He squinted at the door, looking for the giant rectangle of firelight that stretched out across the snow like a red carpet. Instead, he saw a group of shambling figures, stumbling and dragging their frozen feet through the glittering snow. A tangle of dead and deteriorating limbs poked in through the door like the wriggling tentacles of an octopus. Stiffened fingers gripped the wood and latched onto the swaying bodies of others to help them stay upright as they began to squeeze in through the door, blocking Emmit's only escape route.
The Megahorde is here.
Roy's meat locker had grown deafeningly silent following all the violence that had just occurred there; now the stillness was full of the fleshy sounds of the dead ones struggling against one another, too stupid to cooperate. The crackling noise from the wood burning in the fire was interspersed with the popping and snapping of corpse tendons. Their feet were beginning to clunk and squelch on the slick floorboards. Someone cackled. One of them tripped over the Rev's body and spilled to the floor, taking a few of the others down with it into a clumsily pulsating dog pile.
There! There's a gap—
The brief window was immediately clogged with two more of the horrible bodies.
Emmit was on autopilot now, careful not to think too much or risk fatal hesitation. They were mere feet from him and encroaching; the time for hesitancy was done. Emmit grabbed the shaft of the spear, his muscles griping as he yanked it out of Poke's abdomen. Eying the fresh slick of blood on the razor-sharp tip, he leaned as far as he could reach and thrust the spear head into the licking flames of the fire pit. The dried sapling that served as the body of the weapon caught fire almost immediately, and the sap-like blood began to boil and hiss.
Zombies don't like fire, right?
Emmit hoisted the burning spear and then swung the blazing end at the Links filing in towards him, hoping to scare them back or at least stall them. They had no fear of fire. All Emmit managed to do was illuminate their horribly deformed and gleeful smiles, though his poor vision shielded him from having to see most of the gory details. He jabbed the flaming spear into a tight gap between two of the lumbering bodies. There was a sizzle of steam as the ice in their ragged clothing melted and evaporated, and then the dry rotted cloth itself ignited. The burning Links didn't even acknowledge the flames that began to consume their twitching, crackling bodies. Emmit gaped up as a towering corpse tottered towards him, smiling even as its face began to blacken and ooze off like foul candle wax. Melted flesh peeled away like strips of old newspaper, revealing the charred and grinning skull beneath. The skeletal teeth parted and clicked shut with excitement, even as one of its deflating eyes burst.
It was either go through them or join them.
Now what?
Chapter 12: Megahorde
Emmit knew that the longer he waited, the more nails were being driven into the lid of his metaphorical coffin. He took a few deep breaths, bracing himself for the searing pain he knew was coming. The Links could touch him all they wanted; it would hurt like hell, but if he broke contact fast enough, he couldn't be turned. As for the corpses of Poke and the Rev, lost and trampled among the walking dead, he had no solutions. It made him sick to think of either of them getting up again, transformed into something they had feared in hated at the end of their lives. But his hands were tied once again, and in the grand scheme of it all their problems were over. His were just beginning.
The flame was chewing through the tip of the spear at an alarming rate. Emmit shoved it forward, burying it between the deflated, sagging breasts of an old woman's corpse. The force of the blow shoved it backwards, ropy strands of drool trailing from its blackened lips as it toppled and took several undead brothers and sisters with it. It made a hacking sound as the spear burst from its gaunt back, a noise that was hauntingly familiar to Emmit, disturbingly human. The sound of someone’s sick grandma nursing a cold.
Emmit whirled around, clutched another spear, and ignited the end of it in the fire. As soon as he saw the wooden shaft begin to darken, taking on an excited flame of his own, he pulled it out of the pit and charged forward into the brief hole he had made. He hurdled the writhing bodies beneath him as they snatched up at his clothes, shouldering the rigidly frozen Links to either side as he went. He felt like a star running back, playing the final game of his life.
The smell of the Links was overpowering. It was a putrid blend of freezer burnt meat, urine and feces, and the sickly-sweet fishy smell of advancing human decay. Emmit kept his eyes closed most of the time; they were doing him no good anyway, and he knew the direction he needed to be heading. The fiery pain of their flesh on his was constant, like running through a swarm of furious bees, but the senseless creatures were too slow and uncoordinated to get a solid grip on him. He plowed through them like a sturdy ocean liner through whitecaps, his makeshift torch trailing smoke.
He was already growing tired by the time he had fought his way to the door, and as he expected, it was clogged with rasping, clambering corpses. Emmit paused just long enough
