Jonathan Maberry - Dead of Night

“We have to do this quick,” he said.

Dez went to the little girl. The child was as hot as a furnace, but her eyelids fluttered open as Dez gently picked her up.

“Are … we going home now?” the little girl asked.

A sob broke in Dez’s chest and for a moment she stood there, clutching the girl to her chest, her face crumpled into a knot of grief.

“Yes,” she whispered to the little girl. “Yeah, baby … we’re going home now.”

She led the way out of the room and down the hall. JT and Trout waited for the staggering adults to follow, and then they came last. A procession of the dying and the broken.

They walked to the stairwell and then down the cold tower that was no longer part of a knight’s castle or a princess’s glittering palace or a wizard’s lair. Now it was cold stone, as lifeless as the stones on the walls of a crypt.

They stopped at the back door and, still holding the girl, Dez unclipped the walkie-talkie and keyed the Send button.

“We’re bringing out the bite victims. Three of us are not sick. Two cops and a civilian in a blue shirt and khakis. Do not fire on us.”

“Roger that,” said a voice. Not Zetter.

“We don’t want to get overrun either. Can you draw the infected away from the door long enough to let us bring them out?”

“Yes, ma’am. You’ll hear it.”

Trout grinned at Dez. “‘Ma’am’? You’d have threatened to kneecap me if I ever called you that.”

“That still applies, so don’t get any ideas.”

Suddenly outside a siren began howling. Another joined it, and another. Dez leaned close to the door to listen. The sound began to move, to fade.

“They’re using sirens to draw them away.”

JT nodded approval. “First smart thing they’ve done.”

After a couple of minutes the walkie-talkie squawked.

“You’re clear, Officer Fox,” said the voice. “It’s a tight window, so hurry.”

JT pushed on the crash bar and the door opened. There were bodies outside, crumpled and broken. JT looked around for movement and saw none.

“It’s clear.”

He stepped outside and held the door as the line of infected people shambled out. Trout and Dez came last, still holding the children. The soldiers had popped more flares, but they were on the far side of the parking lot, and trucks with sirens were parked on the other side of the fence.

“Are they going to help us?” asked one of the bite victims.

“They’re coming,” said Dez, hating herself for the lie inside the truth. She told the wounded to sit down by the wall. Some of them immediately fell asleep; others stared with empty eyes at the glowing flares high in the sky.

For a moment it left Dez, JT, and Trout as the only ones standing, each of them holding a dying child. The tableau was horrific and surreal. They stared at each other, frozen into this moment because the next was too horrible to contemplate. Then they saw movement.

JT peered into the shadows. “They’re coming.”

“The Guard?” asked Dez, a last flicker of hope in her eyes.

“No,” he said.

They heard the moans. For whatever reason, pulled by some other aspect of their hunger, a few of the dead had not followed the flares and the sirens, and now they staggered toward the living who stood by the open door.

“We have to go,” said Trout.

“And right now,” agreed JT. He kissed the little boy on the cheek and set him down on the ground between two sleeping infected. Trout sighed brokenly and did the same. “Dez, come on…,” murmured JT.

But Dez turned half away as if protecting the little girl she held from him.

“Please, Hoss…?”

“Dez.”

“I can’t!”

“Give her to me, honey. I’ll take care of her. Don’t worry.”

It took everything Dez had left to allow JT to take the sleeping girl from her arms. She shook her head, hating him, hating the world, hating everything.

“Better get inside,” JT warned. Some of the zombies were very close now. Twenty paces.

Trout ran to the door. “Dez, JT, come on. We have to go. We can’t leave the door open.”

Dez retreated toward the door, backing away from the child she had to abandon. Trout reached down and took her hand, and when she returned his squeeze it was crushingly painful. He pulled her toward the door as the first of the dead stepped into the pale light thrown by the emergency light.

“JT, come on, let’s go!” Trout yelled.

The big cop did not move. He held the little girl so gently, stroking her hair and murmuring to her.

“JT!” cried Dez. “We have to close the door!”

He smiled at her. “Yeah,” he said, “you do.”

They waited for him to come, but he stayed where he was.

“JT?” Dez asked in a small, frightened voice. “What’s wrong?”

JT kissed the little girl’s forehead and set her down with the others. Then he straightened and showed her his wrist. It was crisscrossed with glass cuts from the helicopter attack.

“What?” she asked.

Then she saw it.

A semicircular line of bruised punctures.

Dez whimpered something. A question. “How?”

“Upstairs, when those bastards tackled me. One of them got me … I didn’t see which one. Doesn’t matter. What’s done is done.”

Then the full realization hit Dez. “NO!”

It was all Trout could do to hold her back. She struggled wildly and even punched him. The blow rocked him, but he did not let go. He would never let go. Never.

“No!” Dez screamed. “ You can’t! ”

The dead were closing in on JT. He unslung the shotgun. Across the parking lot the last flares were fading.

“Go on, honey,” JT said.

“No goddamn way, Hoss,” she growled, fighting with Trout, hitting him, hurting him. “We stand together and we fucking well go down together .”

“Not this time,” JT said, and he was smiling. Trout could see it even if Dez could not, that JT was at peace with this. “I’m going to keep these bastards away from those kids as long as I can. I need you to go inside. I need you to tell the National Guard to do what they have to do, but make sure they do it right. They got to wipe ’em all out. All of them.”

What he meant was as clear as it was horrible.

“JT — don’t leave me!”

He shook his head. “I won’t ever leave you, kid. Not in any way that matters. Now … go on. There are kids inside that building who need you. You can’t leave them. ”

And there it was.

Dez sagged against Trout, and he pulled her inside and held her tight as the door swung shut with a clang.

They heard the first blasts of the shotgun. Trout didn’t hear the next one because Dez was screaming.

JT Hammond stood with his back to the line of bite victims, holding the shotgun by its double pistol grips, firing, pumping, firing. There was almost no need to aim. There were so many and they were so close. He emptied the gun and used it as a club to kill as many as he could before his arms began to ache. Then he dropped the gun and pulled his Glock. He had one full magazine left.

He debated using the bullets on the wounded, but then he heard the whine of the helicopters’ rotors change, intensify, draw closer; and he knew what would happen next. He just had to keep the monsters away from the children until then. Soon … soon it would all be over, and it would happen fast.

He took the gun in both hands and fired.

And fired.

And fired.

Then one of the dead came at him from his left and JT turned to see that it was Doc Hartnup. He almost smiled.

“Sorry, Doc,” he said, and fired.