He sighed and poked his head into the room where Tammy had delivered her baby. She slumbered on the bed. Katie glanced in his direction. She stood like a guard, the butt of her spear set upon the wooden floor. Dez sagged in her chair, asleep, the baby cradled in her arms.
"You hear them out there?" Katie whispered.
"Yeah," Mort said.
"Damn thing cried all night. Who knows how many of them there are now?"
"Sounds like a lot."
"We'll take care of it. I'll get some wood and get the fire up."
She nodded at him, returning her attention back to Tammy lying unconscious on the bed. Mort hoped she woke up soon. He hoped he was there when she did. He wanted to see the look on her face when she saw her baby for the first time. He thought that would be a sight to see, something positive in a world full of negatives.
He zipped up his jacket, threw on his gloves, and stepped out into the cold, white world. He could hear them better now, the dead, crawling around outside, searching and probing for a way in. They banged on the trailers, trying to pound their way in. The chain-link gate rattled against the plywood panels as they pulled and pushed on the metal.
He hustled over to the woodpile, a sense of urgency filling him. There were too many of them. They had to be cleared. He carried the firewood inside, set it on the coals, and then grabbed a spear.
"Is it bad?" Katie asked him as he poked his head back into Tammy's room.
"Don't know yet. Sounds bad, though."
"You want some help?" she asked.
"No, you stay here… just in case." They both knew what just in case meant. It meant just in case Tammy woke up and tried to eat her baby.
"If Dez wakes up or Joan, come on out and help me out. I have a feeling we're going to need it."
Katie nodded her understanding, and he stepped back outside into the cold whiteness. He shivered as all the heat was sucked from his body at once. He licked chapped lips, dry and cracked from being outside in the relentless wind. The snow still fell. He stalked across the compound's courtyard and climbed the wooden steps of the guard post. He didn't trust the rooves of the trailers. He had slipped on top of those metal roofs more than once in the last few weeks. Tumbling outside the compound now would be a death sentence.
At the top of the guard post, he looked down into the faces of the dead. Their cold eyes locked onto him. How did they know he was alive? Why did they not turn upon each other? Why was it him they wanted?
He twirled the spear in his hand. It took a lot of force to drive the dull spear tip through the eye sockets of the dead. The first Annie he took out was dressed like a construction worker, an orange, reflective vest wrapped around his torso. Its balding scalp was gray and mottled. He plunged the spear downward into its upturned face. He heard a crunch, and then it sagged down to the ground.
The dead didn't care that one of their number was no longer with them. They offered no ceremony, no acknowledgement. They only wanted Mort. Everything else was inconsequential. Mort noticed that the dead were taller now. Only a few weeks ago, he would have had to really lean over to plunge the spear into one of the dead. Now, he could stand straight up and do the work. He looked out over the cleared area in front of the compound, and he realized that the snow had risen, compacted by its own weight.
The implication panicked him. Even as the dead tromped over the body of the construction worker beneath them, he realized that the tops of their hands now came up to where his foot stood on the guard post. Could the dead climb? If so, they would be in trouble shortly. The trailers were a little taller than the guard post. If it didn't stop snowing, sooner or later, they would be able to climb right into the compound.
He plunged the spear into another one and another, but then he stopped. The corpses were piling up. If he killed any more, they would have enough height to climb over. He stepped back from the railing, making the dead, hungry faces disappear. Their hands pawed at the lip of the guard post's wooden floor.
Mort thought of fire, but he didn't know how he would be able to melt the snow around the compound without burning it up and leaving a hole in the compound's defenses. He toyed with the idea of running around outside and clearing the compound's perimeter, pulling the bodies away one at a time. But that seemed like a foolish idea.
The world around him went quiet. A murder of crows flew into the sky to his left, followed by more birds to his right. The trees began to shake, and then he realized that he too was shaking. He grabbed onto the railing of the guard post, realizing for the first time just how poorly it was constructed with plywood and nails. The frame shook underneath him, and he turned to flee down the steps. He stumbled and held onto the railing. The ground was never in the right place as he tried to climb down, and he tumbled down the last few stairs into the snow.
He placed his hands in the cold powder and pushed himself to his feet, though the very ground itself seemed to spite him by shifting and shaking underneath him. He tried to shake his head and make some sense of the roiling world. In the
