chest. “Save her,” he said, crying. “Someone’s got to. She doesn’t deserve to die like this.”
“Okay, Chris. Okay.” Vince helped him to his feet. “We’re certainly going to try.”
Daniel selected a heavy wrench from his tools and tested its weight. It would have to do. Like an idiot, he had dropped his gun in the stairwell.
He cranked up the stereo, and Michael Stipe’s voice blared; the room rattled to the tune of “The Great Beyond.” It was one of Daniel’s favorite songs, and somehow it seemed to fit. The music covered the noise of the dead as they tore the door off its hinges.
Daniel adjusted his glasses and stood his ground. Two dead things rushed into the room. He swung the wrench and clobbered the first one in the head. It lurched sideways and fell with a crash into one of Daniel’s worktables. Its left eye dangled from its socket as the thing thrashed about on the floor.
The second intruder came at him too fast, and he couldn’t get a good swing at it. It grabbed him, strained against him, tried to sink its teeth into his flesh.
Daniel threw the thing off and darted for the door. He nearly collided with a third creature in the hall. He gave a quick hard kick to one of its knees, then fled, not bothering to look back as the creature toppled to the floor.
As he rounded the bend in the corridor, a voice cried out. “Daniel!” One of the hospital’s defenders, a man whose name he couldn’t remember, was running after him. Daniel skidded to a halt as the man caught up.
“We need to get you up to the roof!” the guard said. “You need to fly the helicopter!”
Vince, Harold, Laura, and any other survivors were all counting on him. Counting on him to fly a type of helicopter he’d never even sat in until today. He remembered the time he’d spent going over its controls and knew he could do it, even if just barely. It would be enough.
The guard shoved a rifle into his hands as they raced toward the roof. The weapon brought Daniel no comfort. If they encountered a large pack of the dead on their way, it wouldn’t make any difference whether or not they sent a few of the creatures back to hell. They’d be overwhelmed and that was that.
They rounded another corner and jerked open the door to the stairs that led to the roof. A decaying woman in a bloodstained wedding gown leapt out at them, slashing the guard’s throat with her long decorated nails. Blood spurted from the wound with every beat of his heart.
Daniel didn’t have time to take a shot at her, so he barreled into her, pushing her back inside the stairwell and over the railing. She hissed, still groping for him as she fell into the darkness below.
Daniel glanced back at the guard’s corpse, wishing he could remember the poor guy’s name. Then he shut the door to the stairs and sprinted up to the roof.
Most of the hospital’s defenders were dead and had switched sides in the battle. Mitchell had disappeared in the fray, leaving only Martin and Jack to hold back the dead long enough for Vince and Laura to escape.
The dead had them cornered now two floors below the roof, backed into a waiting room with no way out. Martin was fighting the creatures hand-to–hand, holding them at the door while Jack tried to reload. A purple blood-like substance oozed from numerous wounds and bites covering his body. He punched one of the things in the head, which flew off and landed on the floor to be trampled under countless feet.
Jack raised his gun and shot a creature that had made it past Martin. The blast hit it in the chest, knocking it to the other side of the room.
“It’s no use Jack!” Martin wailed as a wounded dead thing, its lower spine shattered, sank its teeth into his thigh.
“I know,” Jack whispered, letting his shotgun clatter to the floor. He pulled a bandolier of grenades from his backpack, which he had swiped from a fallen friend, and without hesitation he popped the string’s pin and ran into the swarm of undead. “See you in hell, Martin!”
The waiting room burst into a ball of flames, showering the street below with shards of glass and chunks of debris.
The building seemed to shake as Vince bounded up the last steps to the roof. He lost his footing and would have fallen over the railing had Chris not grabbed him.
“What the hell was that?” Laura asked.
“Jack,” Vince answered curtly as he shoved her ahead of him. “There isn’t going to be a trip back, Laura. I’m sure Martin did all he could, but I think we’re it. We’re the only ones who are going to make it out of here alive.”
Laura nodded sadly as they opened the door to the roof and came face to face with the barrel of a massive, cannon-like gun. Mitchell lowered it and grinned. “It’s about time someone made it up here.”
Daniel stood with him, waving at them with a trembling hand. Laura embraced him, happy to see their pilot alive.
Chris cradled Natalie in his arms and headed straight for the helicopter. “Come on! We’ve got to get out of here before the dead catch up with us!”
Vince met Mitchell with a knowing look. “You’re not going, are you?”
Mitchell shook his head. “There’s no place for someone like me left in this world.”
“I wonder if there’s a place left for any of us,” Vince agreed. He laid a hand on Mitchell’s shoulder for a moment, then darted to join the others.
Mitchell watched as the helicopter whirled to life and lifted off from the hospital’s roof, streaking away into the sky. He swiveled the machine gun on its tripod until it pointed toward the stairs, and he waited for the dead to come.
THE QUEEN
1
The air stunk of filth and human waste. The summer heat heightened the smell, but Scott had long grown accustomed to the stench. Sweat glistened on his sunburned chest and shoulders. He reached up, running his fingers through his short brown hair. They came away wet and covered in grime. He couldn’t remember for the life of him when he’d last been allowed to bathe. There was a large tub of water in the center of the pen where the prisoners were kept. Scott eyed it, not yet thirsty enough to expose himself to the germs and bacteria it contained.
Eleven other men shared the small pen with him. Most of them sat around, lost in their own thoughts like he was. Buck and Hank played cards with a tattered deck for which they’d been able to bribe the guards. Hank had traded a section of flesh from his left thigh in order to get it. The bandage he wore had yellowed, and Scott guessed that soon Hank would succumb to infection and die. He had seen a lot of men die over the three weeks he’d been trapped here. The guards didn’t seem to care, as long as they had one or two healthy males.
The women that had been taken alive were treated much better than the men. Scott had never been inside their actual quarters, but he knew it was inside the breeding center, out of the sun. It had plumbing and was kept clean and free of disease. Unlike the pig slop the men were fed, the women were given real food. It all made sense in a sick kind of way. The dead guards needed the women to make babies, more “cattle” for the pens, whereas they only needed one man to knock them all up.
Of all the men in the cage, only David stood at the fence, peering through it at the hills beyond the compound. He was a newcomer to the breeding center and still hoped that someone would rescue them. He dreamed of escape. It was a dangerous thing. Scott knew there was no way out other than death; it was just a question of how one died and ended up on the other side of the fence.
