Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

He was groaning in agony from the gut shot, and it kept him from regaining his feet.

      The guard latched onto him and took a bite of Tommy’s calf. Tommy screamed as blood began to darken his pant leg.

      Billy turned to run back into the street.

      Three of the prisoners from the Sarasota County Jail were coming toward him, all of them freshly turned. Meanwhile, beside him, the guard was tearing into Tommy with his teeth. He turned his bloodstained face to Billy and started to rise again.

      Billy just shook his head, spun on his heels, and ran for the cottages inside the Springfield Adult Living Village.

      He sprinted across the lawn and reached the nearest of the pink stucco cottages. From the shows he’d seen while frittering away his days in the Sarasota County Jail, Billy knew that loud noises attracted the infected, and once those few infected zeroed in on an uninfected person, they would begin to moan. The moans carried, drawing more of the infected into the area. All the reports of seemingly empty streets suddenly flooding with the infected weren’t exaggerations.

      Billy kept himself low and out of sight. He got to cover, scanned his surroundings constantly, just like the documentaries about the quarantine zone said to do, and tried not to make any noise. His plan was to reach one of the cottages, get to a phone, call for help, then sit tight and wait for somebody with guns to come and rescue him.

      But that plan went out the window when he stepped around the front of the cottage.

      Just ahead of him was a narrow hallway, a courtyard farther on. To his left, just before the courtyard, was a gently rising slope of green grass. The courtyard was packed with the infected. More were coming down the grassy slope. They were headed for the doorway to a single cottage, where two old folks were trying to hold their door closed against the infected.

      “Ah, for Christ’s sake,” he said.

      He didn’t want any part of it. Billy turned away and stepped right into the path of the three prisoners he’d seen from the guard shack. Behind them was the guard. Tommy wasn’t with them.

      He looked for the gun and was both surprised and frustrated to see that the guard no longer had it with him. He had been a fool for not picking that thing up back at the guard shack.

      Billy raised his trash spike and started to run. He was going to flank the three prisoners, sprint around the shambling, slower guard, and take his chances out on the street. But before he could put that simple plan into motion, one of the prisoners broke forward in a furious sprint, crashed into him, and knocked him to the ground, landing on top of him.

      Billy landed with his spike across his chest in a port arms position. He jammed it up under the man’s chin and twisted, tossing him to the side. Billy scrambled to his feet and jammed the spike into the back of the zombie’s head before he had a chance to move. Satisfied the zombie was dead, Billy put his foot on the side of the zombie’s head and yanked his spike free from the corpse.

      But now he was surrounded.

      Some of the zombies coming down the grassy slope had diverted in his direction, and Billy found himself checked everywhere he turned by the mangled arms and faces of the infected.

      Billy jabbed his spike into every face he saw and batted at their hands with his pole as he twisted and spun away from their grasp. He rushed into the crowd and ducked away just as a pair of zombies reached for him. At the same time, he brought the pole around in a sweeping path that caught one of the zombies in its upward arc, impaling its left hand. Unable to control his arm, the zombie bobbed on the spike like a balloon on a string.

      In the melee, Billy had worked his way halfway up the slope. The zombies were slogging after him in a graceless, clumsy mass, and Billy, still swinging the impaled zombie around by its arm, flung him downward, into the advancing crowd. The zombie flew off and tumbled down to the grass, where it bowled into the others like logs crashing downhill.

      Billy ran around the pile and a moment later found himself standing before the old woman and the bent wreck of a man who stood behind her.

      “Are you folks okay?”

      They just looked at him. The woman’s eyes slipped from him to the carnage behind him and then rolled slowly back to Billy.

      “Ma’am? You okay?”

      She blinked at him.

      “They’re behind you,” she said.

      He turned around. At least a dozen of the infected were rising to their feet. Others had already gained their footing and were closing in fast.

      “Can we hide in there?” he said.

      “They pulled the door out of the jamb,” she said. “It won’t close.”

      Just then he heard a gunshot from the courtyard. He turned that way and saw an old dude in a cowboy hat with a pair of pistols in his hand. He had just shot one of the infected and was motioning two old women and two little kids through a corridor on the opposite side of the courtyard.

      The dude in the cowboy hat glanced at Billy, and the two of them made eye contact. Even at a distance, Billy could see the man’s face grow momentarily hard with recognition at the orange scrubs Billy wore. But the look faded just as quickly as it formed, and the next instant he was motioning Billy and the two old-timers with him to follow them into the courtyard.

      Billy looked behind him again. They weren’t going to be able to make it to the street.

      To the old woman, he said, “Okay, you two come with me.”

      “He can’t walk fast enough,” the woman said.

      “I’ll carry him. Here, hold this.”

      He handed his spike to the woman, who took the gore-stained thing like she’d just been handed a pile of dog shit.

      Billy picked up the old man, and the next moment, they were all running for the courtyard, a moaning wake of the infected trailing out behind them.

      CHAPTER 10

      Jeff Stavers was caught up in the parking lot over LAX for nearly an hour before they landed, and now that they were finally taxiing to their terminal, he was feeling irritable and restless.

      The fat lady from Chicago and her even fatter little nine-year-old boy both unbuckled their seat belts at the same time, and the woman groaned as she let her gut relax. The boy’s name was Alex. Jeff knew his name was Alex because the fat woman hadn’t stopped saying his name since Denver, where Jeff had joined their little family drama already in progress. He’d sat down in the window seat next to the woman because it was the only available seat on the flight, and he was immediately sorry for it. The woman hogged the armrest and her bulging elbow kept oozing into his side. For nearly four hours, he felt like he was crammed into the back corner of an elevator. Plus, the kid wouldn’t stop coughing and sneezing. It was a nasty, nostril-clearing sound, and the woman would immediately slap him in the back of the head and say, “Alex, I told you to cover your mouth.”

      The boy would flinch, then slowly uncoil himself and say, in a high, nasally voice, “Sorry, Mom.”

      Once, Alex’s sleeve had pulled up, exposing a fresh bandage around his elbow. His mother rushed to cover that up, and then whispered something into his ear.

      “Sorry, Mom,” he said.

      Right before they landed, the woman turned to Jeff and said, “Allergies,” and rolled her eyes.

      He just smiled and nodded and waited for the brown hazy air of Los Angeles to appear on the horizon.

      But they were here now, finally, and he could feel the tension headache that had plagued him for the last week slowly going away. When he got back to Littleton…Well, he would worry about Littleton when he had to. Right now, all his thoughts were on seeing Colin Wyndham again. Back when they were roommates at Harvard, Jeff would have sworn there wasn’t a woman alive who could lasso the irredeemable and profligate Colin