Zomb-Pocalypse 3 Read online

  “I am too, but we both have to be brave and get through this.” I pause and take a deep breath. “It’s scary outside on the roof,” I tell her, and she whimpers a little. “But it’s the safest place for you.”

  “Okay,” she says, and I can’t help but marvel, not for the first time, about how resilient Sunny is.

  “When you get outside, sit back against the wall and close your eyes,” I tell her.

  “I promise,” Sunny says. I give her one more hug and then watch as she runs down the hall towards the window. Ryan sees her and reaches in to grab her, and I turn my back—she will be safe with Ryan.

  The moans get louder as I creep forward, and every step is a battle of my own personal willpower. I honestly don’t want to know if the zombies are breaching the stairs—there won’t be anything we can do about it anyway. Once I reach the end of the hall, I get down on my hands and knees and crawl up to the couch from Barry’s room that we moved across the top of the stairs like my dad suggested.

  I take a deep breath and force myself to peek over the edge. The living room is filled with zombies, and more are streaming in through the door. They moan and jostle each other, but so far they aren’t paying much attention to the stairs, or even looking upstairs at all. I decide not to give them a reason to change their minds, and I slowly back up and crawl back on my hands and knees until I’m halfway down the hall and well out of their line of sight.

  I crawl back through the window and see Sunny pressed up against the exterior of the house like I’d told her. I give her a small smile as I quietly pull the window down and shut it.

  “What are you doing?” my mom asks from beside Sunny.

  “They aren’t paying any attention to the stairs or us, and I want to try and keep it that way,” I say without turning around. Right now, talking is useless and it won’t help anything.

  I was gone for less than five minutes, but a lot can happen in five minutes when there are zombies involved. I scan the long grass area by the lake—the last place I saw Silas and my dad—but I don’t see any sign of them now. All I see is a huge group of zombies shuffling around and stomping the long grass to a pulp.

  The choking sound from my throat makes Ryan spin towards me with a look of concern on his face.

  “My dad...” I start to say, and a look of understanding crosses his face.

  “Shit, I’m so sorry, Jane. I should’ve told you as soon as you came back. They made it!” he tells me with a triumphant grin, and I’m both overjoyed and skeptical all at the same time.

  “But...how?” I ask, not wanting to get my hopes up too high in case Ryan is just trying to keep me focused until the threat has been eliminated.

  “It was close,” Ryan admits, the strain on his face showing me the truth of his words. “They’d just about bit the big one when Regg and Barry finally noticed them out of the truck. I’m surprised they didn’t wreck another truck the way they drove through the zombies, smashing them out of the way with the Ford.” Ryan shakes his head like he thinks they‘re nuts.

  “So they made it?” I ask breathlessly, and Ryan nods, handing me a pair of binoculars that are sitting at his feet.

  “Just in the nick of time,” he says, and I raise the binoculars up. I can see that Silas is in the box of the truck firing off rounds of the AR-15, and my dad is sitting in the backseat looking extremely pale.

  “I could use a little help over here,” Megan shouts bitchily from near the edge of the roof. Knowing Dad and Silas are safe gives me a renewed feeling of hope. Maybe we can win this after all.

  I join Megan near the edge, and Ryan does the same, and we go back to the never-ending job of inoculating each zombie with a shot of lead. It soon becomes mindless work, much like washing the dishes or vacuuming the floor back in the old days. I find my mind wandering from the task at hand. I still methodically aim and pull the trigger, but my mind is no longer focused. I try and think about how we can possibly rebuild any of this, and make it so another attack like this never happens again.

  The gore starts to build up beneath the house, and the remaining zombies slip and shuffle through the entrails of their fallen brethren. I watch a zombie plant his foot on a fallen zombie’s face, and the force of his weigh causes the skull to cave in. I stop shooting; it’s time to switch out my gun anyway.

  “They’re rotting,” I say, and Megan and Ryan glance over at me.

  “What?” Ryan asks finally, stopping to switch out his own pistol.

  “Come on guys, their almost all down,” Megan says with annoyance, but I ignore her.

