Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (5 page)

She raised one eyebrow. “You mean common
sense, don't you?”

“No. Common sense is a myth. If it actually
existed, everyone would have it, but not everyone does. So it's
called
uncommon sense.
” Jake stepped close and secured
himself to her back, firmly avoiding a maddening urge to look down
at the five-story drop. “What we're about to do is the exact
opposite. I think most normal people would term this as reckless.
Or suicidally dangerous. Maybe even bug-fuck crazy
.
”

Kat grinned over her shoulder at him as she
attached their harness tether to the line. “Yeah, but look how much
fun we're having.”

“You've got a strange idea of fun.” Jake
wound his arms tightly around Kat's waist and took a firm grip on
her belt.

Smiling like a Tabby with a mouthful of
feathers, Kat held up one hand and began counting down from five.
Upon reaching zero, she and O'Connor pushed away from the roof of
Old Hall and sailed out into the darkness.

The quiet rubbing sound of the carabineer
along their slim lifeline sent a chill up Jake's spine. Against his
better judgment he looked down to see nothing but zombies and hard,
unforgiving ground speeding by far below. His arms clenched
involuntarily tighter, and Cho gave a sharp exhalation of
discomfort as his strength forced the breath from her lungs. Kat
curled her legs backwards and wrapped them around his waist,
locking Jake against her firmly as they sped along the climbing
rope to freedom. It was all the shaken writer could do to keep his
eyes open as wind tugged at him. Jake was sure their line would
snap at any moment, sending them tumbling to the pavement below and
into the hungry arms of the wandering dead. That thought sent a
cold thrill of panic through him. He was able to force it down only
with the greater fear of causing Kat injury during their landing or
worse, alerting the zombies beneath to their presence.

They soared over the abandoned street, now
occupied solely with slowly rotting examples of what were once
human beings. The breeze caused Kat's short, blue hair to flutter
as she and Jake sped along their impromptu zip-line, and the pretty
Asian felt like laughing aloud with exhilaration. It was moments
like this when everything became more real. Betting the bank
against impossible odds, thumbing your nose at the gods in the face
of certain death. She understood why Allen enjoyed skydiving prior
to the dead rising to consume the living, but also realized jumping
out of a perfectly good airplane over and over again wasn't
thrill-seeking, it was simply repeated unsuccessful suicide
attempts. Far too much could go wrong with a parachute and you
could end up burrowing into the ground like Wile E. Coyote from
those old Loony Tunes cartoons. But risking everything on her own
long-developed skills, her physical abilities?

That was part of what made life worth
living.

Kat felt the shaking in Jake's arms and
grinned. It was somehow comforting to know the man who'd charged a
baker's dozen of hungry zombies with nothing but a crowbar had a
bit of a problem with heights. It made him human, gave him a sense
of fallibility and vulnerability that she found attractive.

Hey! No time for nookie-thoughts,
remember?
Kat brain piped at her.
Focus!

They were approaching the opposite roof
faster than she'd have liked, probably due to their combined
weight. Usually, Kat didn't have any passengers when she practiced
her ninja thing. She'd drastically underestimated the rate of their
acceleration, and that was going to make their imminent landing
more than a little interesting.

“Remember to go limp when your feet hit,” she
reminded Jake. “That should keep you from breaking—”

“There's something on the roof.” he
hissed.

“Huh?”

Sure enough, as they slid closer Kat began to
make out human silhouettes moving on the rooftop. As she and Jake
sped onward, even though specific details weren't visible yet, she
realized the shadowy figures moved about with the trademark
zombie-clumsy slouch. This was bad. She and Jake were coming in
swiftly and there was no possible way to halt their forward
momentum. Even if they could stop mid-slide, the pair would be
trapped on the line with no way to return to the safety of Old
Hall. All this went through Kat's mind in a second and a half, just
before they passed over the roof's edge and their landing site
became visible in the darkness.

“Oops,” Kat muttered.

