Gun in hand, I ran for the others. They were moving fast now, breaking down chairs and producing weapons. No one went for the fence. We all knew there was no point. The same security features that kept everyone inside feeling like they could enjoy being this close to the wilderness would condemn us all, because only the first person would have the time to clear the first gate. Even Karl wasn’t enough of a bastard to say “I want you all to die for me,” and so he held his ground. We all did.
Putting the gate to our backs would have been putting ourselves into a kill zone. As soon as the zombies got close enough, the sniper turrets would start firing, and we’d be splattered. At that point, we’d become targets. I could have climbed a tree, gotten above the action, but that would have meant leaving the others behind. I wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet.
Chase stepped up next to me, a shotgun in his hands. I didn’t ask where he’d gotten it. It really didn’t matter. “Assessment?” he asked. I shot him a sidelong look. He shook his head. “Karl came in screaming about how he’d seen them, but I know it wasn’t him. Boy would’ve walked for the fence and said he was getting more beer if he was the only one who knew what was about to happen. So what did you see?”
The zombies were about twenty yards out. Close enough that we couldn’t run—not without triggering them to do the same—but far enough away that we had a few seconds of breathing room. We were all professionals. We were going to take every breath the world allowed us, because we knew damn well that these could be our last.
“Five in the lead, unknown number in the back. No moan yet, but they’re moving decisively in this direction, which implies that something caught their attention without fully registering as ‘food.’ I’m sure that’s coming.” Nothing in the world is as single-minded as a zombie that’s started moaning. “Look at their clothes. They’re clean. These people amplified within the last twenty-four hours.”
“So they’re all fresh.” Chase grimaced. “Fuck me.”
“Yeah,” I agreed grimly.
Kellis-Amberlee preserved the human body before amplification, keeping us safe from colds and cancer. After amplification, it destroyed everything in its path. Infected individuals generally divided into two camps: newly infected, or “fresh,” and those who’d amplified long enough ago to start really showing the signs of their illness. Zombies still had the physical limitations they’d had before amplification. They just didn’t pay attention to them anymore. They would run on broken ankles and pursue their prey for hours despite bad cases of asthma. The longer they lived with their disease, the more damage they did to themselves, until they virtually neutralized their potential to do harm. Only virtually. There was no such thing as a “safe” zombie, and even one that was missing all four limbs and most of its teeth could spit or bleed on an uninfected person, starting the cycle over again. It never ended. It never needed to.
Fresh zombies could run, sometimes faster than the living, because they didn’t notice when they broke their toes, blistered their feet, or twisted their ankles. They’d just keep coming, and if the damage they did in the process resigned them to the back of the mob in short order, that was a cold comfort to the people they’d chased down. Fresh zombies could grasp. They no longer understood even simple tools, but their fingers hadn’t stiffened and lost manual dexterity, and they knew how to lock them around wrists or tangle them in hair. No zombies were good, but fresh zombies were the worst of a bad lot.
“Think this is a setup?” asked Chase.
“Nope,” I said. “I know it is.”
Then the zombies were close enough to smell us. The moan went up, and all hell broke loose.
There are a few things all successful Irwins have in common. We know how to defend ourselves. We know the state-mandated firearms well enough to pass our licensing exams, and we know our chosen weapons just as well, if not sometimes better. We know the risks we take every time we go out into the field, and even if most of us secretly believe we’re going to live forever, we still accept the fact that this time, this adventure could be our last. We make our peace with that every time we press the “record” button, because a scared Irwin is a stupid Irwin, and a stupid Irwin isn’t going to be around for very long.
That’s where the commonalities end. There’s no set of standards or guidelines that we all agree to live by, and most Irwins are fierce individualists, convinced that our way of doing things, our ideas about the world and the dead and the living are more important than anyone else’s. A few Irwins choose to work in pairs, or even triplets, but they’re rare, and most of us don’t understand how they’re able to function. We’re too busy grandstanding for the camera and enjoying our independence. Which is great for ratings, but not so good when you’re trying to fight off a mob of zombies that has a better grasp of teamwork than you do.
There were fourteen of us and an unknown number of them: at least twenty, and probably more, since they were still flowing out of the trees like a terrible river. They were all so fresh. How the hell had the people who were targeting us been able to grab so many without being caught? Had we started taking disappearances for granted, viewing them as the dreadful background noise of a life lived in a world full of the dead? And it didn’t matter, couldn’t matter now, no matter how much I wanted it to, because they were closing in on us, and they weren’t going to stop long enough for me to get a better look.
Chase’s shotgun spoke in thunder, and the zombies answered in moans. Every time he pulled the trigger a head disappeared, vaporized past identification by the bullet. I was grateful for my mag, even as my own smaller weapon opened holes in foreheads and in throats. We’d be able to find out who those people had been, assuming any of us made it out of here.
Jody, the woman who’d made her name with pacifism, produced a lethal-looking assault rifle from her things and began picking off zombies with military precision, making me wish I knew more about her background. The front rank of the dead was denuded within seconds, reduced to so many corpses that wouldn’t be getting up a second time. The trouble was, the zombies behind them just kept coming. That was what zombies did. They kept coming.
