CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In case you haven't noticed, our popular culture is quite inundated with zombies.

-Olivia Moore, iZombie

Twenty survivors, the first group, had had the simplest job. Relatively. They had to leave the cathedral, open the gates, and board one of the coaches in the bus depot across the street. Then they were to wait for the others, quietly.

Assuming that they would be safe, Liza had decided not to think about them just yet. Not until she and her friends were in the clear. She and Denslow and two of the stronger, more capable-looking people -- their names were Victor and Robbie … or something enough like that that they would turn if she yelled it -- ran between the pews, out of the open doors, and hopped into the white van.

Quickly as she could, Liza put it in gear and the tyres squealed as she muscled her way back into the centre of the church. Through the windscreen, she stared at Jesus’s sad, bloodied face, and she let out a breath.

Why would anyone want to die for somebody else? For something you weren’t a part of? Jesus would probably have been dead weight in the event of a zombie apocalypse.

“Now. Quick,” she said, adjusting the rear view mirror to see that the second group had done their job -- they made enough noise so that every zombie in the vicinity was drawn towards the cathedral itself, which was great for the first group and not so great for Liza herself. But she had known that going in.

The bells began to sound. From above them, from all around them; the sound echoed and rang and clanged in her chest as she looked at the surging, creeping death in the mirror behind them.

The four of them leapt out of the van and took a second in unison to turn and stare at the incoming horde. Through the courtyard gates they poured, eyes sunken and pale, hands scrabbling through the air, jaws slack, and soon the courtyard was heavy and thick with monsters.

Hopefully that really did mean that the survivors had made it safely to the buses, with all the zombies drawn the other way. The rest would be on her.

“The tie,” she said.

Victor removed the loose tie from around his neck, once a pale blue and now stained with red so that it was spattered with a blotchy maroon. She jammed her thumb into the gas lid and flipped it open, dangling the tie into the full tank as deep as it could go before pulling it out, flipping it over, and dangling the other end in too.

“The lighter,” she addressed Robbie, clicking her fingers in his direction. He fumbled in one pocket, and then the other, face pale and mouth open. “Hurry.” She clicked her fingers again as if he were a disobedient dog.

“Fuck,” he whimpered, backing up and looking at the approaching tidal wave of pale corpses. “F-- here. Here!” He handed it over, hands slippery and fingers clumsy with fear, and it clattered to the ground.

“Liza,” Denslow said simply, evenly. Liza had chosen her because she wanted to keep an eye on her -- she figured that if she put Denslow with a group with no alliance with her, she might direct them to do something else, and Liza didn’t trust that whatever Denslow chose would be the right decision. She had sent Blazer with her friends to the bell tower, so that was out. Two people who seemed against her should be kept apart until she knew what to do with them.

But it turned out that the girl was a level-headed presence, and Liza reminded herself not to view everything that wasn’t in line with her own suggestions as a direct and personal confrontation. Everyone, after all, wanted to survive equally.

“Come on,” Denslow prompted.

The lighter between her fingers finally, she snapped at it twice, three times, watching Robbie trip over a hymn book and catch himself on Jesus’s foot as he stumbled away from the double doors. Fourth time was the charm, and she looked up.

“One moment.”

“Liza,” Denslow said. Her pitch remained the same but her volume was raised.

“Is this going to work?” Victor asked, smoothing his palms over his thighs and darting his gaze all around.

Robbie whimpered and gripped behind him at the red curtain. “Sorry, I … I can’t do this … be here,” he said, his eyes wet and his lips quivering. “I’ll meet you at the bus.”

He backed into the room, the velvet redness billowing around him and then consuming him, and with a shriek he was held tight around the middle. The cold, rotted arms concealed by the partition wrapped around him, grasped at him, a display that in another life could have looked like something artsy; erotic. Pale hands gripped at him, smoothed over his flesh, teeth finally found their way around the velvet and before Liza could pull the gun to fire, Robbie was down, disappeared under the fabric, nothing but disembodied screams. The curtains stayed the same colour. The zombies in the passageway paused and shared their spoils.

While Victor choked, moved around, twitched, wheezed, Liza lit the tie. Denslow lifted her gun and shakily aimed at the oncoming mass as they breached the church.

“We’re trapped,” Victor was crying, coughing, retching. Liza didn’t know if the boys had known each other before this hour, but Victor wasn’t taking it well whatever the case. “We’re trapped.”

