One door was opening, pushing the barricade forward, but no one was in sight. The intruder must be just behind the opening door. Since it didn’t require superhuman strength to move the barricade, she didn’t know who or what to expect.
Now she drew her shotgun from her harness on her back and aimed at the door. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw others up and reaching for their weapons. She kept her gaze fixed on the doors.
A man dressed in women’s underwear, with sores all over his body, appeared in the doorway. The draugar looked right at Jocelyn and pushed at the tables.
Jocelyn fired and blasted his stomach, propelling him backwards against more draugar that had entered the room. The draugar all tumbled down together.
Emily screamed. Jocelyn ignored her.
“Hold your fire!” Jocelyn yelled. She leaped forward, stood on the barricade and began shooting at all four prone draugar.
Jocelyn aimed for their heads and kept shooting until she ran out of ammo. Three of the four draugar had head wounds and did not move. But one leapt up, snarled, and rushed at her. She kicked it in the head, but that merely slowed it down as it grabbed her legs. She fell backwards and pain erupted as she landed on the table, half her body dangling in mid-air as the draugar held onto her legs.
She heard a shotgun blast and her legs were released. Gravity pulled her down, and she went tumbling backwards, a sharp pain in her head as it hit the floor.
Alexander looked over at Jocelyn. She barely moved, her head in a pool of blood.
Vin took over and climbed onto the table, unloading into the zombies.
Alexander went over to Jocelyn, careful not to touch her blood, and when she opened her eyes, she looked at him with warmth and an intoxicating fierceness.
“Are you all right?” he asked, shouting above the noise of the shotgun blasts. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the sheriff had joined Vin.
But all Alexander thought about was making sure Jocelyn was fine. Jocelyn sat up and grimaced as she felt the back of her neck. Her hand came away covered in blood. Her blood.
“I’m fine. How could I bleed so much?”
“Head wounds bleed profusely. It must have bled a lot prior to the wound closing. I wouldn’t be concerned.”
“Stop firing!” Jocelyn yelled as she stood up and drew her sword.
At that moment, Alexander thought her the most majestic and beautiful person he’d ever seen. And she was so cool wielding that sword.
Vin and the sheriff kept firing as if they didn’t hear her—hard to do with the sound of the gunfire and Emily screaming. Jocelyn continued to cry, “Stop firing!”. Eventually they stopped, and Jocelyn climbed over the table and lopped the heads off of what remained of the zombies. She took only one blow for each.
“How the hell does she do that?” Vin asked.
Emily stopped screaming and whimpered in Janice’s lap. Emily would definitely be a burden, though Alexander would never in a million years abandon her. And Janice had helped him with his wrist, which had healed well. Janice nurtured Emily well. She nurtured all of them well. He would not be the one to cause their deaths by abandoning them.
Perhaps this whole goddamned thing could be reversed, and perhaps Jocelyn was key to that.
Alexander did not know the state of his family. Were they somewhere safe? Zombies? Dead? Certainly, they had no access to cell phones, or at least no text coverage. A long time ago, based on that, he concluded they must not be safe at all. Still, he wanted to go after them, but it would be foolish to do it alone, and doubly so without a shotgun.
Most likely, they were zombies, and any hope for a cure lay in Jocelyn and himself—her blood, his expertise. They could be a team that, together, saved the world, but even if not, he needed safety, he needed information, if he were to survive to get to them. Perhaps Colorado Springs knew how Northern California fared? So his best hope of helping his family lay in Colorado Springs.
That he was more than a little attracted to Jocelyn complicated things.
He might be the only one, besides Jocelyn, to note that the zombies didn’t attack at first this time. They must have pushed aside the barricade with no great force, or Alexander would have woken up to the sound, and after he awakened, he saw the zombies file in as if they would hold a board meeting right there in the room.
But Jocelyn attacked anyway.
It might have been a missed opportunity to learn what the zombies would have done if she hadn’t attacked. But Jocelyn’s guess—that they would eventually attack—was as good as anybody’s.
Alexander always thought zombies turned animalistic. But could they have moments of lucidity? Jocelyn was close to being a zombie, and she was very lucid. Wait . . .
Jocelyn was close to being a zombie.
He had never seen a zombie attack another zombie. What if one did? What would the other zombie do? Just like in the animal world, it would protect itself. Why didn’t the zombies attack each other? In fact, now that he thought about it, animals attacked each other all the time. In nature, under what circumstances do animals never attack each other? When they were part of a hive. In family units, many animals attacked one another for dominance, but not in a hive. Except where the Queen killed her suitors, or vice versa, but they never encountered anything resembling a Queen.
Could the zombies think of Jocelyn as part of their hive? Was that why they didn’t initiate the attack? Could they think of her as their Queen?
A big, speculative leap, but as good an explanation as any.
“Alexander!” He broke out of his reverie.
“Huh?”
“Are you all right? You lost us for a while.”
He gathered his thoughts, bringing himself back to the present.
