Feedback (26 page)

Bullets, and other things. One of the younger Irwins had been hanging back, staying behind the first rank of shooters. I'd assumed it was because he was scared. Even field-licensed Irwins don't always see real action within their first year, especially if they're under twenty-one when they start. The nastier hazard zones are off-limits until twenty-five, and even the moderate ones don't unlock until a person is past the legal drinking age. I've never been sure why. Drunk people and zombies are a recipe for disaster.

This was a leggy kid, all arms and elbows. He was about nineteen, and he wasn't holding back to let the shooters do their job. He was holding back while he assembled his polearm.

It was a fancy piece of work, too. It looked like a 3D-printed glaive—basically a long stick, in this case made up of separate pieces of screwed-together piping, with a hooked blade at the end. It had probably seemed like a great idea on paper. The action was always five feet away, held at bay by that wickedly designed hook. It had probably seemed even better when he was practicing in his backyard or garage, disemboweling dummies filled with ballistics gel and making war-whoop sounds.

I realized what he was going to do a bare second after he launched himself toward the oncoming mob. “
No!
” I shouted, and the sound of gunfire drowned out my voice, rendering it small and inconsequential. Not that I could have stopped him. He was already moving, racing toward the dead with his glaive held rigidly in front of him, whooping with delight. His head, I knew, would be full of visions of glory, dreams of the headlines he was going to dominate. Humanity has always been happy to reward the daring and the foolish, holding us up like role models when really, we're just illustrations of the best things not to do with your life.

Everyone had noticed him now, including the zombies. A few people stopped firing, some from visible shock, others from the desire not to hurt the kid, who was one of our own, after all. But not one of us went after him. It felt like my feet were rooted to the blood-colored ground, anchored in place by a weight too enormous for me to ever shift. It was all happening too fast. It was all happening in slow motion at the same time.

He reached the front rank of the zombies, his glaive slicing into the first of them with ease. He whooped as he pulled it loose and whirled it a few feet to the side, cutting the second zombie across the stomach. Its guts fell out with a wet plopping sound, and the zombie went down. Kellis-Amberlee might raise the dead and grant them enhanced blood-clotting properties, but not even it could keep somebody standing after their insides made their first public appearance.

Pulling the glaive loose, the kid whooped again and swung for a third zombie. His foot hit a piece of intestine, and he stumbled, missing by inches.

The zombie that had come up on his side didn't miss. It grabbed his shoulder, yanked him backward, and bit down, ripping a huge chunk out of the side of his neck. He screamed, a high, agonized sound that bore no resemblance to his gleeful war cries. The glaive fell from his hands, making a splashing sound when it landed in the blood that was pooling all around.

The noise broke the spell that this bizarre incident had cast over the shooters. We opened fire again, all of us working together to gun down the remaining zombies. I don't know whose bullet caught the kid, but he fell, a black hole in the middle of his forehead and no life left in his eyes. He wasn't going to be getting up again. That was a small, strained mercy. It was all we had.

Jody screamed.

The sound came from behind me. I whipped around, trusting Chase and the others to cover the hole I had made in our wall of bullets. My eyes widened. All those suppositions I'd made—
we'd
made, since no one had contradicted me—about a fresh mob being too new to plan beyond the moment, they'd all been correct.

We hadn't calculated on there being a second mob, one that had been approaching silently through the trees on the other side, their moans muffled by the sound of the gunfire. “
Incoming!
” I shouted, and opened fire, taking down the first two. Jody had recovered from her surprise. She was firing as well, but there were more of them in this second group, and we were moving toward the point where we would need to reload.

“Fall back!” shouted Chase. “We don't know how many more are in those trees!”

Retreat went against every bit of my training, which said that I should never run if there was any chance of carrying the day. But there were zombies everywhere, and that kid, whatever his name was, that kid was dead; that kid wasn't coming back. I fired one more time before turning, falling into step with Chase as we ran.

