Rotting to the Core (Keep Your Crowbar Handy Book 2) (19 page)

“That's
really
bad.” Kat's eyes were
wide. “What if they start, you know, learning to do other
things?”

“Other things?” Penny demanded as the three
of them set off across the overgrown field again.

“Like—I don't know—how to open doors? Or use
weapons, like clubs and stuff?” Kat frowned. “What if they get
smart enough to set
traps?”

“Let's talk about this later,” Jake puffed
behind them, “when we're not in danger of getting our asses bitten
off!”

The trio reached the fence-line and, true to
her namesake, Kat leapt for the top rail. She somersaulted over it,
using her hands as a guide to send her body up above the nearly
eight-foot tall barrier, and dropped soundlessly to her feet on the
outer side. Jake retrieved his crowbar from Carson, stuck it back
in its scabbard, and bent at the knees beside the fence while he
made a cup with his hands. Penny put one hiking boot on his palms
and reached for the top rail, but she needn’t have bothered. Jake
set himself, then pushed upwards on the bottom of her foot like he
was competing in the Caber Toss event, and Penny literally sailed
over the fence with a yelp of surprise. Ignoring the sound of what
was sure to be an embarrassing landing on her part, he climbed the
fence until his waist was level with the top rail, reached down,
took a firm grip on the chain-link, kept his other on the rail, and
flipped his legs over. This allowed him to come down, albeit a bit
heavily, on his feet, without rolling to absorb the impact.

“Thanks a lot.” Penny sat on the grass, and
was just beginning to brush herself off. There were several small
pinecones in her hair. “I was right. You're a dick.”

Kat faked a cough to cover her laughter,
which fooled no one. After helping Penny to her feet—and removing
the pinecones—the survivors turned back to view the grainery. The
facility's loading door was already bashed in, and what survivors
were left had fled to the walkway of the silo's dust collection
system. Jake pulled the mini binoculars from their pocket on his
tac-vest and took a look.

He was able to pick out Will plugging away at
the dead from just above the collector's main suction tube. The man
was a machine with that BN36 of his, Jake had to admit. His
marksmanship was the only reason zombies hadn't already overrun the
walkway. Rebecca stood at the top of the single access stairway,
holding a revolver in each hand, sending rounds into the slowly
advancing creatures below. She called for the others to make a
stand in an attempt to organize her people, maybe even try to push
back so they could make for the gallery tower, but her remaining
followers weren't listening. They were panicking, basically.
Running to and fro around the circular walkway, searching for some
break in the drooling horde that would provide them an avenue of
escape. There were none to be had.

It wasn't long before the dead gained the
walkway. It took even less time for them to push Rebecca and the
few who still had working firearms back towards the collector. Will
had long since abandoned his rifle and traded it for an automatic
he pulled from his hip, then the damn broke. While the defenders
kept firing, they were simply unable to hold back the slow,
unrelenting press of rotting bodies. Rebecca was the first to fall.
The portly woman had stopped to reload her wheel-guns and five of
the things were on her. From where he and the women stood beyond
the fence, Jake clearly heard her shrieks as the creatures began to
feed.

Those didn't last long either.

Once she was down, her people lost their
spine. Any semblance of orderly defense went right out the window,
and it was a free-for-all of shoving to escape. To where, O'Connor
had no idea. The walkway only wrapped around the dust collector to
come back upon itself again. There was nowhere for those remaining
to go.

Jake watched as long as he could, but in the
end passed his binoculars to Penny. He hadn't necessarily wanted
those people dead. Rebecca had pushed them into adopting her
bizarre philosophy, but they were still living humans. However
fucked up.

“Will's trapped on top of the collector,”
Penny told him, eyes glued to the bloody spectacle on the walkway.
“He's still shooting into the crowd. Everyone else is... Well.
They're gone. He just threw his gun down at one of them, and now
he's just standing there. They can't climb the ducts to reach him.
He's flipping them off. Oh...”

Penny handed his binoculars back. “He jumped.
Dove head-first right off the top of the collector.”

“Damn.” Kat looked back, one brow raised.
“That's a good five stories down from way up there.”

