She heard John shout something as he released the trigger. Abi couldn’t make out what it was. In fact, she couldn’t tell if he was angry or happy. Both of those notions disturbed her, so she quickly pushed the thought aside.
Then the shooting stopped.
The silence was nearly as deafening as the loudness of the weapons’ fire a few moments before. John reached down for his M4 and popped back up through the hatch. He carefully took aim and started shooting the crawling undead.
The end was in sight. At least, Abi thought so. She crawled back to the front seat and sent a quick message to Jack, who was all too happy to hear from her. He told her that he had been attempting to contact Breanne, but to no avail. The news was alarming, to say the least.
But Abi and her team had their own problems to solve.
“How are we going to plug that hole?”
Mike gave voice to the question that was on her own mind. The gap in the wall was about eight feet wide, and Abi could think of no quick way to fix it. She scanned the space around the vehicle.
“Hey!” she pointed excitedly. “What about that?”
BREANNE MOVED ALONG in a daze. She could barely feel her feet touching the ground as she stumbled away. She knew she was moving, though, as she saw the ground slide by under her. It was going the wrong direction, but that didn’t faze her.
Her hearing was slowly getting better. In one ear anyway. She heard Bill’s voice calling out, and BB, who was somewhere close, reply. She couldn’t quite make out the words, though. It kind of sounded like she was underwater. Breanne was reminded of the teacher’s voice in the old Charlie Brown cartoons. “Moh Wohwohwoh. Hom womwon woh-who.” She snickered in amusement.
The sound of several gunshots nearby sent painful spikes into Breanne’s head and shattered her amusement.
Dammit, Bill! Don’t you know how loud that is?
She stopped running. Or at least the ground stopped moving. She felt herself lifted and plopped down on a cold, hard surface. She stared up, seeing blue sky to the left and the metal wall of a tall building to the right. She dropped her head to the side and watched BB climb onto whatever platform she was on. He moved off, affording her a view into...
A parking lot of some kind. Loading dock. I’m on a loading dock.
Then, movement. At the entrance to the lot. A figure. No, two. No. Four, ten, twenty!
Breanne lifted her arm and pointed. “Company’s coming.”
She heard Bill and BB moving on the other side of her. Their voices were raised in alarm. She heard a clanking sound and guessed they were trying to open the door. They grew more frantic in their efforts. Breanne could guess why; she had a first-row seat to their impending doom.
The nearest zombie was about twenty feet away. It was nearly naked, wearing only boxer shorts. Its skin was dark and wrinkled, like it was dried out or something.
Man jerky. Breanne laughed out loud as the thought came to her. Her laughter must have alerted her companions, and she saw Bill kneel at the edge of her vision.
Breanne’s gaze drifted upward from the severely wrinkled bosom, which resembled giant raisins, to the scuffed-up face. Which then exploded.
Ew. You can’t unsee that...
Bill took several more shots, and Breanne saw a few more zombies drop. But the throng of undead just kept growing. And getting closer.
“Last mag!” She heard Bill yell.
Oh. That’s not good.
ABI TUGGED ON JOHN’S pant leg to get his attention. She promptly pointed when he knelt inside the vehicle. “How about that?”
“That’s... fucking perfect!” he said enthusiastically.
“Language, John,” Mike chastised. He did agree, though. They’d found their solution.
No more than a block away stood an ice cream truck. There was no mistaking the vehicle, with its giant-sized soft-serve cone on the roof.
“All right. I can go see if I can get it started,” John said. “Can you guys hold the gap?”
Mike turned in his seat and faced the rugged ex-soldier. “No. I’ve got a better idea. You two hold the gap, and I’ll collect that truck.”
John’s eyes widened in surprise. “You sure?”
“I got this,” Mike said as he reached for his seatbelt.
The trio got out of the relative safety of the Humvee and grouped momentarily in the middle of the street. They checked their ammo and made sure they had spare magazines. John picked off a crawling zombie and another one as it stepped through the gap in the wall.
“Good to go?”
He received nods in confirmation and strode towards the gap with Abi in tow as Mike jogged down the street in the opposite direction.
“Call your shots,” John instructed, smoothly raising his rifle to his chin. “Twelve o’clock, in the gap,” he continued, and pulled the trigger. The well-placed shot snapped the head of the former policeman up, its body falling backwards lifelessly.
“Eleven o’clock. Front yard,” Abi called out, her voice squeaking slightly. Her shot was true, and another zombie folded in on itself.
They continued like that for the next thirty seconds, shooting the undead before any of them could come closer than ten yards. Abi was no longer flustered by the time she had put down her third zombie, a crawler. As a matter of fact, she started feeling the thrill of excitement and a flush crept into her cheeks.
“Boo-yah!” she exclaimed when she shot her fourth zombie — then had to take a hurried breath and shoot again, as she had only clipped her target on the first shot.
“Easy now, soldier.” John’s calm, commanding voice beside her settled her nerves.
The sound of a truck engine starting up in the distance surprised them. They hadn’t figured on Mike being able to get
