A dirty hand with long fingernails shot through the gap in the door grasping at Bud's forearm. A second and third hand followed the first all grasping at different spots on Bud's arm. Sweat dripped from Bud's mustache as he struggled to hold the door closed. Thuds and dings filled the air as zeds slammed into the outside of the door. Johnny reached in with his one good arm, grabbing the handle, and pulling at it with all he had.
"We need to clear them away from the door!" Bud grunted. Mick stepped in and slid the barrel of his rifle through the gap in the door. He squeezed the trigger, firing a long burst out into the night. The sound of gunfire echoed throughout the building followed by a loud bang and glass shattering somewhere nearby. Johnny turned to see Roosevelt at the top of the staircase as he reached into a small red box attached to the wall, triumphantly pulling out a red axe with a point on one end and a short wooden handle. He held the axe up in one hand as he took the stairs two at a time.
"Back up!" Roosevelt ordered Mick, who was already stepping out of his way.
The large man grabbed the axe handle in both hands and raised it high above his head. He gritted his teeth and brought the axe down, connecting with the elbow of one zed. Bone crunched and blood splattered the walls as the axe cut through the arm. The arm fell limp, dangling from Bud's forearm for a moment before gravity took over and it fell to the floor. Roosevelt lifted the axe again and swung with all his might, this time severing the top arm and half of the next.
"One more, Rosie!" Johnny growled, still holding onto the door handle for dear life.
Roosevelt slammed the axe down again, severing the last two arms and sending blood flying through the air. The door slammed shut and clicked in place as Bud fell backwards, stumbling to the ground, grabbing to remove the hands still clenched around his forearm. Zombies slammed and pounded into the door repeatedly.
"Get up there and finish it!" Bud ordered through gasps of breath. Roosevelt and Johnny were the first one to bound up the stairs followed by Mick and Dwight and finally Bud. Seconds later Roosevelt and Johnny burst out onto the roof and darted across to the edge where the rest of the townspeople were already mowing down zombies with automatic gunfire. Johnny used his left hand to pull his rifle around to his chest. He unslung it from himself and dropped down to a knee to take precision shots using the roofs safety wall as a rifle rest. Roosevelt took the space next to him and flip his safety selector to Auto just as Mick and Dwight burst out onto the roof. He took aim and started firing into the massive horde below. Bud stumbled out onto the roof next and made his way over to the firing group and looked down at the sea of dead faces that stared up at them.
“Sounds like a damn war zone out here!” He said to himself as he looked down at the horde. He spotted the reanimated corpse of Miss Mary and sucked in a sharp breath as the ache in his heart overwhelmed him. Mary wasn’t Bud's woman at that point, but he had hoped that she would be eventually but thanks to the damn zeds below she would never be.
“Sonsabitches!” Bud growled as the townspeople fired shot after shot into the turned up mangled faces below. Be drew one of the revolvers on his hip and took aim at Mary’s now hellish features.
“I’m sorry, Mar.” He said under his breath as he fired a single shot into her skull. She fell to the ground and Bud quickly turned away from the action wiping a single tear from his eye.
“Get those guns in here now!” Roosevelt shouted, looking over at Bud as he recovered from what he had just done. Bud didn’t reply with words. Anger at the loss of Mary took his thoughts and he started emptying his pistols into the horde below. The streetlights were providing plenty of light for them to take care of the horde as long as they continued to fixate on the fresh meat above their heads. Johnny was taking slow steady shots with his non-dominant hand. Mick and Dwight were mowing down zeds by the dozen as they held their triggers down and waved the rifles from side to side until their barrels began to glow a deep orangish red color from being fired so much without a break.
“Use your pistols for a while before you destroy those rifles!” Bud shouted after seeing the barrels glowing. Roosevelt was firing slow even bursts to avoid overheating his own rifle. He watched the crowd below as bullets tore through faces and necks. One of the passes Mick had made with his rifle had stitched across several foreheads blowing the tops off each one of their skulls. Lifeless corpses stacked up along the wall of the building pushing the rest of the zeds back farther into the street giving the shooters better points of aim in the streetlights below.
“We almost got them!” A voice at the end of the line shouted in between bursts of automatic gunfire. The horde was reduced to small pockets of the infected, but they were still in a frenzy for the fresh meat above. Johnny took aim at a man that looked to be in his early thirties. He wore blood stained blue jeans and a torn white t-shirt that quickly turned crimson as Johnny’s shot
