“Pipes! Who’s got pipes!” Riley shouted.
They all had pipes, and they all got them ready. Cahill wished he had a gun, but Whittaker confiscated guns. Hell, he wished he had an MK19, a grenade launcher. And a Humvee and some support, maybe with mortars, while he was at it.
Then she was on them, and they were all swinging like mad, because if she got her teeth into any of them, it was all over for that guy. The best thing to do was to keep up a goddamn flurry of swinging pipes so she couldn’t get to anyone. Cahill hit other pipe, mostly, the impact clanging through his wrist bones, but sometimes when he hit the zombie he felt the melon thunk. She made no noise. No moaning, no hissing, no movie zombie noises, but even as they crushed her head and knocked her down (her eye socket gone soft and one eye a loose silken white sack) she kept moving and reaching. She didn’t try to grab the pipes, she just reached for them until they had pounded her into broken bits.
She stank like old meat.
No blood. Which was strangely creepy. Cahill knew from experience that people had a lot more blood in them than you ever would have thought based on TV shows. Blood and blood and more blood. But this zombie didn’t seem to have any blood.
Finally Riley yelled, “Get back, get back!” and they all stepped back.
All the bones in her arms and legs were broken, and her head was smashed to nothing. It was hard to tell she had ever looked like a person. The torso hitched its hips, raising its belly, trying to inchworm toward them, its broken limbs moving and shuddering like a seizure.
Riley shook his head and then said to them. “Anybody got any marks? Everybody strip.”
Everybody stood there for a moment, ignoring him, watching the thing on the broken sidewalk.
Riley snarled, “I said strip, motherfuckers. Or nobody goes back to the compound.”
“Fuck,” one of the guys said, but they all did and, balls shriveled in the spring cold, paired off and checked each other for marks. When they each announced the other was clear, they all put their clothes back on and piled rubble on top of the twitching thing until they’d made a mound, while Riley kept an eye out for any others.
After that, everyone was pretty tense. They broke into an apartment complex above a storefront. The storefront had been looted and the windows looked empty as the socket of a pulled tooth, but the door to the apartments above was still locked, which meant that they might find stuff untouched. Cahill wondered: if zombies did go dormant without food, what if someone had gotten bit and gone back to this place, to their apartment? Could they be waiting for someone to enter the dark foyer, for the warmth and smell and the low steady big drum beat of the human heart to bring them back?
They went up the dark stairwell and busted open the door of the first apartment. It smelled closed, cold and dank. The furniture looked like it had been furnished from the curb, but it had a huge honking television. Which said everything about the guy who had lived here.
They ignored the TV. What they were looking for was canned goods. Chef Boy-ar-dee. Cans of beef stew. Beer. They all headed for the kitchen, and guys started flipping open cabinets.
Then, like a dumbshit, Cahill opened the refrigerator door. Even as he did it, he thought, “Dumbass.”
The refrigerator had been full of food and then had sat, sealed and without power, while that food all rotted into a seething, shit-stinking mess. The smell was like a bomb. The inside was greenish black.
“Fuck!” someone said, and then they all got out of the kitchen. Cahill opened a window and stepped out onto the fire escape. It was closest, and everyone else was headed out into the living room where someone would probably take a swing at him for being an asshole. The fire escape was in an alley and he figured that he could probably get to the street and meet them in front, although he wasn’t exactly sure how fire escapes worked.
Instead he froze. Below him, in the alley, there was one of those big dumpsters, painted green. The top was off the dumpster and inside it, curled up, was a zombie. Because it was curled up, he couldn’t tell much about it— whether it was male or female, black or white. It looked small, and it was wearing a striped shirt.
The weird thing was that the entire inside of the dumpster had been covered in aluminum foil. There wasn’t any sun yet in the alley but the dumpster was still a dull and crinkly mirror. As best he could tell, every bit was covered.
What the fuck was that about?
He waited for the zombie to sense him and raise its sightless face, but it didn’t move. It was in one corner, like a gerbil or something in an aquarium. And all that freaking tinfoil. Had it gone into apartments and searched for aluminum foil? What for? To trap sunlight? Maybe Duck was right, they
The window had been hard to open, and it had been loud. He could still smell the reek of the kitchen. The sound and the stink should have alerted the zombie.
Maybe it was dead. Whatever that meant to a zombie.
He heard a distant
The hair was standing up on the back of Cahill’s neck. From the zombie or the air strike, he couldn’t tell. He didn’t hear helicopters. He didn’t hear anything. He stamped on the metal fire escape. It rang dully. The zombie didn’t move.
He went back inside, through the kitchen and the now-empty apartment, down the dark stairwell. The other guys were standing around in the street, talking about the sounds they’d heard. Cahill didn’t say anything, didn’t say they were probably Hellfire missiles although they sure as hell sounded like them, and he didn’t say there was a zombie in the alley. Nobody said anything to him about opening the refrigerator, which was fine by him.
Riley ordered them to head back to see what was up in the Flats.
While they were walking, the skinny little guy said, “Maybe one of those big cranes fell. You know, those big fuckers by the lake that they use for ore ships and shit.”
Nobody answered.
“It could happen,” the little guy insisted.
“Shut up,” Riley said.
Cahill glanced behind them, unable to keep from checking his back. He’d been watching since they started moving, but the little zombie didn’t seem to have woken up and followed them.
When they got to Public Square they could see the smoke rising, black and ugly, from the Flats.
“Fuck,” Cahill said.
“What is that?” Riley said.
“Is that the camp?”
“Fuck is right.”
“One of the buildings is on fire?”
Cahill wished they would shut the fuck up because he was listening for helicopters.
They headed for Main Avenue. By the time they got to West Tenth, there was a lot more smoke, and they could see some of it was rising from what used to be Shooters. They had to pick their way across debris. Fado and Heaven were gutted, the buildings blown out. Maybe someone was still alive. There were bodies. Cahill could see one in what looked like Whittaker’s usual uniform of orange football jersey and black athletic shorts. Most of the head was missing.
“What the fuck?” Riley said.
“Air strike,” Cahill said.
“Fuck that,” Riley said. “Why would anyone do that?”
Because we weren’t dying, Cahill thought. We weren’t supposed to figure out how to stay alive. We certainly weren’t supposed to establish some sort of base. Hell, the rats might get out of the cage.
The little guy who thought it might have been a crane walked up behind Riley and swung his pipe into the back of Riley’s head. Riley staggered and the little guy swung again, and Riley’s skull cracked audibly. They little guy hit a third time as Riley went down.
The little guy was breathing heavy. “Fucking bastard,” he said, holding the pipe, glaring at them. “Whittaker’s bitch.”
Cahill glanced at the fourth guy with them. He looked as surprised as Cahill.
“You got a problem with this?” the little guy said.