There were zombies ahead and zombies behind, but they hadn't closed the gaps on the sides yet: The way to the open plain between the wood and the convention-center fences was clear. We hauled ass out into the middle of it before forming a circle, some of us slamming new clips into our weapons, the rest just waiting for the dead to catch up.

All except for Karl. He saw his opening, and he took it, weaving around the edge of the second mob and hoofing it as fast as he could toward the fence outside the convention center.

Maybe it was a glitch in the security system. Maybe he was moving too fast, and there was no margin in the biometric scanners; they could have taken him for a zombie, with the way he was racing across the uneven ground. Whatever the reason, he was two feet from the fence and extending his hand toward the testing box when the nearest of the automated snipers opened its blank eye, and a muffled sound like a blast of air being forced through a hose cut through the stillness. Karl didn't have time to react. He fell backward, revealing the hole where his left eye had been, and landed, unmoving, on the ground.

On the ground in front of the gate. Which would now be saturated with his blood. His dead, and hence bioactive, blood. Even if we got past the mob, we couldn't use the gate; we'd be biohazards the second we stepped in what Karl had spilled. No matter how many blood tests we cleared, the convention center security drones would flag us and gun us down.

“Chase, how the hell do we get to the front of the convention center without going through the fences?” I asked the question quietly, not because I was trying to keep it secret—all these people were smart, all these people were reaching the same conclusions I was—but because I didn't dare allow myself to raise my voice. If I started yelling, I wasn't going to stop.

I had no eye protection. I had no leg protection. I wore sundresses into the field on a regular basis, sure, but always when
I
had chosen the field, when
I
had calculated the risks. The rose garden had happened fast and hot and I'd been the one who chose to run toward the danger—me and no one else. Mat had been an unwitting draftee. This time, the danger had come to me, and while I wasn't unnerved enough to forget my training, I was definitely off balance. I just wanted to get out of here alive. I didn't want the perfunctory kiss I'd given Audrey before she trundled off to the convention center and I made for the Irwins' barbeque to be our last. Maybe it was selfish, especially with two people already dead—two people aside from the seemingly endless waves of zombies that were closing in on us—but sometimes selfishness is the truest human impulse of all. Sometimes selfishness is the thing that keeps you alive when everything else fails.

“We have to go back into the woods,” he said. There was a flat, resigned note to his voice, like he'd been circling this conclusion for some time, trying to find any other way to accomplish what he wanted to do. “There's a maintenance road half a mile in. It connects to the tunnel system used for the landscaping and cleanup crews. There's formalin, flamethrowers, everything you could need to stop an outbreak. We just have to get there.”

Get there, with zombies on every side except our rear, where a homicidal fence was waiting to take us down for getting too close, and with most of our ammo already expended. It was an impossible thing for the world to ask of us. It was never going to happen. It was our only chance.

I didn't know most of these Irwins well enough to know their strengths or weaknesses, but I knew what I could see. Like that one Irwin who was built like a small mountain going for a walk. Like Jody, who was tiny and lithe and accustomed to holding perfectly still for long periods of time. Like Chase, who knew the terrain.

And I knew, more than anything else in the world, that I didn't want to die out here. Not today; not like this. “Everyone!” I shouted, even as the gunshots rang in my ears and my own gun jerked in my hand. The shot was clean; the zombie fell. Three more were waiting to take his place. “There's a maintenance road half a mile in! We won't all make it there, but we won't all make it here, either! Who's for a rabbit-run to safety?”

The cameras were on, their lenses greedily gobbling up every picosecond of footage. None of this would be lost. Enough of our Newsies knew what was going on that I'd be stunned if half of them weren't already sending up drone-mounted recorders to get aerial shots. All of us wanted to survive this. Fieldwork and death wishes don't go together well, or at least, they don't go together well for
long
, and everyone here had been working the circuit long enough that I had faith in their desire to stay alive. But even more than we wanted to survive, most of us wanted to be remembered as something amazing. There was a reason the Action News reporters of the world took their name from Steve Irwin, a man who never met a camera he wouldn't mug for or a venomous snake he wouldn't pick up and admire. His legacy might have been his family, but his immortality was in his recordings.

