Chapter 13
I WATCHED the glass pieces fall as if they were snowflakes, twisting in the air to catch the sun in a brilliant arc and then winking to bronze, spinning, tumbling, a glimmering cascade of dying beauty, jewels tumbling from the heavens while the rot of hell pierced the veil.
The first zombie, the one who'd presumably broken the window, stepped barefoot onto the glass shards. It was one of the secretaries from the courthouse. Her teeth did a little jittering dance in her half-open mouth, like she was freezing and trying to suck in icy breaths. Her feet began to leave red prints on the pharmacy floor. I didn't know why the hell she was barefoot. Maybe she took her heels off at the desk to keep her feet from getting sore during the day.
Behind her, the two other pantsuited zombie ladies staggered through the gaping window frame, then the trotter from the hardware store parking lot, and...oh, goddammit...a little boy, maybe twelve years old, wearing a torn Orioles jersey and a pair of baggy khaki shorts drenched in blood. His lips were pulled back in a sinister, leering grin that looked carved onto his face, and he had a spongey loop of gore-soaked intestines in his hand.
"Grab the shit!" I yelled, scooping medicine into my backpack. Rivet yanked the rifle out of Jennie's hands. Jennie unslung her pack and held it down at the level of the counter and swiped a wide armload of bottles into its open mouth. Plastic tubes pattered and bounced on the floor, little green and yellow and white and pink pills clattering in all of them. The open bottle of triazolam tipped over and sent a cascade of sky-blue ovals over the edge of the counter. Dinkins watched us all with half-shut lids, his lips quivering.
The hardware store zombie, a thin, bearded man with a baseball cap askew over thick, curly brown hair, bumped into a magazine stand and sent issues of People and Time sprawling over the tile floor. Rivet raised the rifle barrel, sighted, and pulled the trigger. I barely heard the tiny click among the echoing rattle of medicine bottles. Rivet swore and tried again.
"Take off the safety, shithead," Jennie shouted over her shoulder. She was on her knees, stuffing fistfulls of fallen prescription bottles into her backpack.
"I did! I did!"
"Did you cock it?"
"Of course I fucking..." There was a rasping sound of metal slipping over metal, then an ear-splitting thunder clap. The rifle barrel jerked up in Rivet's hands, and somehow, like the random details you remember from a dream, I saw a miniscule puff of dirt rise out of the lawn in front of the courthouse across the street.
"Missed!" I called.
"Thank you," Rivet's voice held enough sarcasm to dam the Mississipi. He pulled on the metal knob in the side of the rifle, ejecting a long brass tube. He pushed the slide back and barely took time to aim before he deafened us again. I felt like I was standing inside a massive bell while mighty Goliath whacked it with a sledgehammer. Beside the little boy, a bottle of shampoo exploded.
My ears were ringing with a constant, high-pitched whine, I was shouting something, couldn't hear myself, Jennie shouting too, yanking the rifle out of Rivet's hands, bayonet blade flashing. Mr. Dinkins slumped sideways, offsetting his center of gravity and sending the wheeled chair shooting away. He dropped heavily to the floor. Jennie had the rifle now. Rivet was arguing. I couldn't hear, couldn't hear a damn thing, and then Jennie fired it again and the brunette secretary's neck erupted in three directions like a watermelon. The woman's head sagged to the side, down behind her shoulder, a rapidly deflating ballon. I could see a jagged shard of her spine sticking straight up between her shoulders, and she kept walking toward us, blood cascading down the front of her shirt, head still attached but hanging so far behind her it wasn't even visible from the front.
Jennie raised the rifle again, took a slow breath, squeezed the trigger. The woman's left breast spewed blood and the dangling head behind her shoulder blades swung up, over her shoulders, a tetherball on a flap of skin, with a small, neat hole in the left cheek and a gaping chasm over the left ear where the bullet had disintegrated in her skull and sent shards of metal screaming out through the bone plate. The woman crumpled with one foot still in the air for her next step.
Jennie lowered the rifle barrel with the butt still pressed to her shoulder, observing her handiwork with a calm, satisfied air. A gust of wind swept through the shattered front window and swept her auburn hair back off her shoulders, revealing the graceful curve of her neck, her slight jawbone, her glowing white skin remarkably unblemished by the blood that covered the rest of her body. Reflected sunlight lit up her face in a wash of silver, piercing her eyes, lighting up the speckled green-brown of her irises as if a hot fire burned bright just behind her soft brows.
God damnit, that girl was beautiful.
Jennie turned and saw me staring. I hadn't realized I was. She wrinkled her nose and smiled with one side of her mouth and said, "What?"
I stuttered something unintelligible, my mind emptier than the distance between planets, suddenly reduced to an imbecile who couldn't even form words. Jennie cocked her head and looked at me strangely, then Rivet's heavy hand was yanking on my shoulder and we were in a pharmacy again and my ears were ringing and zombies were shambling over scattered housewares to eat us alive.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," he said.
"We're taking Dinkins," I said abruptly.
