His man backed down, muttering to himself. “I don’t have to like it.”
“I don’t give two shits if you like it!” Washington roared. He whirled in a circle and locked eyes on every one of his men. “We are surrounded on all sides by enemies. The dead are literally hammering at the door to get down here. That flimsy thing won’t last long and I’m guessing they’ll just fall down the steps. We’ve only got
He looked at me again, his left eye twitching spasmodically. I could see the sweat just running down his face. “So the plan is to unlock the door and run out there?”
I shrugged. “Pretty much.”
“What then?”
“Once we get out there we need to see which way the zombies are heaviest and go the other way. Hope they don’t see us and we can buy a little bit of time.”
The burly man who’d questioned Wash turned to me and said, “Then what? Where are we going to go that would be safer than this place?”
“I’m open to suggestions. Anyone know of a good place we can hole up?”
He waved his hands in disgust.
Wash said, “Why can’t we just hoof it into town? We’ve got enough guns here that we might be able to protect ourselves.”
I shook my head. “That might work, but there’s no guarantee how infested the woods are and if town is even a safe bet.”
Wash said, “No hope, of course. Then you’re saying we have nowhere to go?”
I shook my head again and lied, “No, I’m not saying that. We need to hole up somewhere – maybe a trailer – and hope that the cavalry comes sometime in the morning.”
Who knows how long we would have debated where to go or what to do. Probably until Hell froze over, but that was when the decision was taken from us. The door at the top of the basement stairs burst with a resounding crack. Fortunately the zombies were in such a frenzied hurry to get down to us that they clustered around the doorway and wedged themselves in. Not one of them had enough leverage to push through the throng. But that wouldn’t last long.
“We’re out of time, Wash!” I yelled. “Let’s go.”
We all ran to the bottom of the walkout. I looked at Wash, “Where’s the key?”
He looked at me and then went, “Oh, shit,” and started rifling through his pockets. He finally pulled out a huge key ring. One of those you always see janitors have in the movies and think how funny it is and wonder how they can ever find anything in that mess. I didn’t wonder. I knew there was no way he’d find it in time.
“Ah, screw it.” I finally said, and then bounded up the bottom two stairs of the walkout. I braced the gun on my shoulder and aimed it at the padlock straight on and turned my head, hoping that I wouldn’t get shrapnel or wood in my face. Saying a brief prayer to whatever god was listening, I pulled the trigger. The blast of the gun was tremendous in the enclosed space and all I could hear was a ringing in my ears as I chambered another round and ran up the rest of the stairs, putting my shoulder into it and heaving the doors with all my might.
They flew open, bouncing noisily against the ground as I ran out of the walkout. I did a quick 360. There were no zombies in sight, thankfully.
“All clear,” I hissed back down the stairs.
Fannie Mae came scrambling up behind me, followed by the other seven men. They spread out in a fan, checking every corner. When they were all out I turned around and looked back down into the basement. As I watched I saw a zombie skidding to a stop at the bottom of the stairs. He looked like he’d surfed to the bottom. He had no legs, his torso ending in a bloody, white stump that twitched madly. It was his spine. I saw his head swivel around the basement and then come to rest on my face. He began to pull himself forward with his hands.
“Shit,” I muttered. I gripped one side of the double doors and swung it shut. Wash saw what I was doing and went and did the other. It wouldn’t hold the zombies off for long but it might confuse them for a couple extra minutes and that was really all we could ask for.
“What now?” The burly man said.
“How about we go that direction?” I said, pointing in the opposite direction from the house.
So we were off. I managed to keep me and Fannie Mae in the middle of the pack while we went off in a fast walk. You don’t want to run too fast when you’re in the middle of a zombie attack. I could just see us running like crazy and turning a corner and running smack dab into the middle of a horde. Although I was hoping against hope that we’d left most of the horde behind us. Fannie Mae only had the pistol she’d grabbed earlier and I don’t think either one of us really knew how to check it to see how many rounds were left in it. It was for last resort only and I didn’t want the others to know that she had it. She must have sensed the direction of my thoughts as she’d not once brought it to anyone’s attention.
For all we knew it only had one round left in it anyway.
We made quicker time than our little rescue party had earlier going to the car park. No rain and less caution help’s a ton. We got there in no more than a couple minutes. We stopped in front of the line of cars to rest and talk and I felt a wave of sorrow pass over me as I saw Tamara’s body. Fannie Mae looked to see where I was looking and she sighed, too, and squeezed my hand. Even though my heart was now full of ideas of me and Fannie Mae together there was still a place in it for Tamara and I wished yet again that none of this had happened. You could blame me or her or Mason Smith all you wanted, but the truth was that I was the only one still alive to shoulder the blame.
Mason was still out there somewhere but he was beyond blame now.
For a moment I flashed onto an image of Mason out there, marshalling his troops. Somehow commanding them to come attack the House or to sweep the trailers for survivors. I had no doubt there were still people huddled underneath beds and in closets. I didn’t think that Mason had any more intelligence or personality than any of the other zombies but a piece of me had a glimmer that maybe, just maybe, there was a little more to him than the
