Zombie Rage (Walking Plague Trilogy #2) (14 page)

Chapter Thirty-eight

“
Jack? Jack, are you there?”

The call dropped.
Crap.

“
What?” Mike asked.

“
He’s trapped in the observatory, and the crazies are there. that’s all I heard before I lost him.” Joe was on fire now. Joe, who was driving, hit the gas harder. “We need a plan now. I bet they’ve locked themselves in.”

“
Who’s with him?” Mike asked.

“
I don’t know. I hope Anna is, and her boyfriend, probably. Honestly, I don’t know.”

“
Okay,” Mike said. “Pull over, dude.”

“
Pull over? Are you crazy?”

“
Listen,” Mike took a tone of authority. “Pull over for just a second. If we’re going in there, we need to be prepared. That means armed. If the crazies are there, we can’t waste time getting ammo out of the back. We need to move in with guns firing.”

Made sense. A ton of sense. Joe stopped the car in the middle of the street and they jumped out. Went to work.

“Lock and load.”

Trained as they were, it took less than five minutes to lock and load everything they could carry.

They continued on to the observatory.

Chapter Thirty-nine

“So, he knows you’re here,” Carla offered.

“
Yeah, but I didn’t get a chance to tell him everything. If I know him, he’ll burst in like Yosemite Sam, guns blasting. He doesn’t know what he’s walking into.”

“
Daddy,” Anna said. “If he’s going to be here in a few minutes, we need to cover him. Make sure he’s okay, you know?”

Carla wasn’t having any of this. She switched on her flashlight again, and I could see she was angry. “Jack, we have no idea how many of them are out there. It’s suicide to leave this room right now.”

“And it would be murder to leave my brother out there.”

I knew Carla was thinking of protecting all of us, but I’d be damned if I was going to leave my kid brother outside. I had to let him in. And Mike, too, if he was with Joey.

“I’m with you, Dad.” Anna was firm. “Family is family. What about the democratic vote?”

Carla fumed. Jared was quiet as usual.

“All right,” I said. “Whoever wants to go outside and get my brother, raise their hands.”

Carla was the only one who didn’t, but she was resigned to stay with the consensus.

“Fine,” she said. “This is how we’ll do it. “It’s the safest way.
My way.
”

We removed the desk as quietly as we could and listened for movement outside the office.
Nothing.
I was to go first, with the keys for the front door. Jared behind me, then Anna, and Carla in back covering us all. We had to be quiet, and hope that Joe was wise enough to be as well.

I crept through the hallways, staying low in a combat crawl. Finally, I got to the front to wait for Joe and Mike and be ready to cover them.

I waited at the main entrance, ready to unlock the door. Soon, I saw headlights through the thick fog, then an official-looking SUV pull up to the steps.

Thank God. I could just barely see two people in the car. Mike was with him. That was better. As I’d predicted, they got out bearing arms. Armed to the hilt. They searched the premises. Of course, there were Zombies roaming around. Within close proximity, they took down about seven.

They couldn’t have known. They couldn’t possibly have known that the shots would stir those inside.

I unlocked the door, hands shaking. I could hear them coming from all around within the large building, but I couldn’t see them.

Carla started firing, and then Jared did, too. Joe and Mike sprinted up the stairs. I let them in and relocked the door.

Anna screamed at that moment and another shot fired.

Joe and Mike were armed, but it was dark and they didn’t know where everyone was. They didn’t want to fire at the wrong person.

There was no time for polite greetings. “Follow me.” I now trotted down the dark hallway. “It’s us, Carla.” I tried not to speak too loudly. “Me, Joe, and Mike.”

Anna ran to Carla’s side, and Jared followed. We were right behind them but the zombies somehow got between Anna and Carla.

There were dozens of them. Where had they come from? The place must not be secured, I thought from the back of my mind as I tried to rally around them to get to Anna. She was backing herself into a corner, the worst thing she could have done.

Tears were streaming down her cheeks. She fired her last shot and in the dim light, I saw her trying to reload, her hands shaking.

It was too dangerous to fire. They were all in front of her, and I couldn’t risk missing them and hitting her. I drew my hunting knife and charged them.

Mike and Jared were taking down those near Carla. Joe moved with me. He also had a knife and we split skulls right and left, trying to get to my daughter. She did reload finally, and her aim was true. She took down six more. My little girl, the zombie killer.

It was close, but not enough. Every time I thought I was getting closer to Anna, I felt a presence behind me and I had to take down another one. I did use my gun then, knowing Joe was on my left and the rest were further away. The floor was slippery with blood and grey matter.

Anna was outnumbered, even with my brother and me doing our best. She was backed up against a window, the moonlight shining down on her. She was out of bullets now. She used the butt of her gun to try to fend them off. I had but an instant to be proud of her, but no time to really think. I had to get to her now.

Right now.

“Cover me!” I shouted to my brother. I dove in, gun in one hand and knife in the other. All I wanted to do was get between my precious daughter and these fuckers. I would take the hit. I didn’t care.
Just save her.