“I'd guess that was the point.” Penny turned
away. While they hadn't agreed on everything, Jake knew she and
Will had been intimate for a short time. Maybe his death affected
her in ways she—

“Fuck him.” Penny spat at the fence.

Or maybe not,
Jake thought.

Quite a few of the creatures had followed the
fleeing trio as they'd escaped the garage. Nearly a third had
already made it to the fence-line and were clawing vainly at the
chain-link, attempting to reach the warm, living flesh beyond.
Twice as many again were still on the way, and yet more were taking
notice of the excitement south of the grainery. In short order,
there would be hundreds of them at the fence.

“Time to go,” Kat said with great
enthusiasm.

“I'll second that.” Jake began jogging beside
her deeper into the trees. He looked back to see Penny still
staring at the grainery. “Coming, Deputy?”

Carson pulled her Beretta free from the
holster at her hip, took aim, and ventilated the skull of a single
zombie inside the fence. It didn't drop. The other creatures
pressing against the barrier held its now truly dead body in place
as they continued their horrendous moaning.

“You're not getting me, you ugly fucks.”
Penny slowly lowered her weapon. After a few steps towards the tree
line, she turned her back on them, the grainery, and those she'd
known within.

The three of them headed quickly into the
surrounding woods, away from the salivating horde.

“Where are we headed?” Penny trotted along
behind Jake, easily keeping pace.

He looked back at her over one shoulder. “You
know how to get to the old DSL airport from here?”

* * *

Laurel was understandably near-frantic with
worry.

It had been three days since Jake, along with
her roommate and best friend Kat, had lured an enormous crowd of
zombies away from their airport hideaway. They'd
sworn
to
return the following evening after redirecting the bloodthirsty
horde, but there'd been no sign of them as of yet. The pair did
have one of George Foster's digital, hand-held radios but—knowing
those two—wouldn't risk broadcasting even if they were 'deep in the
shit', for fear of drawing the others into the hungry arms of a few
hundred zombies. Even worse, the group who'd destroyed Rae's
junkyard cache, kidnapped four of their party members (killing at
least one of them), then tortured Jake's friend Allen Ryker along
with EMT Maggie Reed, was still out there somewhere. While chances
were small those aggressors would actually be monitoring the exact
channel their party would be using at that exact moment, it wasn't
outside the realm of possibility. Jake and Kat would err on the
side of caution to keep their friends safe, even if it put them in
serious danger. That was why Laurel was 'freaking', as George's
buxom counterpart put it.

“Seriously, they'll be fine,” Rae insisted,
attempting for the hundredth time to quell Laurel's growing anxiety
over Jake's absence. She stood before a workbench, in an olive
flight-suit she'd begun to favor, ripping apart small digital
something-or-others. “Jake can take care of himself, and Kat's
definitely no slouch when it comes to dealing with zombies either.
Damn, girl, have a little faith.”

Jake's red-haired lover was having none of
it. “You
do
recall the 'quick trip' the pair of them went on
when we got to your place for our pair of motorcycles, don't you?
When they took on a group of asshole rapists, and ended up burning
down a pizzeria?”

“In Jake's defense, that was actually me.”
Sergeant Elle Pierce sat nearby on their transport's C130 style
loading ramp. “I shot an RPG into the propane tank in the rear of
the pizzeria’s parking lot, and—”

“
So
not helping,” Foster's
green-haired niece mumbled. Beatrix Foster sat brushing her
green-dyed hair, ignoring her uncle's disapproving expression.
She'd raided his supply of military-issue clothing earlier and
while the pants she wore fit, her plain, brown, tank-top style
undershirt was about three sizes too small. Possibly four.

Laurel St. Clair was an inch or so shorter
than Kat’s 5'10" with a shock of deep red hair cascading halfway
down her back which earned her countless envious complements. The
only problem was it would never quite cooperate. No matter what she
did, one stray lock would always work its way from the scrunchie,
or out of the hair clip, and fall over her left eye. She had a
dancer’s build and, even though she didn’t possess the Out-To-Here
breasts modern day, semi-anorexic movie starlets displayed, filled
out her green tank top quite nicely. Her waist was slim and it
curved appealingly into shapely hips, which had a tendency to sway
a bit more than usual when she got upset. A few freckles—the legacy
from a Scottish grandmother—complimented her looks and as Kat had
phrased it,
Would make any red-blooded boy sit up and bark at
the moon
.

