Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (36 page)

“They were a bunch of bitches,” Kat replied,
pausing to reload her pistol after taking it from the writer's
unfeeling hand.

“Well, regardless,” Rae said, and nudged a
corpse with her boot, “we need to get moving. George took the gate
out
with that monstrosity of his, so we shouldn't dawdle.
Our smelly friends outside will be coming soon, and they're still
darned hungry.”

When Jake didn't respond, Kat glanced at him
worriedly.

“Rae, could you go let George know we're on
the way?” she asked.

“Sure. Oh. There weren't any of these
assholes left inside, were there?” she asked, pointing at one of
the corpses that had been killed by one of her grenades. His top
half anyway.

“No. They were all outside watching the
show,” he told them, eyes unfocused.

“Good. Laurel and Penny went to check the
upstairs and hunt around for you. I'll send Donna to find her, and
have George get ready to roll.”

Jake continued to stare at the dead Purifiers
on the patio as the trio headed back through the cafeteria. Kat
knew his shoulder had to be killing him after the firefight. It had
already bled through his bandages, slowly allowing crimson to drip
down his arm, and he was very pale. Shock was beginning to look
like a real possibility, as she moved to take his face between her
hands.

“Hey. Come on, hero. We need to go.”

“What's the point?” he asked numbly. “It's
all like this. Everyone in the whole damn world is trying to feed
on someone else, one way or another. Poole, Nichole, the zombies.
They're no different. And they're trying to turn me into one of
them.”

She pulled him into her arms, ignoring the
blood that coated her right shoulder and upper torso, as he wrapped
his good arm around her. “You're not like them,” Cho said firmly,
willing him to believe it.

“I murdered those men laying right there.”
Jake was trembling. “I'll do it again, if I think it might be
necessary. I should feel bad about that, but I don't. I
don't.
Why can't I feel anything?”

Kat held him tighter. “You've got a strong
heart, Jake. A
good
heart. It's not in you to be cruel. I'd
no more believe you'd turn into a monster than I would that George
could start dancing around in a pink tutu, singing 'It's Raining
Men'. You could never be like these bastards. It's not in
you
.”

She pulled back enough to look in his
fear-filled eyes. “And even if it were, I wouldn't let that
happen.”

Jake could tell she meant it. Kat didn't show
that side of her personality often. Usually she was the bubbly—if
slightly vapid—good natured sex-kitten. When the steel began to
show in her eyes though, watch out.

“How do you do that?” he mumbled.

Confused, she asked, “How do I do what?”

“Make me want to kick myself for introducing
you to Allen.” Jake said quietly, and finally looking her in the
eye. “Make me wish I'd taken you out of that pharmacy and flown us
to a beach in Aruba the day we met.”

“I used to read a lot of romance novels.”

“
You?”
He gaped at her
incredulously.

“Hey, sex and romance aren’t the same thing,”
Kat said defensively. “You can have
sex
with anybody. But
romance? You need to care about a person. You need to have a
connection.”

The thoughtful way he looked at her made
Kat's heart speed up. “You know something?”

She was feeling a little out of breath under
his gaze. “What?”

He leaned forward and his eyes never wavered
from hers. Jake whispered to her, his lips a hair's width from her
own. “I've
always
said the same thing.”

Kat was trembling in the circle of his arm
now. “So...um. So what do we—”

A high scream rang out from inside the
building. Breaking apart, they bolted into the office block,
weapons ready, dashed through the cafeteria and into the echoing
room housing the plant’s massive turbines.

Rae and Gwen were backing towards them from
the far wall, their own weapons pulled tightly to their shoulders
and aimed towards the door leading outside.

The Mimi wasn't out there.

The infected were
.

“Oh.
Shit,”
O'Connor whispered.

There were, quite literally, a river of the
dead flowing by outside. The rotting conga line stretched all the
way back to the gate, three-hundred yards distant. Many of the
creatures had spread out a bit as they entered the facility, but
the majority simply remained true to form and continued to shuffle
towards any stimuli.