Anyone who told me no would look like a coward. Some of them knew that, and had been glaring at me since the words “maintenance road” had left my mouth. The rest were nodding, some even taking their eyes off the mob to look at me.

“How?” shouted Jody.

“Climb the big guy!” I called back, pointing to Eric. He was easily six and a half feet tall; he'd do. “Make a mobile sniper's platform! Chase, you know where we're going—I'll take point, keep you covered while you follow and give me directions. I want covering fire. Now move!” I pulled the trigger one more time, and saw the nearest zombie go down in a heap of limbs before I turned and bolted for the tree line. Footsteps behind me told me that Chase was in close pursuit. That, or the zombies were closer than we'd ever thought. Either way, I needed to keep running.

The two mobs hadn't quite managed to merge together, and there was still a narrow avenue between them. I hurled myself down it, shooting when necessary, running for the tree line. A dead man loomed out of nowhere. I put a bullet in his forehead, turning my face aside to avoid blood splatter, and kept on moving. It was the only thing I could do, now that I was committed.

“Keep moving forward!” commanded Chase. I kept moving forward. That was easier than turning, or slowing down: Now that my body was in motion, it wanted to
stay
in motion. I wanted to run forever. If I ran forever, I wouldn't be forced to deal with the things that happened when I was still. I would never be caught. I would never die.

My foot hit a patch of spilled blood and went out from under me, sending me backward. A massive hand closed around my hair and jerked me upright again, sending a bolt of stinging pain through my scalp. The hand let go and I kept running, glancing to the side to see Jody and her human sniper tower pulling up level with me. His was the hand that had stopped me from falling. Eric wasn't looking at me: His eyes were fixed on the path ahead, presumably so he could aim the massive sawed-off shotgun that he had braced against his chest. Jody had her legs around his neck, her ankles crossed at his sternum; she was twisted to face behind her, and her rifle spoke constantly, spitting bullets like curses into the chilly Southern air.

Someone screamed. Someone else swore. All of us kept running, kept shooting, kept doing whatever it took to get where we needed to be.

I didn't see the next of us to die. She was at the rear of the pack, a slight little thing with brown hair in tight braids and camo pants that bulged with too many pockets. I'd seen her before, gracing the mastheads of various small feeder sites—the kind of places that followed other reporters to the news, rather than seeking it out for themselves. Buzzards instead of lions. But she had been smart, and she had been kind, and it wasn't her fault that I didn't know her name. I had learned it and forgotten it on the same day.

I would never forget the way she screamed. It was high and piercing and pained, and almost drowned out a moment later when the zombies increased the volume of their moans and fell upon her, greedy hands ripping into her body, greedy mouths going for her flesh. I hated that we couldn't stop and save her that last agony, even as a small, brutal part of me delighted in the time she had just purchased for us.
She'll be a hero,
I promised myself.
When I tell this story, she'll be a hero
. I could spin her that way, make her a sacrifice rather than a statistic. It was the only thing I had left to offer her.

And it would only happen if I made it as far as the maintenance tunnels. Chase shouted commands from behind me, and I cleared the path ahead while Jody picked off anything that got too close, and the other out-of-town Irwins formed a bubble of moving safe space around him, keeping Chase as safe as we possibly could.

My ear cuff beeped. I ignored it and kept running. This wasn't a good time for distractions. It beeped again, and again, until I realized that it wasn't going to stop; it was either take the call or do the rest of this run with that noise in my ear, gradually wearing down my concentration. Neither option was good, but one was slightly less bearable than the other. I ticked my head hard to the side, opening the connection.

“I'm a bit busy at the moment, darlin',” I said, making my brogue almost as broad as Karl—may he rest in peace, and not merely in pieces—had done earlier.