Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
Wyatt moved quicker than Jesse could even process. He was asleep and then he was awake, and then there was a gun in his hand and the zombie was headless and twitching on the floor.
You couldn’t kill zombies. They were already dead — and wasn’t that always a freaking mindfuck — but aiming for the brainstem usually took them out of commission. Did right then. Out of commission and in way more than one piece.
“What the fuck?” There were zombie brains splattered on the fireplace.
Zombie brains in the fireplace, the requisite stench of flambéed ammonia to go with.
Jesse had to swallow down the urge to upchuck, but the freezing-cold air wafting through the cabin helped a whole lot — wafting, specifically, because the door was hanging open on its broken hinges. “What the literal fuck?”
“Jesus.” Wyatt made a noise way too bleak to be a laugh. “I forgot to lock the goddamn door.”
“You—” Jesse let out a sound that wasn’t anything other than hysterical but was maybe also a laugh. “God, Wyatt.” He was still maybe-laughing when Wyatt hauled him into a bone-crushing hug. “Jesus fuck.”
Wyatt pressed his face to Jesse’s hair, and the gust of his breath wasn’t steady. “Your fault, bud. You distracted me with those goddamn panties.”
This time Jesse’s laugh was undeniable, and it was aching with relief. He bottomed out his register, spreading around enough gravel to hardscape an ornamental garden. “That sounds like an excuse, bud.”
Wyatt’s answering laugh rumbled through Jesse, more feeling than sound — that’s how close they were, fronts pressed tight, arms wrapped tighter. And that’s why Jesse felt the exact moment Wyatt froze.
“What’s wrong?” Stupid fucking thing to ask, though. Because standing like this, the way they were, Wyatt had a clear sightline out of the open door. So no answer to Jesse’s question was gonna be a good answer. But fuck it, he had to know. “Wyatt, what is it?”
Wyatt didn’t answer, still. Shook his head instead and nudged Jesse back a step. Another. Got Jesse at arm’s length and then pushed him back even more. “Get dressed,” he ordered. “Now, Jess.”
Jesse shook his head too, not disagreeing. It was some kind of shock response, maybe, almost involuntary. He had to be telegraphing it, clear in the fear-crazed whites of his eyes, because Wyatt was already moving to block the door.
But Jesse was too quick for him.
He sprinted forward, ducked under Wyatt’s outstretched arm. Saw, instantly, just what Wyatt had seen. And understood, just as instantly, why Wyatt didn’t want him to see.
“Oh god,” Jesse breathed. “Oh fuck. No.”
They were surrounded. Every square foot of the slushy lakeshore was zombies. Everywhere was zombies. In the moonlight, all Jesse could see was zombies, four, five, six deep.
The moon was bright but it wasn’t full. Jesse couldn’t make out how far back the circle of the horde went, but there was a shadow in the shadows there, where the tree line met the lakeshore, a deeper darkness that moved — that fucking undulated — when Jesse squinted hard.
Zombies.
So many fucking zombies. A megahorde, like the kind that cleared out cities and left nothing behind but bones.
“Oh god,” Jesse whispered again, staggering back, unsteady on his noodling legs.
His stumbling attracted attention. One of the zombies on the lakeshore opposite caught sight of him and came shambling out onto the ice. He, she — whatever the poor fucker used to be, nothing more than an it now — got maybe five feet before the thin ice cracked and took it under.
Another followed. Another. Like a stone rolling downhill, not a single clump of cliche moss to be found, so momentum picked up fast, zombies piling in on top of each other, hands grasping and clawing out from under the moonlit-silver water.
So many of them, so quick.
Jesse’s numbed-up brain tried to do the math. The water was, what? Fifteen, twenty-feet deep. Already a hundred zombies must have staggered themselves into the water under the lake ice. They were close enough to the surface to pick out already, writhing like the worst kind of catch.
Jesse’s stomach cramped up on the realization: it wouldn’t be long until the zombies were enough zombies deep to form their own land bridge, until they could make it to the island en masse, a full fucking megahorde ready to tear into the only two living humans for hundreds of miles around.
Jesse’s legs gave up on him — the terror was just too much.
Wyatt caught him. He hauled Jesse back from the door and slammed it shut, the broken hinges screeching.
His hand was curved tight around Jesse’s shoulder, then cupped tight to Jesse’s cheek, a firm, grounding hold, making sure Jesse looked nowhere else.
“Get dressed,” Wyatt told him, his voice so, so steady. “Pack a bag. Food. Warm clothes. Your med kit. Do it now, Jess.”
Jesse obeyed on autopilot, just like Wyatt knew he would. He scrambled into his jeans and boots, his sweater and one of Maddie’s too. Grabbed Maddie’s patched-up pack and started mechanically packing.
Wyatt didn’t help. He flicked on the shortwave and punched in a staccato code.
Morse code, probably. Maybe some super secret military code.
Didn’t matter. Jesse couldn’t make sense of it either way.
He didn’t even try. The terror swelling up in his chest didn’t leave room for anything else except pure, undiluted panic.
