The safety glass was one-sixteenth of an inch thicker than the original glass, so screws had not been used to replace the moldings. The relatively new synthetic caulk was used instead, and it had gamely held the heavy sheets of glass in place for decades. The 1970s renovations committee had not considered the possibility that scores of living dead bodies would be throwing themselves against the glass. Decades later, it hadn’t occurred to Danny to check that the windows were properly anchored in their frames. Nobody broke into police stations, after all.
Danny rushed into the space behind the partition. From there she could
see two dozen zombies struggling beneath a sagging blanket of broken glass, the top still suspended in the frame. Even as she watched, the pane fell entirely, spilling a million glittering crumbs across the floor. It was the central one of three large panels that had given way, pushed out of the frame at the bottom by sheer biomass. The glazing was composed of sandwiched layers of glass and plastic, so it formed a pendulous sheet like a broken windshield. The zombies tore it apart in their struggle to get into the station. Although the brick footing of the wall was thigh-high, two of the things had already made it onto the station floor and were dragging themselves to their feet, fragments of glass falling from them like droplets of water.
Their eyes were on Danny. Already, they were on the hunt again.
For an instant, Danny thought the partition might stop them. But she knew better. It was only two-by-fours and plywood with Plexiglas above, not one of those serious bulletproof screens found in banks. She had sixty seconds, assuming the partition door even held that long.
Now there were ten zombies on their feet, lurching across the waiting area. The window had collapsed less than thirty seconds earlier. The rooftop escape was not going to happen. Danny’s fingers were clawing at the holster on her belt. There was no gun. She stepped backward out of the front room, closed the door, and turned to her companions.
“Wulf, you still want the Winchester?” she called out. But Wulf wasn’t there.
“He already took it,” Maria said. She was no longer at the radio. She stood against the wall, her hands crossed over her collarbones in a posture of supplication.
“And left,” added Weaver. He was locking the back door.
“That old sack of shit,” Danny said, wishing Wulf luck after her own fashion. She was in constant motion now, wasting no instant of time.
Delegate
, she thought, but she couldn’t think of a task it wouldn’t be quicker to do herself.
Except: “I want everybody to grab a weapon. You, Blue Hair! You ever shot a gun? No? Grab anything you can use as a club. Patrick, you make sure she gets moving, but she’s not your problem. Amy, you can shoot, we both know you can.”
Danny tossed a rifle to Amy. It had a banana clip. Amy grabbed a box of bullets and started thumbing them into the clip. Danny knew Amy hated guns, and hated hunting more—many of her patients were wild animals
wounded by idiots who just shot at things for the sheer hell of it. Danny’s own love of hunting sprang from her desire to spend any quality time with her father, but Danny hadn’t been hunting since she returned from the war.
Danny knew something else about Amy and guns, though: Despite her antipathy toward firearms in general, Amy had been born with the deadeye gift; she could hit damn near anything she aimed at.
Danny stuffed shotgun shells from the gun cabinet into her pockets, then hefted out the Remington pump shotgun, the last of their Mossbergs, and an ugly sawed-off lever-action she didn’t know the make of. They had confiscated it from that lunatic Jimmy Dietrich in February. Danny turned and threw a box of shells at Weaver.
“Load this thing up. You know how to shoot?” He nodded. “Good.” She tossed him the short-barreled gun. It looked like a Marlin 410, she realized, and then felt a flash of anger. Her mind was not on the job. Guns weren’t going to solve this problem. Rapid improvisation was the ticket to the rest of their lives.
Danny had locked the door between the front and back rooms, and after a crash on the other side of the wall, they could all hear the fingers clawing over the surface. And the moan. They were swarming in there, moaning with hunger. Pressing against that door. A thump on the
back
door. More of them outside. Maria screeched involuntarily and pointed at the window beside her. A flood of pale faces was swirling past, moving toward the alley.
They can think a little
, Danny saw.
They knew enough to look for a door
.