  “The zombies are rotting,” I say again, and both Ryan and Megan look at me like I’m crazy.

  “Of course they’re rotting, they’re dead,” Megan snaps, and I begin to get annoyed with her.

  “I’m not an idiot,” I tell her, turning my back on her and walking away to the far edge of the roof. I hear Megan snort and go back to shooting, and my annoyance level is piqued even more.

  I raise my gun and plant a lead bullet right through the nose of a particularly ugly zombie. I feel a shadow fall across my back and see that Ryan has followed me over here. “What did you mean?” he asks patiently, and I’m reminded of all the reasons that I liked him in the first place. He doesn’t act like I’m just a stupid cheerleader, and he’s nice.

  “Never mind,” I mutter, still irritated, and I know I’m not being fair. I’m mad at Megan, not Ryan.

  “Come on, just tell me. I walked all the way over here,” Ryan cajoles, and I feel my stomach growl sharply. I haven’t had breakfast yet.

  “Okay. I just noticed when one zombie stepped on another, it practically disintegrated—maybe these things will eventually just decompose completely and rot into the ground,” I tell him in a rush.

  “God, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Ryan says with a smile, and I nod.

  “What time is it?” I ask suddenly when my stomach growls for the second time, and once again, I can’t help but wish that I had a watch of my own. Ryan checks his wrist, his eyebrows rising in surprise.

  “It’s already after one,” he tells me, and I’m surprised as well. We’ve been up here a solid six hours shooting, and I’m exhausted and hungry.

  “I’m taking a lunch break,” I say, not caring what Megan thinks about that. I walk over, grab my bag, and walk back towards Ryan and sit down. The shingles are cool, but I’m so hungry I don’t care about anything else right now. I try not to think about what kind of person it makes me that I am able to eat in the middle of a zombie slaughter. I pull out a couple granola bars and toss one to Sunny and my mom and then hand one to Ryan, who takes it after a moment of hesitation.

  Megan glances over at me and I hold one up to her, but she stubbornly shakes her head, or maybe she really isn’t hungry. The smell of the dead, and the recently re-dead, is pretty ripe. I shrug and open the granola bar for myself, barely tasting anything as I hoover it.

  I chug some water and offer the remaining water in the bottle to Ryan. He looks at it like he’s worried I’ll give him some kind of disease. “We used to kiss, I don’t have cooties.” I snap, and Ryan gives me a shrug.

  “That was before Silas,” he mutters so quietly that I almost don’t hear him over the howl of the dead, but I do. I knew he couldn’t be as cool about our non-relationship break-up as he was pretending.

  “You’ve shared stuff with Silas before,” I say before I realize how that sounded, and I blush. “You know what I mean,” I tell him, referring to a bottle of water they once shared back on the road.

  “I knew what you meant,” Ryan says, letting me off the hook as he takes the bottle and chugs the rest. He tosses it over the edge and it whacks a zombie in the head on its way down.

  “We’re going to have to pick that up,” I remind him, and Ryan gives a small, humorless chuckle.

  “I think we’ll have a lot of other things to pick up when this is over—a bottle of water is the least of my worries,” Ryan retorts, and I nod. He’s right. If w
e survive this, we will be saturated in zombie guts.

  “I think we should get back to work,” I tell him when I catch Megan giving me the eyeballs again, and Ryan and I both get to our feet. I personally know that I’m dragging my feet a little as I take my place.

  We shoot for another hour, and it gets harder and harder to ignore the fact that my body is in full blown agony. My legs are stiff from standing and balancing on the awkwardly sloped roof for seven hours. My arms and shoulders are throbbing from the long hours spent with my arms outstretched, and the slight kickback of the pistol, which usually isn’t bad, is brutal after the millionth time firing it. My one hand is asleep too, though thankfully it’s not my trigger hand. Every time I move it feels like little needles stabbing through my digits—it’s a lot like what I imagine acupuncture to feel like. I stop and aim at an old lady zombie wearing a bloody shawl, and she goes down. I try shaking my hand out and then aim my gun again, looking left and right before I realize that there are only two zombies left.