He’d forgotten, is the thing. For a few blissful, horny months, Jesse had forgotten all about the ongoing zombie apocalypse. But now the ongoing zombie apocalypse had shown up on his literal doorstep — and staggered over it, hungering relentlessly for blood.
When Jesse logged back in from white-out panic, Wyatt was dressed too, layered up for the cold. He’d been checking ammo, loading the rifle and the buttstock holder. He cracked a shutter and checked that too. Clear, apparently, because he swung open the door.
“Time to head out.”
Jesse struggled into his coat. Shouldered his pack and strapped it tight. He made for the door, but he couldn’t help it, that one last glance around.
From this angle, Jesse couldn’t see the zombie twitching on the floor or the splatter of brains. He just saw the cabin, lit up, the sleepy fire still painting everything gold.
Warm. Safe.
Home.
“Jess, bud, we gotta go.”
“I know. Fuck. I know.” Jesse sucked down a ragged breath. One last look, one last hope of searing that image into his memory, then he slammed the door shut behind him and hurried to follow Wyatt down to the dock.
The metal floor of the jon boat clanged under his boots as he jumped in, echoed as he slid up the bench to clear space for Wyatt at the helm. Needed to, quick — because there was a zombie clawing its way up onto the thicker ice, already maybe halfway to the island, ten more zombies ten feet behind.
“Wyatt,” Jesse said, low, a needless warning.
“I know, bud.” Wyatt yanked on the pull-start cord and the engine roared into life — and caught a whole lot of attention besides.
Even as Wyatt started to pilot a route through where the lake was still mostly clear of ice, the darkness of the horde was already chasing around the lakeshore toward them.
At first glance, it moved like a coherent mass.
But if Jesse squinted, if he let his eyes linger a little too long, he saw the truth of it: zombies trampling one another, clawing each other back, gouging out chunks of decaying flesh and graying fat, their desperate, insatiable hunger overriding everything.
The horde was ravenous, and Jesse and Wyatt were a banquet of living, juicy flesh, just waiting to be served up raw.
“Holy shit,” Jesse whispered. The fear made his stomach turn.
He was sweating, but everything was cold.
He was cold. He was shaking too, a tremor running through his hands and shuddering up into his arms. Shock, hitting hard.
Jesse knew that. Just like he knew, “There’s way too many of them. They’re gonna—”
The boat rocked as Wyatt idled the engine. He motioned for Jesse to switch places with him. “Take the rudder,” he said, already moving.
Jesse scrambled, reaching the outboard before it tipped. He spun back, his heart knocking like a tweaking woodpecker. “Wyatt, what—”
The boat was still swaying as Wyatt braced a knee against the beat-up bottom, as he braced the hunting rifle against his shoulder, as he took the shot — and in the same second, as the lakeshore exploded in a mushroom cloud of flames.
“Jesus!” Jesse flinched away. He folded down, hiding his face in his arms as a harsh punch of fiery heat roared overhead. He popped up like a flash-banged meerkat when Wyatt tapped his knee. “What the fuck?” Jesse managed, still blinking away the afterburn.
“Gasoline trap.”
“You set it up?”
“Set up a few,” Wyatt said. “Contingency plan.”
A heap of logs and branches and accumulated trash was burning on the lakeshore, lit up like a beach bonfire, the smoke acrid already — and sparking a whole lotta shit besides flames.
Because an inhuman wave of sound was coming from the horde. The screeching that Jesse heard in all his worst nightmares but a drone below that too, a sickening bass of it, a constant, rising moan of agony.
“Head for the fire!” Wyatt yelled over that fucked-up wall of sound. “Straight at it, Jess.”
Jesse didn’t need to be told twice. The zombies were already falling back from the flames, some instinctual, remembered reflex, maybe.
Or maybe not. Like, who the fuck knew why zombies did anything they did, but that’s what they were doing right then — screeching and stumbling backward, carving up an almost zombie-free pocket of lakeshore.
Jesse gunned the engine and sent the boat plowing up onto that stretch of slushy, pebbled gravel. He took the legs out from under a zombie that came lumbering out of the trees to meet them.
Out and off, completely.
Not that it mattered. The zombie didn’t blink. Couldn’t, what with not having any eyelids. But not the point, because it just dragged its legless torso after them as Wyatt dragged Jesse out of the boat.
“Gotta move, bud!”
A Wyatt understatement. Their little pocket of safety was already failing, the stitches coming loose as zombies started to flinch closer under the flames.
Wyatt hefted the rifle. Muzzle flash and way too many shots to count, but each shot was answered with a thud and a thump, and when Wyatt shouldered the rifle again, there was a clear path waiting for them, an escape route through the trees, heading out into the dark of the forest.
Wyatt’s hand was on Jesse’s arm, urging Jesse in front of him. “Go! Go! Go!”
So Jesse went, hauling ass and his pack too, ignoring the stab of pain that shot through his bad ankle with every stumbling step.
But Jesse couldn’t ignore the inhuman screeching of the horde already chasing after them.
Couldn’t ignore that, no matter how hard he tried.