“Patrick, Maria? This button is the safety. Leave it off. This here is the trigger. Aim for the head, and hang on because these things kick.” Danny crossed to Maria and slapped an LAPD-issue Beretta into her tiny hand, then pulled Patrick and Michelle out of the cell. She took Patrick’s hand and closed it around a Saturday night special Danny had personally liberated from an unregistered gardening truck two weeks earlier. He shrank away from the thing, but Danny kept her hands around his until he relaxed a little. Everyone was standing around her now, at the door to the cell. Quick summary, then it was time for all hell to break loose.
“Those things don’t move fast. They’re not strong. We’re going outside. I’ll clear a space at the back door. Then you go right, you understand me? Come out behind me and
go right
. There’s a chain-link fence, get behind it and run toward Main Street. Do not stop under any circumstances. You’re going to hear some shouting and screaming from me. Ignore that. It’s for those things. You all get it?”
The others nodded. Weaver was slipping shells into his shotgun with practiced skill. Maria was holding her automatic by the barrel like a dead fish.
Weaver spoke: “This decoy thing won’t work. It’s suicide.”
As if to punctuate his statement, there was a loud impact on the other side of the door between front and back rooms.
“What?” Patrick said. He didn’t look like he was going to last very long. Weaver put an arm around Patrick’s shoulders and pulled him in tight.
“She’s going to try and get those things to go one way and we go the other,” Weaver said.
“But that’s
crazy,”
Amy said. “Absolutely not, Adelman. I forbid it.”
Danny didn’t have time for this shit. Weaver unhooked his arm from around Patrick and extended his hand to Danny.
“You’re a hell of a guy,” he said. They shook hands.
“No, this isn’t going to happen,” Amy said, and broke the handclasp by stepping between them, her face an inch from Danny’s. Danny said nothing, but pushed Amy away with the barrel of the shotgun across her chest.
“You have one advantage, and it’s not firepower,” Danny said, turning her back on Amy. She didn’t want any more hesitation. It sent the wrong message. She crossed to the back door. “Your advantage is speed. You need to keep close to the buildings so you’re protected on one side, understand? And
run
. Run for the motor home. Here’s the hard part. If somebody falls, leave them. If somebody gets bit, don’t stop. Just run. Run like all the devils of hell were after you.”
“They will be,” Patrick whispered.
“We’re on the same page, then,” Danny said.
“Danny,” Amy said. Danny shook her head. No more. There wasn’t another second to waste, because if one person in the world could talk Danny out of doing what she had to do, it was Amy. Danny would have loved to hear why they could do something differently, but none of it would be true. They would end up fighting an army of the undead inside the station, and all of them would be torn apart like Mrs. Larry. Out in the open, there was a chance somebody would get through.
“Please!” Amy cried.
Danny couldn’t look her in the eye. She turned to the door, threw back the lock, and yanked the door open.
Danny racked a shell into the chamber, and it sounded like the apocalypse when she fired it into the mass of exposed teeth in gray faces that surged
toward her. A geyser of meat and bone and zombie blood sprayed into the air. The stuff looked like used motor oil. Danny could see the shape of the blast as it carved a channel among the zombies’ heads.
An instant later she fired again, to her right, and then again, to her left. Six or seven of the things were crumpling, falling away. There was a gap now. Danny fired again and again until the gun was empty, then swung it like a club. She had two more guns across her back, but somehow she didn’t think she was going to get the time to deploy either one.
“Go!” she barked, and threw herself full-body into the writhing nightmare of limbs and teeth.
There had been about twenty zombies in the alley when Danny opened the door, and out of the corner of her eye she saw more of them coming from both sides of the building. Only around the door were they packed in tight.
There was a hair-thin chance.
But Danny had to break through this first swarm if she was going to get anywhere near Main Street—or anybody else was, for that matter.
She wasn’t thinking now. Not since she threw the door open. She was only responding to the shape of the situation in front of her, looking for the next action to take.
The shotgun had plowed huge ruts through the zombies, creating space. Danny hurled herself into it. The zombies went for her. Danny was already moving, rolling on knees and elbows, keeping every part of herself in motion so that the monsters would have to work hard to get a piece of her between their teeth. But she couldn’t move away from where she was, not quickly, or the things would become distracted by the other survivors. They had to keep responding to the easy meat in front of them.