We kept shooting. That was what Irwins did, and as the second rank of zombies fell, it began to look like we might be able to win this one. The zombies were too fresh to have tapped fully into the odd, inexplicable hive-mind that powered large groups of the infected, and they moved with jerky, dogged persistence, not splitting up or trying to confuse us. If they’d been a little more advanced in their infections, they could have done all sorts of things to make our lives a living hell. As it was, they didn’t have the intelligence for tactics, and we had plenty of bullets.
Bullets, and other things. One of the younger Irwins had been hanging back, staying behind the first rank of shooters. I’d assumed it was because he was scared. Even field-licensed Irwins don’t always see real action within their first year, especially if they’re under twenty-one when they start. The nastier hazard zones are off-limits until twenty-five, and even the moderate ones don’t unlock until a person is past the legal drinking age. I’ve never been sure why. Drunk people and zombies are a recipe for disaster.
This was a leggy kid, all arms and elbows. He was about nineteen, and he wasn’t holding back to let the shooters do their job. He was holding back while he assembled his polearm.
It was a fancy piece of work, too. It looked like a 3D-printed glaive—basically a long stick, in this case made up of separate pieces of screwed-together piping, with a hooked blade at the end. It had probably seemed like a great idea on paper. The action was always five feet away, held at bay by that wickedly designed hook. It had probably seemed even better when he was practicing in his backyard or garage, disemboweling dummies filled with ballistics gel and making war-whoop sounds.
I realized what he was going to do a bare second after he launched himself toward the oncoming mob. “No!” I shouted, and the sound of gunfire drowned out my voice, rendering it small and inconsequential. N
ot that I could have stopped him. He was already moving, racing toward the dead with his glaive held rigidly in front of him, whooping with delight. His head, I knew, would be full of visions of glory, dreams of the headlines he was going to dominate. Humanity has always been happy to reward the daring and the foolish, holding us up like role models when really, we’re just illustrations of the best things not to do with your life.
Everyone had noticed him now, including the zombies. A few people stopped firing, some from visible shock, others from the desire not to hurt the kid, who was one of our own, after all. But not one of us went after him. It felt like my feet were rooted to the blood-colored ground, anchored in place by a weight too enormous for me to ever shift. It was all happening too fast. It was all happening in slow motion at the same time.
He reached the front rank of the zombies, his glaive slicing into the first of them with ease. He whooped as he pulled it loose and whirled it a few feet to the side, cutting the second zombie across the stomach. Its guts fell out with a wet plopping sound, and the zombie went down. Kellis-Amberlee might raise the dead and grant them enhanced blood-clotting properties, but not even it could keep somebody standing after their insides made their first public appearance.
Pulling the glaive loose, the kid whooped again and swung for a third zombie. His foot hit a piece of intestine, and he stumbled, missing by inches.
The zombie that had come up on his side didn’t miss. It grabbed his shoulder, yanked him backward, and bit down, ripping a huge chunk out of the side of his neck. He screamed, a high, agonized sound that bore no resemblance to his gleeful war cries. The glaive fell from his hands, making a splashing sound when it landed in the blood that was pooling all around.
The noise broke the spell that this bizarre incident had cast over the shooters. We opened fire again, all of us working together to gun down the remaining zombies. I don’t know whose bullet caught the kid, but he fell, a black hole in the middle of his forehead and no life left in his eyes. He wasn’t going to be getting up again. That was a small, strained mercy. It was all we had.
Jody screamed.
The sound came from behind me. I whipped around, trusting Chase and the others to cover the hole I had made in our wall of bullets. My eyes widened. All those suppositions I’d made—we’d made, since no one had contradicted me—about a fresh mob being too new to plan beyond the moment, they’d all been correct.
We hadn’t calculated on there being a second mob, one that had been approaching silently through the trees on the other side, their moans muffled by the sound of the gunfire. “Incoming!” I shouted, and opened fire, taking down the first two. Jody had recovered from her surprise. She was firing as well, but there were more of them in this second group, and we were moving toward the point where we would need to reload.
“Fall back!” shouted Chase. “We don’t know how many more are in those trees!”
Retreat went against every bit of my training, which said that I should never run if there was any chance of carrying the day. But there were zombies everywhere, and that kid, whatever his name was, that kid was dead; that kid wasn’t coming back. I fired one more time before turning, falling into step with Chase as we ran.
There were zombies ahead and zombies behind, but they hadn’t closed the gaps on the sides yet: The way to the open plain between the wood and the convention-center fences was clear. We hauled ass out into the middle of it before forming a circle, some of us slamming new clips into our weapons, the rest just waiting for the dead to catch up.
All except for Karl. He saw his opening, and he took it, weaving around the edge of the second mob and hoofing it as fast as he could toward the fence outside the convention center.