Currently, she 'had her mad on'.

“I swear, I'm going to kick his ass,” Laurel
fumed. “Kat's too. I kid you not.”

“Gonna have ta get in line, Red.” George
Foster sat in a camp chair, smoking one of his ever present Cuban
cigars. He didn't care whether they were legal
before
the
zombies got up and started eating everybody, and had smoked them
for better than ten years.

That took Laurel aback momentarily. “Excuse
me?”

“I told your boy to get himself back here
quick. What? You think the past three days have been fun and games
for me?” he demanded.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Rae told him,
clearly irritated at the older man's comment. “You've been holed up
in that control tower out there, drinking shit-tons of
my
whiskey, and—”

George looked offended. “Hey, my 'activities'
are gonna let us find them raider pussies and our girl, once our
missing duo get back here. You
do
remember Karen, right? The
one we've been trying ta figure out how ta rescue?”

“Stop being a prick. I haven't forgotten. My
memory is just fine, unlike
some
people. I'll cut you some
slack and chalk your forgetfulness up to advancing age, not just
HIAS.” Ray did not look amused.

Foster looked confused. “What the hell is
HIAS?”

“Head In Ass Syndrome,” she told him snidely.
“It was pretty common before the apocalypse, at least among older,
out of shape, ex-Squids.”

George looked as if he'd blow a gasket. “Now
look here, woman. I don't mind ya' bashin' on me, but don't talk
shit about the navy. That's just wrong. Besides, I'm no more—”

“Gods above and below, will you two give it a
rest?” Laurel snapped. “Why don't you do something constructive
with your time? Like helping me figure out how to locate our two
missing idiots?”

She stalked up the Mimi's loading ramp past
Elle, through the first of its three modules, and slammed the
airlock door at the far end.

George shook his head. “You know, I like
Jake. The boy's got guts. Not a lot a' brains, though.”

“Now, why the hell would you say that?” Rae
demanded, turning away from the mess of electronic components she
was tearing apart on one of the hanger's workbenches. She put both
her fists on her Army-green clad hips, causing what pretty much
everyone would agree was an
impressive
set of feminine
endowments to thrust forward. These were emphasized by the fact she
wore her flight-suit unzipped down to her navel, and had taken to
wearing only a sports bra underneath. When Foster had asked why,
Rae had moodily informed him that air conditioning was a thing of
the past, and she didn't feel like strutting around with 'chicken
soup stains.' Then the buxom woman had looked meaningfully at
George's own sweat-soaked armpits and snorted. That had prompted
one hell of an argument, proving that—like Laurel—she also had no
problem dishing out a verbal lashing.

The aging warrior leaned back in his chair
and blew a smoke ring. “He hooked up with a redhead. Any fool will
tell ya, redheaded women are trouble.”

“That's the most asinine thing I've ever
heard,” Rae informed him loftily.

Foster shrugged. “Come on, ya know redhead
broads got that mile-wide stubborn streak normally. Not ta mention
one hell of a temper. They're famous fer that. Datin' one a' them
is like tryin' ta dance with a tornado. Exciting as all hell at
first, but eventually they'll tear your ass ta shreds. Especially
if you try ta apply
reason
inta any discussion you have with
one. That'll get ya hurt, quick-like.”

“I'm impressed,” Rae said, shaking her head
in disbelief. “That is the single most unenlightened, sexist
comment I've ever heard come out of someone's mouth.”

“Give it time, dear. George is quite the
soldier, but he has no tact to speak of.” This came from Gertrude
Jennings, Jake's eighty year-old previous neighbor, and their
groups surrogate grandmother. The bespectacled woman sat in another
chair they'd looted from a camping supply store, her ever present
cane hooked over the back, knitting something unidentifiable to
keep herself busy. The AR-15 .22 rifle, which was all her slight
frame could handle due to a larger weapon's recoil, lay close by on
the ground at her feet.