I made it. Within a couple of minutes, I killed about nine of them. I got to the last zombie that separated me and my daughter. I would get this one and reach my daughter.

Anna was out of energy, sobbing, and blindly hitting at anything that came near her.

Together, and with Joe’s help, we took them down. I almost couldn’t believe it when there were no more zombies left to kill.

Chapter Forty

Anna was brave; I had to give her credit for that. She had used real muscle to fight off these suckers. If she hadn’t been in shape, we wouldn’t have made it.

“I’m so proud of you.” I tried to hold her but she pushed me away. She simply gazed at all the death, the blood and guts and brains that surrounded us. She began shivering.

The rest joined us.

Joe took in Anna’s state. “She’s in shock. We need to lay her down and keep her warm.”

Jared didn’t hesitate. He ran to the center of the great hall, and sprinted back with a couple of jackets. We wrapped them around my daughter. We brought her into the office and barricaded the door once again.

She lay with her head on Jared’s lap. He kept feeding her sips of water until she stopped shaking.

The office was now crowded. It was warm from all of our bodies, but we kept still, recovering from a battle I never would have dreamed of.

Some of us must have slept. I know I dozed fitfully. It didn’t seem like so much time had passed, but finally, I could see a little light coming in from under the door.

Carla always had a plan. “Jack,” she whispered.

“Yeah? You still mad at me?”

She gave a small laugh. “No, of course not. You were right. I was just frightened.”

I took her hand. “What were you going to say?”

“
Well, that...I know this might not be the best time...but if it’s safe, and now that we have back up,” referring to Mike and Joe, “We really need to get those bodies out of here. It’s going to start smelling.”

I hadn’t even thought of that.

“She’s right,” Joe agreed. “There’s a small door where you and Anna were fighting last night. We could just pick them up and throw them out that door.”

I didn’t know Anna had awakened.

“I don’t want them in here,” she said bitterly. “I’ll be happy if I never see one of them again. And we have to get our food and stuff.”

We all pitched in. After careful searching, we found the place empty except for the Zombie bodies. Carla covered us all. We propped open the door to find a small walkway with a fifty-foot drop to a slope on the hill. Good enough.

The men, Jared included, heaved the bodies up and out the door and let them fall. It was a dirty business.

For the most part, Anna watched. Then her eyes fell onto one of the bodies. One of them wore a backpack, with what looked like a computer hanging out.

“I’m going to get that,” she said.

“
I wish you wouldn’t,” I told her. But she gingerly made her way through the heaps of dead zombies to reach it.

I should have been watching her. We all should have. We were focused on our cleanup work, and Anna wanted that laptop.

She kneeled down and reached for it—

And that’s when a hand shot out and grabbed her leg. She screamed and let go of the backpack. She tried to kick loose, but fell to the ground.

If I had gotten to her a second sooner, I would have made it.
But I didn’t.

She shrieked just as the zombie bit into her ear. In pain and terror, blood running down her ear and neck, she cried out, “Daddy!”

“You motherfucker!!”
I plunged my knife into his skull and he fell to the ground. He was dead, but I was too late.

Anna had be
en bitten.

To be concluded in:

Zombie Mountain

Walking Plague Trilogy #3

Coming soon!

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Sharpened Edges Trilogy #1

by Elizabeth Basque

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Dragon Assassin

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(read on for a sample)

It was another unproductive day.

I don’t like unproductive days, especially as a self-employed private investigator living and working in the city of Los Angeles. Unproductive days meant I don’t eat, pay my rent or pay my alimony. Hell,
I
hadn’t had a haircut in months.
I
made it a new manly style, but the truth was
I
couldn’t afford regular cuts. Unproductive days meant creditors would come knocking, and I hated when creditors came knocking.

Most important, unproductive days meant I didn’t get to drink myself into oblivion, which is exactly what I’d been doing these past few months.

I was in my office, alone, my feet up on my old desk.

It wasn’t much of an office—or a desk, for that matter. The office was just a small room with stained carpet, a couch on the far wall, where I had napped one too many times. The often-broken ceiling fan did little to disperse the hot air. A water cooler occasionally gurgled by a sink and faucet, where I kept my booze. An old TV sat on a bookshelf that was filled with novels I’d always meant to get to, but haven’t found the time yet.

Not much of an office...and not much of a life, either. When I was working, I was usually tailing cheating wives, one or two of which I ended up cheating with myself.

Now, as the ceiling fan wobbled above, as the drone of traffic reached me from nearby Sunset Boulevard, I idly wondered how I could drum up more business. Perhaps start a Facebook account? Or even Twitter? Maybe both? Maybe now was a good time to see what, exactly, a Twitter was.

I hadn’t a clue.

Truth was, I could barely use those new-fangled cell phones. You know, the ones that are practically a computer. Hell, I had a hard enough time with my laptop, let alone a computer the size of my palm.

I shook my head, and absently longed for the days when people actually used a land line. When a phone sounded like a phone, and not the latest Lady Gaga song.