We escaped out of the dojo. Zombies filled the access way to the west wing, so we raced toward the stairwell at the east wing tower, trying to make it to the third floor and the rest of the Zero Dogs.
A few zombies loitered in the stairwell landings, but Jake and I dispatched them quickly. By the time we reached the top, the zombie horde was on our heels again, flooding into the stairwell from the first floor. These bastards just never gave up. The armory was at the other end of the house in the south wing, and we had to cross a lot of dangerous ground to get there.
“Come on.” I dragged Jake back from the stairwell toward the exit.
“Only seven rounds left,” Jake said. “Better hope we’re in the clear or this could get dicey.”
I pushed open the door to the third floor. The zombies packed the hallway from wall to wall, so many of them I couldn’t even see the far end of the house. Below us, down the stairs, the ground-floor zombies had already begun to lurch up the steps after us. I could hear the
thump, drag, thump
as they climbed.
“It just got dicey.” I took one long look at the advancing horde and wished I’d finished that bottle of scotch and screwed Jake when I’d had the chance.
Jeremiah Hansen, Napoleon of the Dead, watched his zombie legions file through the door between the weight room and the dojo. Really, who built a
dojo
in their house? That just might be one of the coolest things he’d ever seen. When he was filthy rich and building his own mega mansion down in Florida, he’d make certain he had his own dojo, and bigger than this one.
Captain Andrea Walker might’ve escaped thanks to her commando boyfriend, but she wouldn’t get away for long. He knew they’d been trapped on the third floor, cut off from their friends. Only a matter of time until a zombie bit them. She’d scorned his offer of a romantic liaison, not that he’d been surprised. He was taken with her, but he didn’t stack up well against her Rambo-style lover boy—though for all of the guy’s muscle, Jeremiah suspected his own pistol had been bigger. Losing vital and human Andrea sucked, but what were you gonna do? She didn’t seem turned on by evil, and since she’d actually
burned down
his place of business, he wasn’t going to have the cash, the sports car and the shiny bling to impress her. Still, their conversation had been rather cordial, except for her actual turn-down comment, and overall she’d been almost pleasant until she’d tried to shoot him with fire daggers. In truth, it was almost as if they were already married, and he found that amusing in a really twisted way.
His cell phone went off, playing Rob Zombie’s “Living Dead Girl” for a ringtone. God, he rocked the clever sometimes. “Yeah?”
“Blake here.” The man sounded calm enough to be sitting on the beach with an umbrella drink. “I thought I should inform you the police have begun to gather in a location several streets south of us. They will be using SWAT teams when they commence operations. Also, National Guard units have begun mobilizing. The 41st Infantry Brigade, I believe. Their presence is expected within the hour.”
Ah,
crap
. So difficult to put in a focused workday anymore with all these outside distractions. He’d taken too much time getting this done, but the ferocity of the resistance had been something of an unpleasant surprise. Of course, the situation had never been ideal from his point of view. He fought a hardened foe and he didn’t have infinite zombie reserves. Already he could sense a huge amount of severed controlling cords. He estimated well over sixty percent losses of his undead army so far. He had nothing to show for it yet—not one infected or eaten mercenary, although they
were
trapped, and he had Captain Walker and her personal military pistol boy holed up in a room on the third floor.
“Thank you for letting me know,” Jeremiah said. “Bring the car. I think the bus is a lost cause.”
“I agree. That asset must be written off. So, we will be leaving then?”
“We’ll be leaving with two zombies. The pyromancer and the commando.” He’d regret Andrea losing her bonfire of personality when she became a zombie, but Mr. Tall Dark and Rambo would bring him his coffee every morning. And maybe Jeremiah would use him for a dartboard too, just to rub it in. “I’ll send the rest of the undead at the cops to buy us some time to get clear. Give me five minutes to wrap this up.”
