“We’ll be there,” said Becks. She tilted her head, studying our onrushing attackers, and chose her first two shots with an almost languid care. Two of the infected went down, each with a hole in the middle of its forehead.
“Show-off,” I muttered, and kept firing, trying to assess the tactical options presented by the room. I counted eight active infected in closing range; five of those were old, probably from the most recent batch of catches, while the other three wore lab coats and scrubs that identified them as former members of Dr. Abbey’s staff. I recognized one of them as the tech I’d yelled at the day before for being careless around the infected.
Guess he’d learned his lesson, even if it hadn’t done him any good. Anyway, those three would be the fastest movers, and the slowest to react. The virus that drove their bodies was still adjusting to being in control. Even the smartest zombie is pretty damn stupid, but new zombies are the dumbest, nastiest of them all.
I don’t think they’ve got the density to start reasoning, said George.
I nodded, acknowledging her words, and stepped forward as I kept firing. “Becks! Fall in, and tell me where we’re going!”
“On it, Boss!” She moved to flank me, our shoulders almost touching as we began to make our way forward. The door, freed from her weight, swung shut, slamming with an ominous bang. “Dr. Abbey’s in her office on the second floor! They’re holding the line, but they can’t do it forever!”
“Got it!” I took aim and fired again, silently counting my bullets. There were two of us; that was good. That meant we might have time to reload, assuming we didn’t both run out at the same time. I had a second pistol on my belt, for emergencies—and this qualified—but I didn’t have my cattle prod, or anything as convenient as, say, a brace of grenades. That would teach me not to stay fully armed at all times.
“Look at it this way.” Becks shot a former technician in the throat, sending the man backward. We continued to advance, moving in smooth, long-practiced tandem. “If we run out of bullets, we can just let them chew on you for a little while.”
“I feel much better.” I fired again. One of the older infected went down. “Any idea how many of these things we’re dealing with?”
“Not a f**king clue!”
“My favorite kind of duck hunt.” My breathing was starting to settle, the adrenaline in my bloodstream slipping away. The endorphins that replaced it were soothing, my old, familiar drug of choice. This was the feeling that used to drive me into the field with a baseball bat and a cocky grin, this floating, flying, nothing-can-hurt-me feeling. Georgia’s death clipped my wings. In moments like this, I could almost forget that. There were no voices in my head that shouldn’t be there, but they were replaced by contentment, and not the yawning void that usually opened when George stopped talking. This used to be what I lived for. I couldn’t live for it anymore. But oh, God, I missed it.
Fire. Step forward. Fire. Becks ducked behind me, letting me cover her while she reloaded her gun. I pulled my second pistol, buying us a few more steps before she needed to repeat the favor.
“This is not cool,” I muttered. “Becks? You got another reload on you?”
“No,” she said grimly.
“Didn’t think so. On my signal, we’re going to run.”
I didn’t need to see her face to know what her expression looked like. “That’s a terrible idea.”
“So is staying here! Either Dr. Abbey’s been doing independent collections, or the locals called for friends. Either way,” I aimed, fired, and took down another zombie, “we’re going to run out of bullets before we run out of walking corpses. We run or we die. Got a preference?”
“I like running.”
“Good. One…” I took another shot. This one went wild, barely grazing the zombie I was aiming for.
“Two…”
“Three!” I shoved Becks in the direction of the stairs, firing rapidly to cover her. She’d been right about one thing; if one of us was going to get chewed on, it needed to be me. One bite and it was game over for her. I’d consider a few more scars to be a fair trade for getting Becks out of this alive.
They can still kill you, hissed George.
“Maybe I deserve it,” I replied, and ran after Becks.
One nice thing about stairs: Zombies can navigate them, but they can’t do it fast. There’s a certain comedy to watching them try, as long as you’re not in a position to get knocked over by an infected body tumbling back down to the ground floor after it manages to misjudge the positioning of its feet. A few zombies had already fallen by the time we reached the bottom step.
