and wondered what the hell the Savage was yelling about. Muscle fired his gun three times until he ran out of ammo, but he was still pulling the trigger. Banjo could hear the clicking of the hammer in the dark, even with numbed ears, as it repeatedly came down on empty cylinders. Jeeter grabbed his arm.
“Where’s Fats?” He was in a panic. His shades were off and his eyes were wide.
“What? How the hell should I know?” Banjo looked back when talking to Jeeter and saw the dead coming at them from two sides. The others were panicking. He remained cool. He knew how to handle these things. He still had Old Crow dangling at his side, held in his right hand.
“Where’s Fats, man?” Jeeter was shouting. “FATS!” He ran off into the darkness.
All his brothers were panicked, and Banjo was disappointed. He looked over and saw Jack standing his ground, looking very much as Banjo felt. Jack gave him a little nod of his head. Then he shrugged and walked over to Banjo. One of the dead made the mistake of coming for him. Jack put him down with Old Crow’s twin. He held it up and smiled at Banjo.
“I think we should walk away so we can come back and lynch another day.” Jack stopped in front of Banjo. “My guys know to follow, yours?”
“Course.” Banjo took a step with his fellow dealer of death and walked toward the runways. They disappeared into the darkness, leaving their brothers to fend for themselves.
§
Jeeter’s hysterical shouts caught Henry’s attention and pulled him from his musings. He looked up to see several dead bodies walking past. He was shocked, but they were ignoring him. The screaming bikers and their guns drew the most attention. Jeeter rushed at Henry from the direction of the garage.
“Fats. Come on, man, let’s get out of here.” He was yelling, clomping around in big boots. The dead were turning to follow him.
Henry watched as the bikers behind Jeeter engaged with the dead. He watched Jeeter freaking out and the approaching line of corpses behind him, moments away from overtaking them. Henry thought he was probably going to die soon, for one reason or another. His life, the life he wanted, had ended eleven years before the world did. Jeeter pulled on him, yelling for him to move.
“Fats! Come on! Fats!” He was in a full panic, shrieking and pulling on Fats.
But Henry wasn’t playing Fats anymore, and the look in his eyes scared Jeeter and brought him up short. Henry looked at him with an expression of sorrow, then walked over to him and bear-hugged him and lifted him off his feet, pinning his arms to his sides. Jeeter desperately tried to break free.
When Henry turned and walked toward the advancing dead, Jeeter shrieked at a higher pitch than before. He was kicking and thrashing in Henry’s arms. The dead crowded around them. Then Henry dropped Jeeter to the ground. He never stood up again.
Henry fell back. The pain was intense and made his eyes water. He whimpered but didn’t let himself scream out. He was glad it was all over.
§
“Did you see that?” Cooper stopped. The dead were flocking toward the structure. Dale was next to him.
“Yeah.” Dale assumed he was talking about the fat biker committing a murder-suicide by carrying the other biker into a crowd of the dead.
“Wonder what the hell that was about.” Cooper was starting to inch forward again. A few of the dead came at him from the darkness, but he expected it now. They were much closer to the dead and the structure, where the dead were getting distracted by the bikers and clumping up. He pulled his baton and took out three of them. It only took a few seconds for him to dispatch them and collapse his baton, so he was startled when he turned back to the garage.
Dale was fighting two of the bikers. One of the bikers was huge, a tall, thick man with a giant belly. Cooper had spent only a second processing this when one of the bikers pulled a hunting knife from a sheath on his leg and plunged it into Dale’s leg.
Dale pulled his gun, and the big one punched him in the face and he dropped it. The blow seemed to stun Dale to near unconsciousness. The big biker pulled his gun, a giant chromed cannon. He pressed it to Dale’s head.
Both bikers faced Dale. He was bleeding from the nose and mouth. The wound in his leg was bleeding profusely and made it hard to stand. He’d been caught by surprise as the bikers came upon him in the dark. That shouldn’t have happened. He’d failed the kid. He would die and they would turn and kill Cooper.
Dale was looking right at the big biker holding the gun to his head, waiting for death. The big bastard was smiling and was about to say something when his eyes crossed and he dropped to the ground. Dale looked up, and the other biker was on the ground too. Cooper was standing there, his pistols swinging from their tethers, his face a mixture of emotions—confusion, fear, but mostly sorrow.
“I shot them.” He was talking to Dale in a whisper. He looked close to losing it. Dale remembered his first shooting. No matter how justified a shooting was, a decent person had to process the taking of a life. He would help the kid through this. The kid had saved his life once again.
Dale put his arm around Cooper’s shoulder and tried to walk, but he collapsed. Cooper fell with him to the ground.
“Cooper, you have to hold it together a little longer. We have to move.”
Cooper stood and looked around then down at Dale. “It’s too late.”
Dale propped himself up on his arm and looked around. The dead surrounded them. He couldn’t walk and was losing blood. He pulled off his belt and wrapped his leg. The kid—for he looked just like a kid now, despite the facial hair—was standing there in shock. Cooper had told him the story of how he tried to shoot Tug to save Ana but couldn’t. Dale knew what a tremendous struggle it was to take a life, how hard it must have been for Cooper to kill the two men.
The corpses closed the circle around them and formed an impenetrable wall of rotten flesh. Cooper stood, unmoving.
§
Ron watched as the dead swarmed the ground below the garage. The bikers were taken off guard, and it looked like several didn’t make it. He could see by the low rising moon that the dead numbered in the hundreds. He had been praying for a miracle and one came in the form of hundreds of rotting corpses. He ran to Sal and Donna.