He shut the phone and put it back in his pocket. Another chattering roar sounded from somewhere upstairs—some kind of machine-gun noise. He closed his eyes and sorted through the cords until he found the one he wanted and dropped into the zombie’s head, seeing what it saw. The zombie stood packed tight with other zombies near a sunroom. The head of a preppy zombie in front of him exploded, and another zombie began to jerk and flail as bullets ripped through its upper torso and head.
Jeremiah caught a glimpse of an angry demon in full body armor holding a really big machine gun. Blood, a shade darker than his purple skin, had splashed across his bulletproof vest as if a psychotic Jackson Pollock had been at work. Another zombie fell under the weight of dozens of yellow things resembling mutated platypus. Platypi? The werewolf bashed skulls with his bent golf club. The last thing he saw before the cord was severed and he was kicked back into his own head was the beautiful, sexy, alluring face of a woman with slit pupils and black hair wearing what looked like chain-mail armor. He was certain she would’ve been lithe and voluptuous, if not for the heavy armor and the dual machine pistols in her feminine hands. She piqued his interest. If Captain Walker wasn’t interested in a necromancer, then maybe this cute chippie would be. But then she yelled, “Die zombie goat-fuckers!” and shot his zombie in the face. With both machine pistols.
Kind of a hard-on killer, that.
He snapped back into his body and hurried (as fast as he could with his shuffling zombie honor guard) up the stairs to the third floor. If nothing else, he had to come away with a sexy flamethrower zombie and that damned army grunt or this venture would be a complete loss of materiel, personnel, capital and time.
Not to mention his ass was personally on the line.
Zombies burned.
Perhaps they burned a little too well, I decided, but without a gun, I was forced to rely on my pyromancy. Not a problem in most situations, except that I couldn’t remember how up-to-date our insurance policy might be or if I’d paid the last premium. If the house burned down and we weren’t fully covered, that would be a Very Bad Thing.
Of course, being eaten and/or turned into a zombie also scored high on the list of Very Bad Things, rating higher than burning down my own house by accident. So I charbroiled zombies. Over and over again.
Jake stood beside and a little in front of me, but clear of my line of fire. We’d been depending on his barrier magic to survive. He slammed the invisible wall into the zombies and pushed back the undead horde while I fried any that managed to get past him. I could see from the sweat streaming down his face he was near exhaustion. Weariness clutched at me too—adrenaline burnout, casting fatigue, caffeine withdrawal, you name it, I felt it.
We’d holed up in a suite of rooms—Mai’s from the look of it—filled with a chaotic smorgasbord of exotic-looking knickknacks, pet trees and litter boxes, wicker furniture and beanbags. We tried to hold the doorway, but Jake’s barriers sometimes interfered with my fire spells, and as his strength started to give out, his barrier flickered and seemed to diminish. Zombies tried to crawl beneath the invisible wall. Piles of charred zombies littered both sides of the doorway. The doorjamb, ceiling and hallway walls were scorched black and burning in places. Flames threw erratic shadows throughout the room, while dark smoke curled along the ceiling. I could taste bitter ashes in my mouth. The burning zombie corpses filled the air with the smell of cooking sausage and an odor that reminded me of sauerkraut, which I also added to my list of things I’d never eat again if I survived.
Movement—I caught a flash out of the corner of my eye. “On your right!”
Jake turned and hammered his barrier into a half-decayed zombie crawling over the couch. He knocked it backward into the air, where I scorched it with a column of fire. Flames kissed the ceiling but didn’t die out. The room began to fill with more smoke. Another very large zombie woman threw one of the wicker chairs and forced us to scatter out of the way.
“We can’t hold here.” Jake punctuated his sentence by putting a bullet hole in the chair-thrower’s forehead. More zombies streamed through the now-unprotected doorway. From somewhere in the house came the deep ripping sound of an M249 Squad Automatic Weapon burning off rounds, and hope surged through me. My hope deepened when the walls echoed with a triumphant werewolf howl.
But too many zombies stood between us and the rest of the Zero Dogs. Neither of us had armor. All it would take was one bite of their filthy mouths and yellow, scum-covered, stinking teeth to end our distinguished careers. I sent another slash of fire against the zombies, igniting their front line, which fell to the ground and began to shake and flail like converted sinners at a tent revival. Another wave of zombies walked right over the top of them—the necromancer driving them forward, regardless of their inbred fear and hatred of fire.
