Deadline

I slammed my foot down as hard as I could.

The Jeep went faster.

I came screeching around the final bend in the road to find Becks and Alaric standing on top of someone’s old abandoned toolshed, the two of them back to back at the center of the roof like the little figures on top of a wedding cake. Only the figures on wedding cakes aren’t usually armed, and even when they are—it’s amazing what you can order from a specialty bakery these days—they don’t actually shoot. They also aren’t customarily surrounded by a sea of zombies. The six I’d seen on the monitors were quiet because they didn’t need to call for reinforcements; the reinforcements were already there. A good thirty infected bodies stood between my people and the Jeep, and even more were shoving their way forward, into the fray.

Becks had a pistol in either hand, making her look like an illustration from some f**ked-up pre-Rising horror/Western. Showdown at the Decay Corral or something. Her expression was one of intense and unflagging concentration, and every time she fired, a zombie went down. Automatically, I glanced at the dashboard, where the wireless tracker confirmed that all her cameras were still transmitting. Then I swore at myself, looking back toward the action.

George and I grew up with adoptive parents who wanted ratings more than they wanted children. We were a coping mechanism for them, a way of dealing with grief; their biological son died, and so they stopped giving a damn about people. Lose people, they’re gone forever. Lose your slot on the top ten and you could win it back. Numbers were safer. ht=re a means to an end.

I was starting to understand why they had made that decision. Because I woke up every day in a world that didn’t have George in it anymore, and I looked in my mirror expecting to see Mom’s eyes looking back at me.

That won’t happen, you idiot, because I won’t let it, said George. Now get them out of there.

“On it,” I muttered, and reached for the rifle.

Alaric was a lot less calm about his situation than Becks was. He had his rifle out and was taking shots at the teeming mass around them, but he wasn’t having anything like her luck: He was firing three or four times just to take down a single zombie, and I saw a couple of his targets stagger back to their feet after he’d hit them. He wasn’t taking the time to aim for the head, and I had no idea how much ammo he was carrying. Judging by the size of the mob around them, it was nowhere near enough.

Neither of them was wearing a face shield. That put grenades out until I could get them to move out of the blast radius, since aerosolized zombie will kill you just as sure as the clawing, biting kind. The Jeep wasn’t equipped with any real defensive weapons of its own; they would have weighed it down. That left me with the rifle, George’s favorite .40, and the latest useful addition to my zombie-hunting arsenal, the extendable shock baton. The virus that controls their bodies doesn’t appreciate electrical shocks. It won’t kill a zombie, but it’ll disorient the shit out of it, and sometimes that’s enough.

The mob still hadn’t noticed my arrival, being somewhat distracted by the presence of already-targeted meat. Attempting to lure them off wouldn’t have done any good. Zombies aren’t like sharks; they won’t follow in a group. Maybe a few would have followed me, but there was no way to guarantee I’d be able to handle them, and Becks and Alaric would still have been stranded. Recipe for disaster.

Not that what I was about to do was likely to be any better, in the long run. Moving to a position about ten feet behind the mob, I pulled George’s gun from its holster and fired until the magazine was exhausted, barely pausing between shots. My aim might still be good enough for the exams, but it was getting rusty in field situations; seventeen bullets, and only twelve zombies went down. Becks and Alaric looked up at the sound of gunshots, Alaric’s eyes widening before he started to do a fascinating variant on the victory shuffle.

Becks was more subdued in her delight over my brainless cavalry charge. She just looked relieved.

There was no time to pay attention to my team members. My shots had alerted the zombies to the presence of fresh, less-elevated meat. Several outlying members of the mob were turning in my direction, starting to lurch, shuffle, or run toward me, depending on how long they’d been in the grips of full infection. After snapping another magazine into George’s pistol, I holstered it and raised the rifle, aiming for the point of greatest density.

Fact about zombies that everyone knows: You have to aim for the head, since the virus that drives their bodies can repair or route around almost every other form of damage. This is very true.

Factabout zombies that almost no one knows, because you’d have to be a damn fool to take advantage of it: An injured zombie does slow down, since you’ve just forced the relatively single-minded virus controlling the body to try its hand at double-tasking. What’s more, the right kind of injury can make the difference between having time to reload and getting mowed down.

Bracing the rifle against my shoulder, I fired wildly into the throng. I was starting to get their attention; heads turned toward me, and the moaning changed timbre. I fired the last three shots in fast succession. Too fast to be productive, but fast enough to signal Becks. She hit the roof of the shed, dragging Alaric down with her. I dropped the rifle onto the seat and opened the glove compartment.

Using live grenades when you have people on the ground is antisocial at best and grounds for a murder charge at worst. Still, if you get the right kind—the ones that are calibrated to be explosive without being too explosive, since you want to minimize your aerosolized zombie bits—they can be damn handy. The wind still has to be with you, but as long as your people are more than eight feet up, you should be fine. I grabbed all four of the available grenades, pulling their pins one at a time as I sent them sailing into the thick of the zombie mob.