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“What’s wrong?” asked Dez, hurrying to meet her.
“That soldier, Captain Imura … he’s in trouble. You’d better come quick.”
Dez blew past Trout and raced for the door. Charlie was right with her.
By the time Trout managed to hobble to the loading bay the sun was above the horizon and the long night was over.
But the nightmare was not.
The dead were inside the parking lot.
And there were so many of them.
Far too many.
Boxer, Shortstop, Gypsy, and Sam were walking backward, firing as they retreated. They killed a lot of the dead, but it wasn’t even making a dent in the seething mass of infected.
“Oh my God,” whispered Jenny, her hand covering her mouth, “where are they all coming from?”
Trout shook his head.
Jenny asked another, even more destructive question. “How bad is this?”
Trout whirled. “Jenny, get everyone on the bus. Tell them to drop whatever they’re carrying and get on the damn buses. We need to get out of here right now.”
Then he was yelling and grabbing teachers and parents who were standing and watching with slack jaws and horror in their eyes. He shoved them toward the buses.
“Get the engines started,” he bellowed. “Pull out of the bays and get into a line. Check all the windows. Come on—move!”
The gunfire was louder but more sparse, and when he turned he saw that the soldiers were no longer backing away. They were running. It was a full rout. Sections of the fence were bowing inward, but that mattered less than the steady stream of zombies who crowded in through the big open gateway. Trout’s orderly mind kept wanting to quantify them, to put a number to the horde.
A thousand?
No, that was too small a number.
Two or three thousand at the very least.
Coming from where?
He tried to remember how many towns were nearby. There were a number of them, but not enough to account for these numbers.
Then Trout remembered the highway. All those cars, all those travelers.
Had something happened to block the highway?
And had the lines of stopped cars become a feeding frenzy?
He didn’t know and probably never would, but it was the only thing that could account for there being so many people here. So many dead people.
Not all of them were slow. Some of them ran like sprinters, cutting ahead of the slower zombies, racing to try and tackle the soldiers. They ran so fast that it sometimes took two or three shots to bring them down. That gave the slower ones more time to stagger forward, and it wasted bullets.
We’re all going to die, thought Billy Trout.
The last of the adults were piling onto the buses.
“Dez!” screamed Trout. “Come on!”
Dez Fox stood halfway between the loading docks and the front rank of the living dead, firing her Glock, dropping empty magazines, swapping in new ones, firing, reloading, firing. All the time she did this she screamed. Rage and terror.
