Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (42 page)

That was when the cafeteria fence finally
collapsed.

Kat's eyes snapped open at the sound of flesh
and steel striking the ground. She stared east at the sight of
zombies struggling over one another—and the fence's double strand
of razor wire—into the yard. There was no order or system to their
efforts. Each strove only to move forward, completely unaware of
all the others in the massive dead pod. It reminded her of a crowd
at a heavy metal concert. On acid. If everyone had been infected
with rabies.

The first ranks were pushed to the gravel by
the initial surge when the barrier fell. They struggled awkwardly
to rise, but remained pressed to the diamond-shaped links by
lifeless feet as the others stumbled forward on top of them. There
were so many. Men, women, even toddlers slowly crossed the razor
wire, leaving behind fabric from their filthy clothes and strips of
skin torn from their unfeeling bodies. The offices at their backs
were an inferno, framing the mobile dead with flames ripped
straight from the Devil's own personal playground. Kat was certain
if there
was
a place, where all the evil people of the world
went to burn after they died, she had surely just caught a glimpse
of it.

The foremost creatures began to wander
aimlessly after crossing the wire. They were aware there was prey
inside the transformer enclosure
somewhere;
they didn't know
its exact location yet though.

After attempting to rouse Jake, Cho watched
them shamble around drunkenly as she wracked her brain for options.
The conduit was out. That's why she'd moved them to the distant
fence-line. Even with Rae, Penny, and Gwen's help, it would've been
a struggle to get the writer's limp body up onto the piping. Kat
didn't have a hope of doing it by herself. Trying to hide was
equally pointless. The only shelter inside the perimeter of the
yard was the small shed, previously used to house the scissor-lift.
It wouldn't withstand five minutes of pounding by the hungry ghouls
before they either gained entry through the roll-down door, or it
lost its integrity altogether and simply fell apart.

Now would be the perfect time for the
cavalry to show up.

Kat visually searched the area outside the
fence. Nothing. She felt her stomach head south for her ankles.
Even in the darkness, the Mimi's ugly, pink hull would be visible
from quite...

Wait a minute.
She felt a light-bulb
pop flick on inside her head.

There was nothing outside the rear
fence-line. No Mimi, no Rae, or Penny, or Gwen.

But more importantly, no
zombies.
They
were all trying to cram through the ten-foot gap in front, where
the fence had gone down.

Keeping low, Kat took Jake under his armpits
and pulled him towards the spot where Rae had cut her way through
the high-tension wire at the chain-link's base.

“Just so you know,” she grunted, “we make it
through this? You're not going anywhere without me, ever again. You
get in way too much trouble.”

* * *

The hunger was all.

The heat given off by the burning Gas and
Electric plant meant nothing. None of the creature's nerve endings
registered any sensation. It had moved towards the light and sound
generated by the burning pseudo-fortress steadily, instinctively
aware that prey should be nearby.

It had once been a woman in her late
thirties. The garish, neon cat-vomit, pattern of the things skirt
warred with its excessive, raccoon-style eye makeup and what was
left of its fraying gray skin. Other unfortunates milled around it,
clothes igniting from the nearby flames and not one of them
reacted.

The hunger was all.

There was movement through the flames. The
creature could see brief flickers of the transformer yard beyond
the smoke. Maybe it was prey. The blonde in the garish skirt,
missing both her arms and most of the soft tissue from her upper
torso, staggered into the fire.
The already rot-fouled air
filled with the aroma of burning hair. The creature continued
slowly into the inferno, climbing over wreckage and white hot
steel, losing more and more of itself with every step.

It made it almost halfway through. By the
time the burning horror finally fell, the BeautyQuest Team
Coordinator pin had melted deep into its charred flesh.

Kat lay on the ground beside Jake in
the darkness, and tried to catch her breath.

The slight incline behind the transformer
enclosure had provided them with a bit of cover—which was a lucky
break—but their situation had
not
improved by much.