A huge yellow arm swung toward my head, and long fingers grabbed at my throat. Jake yanked me out of range and pumped two bullets into the head of a flabby male zombie wearing what looked like women’s garters and a sheer muumuu. For the first time since I took command of the Zero Dogs, I almost hurled my lunch in a combat situation. That image would never go away, no matter how many kittens I adopted or how much alcohol I drank.
“Get to the balcony.” Jake half-guided, half-shoved me toward the French doors off the dining room. “We’ll climb down from the roof.”
The balcony door deadbolt was locked. I fumbled with the switch, cursing like a driver on I-5 at rush hour.
“Hurry up,” Jake advised, the utter calm in his voice making me more nervous than ever.
“You’re not helping.”
He fired off three rounds in rapid procession. “Andrea, a little faster, please.”
Finally, I flipped the lock and shoved the door open. A cool breeze brushed against my face, and it stank of smoke and gunpowder and white phosphorus but was also laced with the delicate scent of the gardenias Mai had planted. I ran out onto the balcony, feeling my facial muscles twist into something, a grimace, a smile, I didn’t know. The night’s symphony had reached a crescendo of gunfire and explosions and the furious, needy roar of fire.
“Hello,” Necromancer Jeremiah Hansen said in a low voice. “I think I’m contractually obligated to say,
So we meet again
.”
Jeremiah sat on the corner of the iron balcony railing with two guard zombies flanking him on either side. The business end of his pistol pointed right at my chest, and for only being a 9mm, the damn barrel looked cavernous from this angle. Dim firelight painted his face a soft yellow and red, highlighting his hair. The glow from the burning garage even made the zombies appear halfway alive.
I opened my mouth to reply, but someone pushed me and I lost my balance. The tiles rushed up to greet me. I barely had time to twist and save my head from smacking the ground.
Jake cursed. I rolled over and looked back, my heart hammering away, and saw him pinned up against the wall by two more zombies. One was the mime zombie I’d seen earlier through the glass. Ash dusted the mime’s black beret, and its white greasepaint had begun to run in the heat. His stripes and suspenders and pristine white gloves appeared strangely surreal and horrible in the darkness. The other zombie was huge—a dusky-skinned Samoan of epic proportions. Jake’s arms were crushed against the wall and his gun had fallen to the tiles. The zombies halted just inches from tearing into his neck with their yellow teeth.
I lifted my hand to burn them down. I’d have to be precise to avoid catching Jake in the flames. Before I could release my magic, one of the zombies next to Jeremiah shuffled toward me, staring at me with hollow eyes. This zombie looked as if he’d been a mechanic when he’d been alive, judging from the stained coveralls and the ED name patch. Now, half the skin on Ed’s face was gone and I thought I saw something white—a maggot maybe—squirming in his right ear. Ed moaned, sounding like a man laughing through deep pain.
I wheeled to face him and prepared to sear Ed’s face off.
“Don’t,” Jeremiah said.
I hesitated. Zombie Ed stopped and stared at me. The two zombies holding Jake didn’t move, though I could see they didn’t like it. The necromancer held them all in check.
More cacophony from the house—heavy gunfire and explosions shook the frame and rattled the few windows which hadn’t already been smashed or blown out. Jeremiah glanced through the door and the zombies inside the room turned en masse and began to file into the hall, no doubt to attack Sarge and the rest of my people.
I shifted my attention back to Jeremiah, lifted both hands and prepared myself to go all out, to burn like a jet engine, so hot I’d melt the railing.
“Ever been cremated?” I gave him my most evil smile.
“Is that a trick question?” He gestured with the pistol. “You can’t kill me and save your precious sweetcheeks grunt over there. The moment I die, the zombies go rogue and eat everything within a ten-mile radius, including him.”
I didn’t lower my hands. “What do you want?”