  Ryan and Megan each take one out, and then we all stand around looking at each other in awe. I search the field for the pickup and see that they are still dealing with a herd, but it is a much smaller herd than this morning—probably fifty or so.

  “I’m actually starting to see a light at the end of this tunnel,” I say in surprise.

  “Don’t forget the ones in the living room,” Mom reminds me, putting a slight damper on my mood, but still. I didn’t stop to count them, but there can’t be more than twenty down there. I grin to myself. When the heck did I reach the point that I don’t think twenty zombies are a big deal? I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure it happened sometime between last night and now.

  Our neighbors, who spent the night shooting, have obviously run dry on ammo. They are sitting quietly on their roof, and have been for the last hour. They have a couple zombies stubbornly hanging around, but since they stopped popping off loud shotgun blasts and screaming, the majority of them have wandered over to the truck, attracted by the noise and movement.

  “How’s our ammo supply doing?” Megan asks, and Abby, who was unofficially in charge of our rounds, shrugs.

  “There is definitely a lot less than when you started,” she warns us. “I would say only one third.” My heart sinks to hear we’ve used so much. I guess I was expecting it, but having that ammunition stockpile was really a load off all our minds. We’ll have to do another run to get some more, but I’m not sure how many gun stores haven’t been completely cleaned out by survivors.

  “We can’t worry about that right now,” I say, even though that is exactly what I’m doing. “We need to go kill the zombies in the living room.”

  Megan wrinkles her nose. “It’s going to be a huge, disgusting mess. I wish there was another way,” she says, and Ryan and I go quiet as we try and think our way through it.

  There is only one way to get downstairs, but if we can find another way to get down and draw the zombies outside, we could shoot them out on the grass and save ourselves a huge headache later. We want to be able to stay in the cabin, so we should definitely try and eradicate the zombies with the least amount of damage. True, zombie guts don’t exactly mean you have to refinish the floors, but stray bullet holes might, and who really wants to be up to their elbows scrubbing black zombie jelly out of the rug?

  “We need to find a way to get down there,” Ryan says, pointing to the mass of destroyed bodies below, and Megan peeks over the edge.

  “You could probably jump; it would be a soft landing,” she says, and I’m not one hundred percent certain she isn’t joking.

  It’s obvious we’ve all reached the same conclusion, but none of us have thought of a way to get down from this second story rooftop.

  “Only one of us needs to get down,” Ryan says, thinking out loud. We all turn to him in surprise.

  “What?” Megan asks, not following, and neither am I.

  “Only one person needs to get downstairs to be the decoy. They’ll have to draw the zombies out and lead them far enough away from the house so that we can shoot them. It’s going to be a super dangerous job, but whoever stays behind can shoot them from the upstairs spare-bedroom window overlooking the driveway.” The spare-bedroom he’s talking about is Hank and Natalie’s old room, no one mentions their names, but I still think about them all the same, and my skin erupts in goose bumps. Now is not the time to think about the people we know who didn’t make it.

  “How will the decoy get down there?” Megan asks, and I think about it for a minute before running over to my backpack. I start pulling everything out until I find exactly what I’m looking for—a long chunk of rope. It was one of the many weird things Silas insisted I carry, though it doesn’t seem very weird now, more like a last minute Hail Mary pass.

  “I have rope,” I crow, even though they already know because they’ve been watching me tear my pack apart for the last five minutes.

  “Holy shit, you just saved us,” Megan says, giving me an honest to goodness smile.

  “I’ll go down the rope,” Ryan volunteers instantly, but Megan shakes her head.

  “I think it should be Jane,” she says, making my heart stutter in my chest. It wasn’t that I wasn’t going to volunteer, Ryan just beat me to it, but it feels a lot different to have someone volunteer you for a life or death job.

  “Megan...” Ryan starts to say, with a frown on his face. “I think you need to put your personal feelings aside,” he tells her, and my ears perk up. Does she really hate me that much that she wants to dangle me from a string and sacrifice me to the zombie Gods?

