rescue and medical treatment and safety. Even though none of them had been told that beyond JT’s cynical comment.
When the infected were all out in the hall, Dez reached for the doorknob to the second quarantine room. That was where the three children were kept. Trout stepped up and pushed her hand away.
“No,” he said. “I’ll do this…”
It meant so much to Dez that Trout understood this about her, and she smiled through her tears. “No,” she said, and she opened the door.
The children were small. There were two boys of about kindergarten age and a girl who looked to be in second grade. All past-tense designations now. These little ones would never go back to school. They would never learn, never play, never grow up. They would always be remembered as children, if there was anyone among the survivors who knew them.
Despite the risk of infection, Trout bent and picked up one of the little boys. The child was on the edge of a fevered coma, but his eyes were still open. He looked despairingly at Dez, who nodded.
JT picked up the other boy and cradled him in his big arms. The child had a bite on his arm that was already festering.
“We have to do this quick,” he said.
Dez went to the little girl. The child was as hot as a furnace, but her eyelids fluttered open as Dez gently picked her up.
“Are … we going home now?” the little girl asked.
A sob broke in Dez’s chest and for a moment she stood there, clutching the girl to her chest, her face crumpled into a knot of grief.
“Yes,” she whispered to the little girl. “Yeah, baby … we’re going home now.”
She led the way out of the room and down the hall. JT and Trout waited for the staggering adults to follow, and then they came last. A procession of the dying and the broken.
They walked to the stairwell and then down the cold tower that was no longer part of a knight’s castle or a princess’s glittering palace or a wizard’s lair. Now it was cold stone, as lifeless as the stones on the walls of a crypt.
They stopped at the back door and, still holding the girl, Dez unclipped the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button.
“We’re bringing out the bite victims. Three of us are
“Roger that,” said a voice. Not Zetter.
“We don’t want to get overrun either. Can you draw the infected away from the door long enough to let us bring them out?”
“Yes, ma’am. You’ll hear it.”
Trout grinned at Dez. “‘Ma’am’? You’d have threatened to kneecap me if I ever called you that.”
“That still applies, so don’t get any ideas.”
Suddenly outside a siren began howling. Another joined it, and another. Dez leaned close to the door to listen. The sound began to move, to fade.
“They’re using sirens to draw them away.”
JT nodded approval. “First smart thing they’ve done.”
After a couple of minutes the walkie-talkie squawked.
“You’re clear, Officer Fox,” said the voice. “It’s a tight window, so hurry.”
JT pushed on the crash bar and the door opened. There were bodies outside, crumpled and broken. JT looked around for movement and saw none.
“It’s clear.”
He stepped outside and held the door as the line of infected people shambled out. Trout and Dez came last, still holding the children. The soldiers had popped more flares, but they were on the far side of the parking lot, and trucks with sirens were parked on the other side of the fence.
“Are they going to help us?” asked one of the bite victims.
“They’re coming,” said Dez, hating herself for the lie inside the truth. She told the wounded to sit down by the wall. Some of them immediately fell asleep; others stared with empty eyes at the glowing flares high in the sky.
For a moment it left Dez, JT, and Trout as the only ones standing, each of them holding a dying child. The tableau was horrific and surreal. They stared at each other, frozen into this moment because the next was too horrible to contemplate. Then they saw movement.
JT peered into the shadows. “They’re coming.”
“The Guard?” asked Dez, a last flicker of hope in her eyes.
“No,” he said.
They heard the moans. For whatever reason, pulled by some other aspect of their hunger, a few of the dead had not followed the flares and the sirens, and now they staggered toward the living who stood by the open door.
“We have to go,” said Trout.
“And right now,” agreed JT. He kissed the little boy on the cheek and set him down on the ground between two sleeping infected. Trout sighed brokenly and did the same. “Dez, come on…,” murmured JT.
But Dez turned half away as if protecting the little girl she held from him.
“Please, Hoss…?”
“Dez.”
“I can’t!”
“Give her to me, honey. I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”
It took everything Dez had left to allow JT to take the sleeping girl from her arms. She shook her head, hating him, hating the world, hating everything.
“Better get inside,” JT warned. Some of the zombies were very close now. Twenty paces.
Trout ran to the door. “Dez, JT, come on. We
Dez retreated toward the door, backing away from the child she had to abandon. Trout reached down and took her hand, and when she returned his squeeze it was crushingly painful. He pulled her toward the door as the first of the dead stepped into the pale light thrown by the emergency light.
“JT, come on, let’s go!” Trout yelled.
The big cop did not move. He held the little girl so gently, stroking her hair and murmuring to her.
“JT!” cried Dez. “We have to close the door!”
He smiled at her. “Yeah,” he said, “you do.”
They waited for him to come, but he stayed where he was.
“JT?” Dez asked in a small, frightened voice. “What’s wrong?”
JT kissed the little girl’s forehead and set her down with the others. Then he straightened and showed her his wrist. It was crisscrossed with glass cuts from the helicopter attack.
“What?” she asked.
Then she saw it.
A semicircular line of bruised punctures.
Dez whimpered something. A question. “How?”
“Upstairs, when those bastards tackled me. One of them got me … I didn’t see which one. Doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”
Then the full realization hit Dez. “NO!”
It was all Trout could do to hold her back. She struggled wildly and even punched him. The blow rocked him, but he did not let go. He would never let go. Never.
“No!” Dez screamed. “
The dead were closing in on JT. He unslung the shotgun. Across the parking lot the last flares were
