Bang. Bang. Bang.
More shots rang out from the ferryboat, but they merely hit the exterior of the tower. As if sensing the bullets, the wildling had ducked at the last second and rammed itself into the door.
I retreated a few steps, frantically patting my pockets for any extra ammo, but as I’d suspected, I was tapped out.
“Course I fucking am,” I grumbled.
As the creature shoved the door loose, busting it from its rusty hinges, I stumbled over a piece of debris and fell hard on my ass. The impact stunned me momentarily, long enough for the liberated door to soar across the shelving unit and almost take my blasted head off.
Wasting no time, the wildling flung the shelves across the room, as if they weighed no more than a pencil would to me. I scrambled to my feet, and another volley of bullets hit the windows and walls, but the wildling ignored them all. He only had eyes for me.
Or is that a she?
Like the others I’d seen, this one had menacing fangs and claws, sporadic tufts of hair, and a wild, cunning look in its eyes. In typical fashion, it wore shredded pants and no shoes, but the chest was decidedly curvier than usual.
Female or not, the wildling proved to be too wily for even skilled shooters like George and Casey. Several shots whizzed past as she crouched closer to the floor, leaving little surface area for my friends to target.
Likely realizing I was now trapped inside a small room with the hairy creature, my support team no doubt worried about my safety, but unfortunately, other monsters awaited. So, they turned their attention and their rifles to the zombies creeping over the bodies on the stairs—and left me to deal with the wildling.
For a moment, nothing happened. The creature remained in a crouch, staring at me with her unnerving yellow eyes, while I stood stock-still, questioning if it was too late to make a run for the skylight.
My rifle started to slip from my right shoulder. Instinctively, I reached for the strap with my left hand, and as I did so, I brushed against my left-side jacket pocket, detecting three odd lumps inside.
“What the—”
Keeping an eye on the wildling and the three zombies that had dodged the whizzing bullets from the river, I slowly unzipped the pocket and slipped my hand within. Not a second later, I plucked out one of the tiny baggies that Myriam Beauvoir had given me two mornings prior. I couldn’t remember stowing them there, but I must’ve done so before heading into Home Depot.
Whatever the case, I wasn’t sure what good the discovery would do me.
I opened my hand in front of my face, the baggie of grayish “frog” powder resting in the middle of my palm. When Miss Myriam had given me the three small bundles, I’d almost scoffed. Though I’d witnessed the rosemary plants at her laundromat and at her sister’s place outside Gramercy inexplicably repelling several zombies, I hadn’t thought much of the so-called frog powder.
But, now, I was out of bullets—and, worse, out of options.
What the fuck. Nothing else to lose.
I let the rifle slip from my arm. It clattered to the floorboards, jolting the wildling to her feet. But as she sprang toward me, I managed to untie the bag and pour all the powder into my right hand.
“Rougarou this, motherfucker,” I yelled, then threw the powder at the creature’s face.
I winced. The words had sounded much cooler in my head.
Guess I figured, if I was gonna die, I might as well shout a cheesy, action-movie one-liner before I perished. Even if nobody but a crazed wildling and three disgusting zombies were there to hear it.
As if mocking my disbelief, the frog powder offered instantaneous results. As soon as it touched the three zombies behind the wildling, the creatures gurgled and gripped their faces. What little skin they possessed promptly disintegrated into ash, followed by the rest of them. Essentially, they’d vaporized in a matter of seconds.
Unfortunately, the wildling didn’t go the way of her undead pals. But she didn’t like the powder either. As soon as the stuff hit the creature, the skin on her face, arms, and chest reddened and blistered. Howling in anguish, the wildling whirled around, bolted through the open doorway, and bowled through a posse of zombies attempting to creep over the mound of corpses on the stairs.
“Huh. Well, I’ll be damned.”
A cacophony of shouts came from the ferryboat. Snapped back to reality, I picked up my rifle and darted through the doorway. The fallen zombies had recovered and were once again climbing toward me. The wildling, however, was nowhere to be seen.
Nevertheless, it was time to go. The longer I stayed, the greater my chances that I’d be eaten alive or buried beneath the rubble of a disintegrating tower. So, I stepped onto the lowest bar of the unstable railing, swung my legs over the top, and balanced my butt on the upper bar. Then, I took a deep breath, steadied my feet on the swaying platform, and launched myself into Ol’ Man River.
As I plummeted thirty feet toward the churning brown water below, I abruptly remembered something I’d completely forgotten.
Shit, I don’t know how to swim.
Chapter
26
“See, you think of what is gonna happen, then life brings you one more surprise.” – Lt. Stanton, Fallen (1998)
To be fair, I technically knew how to swim. I just wasn’t very good at it.
Thanks to a piss-poor swimming teacher I’d had when I was younger, I’d always possessed a sizable fear
