Cameron Haley - Skeleton Crew

“Even if you had directed me to dispose of the heads properly, the bodies remain animated, as well.” The jinn reached down with the scimitar and poked at one of the decapitated bodies. Its arms lashed out and the thing grabbed onto the sword, dragging its hands along the blade. Mr. Clean wrenched the scimitar free and the hands grasped blindly for a moment before withdrawing.

“Yeah, don’t do that,” I said. “I just want you to bring me one head-leave the rest of them alone.”

“Which head would you like?”

“The last one.”

Adan and I zigzagged our way over to Mateo and headed north up the narrow street lined with body shops, warehouses and distribution centers. Taggers had put down most of what passed for paint jobs on the concrete and brick that crowded us on either side. If anything, the street was even more choked with abandoned vehicles than Alameda and the freeway had been. There were a lot fewer cars, but a lot less space to cram them in. We moved quickly, running and leaping along the metal highway, occasionally pausing to liberate a dead motorist that hadn’t yet turned and gone hunting. Most of them were so badly mauled I wasn’t sure they’d be mobile even when they went Zed. We didn’t spot a single zombie up and about.

At Seventh Street, the sprawling warehouse district began to give way to stores, bars, restaurants and the occasional loft or apartment building. We saw shattered windows and splintered doorways, and the businesses were empty and silent.

When we crossed Sixth Street, we heard the noise. It didn’t sound a whole lot different from the obscene choir I’d heard when the zombie horde attacked us on Alameda, except this time it was punctuated by staccato bursts of gunfire. Adan and I stopped on the hood of a greenish-gold Chevy beater and looked at each other.

“How do you want to do this?” Adan asked.

“I figured we’d walk up and you’d throw down that blast spell. Worked pretty good last time. It ought to buy us enough time for Lowell and his guys to get out.”

“Listen to the gunfire.”

I did. “Automatics…some small-caliber stuff.” Then it registered. “Aw, shit, some of the zombies are carrying.”

“Yeah, you have to think the automatic fire is coming from the soldiers. The rest of it, though-that’s got to be zombies.”

“Who are you and what did you do with the country boy?”

Adan laughed. “I’m a quick study. This could get complicated if the zombies have guns. Even if they didn’t, you had it about right-we’d basically have to walk right into the middle of them for me to use that spell. Maybe we should try to think of a smarter plan.”

I nodded. “Let’s move in a little closer and scout it out.” When we crossed Palmetto, we could see the loft building that had been the soldiers’ objective up ahead. The produce warehouse was still out of sight. The noise had grown to a dull, persistent roar and the sharp bursts of gunfire followed one after the other. I’d been around gunfire plenty of times, even automatic weapons fire, but it hadn’t sounded anything like this. I might have called myself a soldier, but I’d never been in a war zone.

I flipped my head up at a large, white stucco warehouse and we levitated to the roof. We moved carefully and quietly to the edge and looked out at the vast horde of zombies that surrounded the produce warehouse across the street.

There were a hell of a lot more than five hundred of them.

Either the bean-sidhe were wrong, or Chavez’s map was wrong, or the dead had gotten some reinforcements of their own.

“The Zed Sea,” said Adan.

I glanced at him. “That’s not bad,” I said. “You’re usually as funny as a bunion, but you show flashes of real talent. The Dead Sea would have been pretty solid, but you bumped it up a notch when you went with Zed Sea.”

“Better Zed than Dead,” he said.

I raised an eyebrow. “Oh, yeah, you’re good.”

“What’s red and white and-

“No, see, you got to know when to stop. Be patient, you’re learning.”

Adan grinned and then his face hardened as he looked down at the horde surrounding the produce warehouse. “What do you think?”

The back wall of the building was a featureless expanse of red brick, but still there was a solid ring of the dead around it, at least twenty deep. The zombies in front were clawing at the brick, as if they could tunnel through the wall. The west wall had two large, barred windows. The glass was broken out and soldiers were firing through the bars. They’d thinned out the front ranks on that side, but they were less effective than I might have expected. I guessed it was hard to get a clean head-shot with a limited field of fire and a zombie horde surging around them, close enough to reach out and touch.

“They can’t get to us up here,” I said. “Let’s just take them out. Use fire if you’ve got it-it’ll spread. Keep it away from the windows.”

Adan nodded and stretched out his hands toward the zombies, fingers spread. “Bladhm,” he said, and a fiery current jetted forth and spilled across the undead mob.

“Do you want the flamethrower spell?” I said, glancing sideways at him. Then I spun up a fireball and hurled it down at the massed zombies.

The initial damage was impressive, but the reaction wasn’t what I’d been expecting. The zombies ran for cover. I’d seen enough zombies running around trying to eat people, it was hard to remember they weren’t mindless monsters. Fortunately, while they had the right idea, tactically speaking, their execution was no better than any other human mob. They all tried to run in different directions and whole waves of them went down under the panicked feet of their comrades. Burning zombies unselfishly shared with their fellows that had escaped the attack, and fire spread through the desiccated bodies like rumors on a Hollywood set.

“Across the street!” a lone voice shouted. “On the roof of the white building! Get them!” Armed zombies scattered throughout the crowd opened fire and bullets chipped stucco off our building’s facade, forcing us back from the edge.

“Smart zombies with guns,” I said. “No fair.” We heard breaking glass from below as zombies smashed their way into our warehouse.

Adan looked around the roof. “They’re not that smart,” he said. “There’s no internal stairway up here. The access ladders are the only way they’re going to get at us.”

“How long will it take them to figure that out?”

“Probably not very long. If we want to stay here, we’ll have to defend the ladders. There are six of them.”

“I’m not sure what good it does to stay here, anyway. The zombies shifted around to the front and sides of the building where we can’t hit them.”

“We need a plan,” Adan said.

“Yeah.”

“Any ideas?”

“I was really hoping your shockwave thing would work. I don’t have any spells designed to clear out several hundred zombies.”

“We could go down and fight them on the street.”

“There’s too many, Adan. I don’t know how good your defenses are, but they’ll eventually take me down. If I don’t get shot, first.”

“Maybe we need help.”

“We are the help, Adan.”

“Okay, let’s think it through. We don’t have to drop all the zombies. We just have to get Lowell and his troops out of there.”

“How are we supposed to do that? We can’t even get to the door. It would be like trying to fight our way through a mosh pit to the front of the stage. Except this mosh pit will try to eat us.”

“Yeah, and the soldiers might shoot us accidentally.”

“We need a distraction,” I said.

“That could work. What did you have in mind? Zed’s not interested in much besides eating.”