"Like hell we are." His backpack rattled as he slung it to his shoulders, but the sound was drowned out as Jennie fired again and the bearded man half-somersaulted backward in a fountain of his own life. She dropped the rifle and ran over to us, scooping her own filled backpack off the counter and onto one shoulder as she moved.
"Where's that back door?" she asked Rivet.
"This way. Come on, Ray."
"Not without Dinkins." I knelt beside the old man. He looked like a bizarre wax doll escaped from a museum in his pressed, antique military uniform, face sallow and still. I held my face over his nose and felt the thinnest push of air. Still alive. Unbidden, the memory rose from the mire of my mind, like a corpse dredged from a muddy riverbank. Leaning over a face, calm and still, feeling for breath that had to be there, it had to be. Weeping when it was, just a hot trickle on my cheek.
"Fuck him, Ray!" Rivet protested. "He tried to shoot us."
A metal shelf rattled somewhere beyond the counter. It sounded close. The wet sound of rolling phlegm, the staccato clatter of teeth on teeth, carried over to us.
"Jesus," I heard Rivet say, followed by a hollow click. They both swore.
"Out," Jennie shouted.
I gripped Mr. Dinkins under his armpits and started dragging him across the floor. His slight body slid easily on the tile.
"Shit, my shovel," Rivet said. "I left it out there."
"Take this," Jennie said, indicating either the poker or the rifle. I was focused on Dinkins.
"Nah, this'll do." Metal scraped briefly on tile. "Not like Ray's using it."
Dinkins began to snore. It was a good sign. Even better would be...I took a precious second to scan the shelves beside me. I could hear Rivet and Jennie walking away behind me, down the length of the narrow aisle behind the counter. Opposite the counter, a metal shelf tumbled, and someone—something—shrieked in rage.
"There's a storage room back here, and a door out," Rivet was explaining. "Dammit, Ray, come on!"
Come on, come on, come on...there! I spied a small plastic-wrapped syringe and shoved it into my pocket, then gripped Dinkins again and heaved. Something swished on my right, fabric sliding on something hard. Jennie spit a warning, and a pair of scissors sliced into my shoulder. I cried out and slapped at the pain with one hand. My fingers closed on something wet and round and hairy. I twisted my head and saw a small, sideways face leering inches away, its tiny pearl teeth sunk deep into my shoulder, its little pink eyes so high in their sockets they were almost blank, staring up at me.
The boy shook his head like a rottweiler. Muscle tissue ripped. Spasms of agony shot down my arm. I tried to blank out the pain but it was too sharp, too present. It c
onsumed the right half of my body. The boy's thin upper lip worked up and down, exposing glistening gums. I was so close I could see the root bulges of the teeth under the pink. His small hands clawed at my face. I couldn't get a grip on him, couldn't push him away. His nostrils flared. His teeth sank deeper, sparking fire-brand pangs on my tortured nerve ends.
Then something flashed just behind him and the weight of the boy was gone. I'd been struggling away from him, pulling back unconsciously, and the sudden freedom pitched me into the row of shelves. Orange cylinders fell around me like hail. Gasping, I saw a round stump filled with gristle and pumping tissue on the faux-granite countertop, sending a Niagra of blood down the white drawers set into its rear.
"F-f-fu..." I stammered.
"Hold still, Ray," Jennie's voice came to me through a heavy mist. "This is going to hurt." I felt pressure on my right shoulder, then the sensation of sandpaper scraping my wound. Dimly, fingers pulling back on teeth, and then Jennie had a little boy's decapitated head in her hands. Behind her, Rivet's blurred form swung the axe at something beyond the counter.
Whatever shock had faded reality for those brief seconds burned away and I gasped as pain came flooding back into my shoulder. I flexed my fingers, lifted my arm. Everything still worked. Jesus, it hurt, but it worked.
"Go," I croaked, then said it louder. "Go." I rolled and grabbed Dinkins again, pulling mostly with my left hand. The deluge pouring from the boy's headless body slowed to a river, then a stream. The tile floor was slick with his blood. My feet slid out, dropping me onto my ass, and I pushed against the shelves, the drawer handles, scooting backward, dragging Dinkins with me. Rivet stepped over us so we could pass and swung again. A piercing howl filled the pharmacy, and Rivet roared back. Jennie stabbed at something with the bayonet, then slung the rifle over her shoulder and lifted Dinkins's feet. The old man had begun to snore.
With Jennie lifting some of Dinkins's weight, I was able to scramble to my feet. Together, we carried him to the end of the aisle and into the dark storage room at the back. His body was limp and uncooperative. My right hand gave out and I nearly dropped him, but somehow I managed to catch his shoulder again and keep stumbling backward. Through the narrow doorway to the pharmacy, I could see Rivet swinging wildly with the axe. Two sets of hands reached for him. He shoved them away, swung again, then turned and sprinted after us.
"...get us fucking killed, Ray," he muttered angrily as he shot past. Then an emergency bar clinked and sunlight streamed into the storage room on the wings of a hot breeze. Jennie and I pushed through, Dinkins snoring peacefully between us. The last thing I saw before the heavy door swung shut behind us was a bloodstained secretary clambering over the countertop and crawling toward the storage room.