After a fair amount of effort and the help of
Jake's crowbar, Cho had managed to pry up the base of the fence and
pull him into the overgrown grass beyond. Though no weakling, she
wasn't going to be able to move them much farther. The muscles in
her back and shoulders already felt as if they were on fire. She'd
managed to drag him maybe forty yards through the turf outside the
barrier but, though safe for the moment, they were totally exposed.
Thankfully, the infected still only meandered around inside the
transformer yard, some of them still smoldered after getting too
close to the flames that engulfed the Purifier's previous home.
Soon, when they didn't find anything to feed on, they'd begin to
move back through the broken section of the fence and spread out
again. It was only a matter of time before the creatures found them
hunkering amidst the overgrown weeds, and then it would be
over.

It wasn't that zombies were adept at hunting.
The average creature simply walked randomly in a given direction,
until some kind of stimuli activated its predatory senses. It
seemed to be their natural state, between gristly feedings that is.
There was no communication between them, they possessed no
hive-mind consciousness, and they had no hierarchy or leadership.
So. No smart-ghouls to be had, thank goodness. They were
independent, solitary, and utterly devoid of anything resembling
personality. They didn't have any conscience, desires, causes, or
motivations. They just didn't stop. Ever. They kept going past the
point of normal human endurance until they fell apart, or were put
down.

The swift-moving group they'd seen enter
Rebecca's grainery during their escape with Deputy Carson still
concerned her, but Cho didn't have the luxury—or spare time—to
wonder about them at that very second. If they managed to survive
the night—and just then, that was a big
if
—Kat would bring
it up to Jake, once he recovered. Surely there would be more of
them, and the other members of their group needed to be warned
about the more agile creatures. Smart-ghouls would be bad, but
zombies that could run could be equally as dangerous. Kat shook off
her reverie and focused her attention back on the present once
more.

She had made Jake as comfortable as she could
with his head rested on her small fanny-pack sized, med kit, then
checked her pistol. Thirteen .9mm bullets. Same as there had been
earlier, when she'd combined her two partial magazines. That gave
her eleven for the ghouls. She pulled the empty magazine from her
pocket and loaded it with the remaining two rounds.

One for each of us,
Kat thought
sadly.

The next half-hour was both excruciatingly
long and painfully brief. After the yard filled, many of the
creatures began to stumble west along the fence and into the areas
beyond. She watched them begin falling back into
roamer
mode
, as Allen had termed it. The point when they stopped
actively hunting and resumed a slow, hungry plod towards final
death. Jake's friend had taken the term from one of the
first-person shooters he'd enjoyed so much, prior to the dead
rising.

A large group of the infected moved along the
outside of the chain-link nearby, already beginning to fan out. It
would only be a few minutes until the zombies found the two of
them, even in the dark. Soon, it would be nothing but a short
fight, a few seconds of sorrow, and an instant of pain as Cho took
care of them both. Then... Well, maybe they'd finally be
together.

It was time.

Bending over Jake's bloody form, Kat kissed
him goodbye.

Then Cho was treated to a welcome and
uplifting vision of destruction as Rae's Hummer roared around the
south-east corner of the Purifier's pyre.

Elle opened fire on the crowd approaching
their friends’ hiding place, with an MG-34 machine gun. She'd
hurriedly assembled it after finding the weapon and its component
parts locked inside a strongbox in the Quonset hut style garage.
7.92mm rounds tore through the rotten things as easily as poking a
six-penny nail through a framed piece of cheesecloth. The
blonde-haired Sergeant screamed obscenities at the horrors as she
began perforating their flesh—and quite a few of their skulls—with
hot, belt-fed death. Her goal wasn't to kill them all, although if
that
did
happen not a single member of their party would
shed a tear. It was to
herd
them.

The dead turned towards the Humvee, battalion
strong, and shuffled after it in pursuit.

“Stay down!” Elle hollered, her voice almost
lost in the bedlam of the .50cal's roar and the hundreds of throats
moaning to take just one, little bite out of her.

Kat dropped flat, still holding the writer
protectively, clutched her pistol in one hand, and desperately
hoped for a miracle.

