while I got to my feet and walked toward her, my gun out, the red dot steady on her chest.
“Joe,” she said with evident relief, “I’m glad you’re all right.”
“I’m not looking to take a chance here, Grace. Tell me what happened.”
“There was a team of hostiles holding this end of the hallway, trying to get in.”
I caught that she said “was.” Another figure moved through the dust and as he stepped into the lab I was surprised to see who it was. I lowered my gun and held it down at my side.
“Skip? Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, Captain I got blindsided.”
The young man looked worse than Grace. His eyes were jumpy and darted back and forth and his smile was both brief and tremulous. I gave him a nod and he stayed where he was, looking around uncertainly as if unsure to which team he belonged.
I moved closer to Grace. “Tell me what happened.”
She told me everything in a few terse sentences. The hurt in her face and voice was bottomless. “We saw a group of hostiles trying to shoot their way in,” she concluded. “We took them out. All communications are jammed, so we couldn’t download a keycard code, so I had Jackson blow the door.”
Behind me Bunny swore. I turned to see that Top had helped the big young man to a sitting position. Bunny was groggily shaking his head, blood trickling down the left side of his face. Top removed Bunny’s helmet and examined the bruise, then he turned and gave me a quick nod. “Farmboy here took a blunt-force hit to the head. He’ll be okay.”
“I ain’t a farmboy, you shit-kicker,” Bunny complained. “I’m from Orange County.”
Top patted his shoulder. “Now that the cavalry’s here maybe we should saddle up and ride.”
“The cavalry’s still not here,” Grace said softly. “My team is Gus Dietrich and the others should be breaching the wall any minute.”
I suddenly felt old and used up. “Well, then we’ll have to make our stand here and wait. No back doors, and I don’t particularly want to go back down that corridor.”
“Sod that,” murmured Grace.
Ollie stood by the table looking as much like an uninvited guest as did Skip. I avoided looking at either of them at the moment. Both of them had gone missing in ways as yet unexplained, both miraculously alive despite the terrorists and the walkers. I was going to have to sit down and have long talks with each of them. It would be better for everyone if they both had nice, clear, and believable stories.
Over by the door Jackson called out sharply. “Major Captain Ledger we’re about to have company.”
“What have you got?” I called.
Jackson looked stricken. “Walkers! Hundreds of them.”
“Terrific,” Top said sourly. “I’m down to one magazine, Cap’n.”
“They’re here!”
We all turned to see the shambling mass of walkers round the bend in the hall outside and fill the doorway. Rank upon rank of them.
There was no time to think, just to act.
“Make a barricade!” I grabbed the nearest table to me and heaved. Grace caught the other end and we shoved it forward, the legs screeching on the concrete floor, the vibration sending delicate instruments crashing to the ground, and I hoped we weren’t breaking anything that contained a virus or parasite. The Hammer suits would protect us from skin contact but none of us were wearing masks.
Bunny was sick and dazed from his head injury but he bulled his way through it; he grabbed the corner of one big table and with a grunt of effort heaved it over onto its side then rammed it with a shoulder to drive it into the doorway. Top began tossing chairs over the table to create an obstacle course to slow the walkers down. Ollie rushed to help him. Skip looked around and grabbed another table and hauled on it without much effect; I took the other end and we pushed that against the others.
Then the mass of walkers hit the barrier like a tidal surge. They were only as strong as ordinary humans but there was so many of them that their sheer weight of numbers acted like a battering ram that drove the barricade backward nearly three feet. Jackson reached over the edge of the barricade and opened up into the massed bodies. A few went down, but most of his bullets tore through chests and limbs without doing much to stop them.
“Pick your bleeding targets, Jackson!” Grace snarled. “Shoot for the head.”
The barricade shuddered again and slid farther into the room as hundreds of the living dead surged forward again and again. At the front of the mass a few of the walkers collapsed, crushed by those behind them, and I could hear bones breaking. But it was weird, without screams or grunts, just low moans, even from those who were being trampled.
“It’s not going to hold,” warned Ollie as he shoved another table against the barricade.
“Nothing gets over that wall!” yelled Grace as she leveled her gun and opened fire, dropping two walkers with headshots and tearing away the jaw of a third. I drew my gun and stepped up next to her and fired; Top and Bunny flanked us and then Skip and Jackson. Ollie and Skip took handguns from Alpha Team members who had MP5s. Eventually all of us had formed a shooting line a few yards on our side of the barrier, shooting point-blank at the walkers as they climbed up the sides of the tables and overturned chairs. The thunder of our combined gunfire was deafening as we fired, fired, fired. The walkers fell but the surge never faltered. As the creatures in front died, the others climbed over them to try and get to us.
The slide of my pistol locked back and I fumbled for my last magazine and slapped it in. Fifteen rounds. “Last mag!” I yelled.
“I’m out!” Top said a moment later. He spun out of the line to look for one of the AK-47s, found it and came back firing, the selector switch set to semiauto.
Grace was shooting slower than the rest of us but she was making more kills. She aimed and fired, aimed and fired, and with each shot a zombie toppled backward, its infernal life force snuffed out. I followed her lead and slowed my rate of fire.
The walkers fell by the dozen. By the score.
The dead were heaped so high that for a moment they blocked the door, but then the surge hit the other side of it and the mountain of corpses toppled into the room. We had to jump backward to keep from being buried by them, and that broke our line. The barricade was gone and now the walkers were climbing into the room over the heaped dead.
“Remember the Spartans,” Bunny mumbled as he backed up.
“We ain’t dead yet, farmboy,” Top said.
“I told you already that I’m not aw, fuck it.” He shot two walkers who tried to rush him from his blind side. His gun clicked empty as the slide locked. “Shit! Who’s got a mag?”
Nobody answered him. Those of us with bullets kept firing.
“Shit!” he swore again, and threw his pistol so hard at a rushing ghoul that it knocked the creature onto its back. Bunny rushed over to a far wall and tore a fire axe out its metal clips. “C’mon, you undead sonsabitches!”
They came. They swarmed at him and he laid into them with the axe, swinging it with such incredible force that arms and heads flew through the air. His backhand slash dropped two walkers with broken necks. One walker lunged at him and sank its teeth into the fabric of his Hammer suit and though Bunny broke its back with a chop of the axe the creature’s bite tore the whole front of the suit open.
I fired my last shot and tossed the gun aside. Grace and her team still had ammunition and they re-formed into a tighter line, firing constantly but now their shots were killing only one in two, and then one in three as their hands went numb from the recoil and their hearts froze in their chests. Even Grace was missing the kill nearly half the time.
“Out!” Top called and fell back. He caught my eye and gave me a wicked grin. “Be nice if this was like the movies. Nobody ever runs out of ammo in the goddamn movies.”
Ollie fired his last shot and dropped out of the line, too. “Now what?” he asked.
I cast around for something to use as a weapon and spotted a set of shelves made from wire racks and chrome-plated pipes. I snatched it up and swung it with all my strength against a wall where it exploded into its component parts. I picked out a six-foot-long upright and swung the bar with all the force I could muster from need and terror, and laid into the front rank of the walkers, crushing the head of one and breaking the neck of another. I
