the heart enough to ‘kill’ it, but the bullets weren’t doing more than make the zombie stumble. The zombie on his back was ramming its bloody stump into the back of the officer’s head as if it didn’t realize it didn’t have a mouth anymore, and was still trying to eat him. The officer was screaming as the zombie that still had a mouth leaned down, as his gun clicked empty.
I yelled, ‘Guard your eyes!’ but I didn’t have time to wait and make sure he heard me. I fired the AR almost point-blank into its head. It exploded in a shower of blood, brains, and bone fragments.
The officer was on all fours, blood covering his hair, and he was yelling, ‘Get it off of me! Get it off!’
I wasn’t sure if he was talking about the brains and blood or the zombie, but I went for the zombie. I put the AR against the zombie’s shoulder where the arm attaches to the torso and fired. It blew the arm off and rocked the zombie backward. The officer was able to scramble free of it and almost fell into the second zombie as it crawled around on the ground. It seemed more disoriented about the whole decapitation thing than the first one.
The officer was shoving at the air as if the zombies were spiders and he didn’t want them to touch him. I grabbed his arm and helped him get to his feet and move out from between the two zombies. Half his face was covered in zombie blood, but I still recognized him as Officer Bush, who had thrown up first at the crime scene. His eyes were huge, his breathing so rapid he was going to hyperventilate if he didn’t stop. I had to find my men, but damn it.
‘Bush, Bush, can you hear me?’ I shook him until I was sure he was actually focused on me. ‘Slow your breathing down, Officer Bush.’
He nodded a little too rapidly.’
‘Are you out of ammo?’ I asked.
‘It didn’t do any good. It didn’t stop them.’
‘Shoot the head,’ I said.
‘You shot their heads off and they didn’t die. They’re supposed to die if you take their heads.’
‘Only in the movies,’ I said.
He clutched at my arm. ‘How do we kill them?’
‘You can’t,’ I said.
‘What do we do then?’
‘Do you have ammo left?’
He nodded, his breathing even, and I watched his eyes fill back up with him and push back the fear. He popped out his empty magazine, reached for his equipment belt and a new magazine. He did the transfer automatically and smoothly. He was going to be okay.
‘Shoot their heads, take the mouth out, and then they can’t bite.’ In my head I added, so they can’t give anyone else the rotting infection.
‘But it still jumped me,’ he said.
‘Sometimes they do that,’ I said. ‘Stay with me. Shoot any zombies in the face until they don’t have a mouth.’
He nodded, though his face was a bloody mask. He had the gun held upright in both hands; his hands were almost steady, his eyes were good.
‘Come on, Bush, let’s do this.’
‘Right behind you, Marshal Blake.’
‘I know you are, Bush. I know you are.’ We moved forward and started shooting zombies. He didn’t waste any ammo on anything but the faces. Fast learner; good, maybe he’d live to see dawn.
28
We dragged Ranger Becker out from under a mound of zombies. She’d shot off their faces with a shotgun and wasn’t bitten as far as I could tell. Her partner was dead, his throat ripped out, eyes glazed even by starlight. The head of the zombie who’d killed him was still eating his throat, even though the bits of him were falling straight out of the neck, because the body was gone, lost somewhere in the clearing. The neck had been shot through, spine severed, but that hadn’t saved him.
She said, ‘Pete!’
I turned her away from him. ‘He’s gone, move!’ Bush helped me get her moving through the carnage of decapitated zombies and body parts. Any zombie that had made a kill was eating, and other zombies joined them, so in a way even dead they helped the other men. An eating zombie wasn’t trying to kill anyone else. I’d never seen this many flesh eaters outside a cemetery. Where the hell had they come from?
I heard the leopard scream over the sound of gunfire and men screaming. It jolted through me as if I’d been shocked. I fought not to reach out