“We have guns and they don’t,” Liza told him. The tie was burning bright as she ran for the red curtain, pulled down to obscure Robbie’s mangled remains. She didn’t wait to let the others figure out their weapons; she lifted her arm and destroyed the monsters’ heads with twin echoing booms.

“Run,” she roared over her shoulder. Victor was frozen in place until Denslow hurled a collections basket with all her might and caught him in the shoulder. He jerked to life and ran after them, overshooting his leap over the red velvet mess to such an extent that she stumbled and had to push off the floor with his palm in order to turn the corner and keep running after Liza.

“Alive?” she yelled back at them, but she could hear their pounding feet; his gasping, rattling breaths.

“Ye--” he answered, but Denslow cut over him.

“In front,” she cried, lifting her own Glock and pointing it over Liza’s shoulder. Three quick bullets and the skull was sliced open. The zombie closest to them was felled. Liza couldn’t fire when running, so she stopped, and closed one eye. In the hallway in front of them were a small clutch of them, trying their hardest to squeeze at the same time down the hallway towards all the exciting noise and delicious flesh.

She took five down with five bullets while Denslow picked off the sixth with three.

“Damn,” the other girl muttered, lowering her gun. “I guess I’m sorry I doubted your skills.”

Liza winked over her shoulder to see Denslow purse her lips in response.

“We’re going to be OK,” Liza said, responding to what she assumed the others were thinking about. “We’re going to make it.”

“Robbie didn’t,” Victor croaked. He hadn’t so much as raised his gun.

The first of the church horde rounded the corner to occupy the hallway behind them. Liza gestured at it with her gun. “Keep moving,” she reminded them, and turned and jogged ahead. Behind her she heard the sound of Victor crying out as his shoes became entangled in the spaghetti of wet limbs beneath them, and came down hard and with a disgusting sound.

“Help me,” he cried, and Denslow was quick. She aimed and fired, causing the closest zombie, who was reaching as desperately as a plant for the sun for Victor’s struggling leg, to lose its head in a shower of dark slime.

“Nice!” she praised herself, wheeling around to look Liza in the eye. There was a flash of adrenaline-fuelled pride that made her look even more alive than before. “Hole in one.”

Liza yanked Victor’s armpits from the body pile and he scrambled to his feet just as the second closest zombie came within flailing range. Denslow sighted, but Liza took her elbow too to silently remind her to keep running.

“There’s only so much time before--”

The force of the explosion was not quite as intense as Liza had expected -- which was a good thing, as they were nowhere near as far away from the source as she had assumed they’d get. She heard the crackling of pews, the gargling of corpses, and had to think that they had achieved what they had intended to achieve. The smell of smoke, and the smell it carried with it through the corridor -- burnt flesh -- threatened to close her airways, but she carried on. The other group had lured the zombies out of the passageway for their escape as best they could, but the bell tower had lured them back in through this back way just as effectively as it lured them in through the front doors.

Liza lifted her gun for the second cluster and this time took out four with four bullets while Denslow took out two with three bullets, and Victor shot numbly to graze jaws and shoulders from safely behind them.

“We...” he said weakly, “the … the fire is going to catch us. If the zombies don’t.”

“Jesus, are you always this fuckin’ bleak?” Denslow asked, the fire of war burning bright inside her; an inspiring force beside Liza that had come from a completely unexpected source.

“You’re learning fast,” she told the girl as they hopped over the latest pile, turning around to -- perhaps a touch patronisingly -- guide Victor over as well.

“I love shooting games,” Denslow said with a swift shrug as they rounded the corner ot the archives. “The only thing I don’t know about shooting is how to do it.”

It was a weird thing to say, but Liza kind of knew what she meant. If the theory was there, the muscles would adapt faster than someone like Victor who had probably never even thought about guns before for more than a quick second.

“You’ve seen a lot of death already, I take it,” Liza said to the girl, her voice low as they came to exit. Forty, fifty bodies blocked the open glass doors to freedom, and there had to be countless more entering from the streets.

“You could say that,” Denslow asid low, holding up her gun and squinting at the oncoming horde. Behind them was another, hundreds deep probably but coming at them only three or so at a time from the hallway.

“We’re fucked,” Victor managed to get out, with what seemed like great effort.

