Mark Rogers - The Dead

“Then why don’t you stop arguing and start praying?” Gary asked.

At that, Linda muttered something and left him, disappearing into the darkness below.

“Besides, you should all shut up,” Gary went on. “Makes it hard listening to what’s going on topside.”

There was no more conversation after that; but Gary thought he could hear Linda crying quietly.

Max watched the van speed off into the distance and for a maddened instant thought of blasting the tires with his Remington. He even brought the gun up to fire, but there was no point in shooting. At least Gary and Linda might escape.

He lowered the gun.

He looked north, then west and south. Scores of dead were coming. The tightening cordon seemed thinnest to the south.

“That way!” he cried. “Dennis, reload! We go first!”

They started south across the front lawns of leveled lakeside houses. A half-dozen corpses approached rapidly along Carter, veering off the street toward them.

“Just cripple ‘em!” Max shouted to Dennis, shoving cartridges into his shotgun. “All we have to do is break through!”

He looked back briefly. The others had somehow kept from falling too far behind, though MacAleer and his wife were plainly struggling.

Ahead, the six were drawing near, the first barely twenty feet away. Max blew its left leg off at the hip.

Two blasts from Dennis. A corpse’s kneecap vanished. The ragged figure toppled to the grass on its chin.

Max and Dennis pressed past the fallen corpses, who were already crawling to grab them. A few moments later Max heard MacAleer’s Beretta roar three times-the crippled cadavers had turned their attention elsewhere.

The other four corpses closed in. Two had baseball bats, but a barehanded one was already so near that Max went for the headshot, blowing its face in. He sprayed another’s leg all over the grass; then a bat was whistling at Max’s shoulder.

He twisted aside and jerked backward, pump-BLAST. The bat shattered in a shower of splinters. Dropping the ruined shaft, the corpse followed him eagerly, licking its lips with a dried leathery strip of a tongue and clutching with bony fingers.

Max’s foot came down on a lawn ornament, tilting it over. He fell, landing hard on his back, breath bursting from his lips.

The corpse hurled itself headlong at him. He barely had time to pump and lift his gun, the dead man’s ribcage jolted against the barrel just as Max pulled the trigger. Gunsmoke belched out of the weapon’s mouth and the corpse shot backward as though jerked by a rope.

Somehow it landed on its feet. It swayed, staggered. Max heard a crackling sound. The top half of the cadaver’s torso flopped over as the spine broke, and the whole body fell.

Max started to get up, but all at once two hands locked on his throat, and he was hurled back to the grass by one of the corpses he’d crippled; she leered down at him with a grin that seemed half a foot wide, a mummified dark-haired woman, squinting through a pair of silver wire-rimmed glasses, face spotted with purplish mold. Her fingers tightened horribly, and Max felt things shifting in his throat, blood veins swelling in his temple…

Then her head jerked up, she hissed as if in surprise-and the muzzle of Dennis’s Remington went flush against her brow and roared, injecting her skull with the full fury of a twelve-gauge discharge, force, heat, gas, pellets, sabot. Her head bulged and broke, parting into two straps of burning meat that flapped sideways against her shoulders.

The grip on Max’s throat slackened. Knowing he wouldn’t get a second chance, he dropped his shotgun and yanked the hands from his neck. The butt of Dennis’s gun thumped into the decapitated horror, knocking her aside. Max grabbed his weapon again and leaped to his feet, ears still ringing from Dennis’s blast.

A glance revealed that Dennis had downed the fourth corpse.

But more were speeding their way.

MacAleer appeared, panting. Taking careful aim with his Beretta, he kneecapped one of the advancing corpses. The others came on howling.

Max, Dennis and the others withdrew toward the scorch-marked facade of a white-shingled house, MacAleer bringing up the rear, blasting away with his pistol. Max and his uncle reloaded feverishly, then fell back with MacAleer.

When the last corpse lay writhing on the grass, they raced south again. The way was clear before them, but a look back showed fifty at least drawing in behind.

A thick pall of grey-blue smoke drifted onto Carter.

“Keep together!” Max cried. “Follow me!”

They plunged into it. Knowing they were hidden for the moment, Max led them across the street, in among the ruins. Emerging from the smoke, he rounded the corner of a garage-only to throw himself flat as a shotgun bellowed.

Raising his head, he saw a group of people ranged against the wall of the garage; a terrified looking middle-aged woman had a smoking Mossberg pump pointed at him.

“Don’t shoot!” he shouted.

The woman lowered her shotgun. A teenaged girl beside her held an over-under, and several other women had hatchets and carving-knives. Clothes blotted with bloodstains, two white-faced men sat with their backs to the wall.

Max’s companions arrived as he picked himself up.

“They’re coming,” Dennis told him breathlessly. “Heard that shot.”

Max looked west. Several high chain-link fences stood in the way. He started north along the garage wall.

“You’d better come with us,” he told the woman with the Mossberg as he passed.

“My husband…” she said, nodding toward one of the bloodstained men. “He won’t be able to keep up.”

“They’ll be all over you in a minute,” Max said over his shoulder, pausing.

“You have guns!” she answered. “Stay with us. Maybe we can hold them off-”

“I’m not getting my people killed,” Max said, pressing on.

Father Chuck ran up beside him.

“Max, we can’t leave them to die,” he panted.

“What good’ll it do if we all buy it?” Max asked.

“What kind of a Christian are you?” the priest demanded.

“Show me what kind you are, Father,” Max replied. “Stay here. Set me an example.”

Father Chuck fell behind. But Max didn’t look to see if he was going back.

Going through a gate in a tall hedge, Max led them past a swimming pool. A dead man lay by the pool-side, holding an axe, his face hanging over the edge, head surrounded by a dark blur of floating hair. Out in the middle, a severed arm in a dark blue sleeve squirmed on the bottom like a giant worm.

Following a driveway, Max came out between two fire-eaten walls and halted, looking east from behind an overturned pickup truck. Through the thinning smoke he could see shadowy shapes speeding mechanically south on Carter. He retreated, motioning his companions back into the driveway.

Shotgun fire from behind; fleshless screams of rage and delight. The other group had begun their last battle. How long would they hold them off?

Max looked round the truck again, back toward Carter. The corpses moving south had vanished. Time to go.

They headed west, deep into a grove of burnt-out hollies. Denuded as they were, the branches were still thick enough to provide some cover, particularly in the middle of the stand.

And all the while, the gunfire and the shrieking of the corpses intensified. Suddenly other voices started to scream, living voices. The gunfire died.

Striped with soot from limbs they’d brushed, the group soon reached a broad asphalt drive, and followed it back to a large two-story brick house that looked fairly intact. Max went up to the front door, pushed it open. Inside was a well-furnished living-room, the rear third of it buried under debris from a collapsed ceiling. Max guessed that the house had been torched from behind, and that a strong northwestern wind had kept the fire from spreading too far.