Becks shot the first of them and ran on, leaving me to take out the other two. Both of them were wearing lab coats. They moaned, reaching for me. I grimaced as I jumped over them, and paused long enough to turn back and shoot them in the head. It took a few seconds to be absolutely sure they were dead, not just incapacitated. I spent the time. I knew these people. I might not know their names, but I knew them, and this was at least partially my fault. I could have forced Dr. Abbey to up her security. I could have helped more. I could have stopped this from happening.
You need to stop taking responsibility for things that aren’t your fault, said George, sounding cranky enough that I could almost see her frown.
“You need to stop telling me that things aren’t my fault,” I countered, turning to shoot a zombie that had been lurching up behind me. It went down hard. I kept my gun raised and began backing up the stairs, scanning the lab below me. The occasional gunshot from above told me that Becks was doing her part to clear the landing.
My ear cuff beeped. I jerked my chin upward, answering the call. “Kinda busy, so this better be good.”
“Maggie’s upstairs, locked in one of the cold storage rooms. She’s not injured, but she’s bloody pissed at whoever it was that shoved her in there,” said Mahir. “Dr. Abbey says she made contact with Becks?”
“We’re en route now.” I took another shot. That left three. Four if I decided to use all my bullets, rather than going with the traditional approach to zombie-killing, and saving the last one for myself. The thought made me crack a smile. Saving bullets for myself was something I didn’t have to worry about anymore.
You are so f**king morbid, muttered George.
“Learned from the best,” I replied. There were only two visible zombies left on the floor, and both of them had been infected for long enough that they were moving slowly, in that classic Romero shuffle. Better yet, killing so many of their pack mates meant the viral intelligence driving them all had been reduced from mob level smarts back to individual stupidity.
No one knows why zombies get smarter when you have a bunch of them in one place, but they do, and it’s a problem. Tactics that work against one or two lone undead will get you killed when you go up against a mob. I’ve seen them demonstrate complicated hunting techniques, like actual ambush preparation, and it’s scary as hell. If nothing else, it forces you to remember that the things inside those rotting shells used to be human, and on some level, still might be. They just got sick. It could happen to anybody.
Anybody but me.
“Shaun? Shaun, are you there? Shaun?” Mahir’s voice in my ear dragged me out of my thoughts and back into the situation.
“Sorry, just assessing.” I turned, running up the stairs. Becks was waiting on the landing. She had her gun up, and was braced against the banister; two infected were shambling toward her, neither moving fast enough to be a major threat at their current distance. She was letting them set up the shot. It’s a classic field tactic, and a good way to save your ammunition. There was just one problem with it.
If there were only two zombies out here, where was all that moaning coming from?
“What’s your assessment?” asked Becks.
“We’re f**ked. Where’s Alaric? I’m pissed off, I’m almost out of bullets, and I’m not having any fun.” And that, right there, was the reason I stopped doing active fieldwork, even before we stopped really being a news site. You can’t be a professional Irwin when you can’t at least pretend to enjoy what you’re doing. It doesn’t work. The center does not hold.
“He’s with Dr. Abbey.”
“Good.”
Becks took the first of her shots as I reached her. The zombie went down. She didn’t even glance in my direction. “We clear below, Mason?”
“Two zombies, both too uncoordinated to handle the stairs. I made an executive decision. We need to conserve bullets more than we need to perfectly secure the area.”
“Well, just don’t forget that they’re down there and sound the all-clear without going back to mop up your mess.” She squeezed off her second shot. This wasn’t a clean hit; her bullet took the infected in the throat, reducing it to a mass of torn flesh and visible bone. It kept shuffling forward.
“Uh, Becks—”
“One,” she said. “Two. Three…”
The zombie went down, the virally enhanced clotting factors in its blood finally giving up the task of repairing the arteries shredded by her bullet.
“Three,” she said, and flashed me a self-satisfied smile. “Just like getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop.”
“Did you know they made that commercial in the 1970s?” I asked. There were no more infected in sight. The moaning in the distance continued. “How are you for bullets?”
“I did know that, yes. Three bullets left. You?”
“Four.”
“Great. Let’s hope this party isn’t strictly BYOB.” She turned and ran in the direction of the dead.
“We’re on our way, Mahir,” I said, and ran after her.
“Do they train you people to say stupid things when in mortal danger? I’m just curious, you understand, I’m not judging you.”
“Yes, you are.”