“Sal needs help. I stopped the bleeding, but I think the bullet broke into pieces. It didn’t go through clean.” Donna looked up at Ron, fear in her eyes.
“A swarm showed up. I think the bikers are gone.” Ron looked dazed. He couldn’t believe how quickly the tables had turned.
“Ron. He needs help,” Donna repeated with greater emphasis.
He looked down. “I need to go get the others.”
Everyone gathered around Sal. He slipped in and out of consciousness a few times. He was covered in sweat and groaned constantly. Everyone felt so helpless.
“The ambulance!” Ana ran down the ramp.
“Wait,” several voices called to her, but she was gone. Donna took off after her and quickly caught up.
“Hey, slow down!” They ran together. “You know you can’t go down there now.”
“The ambulance has stuff we can use, lots of stuff. And I’m not stupid, I’m not going to try to crowd surf on the zombies.”
Donna smiled. “I know.”
They got to the elevator and waited for the others.
Ana looked at Donna. “You’re a runner?”
“Yeah, marathons.” Then she chuckled. “You know, we’re going to be waiting here for a while. From what I’ve seen, you and I are superheroes.”
They heard the squeal of tires coming down the ramps. Ana rolled her eyes. “They’re driving.”
The group all gathered around the hole where a ramp used to be. It was dark, but they could hear the dead below them, shuffling, moaning, gasping.
Mary stayed with Sal and held his hand. She was worried. He was losing a lot of blood. No one was around and he looked unconscious, so she kissed him on the forehead.
§
Blood pooled under Dale’s leg. The tightly cinched belt was almost as painful as the stab wound itself, but the pain was secondary to the fear. Several hundred shambling corpses surrounded him and Cooper, and they were closing in. He slapped Cooper’s legs hard to get his attention.
The kid’s just standing there
, he thought in a panic. He yelled, stealth and silence useless now. Cooper still had a chance to survive if he acted now, but Dale knew he was done for.
No way I’m getting out of this alive
, he thought.
“Hey! Hey! Cooper! Run now! Before they get too thick! Fucking run, man!”
Cooper looked down at Dale with a blank expression. He was just becoming aware that someone was hitting him and yelling at him.
Dale watched Cooper’s face and could see the moment he returned from wherever he was mentally, as Cooper’s eyes focused on him, “Hey man, there’s no use both of us dying. Now go, get out of here.”
It took a while to register in Cooper’s mind that he was in grave danger and that both he and Dale would die if he didn’t act immediately. He raised his pistols. “That tourniquet tight?” he asked Dale over his shoulder.
There were five zombies within a few feet of the two, and Cooper took each of them out with a headshot as they stepped right up to him. There were many, many more behind them, and Cooper had to act fast.
Cooper was focused, shutting out the hundreds of naked corpses looking like ghosts as their skin glowed a pale blue under the rising moon. They were within seconds of bringing him down and tearing him to pieces, so he wasted not one precious moment.
He dropped the left-hand pistol as he ran past Dale and grabbed him by the back of his collar. He raised the right-hand gun and took out three more zombies that were closing in.
“Don’t fire the gun,” Cooper stated flatly as he started running, dragging Dale across the tarmac in the sitting position facing backward. He fired—
click, click, click
, and dropped three more within two yards.
Dale watched his feet as Cooper dragged him backward. A zombie dropped across his legs, but Cooper kept pulling and the zombie wasn’t able to grab hold. A following corpse tripped over that one and a few more after that. But there were plenty more surrounding them. Another zombie fell across Dale’s legs. The pain from the wound was intense. Dale had both arms free, and as the corpse tried to bite his leg—teeth rubbing across his jeans, trying to get a mouthful it could rip away—Dale slammed his handgun on the back of its head. Black liquid oozed from a widening hole he’d cracked in the skull. Finally it let go, and he slid faster as the dead weight dropped away and Cooper could move faster.
Dale watched a few corpses drop to the ground a split second after a .22 slug entered their skull. He could hear the kid’s silenced gun clicking away, but he was sure he and the kid weren’t going to make it. They were in the middle of the lot and surrounded by the dead. He took the safety off his gun. If they were overcome, he would take the kid out first as a kindness, then himself. No one should have to die like that.
Suddenly there was a loud metallic rattling. Dale came to a stop. Zombies were just inches from him. One fell to its knees, grabbing Dale’s feet, and started biting on the toe of his boot. He couldn’t reach it or kick it off, so he just let it chew. He figured the kid had worn out, or maybe they got him, he couldn’t tell. He started to turn, gun in hand, to do what needed to be done, when he started moving again.
Another zombie was on the back of the first and trying to climb toward him. The toe chewer was getting tired of tasting boot leather and was looking up at Dale too. He was moving slowly backward, being dragged up a small ledge and across what felt like a board.
It was dark, but he could see that there were no zombies near him, and he didn’t understand how that could be. He heard a
click, click
from above his head, and the two at his feet stopped moving. Cooper was at his ear.
“Don’t move. Sit very still.”
Dale looked down. He was sitting on a board atop an aluminum ladder. The ladder spanned what had to be the incredibly deep hole Cooper had told him about. He felt the ladder bouncing and sagging. It creaked under their combined weight. Then it was still and Cooper’s arm reached slowly past him.
Cooper and Dale rolled the deadheads off Dale’s legs and into the hole. Cooper wrapped his arms around Dale’s chest and pulled him farther out on the ladder. Now that things were calming down, Dale could see what was happening around the hole. He watched as the dead stepped off into oblivion. The few that got a foot on the ladder only managed one step before dropping into the darkness. The ladder jumped and rattled as the zombies slammed into it as they fell.
Holy shit
, Dale thought,
the kid did it. He saved us both.