Deadline Read Free

opened the glove compartment.
    Using live grenades when you have people on the ground is antisocial at best and grounds for a murder charge at worst. Still, if you get the right kind—the ones that are calibrated to be explosive without being
too
explosive, since you want to minimize your aerosolized zombie bits—they can be damn handy. The wind still has to be with you, but as long as your people are more than eight feet up, you should be fine. I grabbed all four of the available grenades, pulling their pins one at a time as I sent them sailing into the thick of the zombie mob.
    There were several loud, wet bangs as the projectilesfound their targets, fragmented into multiple slammer pieces, and exploded. The zombies that caught shrapnel in the head or spinal column went down. Others fell as their legs were blown out from under them. Those last didn’t stay down; they started dragging themselves forward, the entire mob now moaning in earnest.
    Say something witty now, moron,
prompted George.
    I reddened. I never used to need coaching from my sister on what it took to do my job. I hit the general channel key on my watch, asking, “You guys mind if I join your party?”
    Becks responded immediately, relief more evident in her voice than it had been in her face. Maybe she just wasn’t as good at hiding it there. “What took you so long?”
    “Oh, traffic. You know how it goes.” The entire mob was moving toward me now, apparently deciding that meat on the hoof was more interesting than meat that wouldn’t come out of its tree. I snapped the electric baton into its extended position, redrawing George’s .40, and offered the oncoming infected a merry smile. “Hi. You want to party?”
    Shaun…
said George.
    “Yeah, yeah, I know,” I muttered, adding, louder, “You guys get down from there and try to circle to the Jeep. Hit the horn once you’re in. There’s more ammo under the passenger seat.”
    “And you’re going to do what, exactly?” asked Becks. She sounded sensibly wary. At least one of us was being sensible for a change.
    “I’m going to earn my ratings,” I said. Then the zombies were on top of me, and there was no more time for discussion. Quietly, I was glad.
    There’s an art to fighting the infected. It was almost a good thing that this mob had started off so large; we were cutting down the numbeapidly, since we had the ability to think tactically, but the survivors were still behaving like members of a pack. They wanted to eat, not infect. “They wanted to kill me” may not sound like much of an advantage, but trust me on this one. A zombie that’s out to infect will try to smear you with fluids. That gives it a lot more weapons, since they can bleed and spit—even puke, if they’ve eaten recently enough. A zombie that wants to eat you is just going to come at you with its mouth, and that means it has only one viable avenue of attack. That evens the odds, just a little.
    Just a little can be more than enough.
    I used my baton to sweep a constant perimeter around myself, shocking any zombie that came into range and trusting the Kevlar in my jacket to keep my arm from getting tagged before I could pull it back. The electricity slowed them down enough for me to keep firing. More important, it kept them from getting positions established behind me. I could track Becks and Alaric by the sound of gunshots, which came almost as regularly as my own. I was taking out two zombies for every three shots. Not the best odds in the world. Not the worst odds, either.
    The zombies pressed forward. I backed toward the Jeep, letting them think they were herding me while I kept thinning out their ranks. I realized I was grinning. I couldn’t help it. Maybe facing possible death isn’t supposed to make me happy, but years of training can’t be shrugged off overnight, and I was an Irwin for a long time before I retired.
    Aim, fire. Swing, zap. Aim, fire. It was almost like dancing, a series of soothing,