handful of fur.
Amy opened her eyes and in the darkness, found Molly staring back at her.
Molly sniffed her again, turned, inspected the Pop-Tarts on the floor among the broken glass, then trotted over to the side door of the RV, staring at Amy and wagging her tail. Dog language for,
Strangely, that got Amy’s leg’s moving again. Molly needed to go out. Amy had responded to that canine nonverbal cue a thousand times. She moved quickly to the door, steeled herself, and pushed it open. Molly jumped into the night, into the still air that minutes ago had carried dying screams and the visceral crack of gunfire. Into the night, where teeth and mindless appetites waited, digesting the entrails of boys she’d been laughing and joking with an hour before.
Molly returned, looking at Amy expectantly. Amy stepped into the night air, crouching low, keeping her eyes focused on Molly to keep the terror at bay. The dog was not afraid. Amy got ready to run, trying to decide which direction to go. She looked at Molly, as if hoping for a suggestion.
Molly made a beeline for the basement window.
Molly jumped over two piles of guts that used to be Josh and Donnie, and disappeared into the cafeteria Amy had seen on the grainy camera.
From below, Molly barked. Amy decided that dying out here, in the yard, in the open air, was somehow better than dying down in that dark basement. Molly barked again, but this time it was followed by the sound of shuffling footsteps behind her, somewhere in the night. A lot of them. Something was out here. Down there in the room, Molly was still alive and unharmed. Still, Amy half decided to just go running off into the night. But to where?
She got down on hand and knees and crawled through grass that was slimy and sticky with blood and other bodily discharges that were never meant to leave the confines of their organs. Her knees squished through spilled entrails until she awkwardly climbed/fell through the window.
Amy was blind in the darkness. The lantern was gone, the flashlight was gone. Molly was immediately at her side. Amy reached down to touch her, then grabbed her collar. Molly pulled her along, Amy using her as a Seeing Eye dog.
Amy kicked a corpse and stumbled, catching herself via the pure desperation to not have to crawl through any more guts. Molly led her out of the room, into the hallway, and Amy tried to pull her away from the direction of the stairwell, and the maintenance room down there that she knew was now a mass grave. Molly would not budge, pulling the other way, heading for the stairs.
Amy didn’t care what Molly had in mind. She wasn’t going down into that basement. Not now, not ever. Not for a million dollars. Not if her life depended on it. Amy pulled one way. Molly planted her feet and pulled the other.
Amy let go, and charged off into the darkness of the hall, toward whatever lay at the opposite end from the stairs and the twitching, writhing tomb she knew lay below. She threw her hand in front of her, walking blind, and eventually found a metal door just like the one she was running from.
A locked door.
She ran her hand along the handle and dead bolt, hoping to find a lever but instead finding a keyhole, one requiring a key she did not have. Clawed feet scratched up the floor tiles behind her, Molly coming back to say, “See?”
Amy didn’t move. She shivered. Her pants were wet. Her fingers were sticky with other people’s blood. Molly barked. Amy grabbed her collar, and allowed herself to be led down the hallway. They reached the end, and the stairs.
Down they went. They emerged onto the cell block and there was the stench of sewage and gunpowder, and there were the doors, and the scratching noises behind the doors. Amy blocked it all out. Molly pulled her along, and Amy knew where they were going. They reached the MAINTENAN door. In the darkness, Amy ran her hand over it and felt puckered bullet holes. She closed her eyes, let out a breath, and said a silent prayer.
She pushed the door open.
What lay beyond the door was Hell. Smoke filled the room, wafting between the rusting pipes and ducts that made the big room look like it was being attacked by a giant robot octopus. It stank like fireworks and burned cloth and scorched meat. A single, tiny white shaft of light stabbed up from the center of the floor from a dropped flashlight. It illuminated just enough of the nightmare so that Amy would be seeing it for the rest of her life. Dead, open eyes stared up at the ceiling. Open mouths, twitching fingers. All of the bodies wearing the same solid color. She felt her stomach turn.
Molly pulled free and stepped across corpses, trotting past the tiny shaft of light, continuing into the shadows beyond. She stopped at the opposite wall, looked back at Amy, and wagged her tail.
Amy focused on the light—she was determined to block out everything else from this nightmare place. If she could just make it there, then she’d have a flashlight, and everything would be a bit better. She carefully stepped over limbs and squishy things and explored with her toes to find the solid floor in between. One step, two, three… eventually she got close enough to grab the flashlight, trying to block out the fact that it was curled in three dead fingers. She plucked out the light and made her way toward Molly. The smoke was getting to her now, toxic, stinging fumes that burned her eyes.
There was a hole in the wall. Cinder blocks had been smashed and knocked aside. This was where the monsters had tunneled into the room. She shined the light inside and found that wasn’t quite right—the tunnel had already been there. It was made of brick and looked like the old-fashioned sewers they have under European cities. Old rusty pipes and stuff. Did the zombies live down here? Under the town?
Molly pushed past Amy, jumped and scrambled up into the tunnel.
“Molly! Wait!”
It was barely more than a whisper. The tunnel was crawling with bugs and dripping with muddy water. But that wasn’t the worst of what she knew lurked in there. Molly scampered into the darkness, the scratches of her claws disappearing into God knew where.
“Molly!”
Amy shined the flashlight down the tunnel, and saw two eyes reflecting back at her. Molly had stopped and looked back at her, but stayed where she was.
Amy climbed into the tunnel, realizing it wasn’t tall enough for her to crouch. She would have to crawl, on her hand and knees, over the bricks. She started, realizing the flashlight was next to useless in her right hand, the beam whipping around crazily as she edged forward. She briefly thought about sticking the flashlight in her mouth, but pictured the dead hand that had been clutching it and decided no way.
She pressed on.
Amy crawled, and crawled, and crawled. The brick ate up her knees and the stump of her left hand and the knuckles of her right that were trying to simultaneously clutch the flashlight and act as her front paw. Molly had taken off, her claws echoing down the tunnel until not even the echoes could be heard, and Amy wondered how long this tunnel could possibly be.
She crawled. Pain flared up each time a bony kneecap struck brick, grinding away at the paper-thin skin between the bone and the denim of her jeans. It seemed like she had crawled for miles, and hours. Water dripped in her hair, and on her back. She pushed through spiderwebs, she squished bugs under her hand, she thought she saw a rat scurry off at the sight of the flashlight beam.
She had to stop and rest. She couldn’t take the agony in her knees and fingers. The crawling was pulling and twisting at muscles she hadn’t used since she had learned to walk.
She stopped, pulled up her knees and leaned up against the rusty pipes. She shined the light back the way