Her grappling hook had found purchase in the
protective grating of a large air conditioning unit. It stood
roughly four feet off the surface of the roof, just to the right of
center, and was surrounded by a group of zombies. Evidently, the
sound of Kat's hood impacting into the steel housing had focused
their attention causing the creatures to cluster about the dormant
machine. This had allowed Cho and O'Connor to zip-line over the
clustered dead to what they'd believed to be safety, but would
surely get them noticed by the rooftop ghouls. Jake saw the open
stairwell door at the roof's corner, and realized the zombies
unknowingly waiting for them hadn't gained the supernatural ability
to climb sheer walls. The rotten bastards, possibly attracted by
just a domestic house cat, had simply walked mindlessly up the
interior stairs in search of prey. That was the good news. The
bad
news was, even though there were only seven or eight of
the things on the roof, he and Kat were latched together, unable to
use their weapons, and heading directly for them.

Not wanting to play a game of body-based
ten-pins with the things, Jake jammed his booted feet against the
roof, slid across its rough surface for nearly fifteen yards, and
brought them to an abrupt stop. He quickly unlatched the carabineer
that secured him to Cho, took a firm grip on her belt and heaved
her back the way they'd come. This did two things: One, it sent Kat
nearly thirty feet backwards up the zip-line, putting her behind
his crouched form and well away from the as-of-yet unresponsive
dead. Two, it gave Jake a few seconds to prepare himself and free
his crowbar from its scabbard along his back. As he worked, the
creatures turned their piss-yellow eyes towards the noise generated
by his landing.

The zombies had just begun to register his
presence when the hooked, business end of his weapon punched its
way into the first one's head. Jake's punishing two-handed smash
pulverized its skull, sending chunks of bone into the creature's
brain as the crowbar turned its parietal and occipital lobes to
mush. That one fell without so much as a chatter of its gray teeth
while he yanked his weapon free, spun it end-over-end, and jammed
its chisel tip through the second's creature's ear as the moldy
thing turned. The steel tip punctured both temporal lobes along
with the opposite side of the horror's skull, ventilating its
cranium. The zombie stiffened and Jake kicked it in the ribs,
sending it sideways to the roof's surface in the first creature's
wake. It left awful-smelling gore smeared along half the crowbar's
length, which he flicked away by whipping the weapon towards his
feet.

By that time, the six remaining creatures
were in full-on “hunter” mode. Their jaws were snapping like
horrific castanets in anticipation of feeding on warm flesh,
sending brackish, black fluid down over their lips and chins as
they staggered forward. Jake couldn't say one way or another if
said goop was zombie saliva or if their snapping jaws had simply
bitten off their own tongues, but he had no intention of getting
close enough to find out. He circled away as one by one, each
raised its desiccated, ragged-nailed hands towards him and
continued their advance. There was ample room on their particular
roof, but the open stairwell door worried him. If these had found
their way up from street level without signs of human prey about,
any number could come traipsing up those stairs. Closing that door
was the first thing he needed to do, preferably before more of the
rotten shits arrived.

Another of the maggot-heads stumped forward,
half-decomposed hands stretched out towards Jake in anticipation of
tearing into him. In life the creature had, at least judging from
its clothing, been a doughnut shop employee. Jake noticed said fact
with some disgust, positive he'd never be able to eat another
raspberry-filled again without having flashbacks. If that weren't
bad enough, while he was not particularly sensitive to the awful
stench that went hand-in-hand with decaying flesh, the thing's rank
odor caused him to gag violently.

It smelled like a warm, pickle-flavored
yogurt and butt-cheek parfait.

Jake tasted bile in the back of his throat as
it stepped closer, noting once again the black goo that coated the
creature’s mouth, neck, and apron front. None of his little group
of survivors, not even their EMT Maggie Reed, had been able to
confirm what the fluid actually was. Jake's opinion leaned toward
drool. That posed the disturbing question: While zombies couldn't
feel pain, did they feel pleasure? More specifically, did they
like
the taste of human flesh and blood? He didn't even want
to consider that possibility. That would mean, at some primal
level, the creatures were actually
aware
. What if a person's
consciousness was trapped inside their body after death, watching
as they fed on other humans, helpless to stop the dead shell? It
was too horrible to contemplate.

