“Inside the offices?” bellowed Mark above the roar of gunfire, the pungent smell of discharged ammunition thick in the air.
Nate shook his head, wincing a little as a hot casing ejected from the rifle and caught a bare patch of skin on his arm. The last thing he wanted was being trapped inside a building and the unholy monsters surrounding every possible exit. They needed elevation and time to thin the mass from a point of safety. The bed of the truck wasn’t high enough, as grasping hands could still reach the edges and one misstep could see one of them hauled from the truck and ripped to bloody chunks. Even if they killed the undead around the truck and didn’t make a mistake, every downed corpse would become a stepping-stone for the advancing rearguard, making access to them easier with every kill. They would end up potentially being the architects of their own demise. No, the truck wasn’t high enough and they needed to thin the herd. With how quickly the undead had filled the yard, it was too dangerous to even attempt a bolt for it now.
“Keep fire steady, stagger it,” ordered Nate. “Don’t let up. Always one shooting.”
Mark and Alicia both looked pale and terrified, but to their credit, they nodded and focused in line with his command, firing alternately and blasting the nearest targets. Every shot didn’t kill, but every downed zombie was an obstacle for those behind to navigate and Nate was gratified when a pack of them went down in a tumble like toppled dominos, slowing the encroachment.
Satisfied he had a moment, Nate glanced round and spied a blue-painted stepladder, the type used in warehouses to reach higher levels of racking. It was more like a wheeled staircase and scanning the area behind them, the veteran spotted an elevated position that would give them the desired level of safety and immediate respite.
“Back slowly,” he called, even as he ran to the wheeled stairway. “Towards my voice.”
Alicia and Mark did so and he allowed himself a small smile of pride as the dark-haired woman called out, “Reloading!” Communication was everything and it took a level of clear thought to keep that up when under pressure. Now she had calmed down a little since her liberation, Alicia had proven to be an apt student. If they ever got out of this mess, he would upgrade her to rifle training. He was certain she had the chops for it now.
Nate kept talking, using his voice as a lodestone to guide his two comrades as he wheeled the stairway into position and locked the brake into position. Sweeping his rifle forward, he turned back and moved between the two of them.
“Up the stairs, on top of the bricks,” said Nate. “I’ll go last. When you get the top, fire down on them, and slow them as much as you can. Mind you don’t blow my head off, eh?”
“On top of the bricks?” queried Mark.
“Move,” he ordered. This was no time for debate or reassurance. Time was a luxury quickly dissipating as the undead continued to swell. They easily numbered three hundred in total and Nate swore silently as gunfire rattled his senses. Where had they all come from?
His heart pounding, the swell thickened and advanced too swiftly, with no way to keep them at bay any longer. The lead zombies were too close, relentlessly plunging forward, their all-too-familiar lunge creeping ever nearer, when the thunder of two shotguns above him rained down into the mass.
Puffing his cheeks out in relief, Nate turned and headed for the stairway, but mis-stepped as he placed his boot on the stairs. Intending to bound up them two at a time, his foot was too near the edge and slipped, sending him sprawling forward, his hands flashing out to stop him from smashing teeth-first into the metal. A brief blaze of pain flashed up his leg as his shin smashed against the edge of a step. Wincing, Nate quickly regained his footing and began to move up the stairs.
“Nate!” called Alicia, her voice near panic.
It was a warning, a proximity alert encased in terror. The brief slip had allowed one of the undead to get too close, and neither Alicia nor Mark were willing to risk their amateur shooting skill on a creature so near to him.
As he began to push up the steps, his forward momentum was arrested by a tightening pressure across his chest. Somehow, the undead’s grasp had latched to the strap attached to his rifle and reflexively gripped it. His forward momentum would be reversed in an instant as the zombie, a couple of steps lower than him, would drag him down. If he tried to fight it, if he tried to risk battling with the undead, his balance would be destroyed, and it would be a grim and ignoble end.
Years of training, experience, muscle memory, and instinct ignited as he processed all the possible outcomes in a millisecond, acting without thought or hesitation. He reached up and released the clip of his makeshift strap, feeling the weight vanish as the material dragged across his chest and the zombie tumbled backwards, taking his rifle with it.
Without looking back, Nate bounded up the stairway and climbed to the top of the brick pallets, turned, and gave the ladder a savage kick from the side, watching as it toppled away from their perch to crash onto the concrete and pin a handful of undead beneath it. He had no idea if the undead could navigate upwards, but he was taking no chances.
“Everyone okay?” he panted, heart pounding painfully in his chest. Too damn close.
Both were scared and a little wild-eyed, but unharmed.
“What now?” Alicia asked.
“Call for backup, now we’ve got a minute,” replied Nate, reaching up to his chest. Frowning, he looked down. “What the fuck?” The radio was gone.
Peering off the edge of their fourteen-foot platform of wrapped bricks, Nate looked down to where his rifle lay on the