Just this once, those incorporeal, vain,
vengeful-minded sky-beasts provided.

The Screamin' Mimi blew out of the flames
along the northern edge of the office block, moving fast and
tearing up real estate. The creatures between the massive vehicle
and the edge of the transformer yard parted so easily against its
enormous Pepto-colored plow, that anyone watching would've searched
the surrounding area for Moses. It didn't just ram through the mob.
It
annihilated
them.

The transport's nose blade sliced scores of
infected cleanly in half, while its hull pulped dozens more. Many
of the creatures fell beneath its massive weight, smashed into the
earth like flesh-flavored jelly beans by its solid combat-armored
tires. An awful wake of body-parts and tainted fluids was thrown
out to each side of the Mimi's prow, slamming yet more of the
loathsome dead from its path. Just like before when it had
destroyed the Purifier's gate, the impervious SEP skin of the
vehicle preformed like a dream. If she hadn't known the thing was
virtually soundproof, Cho would've
sworn
she'd heard Foster
howling at the wheel in glee over the revolting spectacle.

While the bubble-gum hued leviathan created
an avenue of shredded, chunky death worthy of a tank-sized food
processor, Leo sped the Hummer back along the parade of creatures,
drawing them further away towards the power plant's settling pond.
The huge pool located to the south was used for filtering the
facilities industrial by-products. Liquid was pumped into the
enormous depression, where it was allowed to evaporate, leaving
only solid waste. Waste that was then reclaimed and packaged for
disposal and shipped to a HazMat facility upstate.

Young Salizar and the blonde bombshell—who
was enthusiastically turning zombies into impressionism
pieces—continued to lead the horde away from their friends. They
were to circle the pond once, keep the creatures interested for a
few minutes, then haul ass. That would give the others time to
retrieve Kat and Jake, then head for their prearranged rendezvous
point ten miles distant.

The Mimi's access hatch was already dropping
when the rear pulled even with where Cho and the writer lay. George
was the first to exit, armed with a carbon copy of the Hummers
minigun, followed closely by a frantic looking Gwen. Both ran for
their friends, weapons up and pointed at the darkness, scanning the
night for nearby threats. The gaping hatch behind them showed the
interior lit by a dim, green glow, that didn't seem to attract
undead notice. The ninja-girl filed that little factoid away for
later investigation and possible use, as Foster skidded to a halt
before her.

“What took you so long?” she demanded.

The fixer snorted and gestured at his pink
behemoth. “Hey, my baby's tough, safe and pretty. Not really that
maneuverable in tight spaces, though.”

“That's why we have the Hummer,” Gwen said as
she watched the ghouls in the transformer yard closely.

“Sweet Baby Jesus on a Flying Fucking
Mountain Bike,” Foster said, obviously shaken as he pulled O'Connor
into a sitting position and took in his injuries. “This boy looks
like ten miles of bad fucking road. Dammit, girl, has he been
bit?”

Kat could've wept in relief at the old
soldier's irreverence and helped Foster lift Jake over one of his
burly shoulders. “They kicked him around a bit, and he has some
shallow cuts on his chest, but none of those things got to him. The
wound on his arm is pretty bad, though. That skinhead guy stuck
big
knife in it. How did you know where to find us?”

George led her up the ramp. “Since all those
fuckers were tryin' to get through the fence back here, Rae, Penny,
and Blondie here managed to get to our Hummer. Me and Bee were
tryin' to figure out where you all were for a while there, once the
fire started. We thought you might be in the shit, so we sat tight
and waited for some kind'a signal, two buildings to the north.”

“Elle used the Hummer's radio to reach them,
and George came up with the plan to use it as a distraction.” Gwen
activated the hatch controls.

“It was the only way we could think of ta get
ta the two a ya.” He laid Jake on the single gurney and removed the
younger man's bandage. “Whoa. How long has he been
unconscious?”

“Thirty or forty minutes. Can you help him?”
The fixer's reaction worried Cho.