“Oh, god! Help … oh, Christ…”
“That’s Lucas,” said JT. They took the last steps two at a time, swiveling their weapons around at each corner, expecting white faces to come lunging out of the shadows. They saw the blood first.
A footprint perfectly outlined in red. A heavy shoe, a Timberland or a good knockoff. Dez pointed with her Glock.
“I see it,” JT said quietly as they moved up the steps.
“… please … God…” Lucas Chestnut’s voice was faint, depleted. Dez already knew that they weren’t hurrying up the steps to save him. He sounded hurt, and the day they’d lived through had taught them that “hurt” was a death sentence. No matter how small a bite, it was as good as a bullet to the heart.
They rounded the last turn in the stairwell and found another footprint.
And a foot.
The shoe, ankle, and part of the shin stood on the top step. The rest of their owner was twenty feet down the hall, crawling along, inch by inch, toward a man who sat with his back to the door of the English room. A bloody fire ax lay across the man’s thigh, and his body was covered with bites. Dozens of them.
Two other figures crouched on either side of him. One held Lucas Chestnut’s arm in both of her hands, and as Dez watched she bent and sank her teeth into the flabby flesh on the inside of the teacher’s elbow. The other person, a teenage boy, knelt and worked at Chestnut’s abdomen, biting and tearing to get through the tough abdominal wall. The zombie with the missing leg crawled inexorably forward, moaning piteously at the meal it longed
to share.
Chestnut was too weak to scream. He sobbed and shook his head over back and forth in a permanent denial of what was happening. Then, as Dez and JT stepped out of the stairwell, Chestnut turned his streaming eyes toward them.
“Please…” he begged weakly. “For the love of God … please stop this…”
Not stop them. Stop this.
Dez heard JT inhale with a hiss.
“Steady on, Hoss,” she said softly and stepped past him. The maimed zombie heard her first and he turned and snarled. Black saliva dripped from his lips. Dez recognized him as one of the janitors. Roger somethingorother.
She raised the Glock and fired. The bullet caught Roger in the temple and the force blew one of his eyes out of the socket. He collapsed forward, the bones of his face crunching onto the hard floor. Behind her, Dez heard JT gag.
Dez did not look. She shifted the barrel of the Glock to the teenage boy.
Bang.
Then the woman, a stranger.
Bang.
Lucas Chestnut raised his eyes to her. Blood bubbled from between his lips.
“Please…” he begged.
Bang.
Dez lowered the gun and closed her eyes.
Behind her a door creaked and she whirled just as JT bellowed in surprise, his cry mingling with moans as the dead poured out into the hall. Five of them. No, more. Eight or nine!
“JT, look out!”
JT went down under a pile of them and the impact made him jerk his finger on the trigger. The blast hit one of the dead above the elbow and blew away her arm. She did not even pause as she flung herself at JT.
Dez fired three fast shots at the infected who were still standing, killing two and sending one staggering backward toward the top of the stairs. The creature fell and went tumbling and crashing down out of sight.
Under the pile, JT pivoted his big shoulders and smashed the shotgun across a zombie’s face, knocking the creature off of him. The dead man fell with a swatch of JT’s shirt between its teeth. Another of the dead immediately lunged into the opening and then Dez was there, kicking at them, slamming the steel toe of her shoe into the temple of one, stamping her heel down on another’s spine, using her free hand to grab one by the belt and pull him back. When that zombie hissed and turned toward her, she pistol-whipped his mouth away from her and then shot him through the ear. JT rammed the barrel of his shotgun under the chin of the closest infected and pulled the trigger, blowing the thing’s scalp and brains all the way to the ceiling.
Dez kicked one of the dead in the cheek and shot another through the eye. Then she grabbed JT and hauled. He kicked his way out and they flopped backward, both of them flat on their backs.