Like a moving tide of ragged, livid faces, shifting with the gravitational tug of the moon, they start following the noise and light, heading in a disorganized mass toward the south side of the building.
Tinsel shimmering in the sun couldn’t attract a flock of sparrows better than this explosion works on these Biters. Within a minute or so, the street in front of the building is practically deserted.
April girds herself. She takes a deep breath. She secures the straps of her duffel bags. She closes her eyes. She says a quick, silent prayer … and then she springs up, yanks the cross-brace, and shoves the door open.
She creeps outside. The wind tosses her hair, and the stench strangles her. She stays low as she darts across the street.
The sensory overload threatens to distract her—the smells, the proximity of the horde half a block away, the thunderous beating of her heart—as she frantically moves from dark storefront to dark storefront. Thankfully, she is familiar enough with the neighborhood to know where the convenience store is located.
If measured by the clock, it only takes April Chalmers eleven minutes and thirty-three seconds to slip through the jagged maw of broken glass and visit the ransacked interior of the convenience store. Only eleven and half minutes to fill one and a half canvas bags with enough food and water and miscellaneous stuff to keep them going for quite a while.
But to April Chalmers, those eleven and half minutes feel suspended in time.
She grabs nearly twenty pounds of groceries from the convenience store—including a small canned ham with enough preservatives to keep until Christmas, two gallons of filtered water, three cartons of Marlboro reds, lighters, beef jerky, vitamins, cold remedies, antibacterial ointment, and six extra large rolls of blessed, blessed toilet paper—throwing it all in her duffel bag with lightning speed.
The back of her neck prickles as she works with constant awareness of the ticking clock. The street will fill up again soon and the army of Biters will block her path if she doesn’t get back within minutes.
Philip goes through another half a clip of .22-caliber rounds, working his way back around the rear of the apartment building. The majority of the Biters are now clustered around the flaming debris of the Malibu, a riot of moving corpses like June bugs drawn to the light. Philip clears a path around the back of the courtyard by squeezing off two shots. One of them cracks open the cranium of a lumbering cadaver dressed in a running suit, the zombie dropping like a puppet whose strings have been cut. Another blast opens a trough in the top of a skull belonging to what looks like a former homeless woman, her geode eyes flickering out as she falls.
Before the other Biters have a chance to close in on him, he vaults over the rear fence of the courtyard and charges across the leprous brown grass.
He climbs up the back wall of the building, using an awning as a foothold. A second fire escape ladder is folded halfway up the stucco wall of the first story, and Philip gets a grip on it and starts to pull himself the rest of the way up.
But all at once, he pauses, and has second thoughts about the plan.
April reaches the critical point in her mission—twelve minutes have elapsed since she emerged—but she risks visiting one more merchant.
Half a block south, an Ace Hardware store sits empty, its display windows broken, its burglar gates loose enough for a smallish woman to negotiate. She slips through the gap and enters the dark store.
She fills the remainder of the second canvas bag with water filters (for making the standing water in toilets drinkable), a box of nails (to replenish their supply, which they used securing the barricades), markers and rolls of large-format paper (for making signs to alert any other survivors), light bulbs, batteries, a few cans of Sterno, and three small flashlights.
On her way back toward the front of the store, now lugging nearly forty pounds of merchandise in two bulging duffels, she passes a figure slumped at the end of a side aisle stacked with fiberglass insulation.
April pauses. The dead girl on the floor, slumped and leaning against the far wall, is missing one leg. From the snail-trail of gore leading across the floor, it’s clear that the thing dragged itself here. The dead girl is not much older than Penny. April gapes for a moment.
She knows she has to get out of there but she can’t tear her gaze from the pathetic, ragged corpse sitting in its own juices, which have obviously leaked out of the blackened stump where its right leg used to be.
“Oh God, I can’t,” April says under her breath, to herself, uncertain what it is she can’t do: Put the thing out of its misery, or leave it to suffer for eternity in this deserted hardware store.
April pulls the metal bat from her belt and sets down her packs. She approaches cautiously. The dead thing on the floor hardly moves, just slowly gazes up with the trembling stupor of a fish dying on the deck of a boat.
“I’m sorry,” April whispers, and buries the end of the bat in the girl’s skull. The blow makes the wet, snapping noise of green wood breaking.
The zombie folds silently to the floor. But April stands there, closing her eyes for a moment, trying to will the image from her mind, an image that will probably haunt her for the rest of her life.
Seeing the shank of the bat cleave open a skull is bad enough, but what April just saw in the horrible brief instant before she brought the bat down, as she was drawing it back, winding up, was this: Either through some meaningless flicker of deadened nerves, or through some deeper understanding, the dead girl turned her face away in that moment before the bat arced down.
A noise near the front of the store gets her attention and she hurries back to her duffel bags, throws the straps over her shoulders, and starts toward the exit. But she doesn’t get far. She slams on the brakes when she sees a
It stands fifteen feet away, just inside the mangled burglar screens, in the identical soiled dress as that of the girl April just dispatched.
At first, April thinks her eyes are playing tricks. Or maybe it’s the ghost of the girl she just put down. Or maybe April is losing her mind. But as the second dead girl starts shuffling down the aisle toward April with black drool falling off its cracked lips—this one has both its legs—April realizes that it’s a
It’s the other girl’s identical twin.
“Here we go,” April says, drawing back the bat, dropping her load, preparing to fight her way out.
She takes one step toward the pint-sized monster, raising the bat, when a dry popping blast rings out behind the twin, and April blinks.
The bullet shatters a corner of the front window and takes off the top of the twin’s head. April flinches back at the kick of blood mist, as the girl collapses in a heap. April lets out a pained sigh of relief.
Philip Blake stands outside the store, out in the middle of the empty street, clicking a new magazine into his .22-caliber Ruger.
“You in there?” he calls.
“I’m here! I’m okay!”
“I know it ain’t polite to rush a lady but they’re comin’ back!”
April grabs her treasures, and then leaps over the bloody remains blocking the aisle and slips through the burglar gate and out into the street. Instantly, she sees the problem: The throng of zombies is returning, coming around the corner with the collective fervor of a demented chorus line moving in haphazard formation.
Philip grabs one of the bags and they both make a run for the apartment building.
They cross the street in seconds flat, with at least fifty Biters on either flank.
Brian and Nick are peering out the reinforced glass of the outer vestibule door when they see the situation in the street rapidly changing.
They see wolf packs of zombies coming down the street from both directions, returning from wherever the hell they had just gone. In the midst of all this, two human beings, one male and one female, like ball carriers in some obscure, surreal, twisted sport, come charging toward the apartment building with duffel bags slung and
