The Bellows coming from the movie screen: they had no eyes.
“Uh-oh!” Patrick shouted at something behind them, his voice half-fright, half-fun as he pulled out his toy gun.
Michael spun, seeing the several shadows lurching through the theater door. The captain paused to reload.
Michael listened to the monsters’ footsteps: like glass, like crunching broken glass.
They came in through the front door, he understood. Even though it’s daylight, they came in through the front door, and stepped on the glass the captain broke!
“Captain!” shouted Michael. “We have to get out now!”
“For twenty points,” he added under his breath. Michael picked up Patrick and sprinted down the aisle toward the captain.
“Captain, we have to leave!”
“Stand down,” the captain barked, still smiling, his eyes glittering. He was firing on the screen again. “Captain’s got this; can’t be that many back there. Ha!—sons-a-bitches can’t even see!”
“Captain,” Hank shouted, “behind us—”
The captain whirled and popped four perfect shots to destroy the brains of the Bellows in the theater doorway. He spat tobacco, spun back, resumed his firing on the theater screen . . .
. . . and were there more Bellows there now, even though he’d been massacring them? . . .
Yes-yes.
Michael reached the captain, forcefully grabbed his shoulder. The captain tore his shoulder away, and his glare blazed into Michael.
“Listen!” Michael shouted. “They’re all coming from outside! If we don’t go, they’ll trap us in here!”
“Outside?” The captain laughed. “It’s still daylight.”
“I know it is, but . . .” Michael began—and the thought finished itself: “—they tore their eyes out so they could go outside in the day!”
The captain glowered. “Get back, and that’s a goddamn order.”
You have to get us out, Michael! he thought. At that moment he remembered: The captain’s got another gun strapped to his ankle.
Michael knelt so quickly that even the captain could not react in time. Michael found the Velcro and unstrapped Jopek’s combat-issue pistol in one seamless, yes-yes move.
Michael felt a joy at the captain’s anger.
“The hell?” said Captain Jopek, gaping at Michael, as if astonished that this skinny kid stealing his gun could exist at all.
And that was the only reason Michael had time to turn and run up the aisle, saying to Holly and Hank, “This way,” firing his own three perfect shots at the new Bellows streaming in through the theater door.
What am I doing what am I doing.
Answer: Grabbing the controller, FTW!
Michael charged into the hall and Patrick held on piggyback and Michael felt Patrick’s excitement and his own blood and spotted his reflection in the glass poster cases and thought, Hot diggity—badass.
“Faris!” Hank barked, running behind him, voice strained with confusion. “Wait for the captain!”
Two Bellows moaned in the lobby—a fireman, a thin woman in a polka-dot dress. Shot down with his huge handgun. “He’ll catch up,” Michael told Hank, because he did hear the captain firefighting his way out of the theater, and at the last moment before Michael led Hank and Holly into the blazing sunset, the captain dashed around a corner into the lobby and shouted:
“Don’t you go out there! There’s still m—”
But the rest of the captain’s shout was drowned out.
Because Michael had been right.
Outside Bellows roared and echoed death-calls, clots in the bright bloody light, moaning from the sides of the shopping square corn maze, coming closer. Despite the joyous adrenaline of the moment, the previously impossible sight made a clean run of terror through Michael. The walking dead. The dead, in daylight.
“C’mon!” Michael said, leading everyone from the infested theater.
“Goddammit!” the captain shouted. “Ho’ up!”
The stalks of the corn maze ahead surged and whipped. “Daaaamn—GOOODDD—” the maze roared. Bellows reached out from the corn sightlessly, their eye sockets cored to oval pits of gristle. Michael gave the maze a wide berth.
He had just begun running past it when the captain opened fire in his direction.
The maze exploded. The land mine, on the other side of the maze’s fence only ten feet to Michael’s right, blew high as the captain’s bullet struck it, raising a man-tall spiral of concrete and fire. Hot air displaced into Michael; he cried out and stumbled to the ground. Debris peppered down; more camouflaged mines detonated. Whampf!—WHAMPF! Corn and walking corpses leapt.
Michael’s ears rang. He blinked down at Patrick, who had fallen on a hay bale beside him. “Too loud!” Patrick said.
Now the captain was long-strong striding, gun nocked, past him.
“What was that?” Michael spat.
The captain said, his eyes glittering both bitterly and happily, “Didn’t think you’d seen the Zeds in