Maybe it was a glitch in the security system. Maybe he was moving too fast, and there was no margin in the biometric scanners; they could have taken him for a zombie, with the way he was racing across the uneven ground. Whatever the reason, he was two feet from the fence and extending his hand toward the testing box when the nearest of the automated snipers opened its blank eye, and a muffled sound like a blast of air being forced through a hose cut through the stillness. Karl didn’t have time to react. He fell backward, revealing the hole where his left eye had been, and landed, unmoving, on the ground.
On the ground in front of the gate. Which would now be saturated with his blood. His dead, and hence bioactive, blood. Even if we got past the mob, we couldn’t use the gate; we’d be biohazards the second we stepped in what Karl had spilled. No matter how many blood tests we cleared, the convention center security drones would flag us and gun us down.
“Chase, how the hell do we get to the front of the convention center without going through the fences?” I asked the question quietly, not because I was trying to keep it secret—all these people were smart, all these people were reaching the same conclusions I was—but because I didn’t dare allow myself to raise my voice. If I started yelling, I wasn’t going to stop.
I had no eye protection. I had no leg protection. I wore sundresses into the field on a regular basis, sure, but always when I had chosen the field, when I had calculated the risks. The rose garden had happened fast and hot and I’d been the one who chose to run toward the danger—me and no one else. Mat had been an unwitting draftee. This time, the danger had come to me, and while I wasn’t unnerved enough to forget my training, I was definitely off balance. I just wanted to get out of here alive. I didn’t want the perfunctory kiss I’d given Audrey before she trundled off to the convention center and I made for the Irwins’ barbeque to be our last. Maybe it was selfish, especially with two people already dead—two people aside from the seemingly endless waves of zombies that were closing in on us—but sometimes selfishness is the truest human impulse of all. Sometimes selfishness is the thing that keeps you alive when everything else fails.
“We have to go back into the woods,” he said. There was a flat, resigned note to his voice, like he’d been circling this conclusion for some time, trying to find any other way to accomplish what he wanted to do. “There’s a maintenance road half a mile in. It connects to the tunnel system used for the landscaping and cleanup crews. There’s formalin, flamethrowers, everything you could need to stop an outbreak. We just have to get there.”
Get there, with zombies on every side except our rear, where a homicidal fence was waiting to take us down for getting too close, and with most of our ammo already expended. It was an impossible thing for the world to ask of us. It was never going to happen. It was our only chance.
I didn’t know most of these Irwins well enough to know their strengths or weaknesses, but I knew what I could see. Like that one Irwin who was built like a small mountain going for a walk. Like Jody, who was tiny and lithe and accustomed to holding perfectly still for long periods of time. Like Chase, who knew the terrain.
And I knew, more than anything else in the world, that I didn’t want to die out here. Not today; not like this. “Everyone!” I shouted, even as the gunshots rang in my ears and my own gun jerked in my hand. The shot was clean; the zombie fell. Three more were waiting to take his place. “There’s a maintenance road half a mile in! We won’t all make it there, but we won’t all make it here, either! Who’s for a rabbit-run to safety?”
The cameras were on, their lenses greedily gobbling up every picosecond of footage. None of this would be lost. Enough of our Newsies knew what was going on that I’d be stunned if half of them weren’t already sending up drone-mounted recorders to get aerial shots. All of us wanted to survive this. Fieldwork and death wishes don’t go together well, or at least, they don’t go together well for long, and everyone here had been working the circuit long enough that I had faith in their desire to stay alive. But even more than we wanted to survive, most of us wanted to be remembered as something amazing. There was a reason the Action News reporters of the world took their name from Steve Irwin, a man who never met a camera he wouldn’t mug for or a venomous snake he wouldn’t pick up and admire. His lega
cy might have been his family, but his immortality was in his recordings.
Anyone who told me no would look like a coward. Some of them knew that, and had been glaring at me since the words “maintenance road” had left my mouth. The rest were nodding, some even taking their eyes off the mob to look at me.
“How?” shouted Jody.
“Climb the big guy!” I called back, pointing to Eric. He was easily six and a half feet tall; he’d do. “Make a mobile sniper’s platform! Chase, you know where we’re going—I’ll take point, keep you covered while you follow and give me directions. I want covering fire. Now move!” I pulled the trigger one more time, and saw the nearest zombie go down in a heap of limbs before I turned and bolted for the tree line. Footsteps behind me told me that Chase was in close pursuit. That, or the zombies were closer than we’d ever thought. Either way, I needed to keep running.
The two mobs hadn’t quite managed to merge together, and there was still a narrow avenue between them. I hurled myself down it, shooting when necessary, running for the tree line. A dead man loomed out of nowhere. I put a bullet in his forehead, turning my face aside to avoid blood splatter, and kept on moving. It was the only thing I could do, now that I was committed.
“Keep moving forward!” commanded Chase. I kept moving forward. That was easier than turning, or slowing down: Now that my body was in motion, it wanted to stay in motion. I wanted to run forever. If I ran forever, I wouldn’t be forced to deal with the things that happened when I was still. I would never be caught. I would never die.