Eight bodies lay littered about on the ground. Tom and a woman who’d been part of the mob were injured but alive. Outside, the infected grew louder.

“Sean, that includes you.” The man with the rifle advanced.

The captain didn’t seem to hear at first. He stayed huddled over the dead woman in silence. When he looked up his face was stark with loss, embedded with lines. He appeared to have aged a decade in a moment. His hands were covered in blood.

“Will you bury her?” he asked.

“Yes. She’ll be given a proper burial.”

Sean carefully laid Lila on the ground. He picked up the backpack she’d brought and, slinging it over his shoulder, rose to his feet and looked around him. “Cooper and Matt, too?”

“Yes,” the man with the rifle said. “We’ll see to them too if you go peacefully. Now.”

Sean nodded and turned to Nick. “I’ll go first.”

“Right,” said Nick. He stood, pulling Ros up with him and holding on tight. She didn’t complain.

“We’re going to be fine,” he said, willing it to be true.

Anything less was unacceptable.

Terror toyed with him, f**ked him up just a little. He needed to focus. Roslyn couldn’t afford for him to be anything but on top of his game. They were going out there.

Oh God, please let them be fine. He wasn’t even convinced he believed in God, but just in case.

The rest of their group gathered around. There were nine of them. Funny, the night he’d first entered Blackstone it had been as part of a group the same size. On the other side of the wall the moaning and growling went on. Impossible to tell how many zombies had gathered. Definitely more than a few. They were walking out into a killing field.

“Stay close together. Noise won’t matter now. Shoot anything that moves.” Without a backward glance Sean ducked his head and walked through.

The man was covered in Lila’s blood.

“They’ll tear him apart,” said someone behind him.

“Yeah.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Roslyn fought the haze filling her mind from the pain meds, the lethargy slowing her limbs. She could do this. She would do this. There was no other choice.

Nick stayed close, keeping a hand on her back as she crawled through the hole and emerged into the back of the refrigerated van. Sean took one look at them, nodded and threw open one of the back doors.

A sea of infected waited beyond with mouths wide open and arms outstretched. The putrid stench of them was overpowering. It filled her nose. Bile rose in her throat. The rotting remnants of clothes hung from emaciated limbs. No trace of humanity lingered. Every instinct in her screamed to turn and run.

More people came through the hole behind her and the van filled up. But what was claustrophobia when confronted with what lay ahead?

Sean fired his weapon into the crowd. Her ears howled in protest at the ricochet. Infected fell and the man pressed forward, stepping down from the back of the vehicle and onto the ground. There were so many of them out there, a veritable sea of monsters.

Her legs shook, partly due to fear but also care of the drugs rocking and rolling through her system. She was all over the place. This wasn’t going to work. She needed both hands to have a hope of aiming the gun. Quick as she could she unbuttoned the jacket, still holding onto her gun, and freed her arm from the sling. Her movements were slow, sloppy. She stuffed her left hand into the coat arm and pushed up the sleeve. Much better. The spare pistol still sat in a coat pocket along with her medicines. Truth was, they were probably going to die. But they’d go down fighting.

“Stay close to me,” said Nick, and followed Sean out into the night.

Growling and gunfire filled the air. One foot after the other, she stayed close but not too close. Nick needed to be able to move. Carefully she pointed her weapon out into the horde. She took aim at the nearest, a woman in a tattered dress, and fired. The semi-automatic only had a mild kick, but it set her wound to stinging.

It hadn’t seemed quite so dark inside Blackstone but out here the world was murky gray. She could feel, more than hear, the people behind her. More gunfire and more moaning ahead. The rising stink of blood and guts and gore as they pressed forward. Beneath her feet was gravel. At least she was wearing shoes.

A man in overalls, his face caked in blood. She aimed and fired. Pain swamped her shoulder at the jolt to her body. A boy who couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve. It looked like its face had been skinned. Thank God it was too dark to see properly. Her bullet hit it in the chest. For a moment he faltered, but then started reaching for her once again.

Shit. Impossible, but there it was. Just like the zombie in the downed plane. They weren’t dying.

“Head shots! You have to shoot them in the head,” yelled Sean.

“Fuck me,” swore someone behind her.

“They’re not going down,” said another, a woman.

“Get ’em in the head, take out the brains.”

The virus must be mutating, evolving to survive. Infected were running out of food so the plague made them hardier, harder to kill.

The boy stumbled toward her. Her first bullet flew past it but the second punched into the side of its forehead and it fell. Head shots worked. Blood soaked into the bandage on her shoulder. Felt like she’d ripped some stitches. She gritted her teeth as pain coursed through her. Without the meds she’d have been rolling on the ground in tears.

“Watch out for the train tracks,” Nick said.