rig and snugged a Sig Sauer nine into that. Magazines were stuffed into every pocket. They were so heavy that she had to cinch her trousers belt tighter. The last thing she pulled on was a heavy leather biker jacket Billy Trout had given her for Christmas two years ago. She pinched the thick leather.
“Bite through this, motherfucker.”
As she slung the bag over her shoulder, Dez caught sight of herself in the floor-length mirror that hung from clips on the bedroom door. She looked like a character from a video game. One of those improbably busty, impossibly well-armed superchicks who could do acrobatics and hit the kill zone even while firing guns from both hands during a cartwheel.
“You look fucking ridiculous,” she told herself.
Her reflection grinned back at her. Dez picked up a Daewoo USAS-12 automatic shotgun, slapped in a ten- round magazine, faced the door, and drew a deep breath.
“Yippie ki-yay and all that shit.”
She kicked open the door and jumped out into the rain.
CHAPTER EIGHTY
Corporal Wyckoff let the Humvee roll to a stop just inside the big wrought iron gates of the Stebbins Little School.
“Holy God,” he said softly.
Beside him, Sergeant Polk stared openmouthed.
The entry road wound upward from the gate to the block school that sat like a medieval castle on a knoll surrounded by neat rows of ancient oaks. The school looked solid enough to withstand a mortar assault, but that wasn’t the problem.
The road leading to the school was choked with dozens of crashed and abandoned school buses. Hundreds of passenger cars were clustered around them. A few were burning, several were overturned. Even in the downpour, two of the trees were burning as well, the fire having spread from a wrecked yellow bus that still smoldered. And everywhere — everywhere — were the infected.
“Jesus Christ, Nick … there are hundreds of those things.”
“Thousands,” murmured Polk. “Oh man … we are so fucked.”
The dead surrounded the school like an invading army laying siege. Wyckoff and Polk heard a few pops of small-arms fire, but whoever was shooting was either in the crowd, in which case he was dead the second he ran out of bullets, or inside the school, and in that case he might as well be on the moon.
Wyckoff stabbed a finger at the scene. “We’re supposed to go in and secure that? Not a chance.”
“I know.”
“Why’d they send us down here?”
“’Cause no one knows what the hell’s going on, that’s why. They don’t know how bad this shit is. We got no air reconnaissance, Nick; we’re the first ones to put eyes on this.” Polk pulled his map out of its case and studied the position of the school, pointing out landmarks to Wyckoff. “Okay, here’s the school and here’s us. We have two squads, so we’re sure as shit not going in there. Beyond the school is some forestland, what looks like a stream that feeds into a series of ponds, part of a golf course, and then the Maryland state line. That stream is going to be a river right now, so that’s good news. No one’s crossing that, and sure as hell not those awkward sonsabitches. That leaves the western side. There’s a soccer field and a parking lot, and another fence. The east is a fence and then a couple of farms.” He chewed his lip. “We might be luckier than I thought.”
“How?”
“We have a combination of natural and man-made barriers that could contain the infected at least for now.”
“What if they come this way?” Wyckoff asked.
“We hold them.”
“With two squads?”
Polk didn’t answer. Instead he grabbed for the radio and called in a situation report to his commanding officer, Captain Rice. Each squad was composed of two four-man fire teams. That gave him sixteen men to hold a gate and the road. It was ugly math, but at least the infected seemed to be focused on the school. None of them had noticed the vehicles sitting at the base of the long entry road.
At least for now.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Dez landed too hard, the heavy bag driving her into the mud with so much force that her legs screamed in pain and buckled. She went down to her knees in the rain, but she kept the shotgun barrel out of the mud, and, as the first of the dead turned toward her, Dez fired.
There had to be forty of the monsters clustered around her trailer.
Dez fired and fired.
Each 12-gauge shell was packed with nine lead pellets. The blast caught a woman in a bathrobe full in the face and blew half her head away. The dead man behind her caught some of the pellets and one went down with a hole through his eye.
Dez forced herself to her feet and fired, turned and fired, spun and fired. Rainwater hissed on the barrel as it flared hotter with each blast.
The dead were so close to her that she barely had to aim and couldn’t miss. Not every shot was a kill, though. Her own awkward gait as she slogged through the mud and the twitchy shamble of the dead threw wild cards into the point of impact. She blew the left arm off of Donny Phelps and caught Lisa Davis on the shoulder. Seven of them went down before the magazine went dry. Dez kicked one of the dead in the thigh, knocking him back as she reached for a second mag and swapped it out. This was worse than her worst day on the Big Sand. This was a different kind of hell.
Rempel’s Tundra was parked thirty feet away, in the slip by the office, but there were so many of the infected, and more were coming from the other trailers, drawn by the blasts of the shotgun. She fired and fired, and the dead fell away, their faces splattered, their bodies pirouetting sloppily as they fell.
Tears ran down Dez’s cheeks but she didn’t know it. She tried not to name the dead as she killed them. She knew that to allow them to be her neighbors, to be the people she knew, was going to kill her. The process had already begun. So she opened her mouth and roared out an incoherent bellow of rage and grief and need and kept firing.
Then Rempel himself was there, and he was the last one between her and the Tundra. His Tundra. As Dez pulled the trigger to fire the last round in the second magazine, she remembered something from that morning. After the hot water had cut off in her shower Dez had thought that she could put a bullet into Rempel’s brainpan without a single flicker of regret.
The blast caught Rempel on the bridge of the nose and the top of his head leapt off with a geyser of blood and gray matter, and Rempel was falling.
“God!” Dez screamed as she leapt over him. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry … God I’m sorry!”
She reached the Tundra.
Which was locked.
Of course it was locked.
Dez dropped the heavy bag of weapons, whirled and charged back, swapping in the last magazine for the shotgun, firing at the McGill twins and old Mr. Peluzzi, destroying them, erasing their faces while burning their