Skipping to the left, Jake jammed his crowbar
through the nearest creature's right eye. The thing stiffened
briefly then fell, creating a paintball-like splatter pattern as
its face impacted with the surface of the roof. As the remaining
five zombies shambled closer, Jake dodged around their far side and
sprinted for the stairwell door. Upon reaching the darkened
entryway, he quickly shut the metal plate, yanked his K-Bar from
the sheath on his vest, wedged it sideways between the frame and
the door to prevent it opening from the inside, and spun back to
face the oncoming dead.

They were
close.
None of the quintet
were able to run. None of the creatures the survivors had
encountered so far possessed enough coordination to do so. They
were walking pretty damn fast, though. Jake barely had time to set
himself before the first grabbed for him. Spinning to one side, he
did a full three-sixty and bashed the thing in its brain-holder as
it stumbled by. He felt more than heard the back of the zombie's
skull give as the tool's rounded end crushed the rear of its
flaking head. There wasn't time for him to appreciate the way it
lost some teeth hitting the door nose-first before falling truly
dead to the rooftop however, because the other four were on him.
They were literally
unable
to feel fear or pain, so Jake was
hard-pressed to stay out of their reach. He shoved one hard and
sent it reeling to fall backwards onto its dead ass, but the other
three were right there. The first of the trio caught the point of
his crowbar in the throat.

Jake's thrust caused his weapon to penetrate
the zombie's spinal column where it lodged fast, effectively
trapping both zombie and crowbar in place. While the thing could
paw at him, it was unable to move further down the steel into
biting range. Holding the pinned creature at arm's length, Jake
lunged forward, took a firm grip on the second one's throat, and
used it to hold back the third. Thankfully his hard-knuckled Nomex
tactical gloves, and a pair of Damascus FA30 Flex Force forearm
guards he'd taken to wearing, after coming close to becoming zombie
kibble in a back alley of Columbus, provided the writer some fairly
durable protection. This prevented the second and third zombies
from clawing into his arm as he continued to fend off their clumsy
attacks, but Jake knew he wouldn't be able keep up his defense for
long.

The ghoul impaled on his crowbar was still
grasping at him, the other two were determined to outdo each other
in their attempts to latch their snapping jaws into him somehow,
and the one he'd toppled was already getting to its shredded feet.
Jake yanked the zombie stuck on his crowbar around and knocked the
half-vertical one back to the rooftop. He continued to struggle
with the other three and saw the prone creature rise once
again.

“Shit!” He used its impaled companion to
knock the thing head-over-heels again, but it didn't take long for
the rotten corpse to gain its feet once more.

Jake knew he was in trouble. While not
supernaturally strong, the creatures didn't care about taking
damage. They wouldn't feel broken bones or bruised tissue. They
didn't need to breathe, and Jake was panting from the exertion now,
trying to get oxygen into his system as lactic acid began building
up in the muscles of his shaking arms. The zombies were putting up
a damn good fight. He could feel panic begin to clench in his guts
as the previously flattened creature drew closer and the sound of
their snapping jaws sent chills up his spine. Jake ground his teeth
together as he wracked his brain for some way to get clear of the
dead, if only for a moment or two. If he could just get a good
breath, get a little room to work with.

That was when the ghoul he'd been knocking to
the ground latched onto Jake's wrist with both hands and bit his
arm.

The zombie's teeth failed to penetrate the
riot armor encasing Jake's forearm, which is what saved his life,
and one of the things incisors snapped off against the thick plate
to spin through the air like a gore-incrusted Chiclet.

“You grungy shit-bag!” Fuming, he released
his crowbar and slammed a hard-knuckled fist into the biter's
face.

While his blow sent the hungry ghoul skidding
some distance across the roof, when Jake let go of his weapon the
impaled zombie took a double-handful of his t-shirt and tried to
pull itself towards his throat. O'Connor managed to get his forearm
under the creature's jaw to hold it off, aided by the rounded end
of the crowbar that pressed forcefully against his chest, but he
realized it was a losing battle. He could barely keep the two he
had a grip on away. Bitey-ghoul was on its feet again and coming
back for another round, the forth was still trying to get around
the zombie Jake had by the neck, and…