  Megan flushes in anger. “Don’t be an idiot,” she snaps at Ryan. “I’m not suggesting Jane to be a bitch. She is the best choice. We need to send our weakest link.” She glances across at me and shrugs. “No offense,” she offers, but I don’t accept her apology, I just cross my arms across my chest. “You’ve gotten good at shooting, but you aren’t as skilled as Ryan or I,” Megan points out.

  “Still...” Ryan starts to say, but Megan cuts him off again.

  “This is going to take precise shooting, or the person down on the ground could easily be shot by a stray bullet.” Megan levels a no-nonsense stare at me. “Can you guarantee that none of your shots will go wide and accidentally hit the wrong target?” she asks, and I really want to say yes, just to spite her, but she’s right. I’m still just a novice, no matter how much practice I’ve had today.

  “I’ll go then,” my mom offers, and my heart drops. There is no way I can let her go rappelling into danger like that.

  “No,” Megan tells my mom, and I think both my mom and I are a little taken aback by her tone.

  “The person on the ground still needs to know how to shoot and protect themselves.”

  “I’ll do it,” I say before my mom can argue further and ends up getting herself eaten by a zombie. Megan nods approvingly, and I get the impression that she’s proud of me, rather than gleeful I’m going to be the zombie bait.

  Ryan looks like he still wants to argue, but since we aren’t really in our non-relationship, relationship anymore; he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. “Silas wouldn’t like it,” he tells me, and I shake my head.

  “That is where you’re wrong,” I tell him, knowing in my heart that I’m right. “He wouldn’t like it, but if I was the best option... He would let me do it. He’s always had faith in me that I was capable, that I could fight just as well as anyone else.” I walk over and fill my holster with spare rounds and an extra gun, trying not to notice that Ryan looks like a little boy that’s just received a scolding.

  I didn’t mean to lay into him, but he shouldn’t have tried to use Silas against me like that either.

  “Let’s tie the rope to the chimney,” Megan suggests, and they make sure it’s solidly knotted before tying it around my chest and underneath my arms. I give Sunny and my mom each a hug, and then I do something completely terrifying. I sit on the edge of the roof and allow myself to jump into n
othingness.

  I feel myself free falling for a moment, and then Mom, Ryan, and Megan get control of the rope and they jerk me to a stop, grunting at my weight as they slowly let a little bit of rope down at a time. My heart is racing a mile a minute, and its pounding fills my ears, so I have no idea how I still manage to hear Sunny call out a warning to me.

  “Zombie!” she shrieks, pointing down, and I follow her line of sight to a lone zombie that has stumbled up unobserved and is waiting underneath the rope with his arms outreached hopefully. I grab my gun from my holster, praying I don’t do something idiotic like drop it by accident, and then I aim carefully, not wanting to shoot myself in the foot, and pull the trigger. My bullet punches through the very top of the zombie’s head and he instantly crumples to the ground. I scan the area, not daring to put my gun away again—but thankfully I don’t see any more flesh eaters.

  When I hit the ground, landing in a disgusting pile of reanimated human remains, I grimace as my boots sink in past my ankles. I try to figure out the knot in the rope, but my weight has caused it to become inhumanly tight, so I reach into my belt, pull my knife out, and saw it apart instead. I don’t have time to sit around and mess with an overly complicated series of knots.

  I look up at the group on the roof staring down at me, and Ryan gives me the thumbs up. “Be careful,” my mom whispers, but I don’t reply. I don’t want to attract a bunch of zombies until I get to the zombies I’m supposed to be attracting. I tuck my knife back at my hip and clench my gun in my hand so hard it actually hurts—I think I’ve actually developed blisters from shooting so much today.

  I push my curiosity about the blisters out of my head, for now, and focus on the task at hand as I creep towards the corner of the cabin. I don’t encounter any zombies, though I do have to step over quite a few corpses until, finally, I’m only a couple feet from the front door. I can hear the zombies milling around and moaning inside, and the occasional tinkle of breaking glass.

  My intestines quiver in fear, but I try to ignore the feeling as I force myself to walk up to the open cabin door. I keep expecting a zombie to stumble out any moment and try to take a bite out of me, but it doesn’t happen.