In this case, the high volume of noise
generated by their parties battle with the Purifiers.

The nearest creatures noticed the open door,
and then the humans standing within. Yellow eyes locked on them in
almost palatable hunger, and gray skinned jaws dropped open with
gurgling moans. Then the first of them stepped though the doorway,
and the
whole damn horde
began moving towards the
survivors.

“
Shoot!”
Jake yelled.

They began fighting for their lives. Brains,
long-congealed blood, and fetid fluids spattered across the far
wall. It coated the faces of the infected behind the first rank,
but they kept coming.

They aimed for the heads, realizing any other
hit was useless and that their ammo supply was finite. They fired
carefully, calmly, hitting seven of ten head-shots, trying to block
the door with the fallen and deny the creatures entry. The dead
stumbled over the prone bodies of their predecessors and kept
coming.

Jake shot over and over, nailing the awful
things through their eyes with rounds from the AR-15. Kat hit the
bulls eye, striking them through the center of their brows with
bullets from both Glocks, but the dead kept coming.

Gwen pulped their frontal lobes with shots
from the barrel of her own AR-15. Rae vaporized entire heads with
blasts from her XM-8, sending rotting bodies flying back to impact
lifelessly against the faces of the ghouls behind.

The dead... kept... coming.

Their party was slowly pushed back among the
turbines as more and more infected filtered through the opening.
Dozens lay truly dead all over the building's floor, but hundreds
more were still on the way. The creatures filled half the room now
and
still
more pushed in behind, hungry for the life behind
slowly heating, blued-steel barrels.

At that point, Donna rushed from the
stairwell. She was talking over her shoulder with Penny and Laurel,
so she hadn't paid much attention to where she was going. The
turbine house was well soundproofed, due to the excessive noise the
huge machines made when in use, so neither of the other women had
heard the single-sided firefight either, until they were in the
middle of it.

“…so Kat said to come get you and… YIPE!”

The blonde had run headlong into one of the
creatures, knocking it over against other members of the terrible
horde. She stumbled to regain her balance as Penny cursed loudly
and brought her weapon to bear. Laurel's eyes went wide and locked
on to where the unruly-haired writer stood, throwing hollow-pointed
death before him.

“
Jake!”

“Laurel! Get back in the stairwell!” he
yelled, and tried to clear a path to her through the mass to no
effect. “
Get back inside!”

Many of the dead oriented on the two women
and started forward.

The redhead didn't scream or cringe or
generally freak out. She opened up on them with her carbine. Laurel
fired her M-4 steadily, double-tapping the shamblers as they moved
towards her all the while moaning horribly. She'd taken George's
instruction to heart, and continued blowing the creature's brains
across the building's interior as Penny laid down a little covering
fire of her own. It was clear there were too many for them to
handle even together, and Laurel called to the frozen blonde to
snap out of it.

Then it happened—so quickly that later none
of their party members could have pinpointed the moment if
pressed.

That was the instant Donna, anti-gun activist
and all around political-corrector, came into her own. The
previously prissy woman—who hadn't wanted Jake to instruct her in
the use of his M-4 rifle—transformed into a
warrior.

Donna killed over thirty of the horrors, all
the while calling them everything from
nutless refugees from a
mortuary
to
formaldehyde-breathed fuck-tards
. She blew
their heads to bits, teeth bared in rage. Her face a mask of
unreasoning and uncomprehending hate. They had eaten everything
she'd ever known or cared about, and she made them pay for all the
heartache they'd put her through.

But the dead were just too numerous. They
began latching onto her, biting mouthfuls of flesh from her
shoulders and arms, even as she used her rifle as a club to bash
half a dozen more into oblivion. She fought them hand-to-hand,
kicked, and gouged out their eyes. She even bit a couple of them
back.
But eventually, they had her pressed helpless against
the wall, and began to feed.

“Donna! No!” Gwen cried.

