Page 2

"Some help here, please!" Alana yelled, hoping at least one or two of her comrades-in-arms would hear her over the gunfire and the dwindling sounds of screams coming from the first floor. There was another stairwell several yards down the hallway behind her, and she heard the sound of stiff hands plying the bar on the stairwell side, as dead brains attempted to access once more the knowledge of how to open it. It would only be a matter of time before they realized that all they had to do was push on the bar. She jerked the trigger and dropped the lead girl, then the next undead form, an older man, freshly dead and in tattered, blood-soaked priest's, garb sporting a gaping chest wound.

The next was a child; she'd been perhaps twelve or thirteen, from the look. She might even have gone to this school. Her once-beautiful face was mutilated now, gnawed on; her cloudy, marble-like, dead eyes stared deeply into Alana's soul.

She found it difficult to pull the trigger on this one....until the child's mouth opened, and she stumbled toward her, arms outstretched and fingers grasping horrifically, like some corny B-movie monster.

Alana jumped back just as the girl touched her, and in reflex pulled the trigger after all; the round tore into the child's lower face, tearing half of her jaw away from the rest of her skull. She was staggered, but quickly righted herself and still came toward Alana, the remains of her tongue lolling, but, to Hashbarger's horror, still working, out of the splintered jawbone and cheek. She raised her rifle again and ended the child's agony.

"I'd like some help, please!" she yelled again, louder, now. She heard the door open down the hall behind her. She turned briefly to look in that direction, and her heart thumped sharply when she saw a rotted, ragged corpse, flesh dark with decay and obviously several months old, its hair and burial clothing caked with mud and filth, shamble loosely into the hallway.

As if to punctuate her startled reaction, bright lightning flashed garishly, briefly rendering everything into a negative image. A murderous clap of thunder roared from directly above, shaking the building. She stood, transfixed, staring in unabashed horror at this monster, quite literally from beyond the grave, advancing slowly on her. Vomit rose, in a spasm, to her mouth and she quickly squashed the reaction, swallowing the bitter wad.

The undead corpse opened its mouth silently, bits of maggoty filth tumbling to the floor, and stretched its arms out to her. The darkened flesh of its fingers and hands was torn and stripped away, the tiny bones of its fingers exposed and worn from the task of digging its way back to the surface.

Behind the rotted corpse were....how many? She couldn't tell. All she could hear, intermittently with the gunfire, were the sounds of untold pairs of shuffling feet on the cement stairs. They were undoubtedly coming up the other stairwells, too, she considered with a sudden shock of dread welling deep in her gut. "Damn......" she muttered, shaking herself from her momentary lapse.

She slammed her back to the nearest the wall and drew her .9mm, as well as the .45 automatic she'd liberated from the body of a looter they'd run into in Central Ohio. He'd had the .45 and eight fully loaded clips on him, along with a well-kept AK-47. Her Sergeant, Jim Tune, had taken that one.

Tune had led a patrol out a few hours before. She knew he had to be dead by now. A shame…he was a good man, and had shown himself to be a resourceful soldier.

"SOME MOTHERFUCKING HELP HERE, GODAMMIT!!!!!!!" she screamed this time, spreading her arms and proceeding to fire simultaneously in both directions. The older, rotted corpse took the first shot in the stomach and so did not even slow, even though the shot had split its rotted skin and the putrid contents of its gut were spilling out. The hallway filled with the bitter smell of decay. She gagged again and drew a bead directly on its head for the second shot, and let'er rip.

The near-mummified flesh covering its skull split like parchment, and the long-dead bone caved inward with an audible crack, creating more of a crater than a bullet hole. But, it dropped neatly to the carpeted floor nonetheless. She fired another several shots in the other direction, hitting two of the zombies and taking them out, but not without wasting several shots. The stairwell behind them was filling now, however, as the smorgasbord downstairs was undoubtedly beginning to peter out by this time, and they came here, attracted by the sound of the gunfire.

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