Dead of Night

closed like gasping fish, or as if they were practicing chewing a meal that was not yet theirs.

They were on all sides of them, the closest about twenty yards away. Dez recognized that one. Not a statie. Paul Scott, the forensics officer. He only had one eye and patches of his scalp had been torn away. Over to his right, standing half-obscured by the smoke of a burning cruiser was Natalie Shanahan, her Kevlar vest hanging open, her blouse torn, and gaping holes where her breasts should have been. There were others. Sheldon Higdon stood by the open mortuary door, his chest marked with a line of bullet holes. There were four people — a civilian, two cops, and a trooper — with their hands cuffed behind their backs, but their faces were just as empty and pale as the others.

A sound made Dez turn and, closer than all of them, moving slowly out from behind an ambulance, was Chief Goss. One half of his face was gone, exposing the sharp angles of bare white bone and stringy muscle laced with yellow fat. The chief reached for her and she could see that most of the fingers were missing from his right hand. Bitten off, leaving a palm and one fat pinkie.

“Dead,” echoed JT.

Dez felt her arm move and she looked down to see her right hand rise. She was not aware of any conscious choice or deliberate intent. The hand rose, and the arm with it. The gun was a thousand-pound weight in her fist.

I could end it now, she thought. Under the chin, against the temple, or maybe just suck on the barrel and go meet Jesus. Ask that fucker for an explanation. Say good-bye to this shit. This isn’t right. This isn’t how the world’s supposed to be. I can’t live in a world like this.

The chief was ten feet away. Three shuffling steps and he would have her.

I can’t.

The gun rose.

Goss stepped closer. She could smell him. Open bowels and an outhouse stench.

Just do it! screamed her inner voice. Just one trigger pull and a wake up in the big hereafter. If they weren’t lying in Sunday school then it was a ticket to heaven. Mom and Dad would be there. If it was all a lie, then there was nothing at all. Even that option was better than this shit.

The chief’s half of a face wrinkled in a snarl of predatory lust. Hunger flickered like matchstick flames in his eyes as he stepped so close that he could touch her. The fingerless hand pawed at her, leaving smears of red on her vest. The other hand scrabbled to grab her shoulder, to pull her close as his mouth opened wide.

Chin, temple, or mouth. Do it!

She chose the temple.

The barrel pressed in against the skin until it stopped against the hardness of bone.

“Daddy,” she whispered. “Help me…”

And pulled the trigger.

The blast was huge. The bullet punched a big red hole through two walls of bone and blew brain matter twenty feet across the lawn.

Chief Goss fell.

And Dez Fox became alive again.

“JT!” she screamed as she spun and aimed, firing at Gunther, hitting him square in the center of the chest. A certain kill shot. He went back and down to one knee. Then he climbed to his feet and kept coming forward. She fired again, a double tap, one to the sternum — which only slowed him — and one to the bridge of the nose. Gunther’s whole body rocked back, paused for a moment as if he was going to recover and keep coming, and then fell.

The other things around them moaned and hissed and snarled as they came. They all came.

Dez turned and fired at Natalie and blew away most of her throat.

Natalie kept coming, red drool dripping from her lips.

“Fuck!” Dez yelled and fired again, and again, the bullets hammering into Natalie’s body. “Fucking die, you ugly cow!”

Natalie kept coming.

Dez took the gun in two hands and aimed. Her next shot blew out the light of Natalie’s left eye and blew off the back of her head. Natalie’s next step was meaningless and she collapsed down, making no attempt to catch her fall.

Dez whirled toward JT, who was still frozen and immobile. Dez shifted her gun to her left and with her right slapped him as hard as she could across the face. Again and again, forehand and back.

JT staggered back, his lips exploding with blood.

She saw the precise moment when the vacant space behind his eyes suddenly filled again. Just as the gunshot had brought Dez back from her brink, her slaps had dragged JT back from his.

“Watch!” he barked and shoved her aside as he brought the shotgun up and fired a blast at Paul Scott. The beanbag round hit Scott in the chest and spun him in a full circle, but Scott bared his teeth and lunged again.

The second beanbag caught him on the bridge of the nose and his head snapped back so fast and so far that Dez knew that his neck was broken. Scott fell backward and sprawled like a rag doll. He did not move again.

The others were coming now.

They were not fast, but they kept coming. Lumbering, some of them limping on damaged legs, a few — those with head injuries — staggering more awkwardly. Dez fired into them, hitting everything she aimed at. Punching hollow-points through hearts and stomachs and thigh bones and groins.

“Why won’t they go down?” she bellowed.

As they came closer she raised her gun, tried for the more difficult head shots. She caught a state trooper on the cheek, tearing a huge chunk of his face away, but he kept coming. She shot him again, right over the right eyebrow and he abruptly crumpled.

She fired two more shots and the slide of her pistol locked back. She began backpedaling as she swapped out the magazines, letting the spent one fall — against all training and instinct — and slapping the fresh one in. The new mag was heavy with bullets. Reassuring.

She fired.

JT was back to back with her, firing at the things she could not see. Dez had seen the beanbag round drop Scott, but that had been a neck-breaker. JT tended to go for body shots with the shotgun. Dumb, she thought. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

She heard JT mumbling something over and over again.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.”

He fired and fired.

And fired the gun dry.

“I’m out,” he said, as if surprised that a gun could commit such a heinous act of betrayal in so obvious a time of need.

“Get to the car! I’ve got a box of buckshot under the seat,” Dez said, turning, shoving him, and then they were running.

Dez did not even remember walking this far from the cruiser, but it was a dozen yards away. Some of them were in the way. All of them were closing in, some moving much faster than the others. Distantly Dez wondered if they were the more recently dead.

Another part of her mind wanted to laugh at that thought.

And still another part was whispering her three choices. Chin, temple, mouth.

JT used the shotgun like a club. An EMT grabbed at his sleeve and JT hit him in the eyes. The blow was savage and the sheer force of it pitched the EMT onto his back, but the young man immediately started struggling to get up. Another state trooper lunged at JT and clamped his teeth down on his shoulder. Even through the Kevlar the pain was immediate and excruciating, but JT channeled it into his rage as he swung the shotgun stock up under the trooper’s chin so hard that it snapped his neck. The thing fell backward, colliding with two others who had been reaching to grab.

That gave JT a tiny window and he leaped for the car door, opened it, threw the shotgun in, and pulled his Glock. “Dez, get in! I’ll cover you.”

He began firing spaced shots at the creatures that had been closing in on Dez. He dropped a few — a bullet through the forehead or sideways through an ear. Most of them merely staggered but still came on. It created a