heard a roaring sound and realized that it was my own voice, raised into an animal howl of rage as I swung and smashed and thrust at the living dead.
I swung low to knock the legs out from under two of the creatures and suddenly Top and Ollie were there, both of them with shorter pieces of chromed pipe in their hands. They crushed the heads of the walkers I’d knocked down and that fast we had a rhythm. I knocked them down and they finished them off. I could hear Bunny’s bull roar behind me, as loud as my own. Top’s arm was red to the shoulder; then Ollie slipped in a pool of blood and went down with three of the creatures on top of him. In a flash Skip was there, his gun empty but a KABAR in his hand, and the blade flashed out, cutting tendons and slashing throats. Top pulled Ollie up and the three of them fanned out behind me as we met the next wave. And the next. And the next.
Five walkers rushed me and I chopped the outermost one in the temple so that he crashed into the others and knocked the whole line off balance. Top leaped at them, hammering away with the pipe, but I could see that his blows were coming slower and with less force. He was tiring. So was I. It had been an insanely long day and this was past human endurance.
I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and wheeled to see three walkers coming at Grace from her blind side.
“Grace! Left flank!” I yelled, and went for a long reach with my pole.
She saw my swing and ducked under it, allowing the bar to smash into the face of one of her attackers. She shot the other two and then she was empty.
I pulled her away and pushed her behind me. “Fall back!” I shouted to the others. There were six tables at the back of the room. If nothing else we could try a second barricade. “Bunny, plow the road!”
Bunny leaped forward and cut down two ghouls with a swing that was so powerful that it cut one of them nearly in half. He hacked his way to us. I realized that both sides of the lab were lined with tall metal cabinets. They were freestanding, not bolted to the wall, and it gave me a spark of hope. “Skip Ollie!” As they turned toward me I grabbed the corner of one of the cabinets and pulled it as hard as I could. It toppled easily and fell with a deafening crash, crushing one of the walkers under its ponderous bulk. The others got the idea at once and immediately began overturning the cabinets so that within seconds we had created a steel corridor that limited how many of them could approach at once.
Grace herded her team back, and Jackson had enough presence of mind to drag our prisoner with them. That showed optimism, I thought. Then something caught my attention and I turned to look at a steel cabinet mounted against one wall. It was chained shut and across it was stenciled ARMS in Farsi.
“Top! Arms locker on your nine o’clock!”
He spun around and saw the cabinet and a big grin broke out on his face. He couldn’t read Farsi but he got the picture and with a heave of his whole body he brought his bar down on the lock, shattering it. He pulled open the door and we saw six police-style.38 revolvers hung on pegs and a shelf of boxed cartridges. Top’s smile faltered. Automatics and preloaded mags would have been a lot more comforting.
“Buy me some time, farmboy,” he called to Bunny as he and Grace began pulling down guns and tearing open boxes.
I stepped into the corridor to meet the rush of walkers who had succeeded in climbing over the piles of their own dead; Bunny flanked me and together we attacked. The pipe felt like it weighed a ton and each time the shock of impact sent painful shudders through my wrists and shoulders. I could barely drag in enough breath, and sweat stung my eyes. Bunny had to feel the same, and we stood there, fighting to hold the line. But every few seconds we were forced back a step and then another.
“Joe!” I heard Grace scream. “Fall back.” And suddenly the air around me exploded as six pistols fired at once. The front rank of the walkers was hurled back; then a second volley dropped more of them. I felt one round sing past me so close it burned the air next to my ear. I turned and saw Ollie staring at me with a shocked expression, and the gun in his hand trembled. Was it fatigue? Or fear of the walkers? Or had he missed the target he was aiming at? He opened his mouth to say something but I shot him a hard look as I rushed to get behind the line of guns.
Grace and her team had pushed tables together to create a redoubt. Skip was at the far end, boxed in behind the edge of a table and the last remaining cabinet; the rest were shoulder to shoulder behind the makeshift battlements. It was flimsy, but it was all we had. On the floor at Skip’s feet was the lab tech, wide-eyed with fear.
As Top passed me a pistol he murmured, “Getting to be a real nice time for that cavalry, Cap’n.”
“Prayer might help,” I said. “You a churchgoing man, Top?”
“Not lately, but if things work out right I might start up again.”
Grace and I stood behind one table, sharing half a box of bullets, timing our shots so that one fired while the other reloaded. “Some rescue, huh?” she said, trying to make a joke of it even as tears glittered in the corners of her eyes.
“I’m sorry about your team.”
She sniffed and cleared her throat. “We’re at war. People die.”
I looked at her for a long moment but she turned her face toward the door and I could see her features harden up like concrete drying in a hot sun. On top of everything else the loss of her team was a terrible blow, and I hoped it wouldn’t be a fatal one. Not only for us in the moment, but for her if she lived through this. Maybe Rudy could help. Or, maybe I could. I hoped the schism didn’t run too deep for anyone to reach.
I drew a breath as two more walkers shuffled into the corridor, then three more, then nine. They moaned like lost souls, though I wondered if they were truly without souls or if in some dreadful way the person that these creatures had once been was somehow trapped in those undead bodies; caught there with no way to control the killing machine that their bodies had become, watching with awful impotence as they shambled toward murder or death.
It was bad, bad thinking and I wondered if I was going into shock. Shit, I snarled inwardly. Got to stay solid. Got to stay sharp.
I squeezed the trigger and the leading walker was flung backward against the others, the whole front of his face disintegrating in a cloud of pink mist. I fired again and Grace shot at the same moment. Then everyone was firing and once more the room became a hell of earsplitting gunfire, the moans of the dead, and the screams of the living. The living dead kept coming, wave after wave of them. We shot well, a head shot nearly every time, but they kept coming.
The hammer of Grace’s pistol clicked on an empty cylinder. “Bugger all,” she hissed, “I’m out.”
One by one we emptied our guns and they kept on coming, moaning, reaching for us. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Grace’s profile. Even dirty and marked by strain she was beautiful. So brave and noble. As I fired my last bullet I could feel my heart sink to a lower spot in my chest. The dead were going to get to us. There were still forty or more of them in the room and more of them kept shambling through the door. I knew what I was going to have to do. It would be simple stand up and take her chin in one hand and gather up her hair in the other. It was easy, nothing more than a quick turn of her head and then she’d be free of all of this, beyond the reach of the walkers and their plague. I could do it. I’d done it twice with walkers-with Javad and with the walker in Room 12. I could do it now for Grace to keep her from slipping into that ungodly hell. The last gun clicked empty. Around us the air was filled with the hungry cries of the dead.
I felt myself getting to my feet, felt my hands flexing open, felt myself starting to move toward Grace, the movement necessary but the motion stalled by doubt. What if I’m wrong? What if she stops me and they get us both while we’re struggling? What if I and then above us, all at once, six of the steel-shuttered windows blew inward.
We all looked up, and even some of the walkers turned their dead faces upward as the steel panels-buckled and in fragments-tumbled murderously into the room.
“Heads up!” I screamed and my reaching hands closed on her shoulders and pulled Grace back as a huge chunk of steel drove like a logger’s maul right down onto the spot where Grace had been leaning, cleaving the table in half. We both screamed as my pull carried us back and down, and then we were rolling over and over each other until we collided with the wall. I wrapped my arms around her and buried my face in the crook of her neck as debris pelted down on my back. The others dove beneath the heavy lab tables or crowded into the corners as hundreds of pounds of jagged steel slammed into the ground. The front three ranks of the walkers were crushed and torn to rags, but the others, unable to feel shock or surprise, tottered forward with no change in their singleness of