Danny hadn’t warned her companions to keep quiet. Amy was shouting. If these things hunted by sound, she was ruining everything. Danny felt an excruciating pinch on her leg and brought the shotgun down across the neck of a dead child that had a fold of her skin in its teeth. Danny used twice the force necessary and the small head almost broke free of the neck, but the biting stopped.
She couldn’t tell if her own skin was broken. She was already back on her feet, whirling the gun to knock back the reaching hands that clawed at her. Whether the others were clear or not, Danny had to start moving fast.
She broke into a run, and immediately discovered she didn’t have much use of the leg that had been struck by a wing mirror so long ago. She’d let it
get stiff. The knots would have to come out the hard way. She forced the sluggish limb to pump alongside the other. Rammed the butt of the shotgun into a gaping mouth, then reversed the thrust into an eye socket directly behind. She left the gun there, the zombie groping to pull the weapon free. The second shotgun, the Mossberg, was already in her hands.
She heard shots. Somebody else, at least, had gotten outside. She didn’t know how far away the shots were or what direction they came from. She blew the head off a big zombie in her path and the entire cranium flew off the neck and spiraled into the sky. She leaped at the body as it fell and almost surfed the thing into the zombies behind it, then threw herself through the thicket of legs below.
Danny felt like there was no strength in her body. The repeated doses of adrenaline, the lack of sleep were catching up fast, and there were parts of the reptile brain that wanted to cut their losses and die. It was a wall, the same one athletes hit. The body ceases to cooperate and willpower takes over. When the willpower is out of bargaining chips, there is nothing else left but to keep moving, somehow. Any way possible. Danny kept moving, but she knew there was nothing but luck between her and a hundred mouths ripping spurting chunks out of her until she died of shock and blood loss.
Another mouth crushed into the skin of her shoulder, but she twisted away and the teeth only tore her shirt. She ran blindly forward, ramming into the undead, shoving them away with boneless limbs. More gunfire from somewhere, and screaming. Then Danny hit the chain-link fence, so hard it almost knocked her out. She tumbled backward, dazed, and as she hit the pavement, the hands and teeth seemed to pour out of the sunset sky, rushing down to rip her apart.
There was a deafening bang, and fountains of blackened meat and streams of blood sprayed out and the whole corpse tableau jerked sideways and Weaver was there, firing again with one hand and reaching down for Danny with the other. He dragged her a few feet, Danny using her legs to kick rather than walk, because the zombies were trying to bite her in earnest now, six at a time trying to get a purchase on her flesh. She rolled and came up beside Weaver and they shot their way out like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
They got free of the almost solid mass of things that had converged on Danny’s position, and were now in a narrow channel between those that were turning to follow Danny’s group of survivors, and those that had gone
after Danny herself. The things were slow—that was what saved their lives. Danny saw but did not absorb that Patrick, Amy, Maria, and Blue Hair had all made it to the end of the station and were rushing out into Main Street as she and Weaver reached the driveway that led away from the alley.
Danny and Weaver sprinted after them, the stink of cordite and spilled guts rank in their nostrils.
The zombies had a tendency to bunch up, because they had no regard for anything but their immediate desire to rip into living flesh. Somewhere in Danny’s mind this fact was filed away and added to the hypothesis. It was already of some use. There was a big gap in the crowd where the zombies had staggered away after the others. Danny rushed into it.
“Weaver, go after them,” she said.
“I’m with you,” he replied.
“You have the keys, asshole!” Danny said.
Weaver clubbed a zombie to the ground, once a short, stout man with a bald head. The butt of Weaver’s shotgun was covered in scraps of hair and skin.
“Gave ’em to Patrick,” he said, and ran toward the junction of 144 and Main. And with that, Danny was no longer out in front of her own plan.
She ran as fast as her stiff leg would carry her, shouting at the top of her lungs and waving her arms to draw as much attention as possible.