“Gwen! Don't let me come back!” Donna was
being splattered with her own blood. The creatures had begun to
chew on her stomach, seeking the soft organs within her body
cavity.

Her blonde-haired friend raised her weapon
and tearfully put a round through the
brave-little-Barbie-that-coulds forehead. Donna's head slumped
forward, after the rear of her skull exploded across the unpainted,
cinder-block wall. Her pain was done. She was free.

Laurel and Penny were doing better but still
couldn't manage to secure the stairwell door. For every zombie they
killed, three more shuffled up. Laurel changed magazines quickly
and kept firing.

“Laurel, shut the door!” Jake bellowed.

“I
can't!”
She yelled back. “There's
too many bodies in the way! And don't yell at me! I'm still pissed
off at you over leaving without—”

“Later! Later! Later would be better!” Rae
called and shot a trio closing on her from the right.
One-two-three, she laid them out side by side on the ever more,
blood-splattered floor and swung her massive weapon back, firing at
the ones coming through the outer door again.

Jake was frantic. More of the creatures were
pouring in, Laurel was close to being overwhelmed, and the rest of
them were about four staggering steps from becoming dinner. The
ghouls were reaching out towards them, semi-skeletal hands grasping
and biting at the air in the eagerness to feed. They needed to get
to the Mimi—wherever
that
was—or find a secure...

“Laurel! The roof! Get to the roof!”

“What?” She yelled, and put down another pair
trying to muscle through the doorway together. Their bodies clogged
the opening as they fell and kept the others back briefly, allowing
her some breathing room. “Are you
crazy??
I'm not leaving
you down—”

“The roof!” Jake bellowed, motioning the
others into the cafeteria, away from the oncoming crowd. “There's a
door in the far, left corner at the end of the hall on the top
floor! It's strong enough to hold them back for a while! Go!
Please!”

Laurel and Penny vanished up the stairwell
with the dead in slow pursuit. They would scatter through the upper
floors in search of the women before attempting the heavy security
door. He'd seen it next to Poole's office when they'd taken him to
meet the Nazi's leader. The barrier would buy time for his party to
reach them, somehow.

Jake and the others ran for the outside,
passing through the bloody, body-covered dining area and through
the shattered entryway. The dead followed but much more slowly. His
group reached the edge of the outdoor patio, long before the first
of the creatures even put a hand to the cafeteria door within.

“Think, Think!” Jake mumbled to himself, as
they crossed the slab. He was having problems keeping his thoughts
on track with what was going on around them, and there was an
annoying ringing in his ears which he couldn't explain or
understand. He slapped himself in the face a few times. When that
didn't work, he balled up his right fist and slammed it against his
wounded shoulder.

Oh, you stupid son of a bitch!
The
voice in the vaults of his brain screamed at him, after O'Connor
almost blacked out from the wave searing agony the blow sent up to
explode behind his eyes.
Stop. Fucking. Around. And
focus!!

There had to be somewhere to—

“Jake! They're coming around!” Rae called.
She stood at the corner of the slab, her huge weapon pointed down
the wall of the building towards the far end, but not firing
yet.

“Over here too!” Gwen yelled. She gazed
towards the opposite end of the building nervously.

“Dammit, this is turning into a
cluster-fuck!” he exclaimed, and looked back into the cafeteria.
The creatures had entered the room but were temporarily distracted
by the numerous dead Purifiers. They were
eating
the
corpses. “Kat, help me out here! We need to buy time. Foster's sure
to find us eventually, but we need to keep those things back!”

“We don't have many options here!” She told
him, looking around, gun in hand. “The offices are
definitely
out. No fire escapes or anything on the outer
wall. The creatures are coming from both directions and we're
butted up against the transfor—”

“The transformer yard!” Jake cast his eyes
around the surface of the patio. “The guard with the gate key is up
here somewhere!”

Kat looked back inside. The creatures within
were still feeding on the bodies, but more were coming through
every second. Soon they'd be pushing out onto the concrete slab,
and the survivors would be screwed. “Um. He might be inside. If
that's the case—”