Resurrection: A Zombie Novel, - [ereader manga .TXT] 📗

Annie screamed as the wood burst inward. Bloody hands reached through a ripped seam and grasped Parker’s ankles. He tried to kick the hands loose and back away at the same time, but he had nowhere to go. He fell backward and pinwheeled off the ladder and onto the floor. Kyle hopped off the magazine rack to help him up.

Annie was alone up there now.

“Bring me a crowbar!” she shouted.

Kyle helped Parker up, then grabbed two crowbars, one for himself and one for her.

She and Kyle swung at the hands reaching through the seam while Parker pulled himself together. Annie swung in wide arcs, shattering wrists and forearms and even severing a couple of fingers. She heard howls of pain every time iron struck meat. The mass of the infected pushing inward from outside was relentless. The ripped seam wasn’t large enough for them to get through just yet, but it would be soon enough.

Parker pushed her aside and fired through the gap, trying to aim for the head.

Some of them died.

Most of them screamed.

The live ones behind the dead ones kept pushing. They were pushing the corpses of the dead ones through the gap.

“Hughes!” Parker shouted over the din. “We need you over here!”

Hughes left his post near the front door and brought his rifle.

“Shoot the ones in the back,” Parker said. “They’re pushing the dead ones through the hole.”

“We may have to join Carol in the cooler,” Kyle said.

“We’re dead if we go in there,” Parker said. “We’d never get out. Not with this many out here. We stand here and beat them or die.”

Another sheet of plywood cracked down the middle. Annie panicked and stepped back.

But then something strange happened. It was like a switch got flipped in her head. Another hole was about to get punched in their fortress, and it was her job to guard it while the others protected the first one. She felt determination wash over her, but her determination wasn’t quiet or steady or calm. It was ferocious.

She would happily beat every single one of those things to death with her crowbar.

Fingers appeared in the ripped seam and pushed outward. She smashed them. No harder than stepping on bugs.

The seam opened wider. An infected woman’s face appeared. Her hair must have been blond before it became matted with gore, her nose a little bit pointed, her ears slightly elfin. Her cheeks were covered with months of grime and filth. Her blue eyes were so full of primitive hatred, they could have been red.

Annie drove the sharp end of her crowbar straight that face as if she were driving a stake into the ground. She broke through the skull and killed the diseased woman instantly, and it felt exhilarating.

What was this? She was in the fight of her life, but she still had enough flickering self-awareness that she was appalled by her reaction. She had just killed a woman—granted, a disease-ridden hyper-violent juggernaut woman—and she felt exhilarated?

She destroyed another human being’s face with a crowbar, and she felt exhilarated?

She tried to imagine how much a steel bar smashing her lips, teeth, and nose would hurt. She couldn’t. It was beyond comprehension.

But did she just kill a human? Really? She knew what those things were thinking. Everything that once made them human had been stripped away, leaving only muscle and bone and distorted primitive brain function. They hated her and thought she was food.

More faces and arms appeared. Annie smashed every single one of them, and she felt delirious.

Only then did she notice the stench. They reeked of body odor, rotten meat, and shit. She swung again and caved in another one’s skull.

Her killing bar glistened with blood, black fluid, and pieces of bone.

Killing Lane was hard, but this was easy. It was easy and it was satisfying.

She hated the infected. Hated them with a passion she hadn’t felt since … hungry hungry predator … since she was one of them.

Hughes pushed the dead things back through the hole with all his strength while Frank dragged up a spare sheet of plywood from the back of the store. This one was uncut, bigger than those they had already used. It would easily overlap with the adjacent boards so they could hammer it in.

“Nails!” Hughes shouted. “And a hammer!”

Frank retrieved a box of nails and a hammer. Hughes used his massive bulk to hold the new sheet of plywood in place while Parker drove in the nails.

Twelve or so feet to his left, Annie swung her crowbar like a maniac as a second wave of those things tried to push their way in. There were nothing but dead ones at the other, smaller opening, but he knew if the live ones pushed hard enough they could knock that entire sheet of split wood out of the window, and there’d be no way Annie could stop them.

“More wood!” Hughes yelled at Frank. “We have to patch up the other one!”

The new sheet was in place and he felt no resistance now, so Hughes could help Annie. But how much more wood did they have in the back? One sheet? Two? And did they have enough nails?

Hughes picked up his rifle and joined Annie. Mutilated heads and arms protruded through the seam.

“Jesus, girl,” Hughes said.

He stuck the barrel of his rifle through the slit between an arm and a bashed-in head and pulled the trigger repeatedly.

Screams from outside. More of those things were going down. Soon there’d be nothing but dead ones outside if they had enough ammunition, but they didn’t. The best he could do was thin their numbers for now.

Another sheet of plywood on the north side of the store split down the middle.

“Shit,” Frank said.

They weren’t going to make it.

“Where’s Carol?” Kyle said.

“Hiding in the cooler and useless,” Parker said as he ran, hammer in hand, to the north side of the store.

“She might have the right idea, guys,” Frank said.

“Get another sheet of wood over here!” Hughes said. He and Annie wouldn’t be able to hold the gap very much longer.

“How much ammo do we have left?” Kyle said.

Hughes paused and took stock.

“We’ve gone through most of it,” he said. “We’re running out and we haven’t even killed half of them.”

He exchanged glances with Annie. The look on her face. Jesus. She was ready to eat those things alive if she had to. That girl was a killer. But there were just too damned many of them.

Frank returned from the back with another sheet of plywood.

“Put it down,” Hughes said.

“Put it down?” Frank said.

“Put it down,” Hughes said. “And go get the gas cans.”

They had three large cans left over from torching the car lot down the street. Hughes had saved them for the Chevy’s tank. He never expected to use them for more arson. He certainly didn’t expect to use them to burn down the store, but what else could they do? Their fortress was falling.

He climbed onto the magazine rack and emptied one of the cans over the lip of the plywood barriers. Annie took another, unscrewed the cap,