Liza looked around, heart pounding in her ears from gunfire and the strangely addictive chemicals of intense fear. To the left, the archives, and zombies. In front, doors, zombies. Behind, the hallways, zombies. Above her was an ornate and huge circular chandelier, three-tiered and glittering. “Press yourselves against me.” They looked at her. “Get in here.” She pulled Denslow tight to her side and then Victor, too, to her hip.

She shot upwards. Just as the zombies got too close and Denslow let out a whine of resignation, the chandelier disengaged from the ceiling and fell with a deafening crash on top of them.

When they uncovered their faces from the threat of glass damage, the zombies were still upon them. Pressing with their torsos and shins against the copper circles of the chandelier that now surrounded them, gnashing their jaws, groping through the gaps.

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“That…” Denslow managed to breathe out, “...won’t hold them forever. And the fire.” The stench of thick hot smoke, burning, and the shrieking gargles of the undead got stronger by the second from behind them.

Liza swallowed hard, the dry air burning at her throat. “Lift,” she said, bending and grabbing at the lower coil, immediately feeling the sharp pain digging into her fingers from its weight. After some hesitation, and the swiping of fingers from the zombies just feet away from them, the other two bent and lifted, and they took a step towards the exit. The picturesque outdoors, with its swaying trees and big bright moon.

Just beyond the shattered glass doors and, of course, the horde of zombies.

“Step at the same time,” Liza said as they struggled against each other and almost tumbled to the floor, straight into the jaws of a hundred waiting creatures. “Step, step, step, step.” They got into a rhythm, pushing through the crowds, picking their way across the hardwood, and Liza could feel the hot trickle of blood circling her knuckles from the irresponsibly sharp copper she squeezed. “Step, step, step,” she continued, and sooner than they could have thought, they had gently teased their way through the urgent crowd before them, slicing at the rotting skin and shredding the clothes of those closest with the outer layer of shattered glass.

“My fingers,” Denslow hissed. “I can’t … I have to drop.”

“Seconds away. Count to ten. Just get to ten,” Liza told her through gritted teeth. Her own eyes were welling with tears from an identical pain.

“We’re through,” Victor said thickly, his red nose dripping. “We’re through.”

“...four … five…” Denslow whispered, pausing to let out a pained cry.

“Just a few seconds,” Liza encouraged them both, feeling the fire behind them burn the back of her neck; the sweat gathering between her shoulder blades. The building was mostly wood, after all. There was little else to it. Frankly, it was a fire hazard.

“Ten,” Denslow said, and then grunted and her third of the chandelier clattered to the ground just four paces outside the cathedral. Hot air blew through the hallways and the bell stopped tolling, filling the air with a heavy silence. With dread.

Victor dropped his section too, and then so did Liza. They were free and clear of the burning building but they were still surrounded by more and more monsters every second. Reaching, clawing, grabbing. Victor’s trouser leg was caught in the clenching fists and then yanked, causing him to fall hard on the grass and almost pushing the two girls hard enough against the coils that the chandelier upturned. But it didn’t.

The zombie who had him as he kicked and screamed tried its hardest to take a bite out of his shoe, which made a horrible noise and prompted more shrieking from him, but didn’t transfer any infection, and didn’t satisfy the creature. He kicked it in the jaw and scrambled away, leaning against the coil and panting, sweating, shaking.

“V--” Liza began, as a head jammed itself past the shattered glass, losing an eye in the process and not caring, and bit into his shoulder like one might chomp on an apple. It was pure bad luck that it had dropped so that its head had been down at that level … the other zombies were not smart enough to crouch or bend and slip through the gaps, but just flailed and chomped fruitlessly.

Liza took out the zombie with her knife, but Victor was whimpering, twitching, pressing his hand against a sizeable missing chunk that had quickly stained most of the right side of his shirt.

“You … I think you need to…” Denslow began, but couldn’t finish the sentence.

“What if it doesn’t work like that?” Liza asked. “I don’t know if he’ll turn now, just from that. We could get him help, or something.”

Victor quivered, opened and shut his mouth and shook his head. “Don’t kill me,” he said, his leg spasming in front of him. “I’ll be fine, don’t kill me. Please, don’t shoot me.”

“Shit, I don’t know what to do.” Denslow held out her own gun, her chest heaving with breaths and blood tracing its way down her wrists, just like the statue back inside. She could see plumes of smoke now from the top of the building.

Had her friends escaped?

“We can’t just…” Liza began, just as Victor’s head lolled to the side and he lost consciousness. “Wait,” she said, holding up her hand as Denslow squinted down her arm. “He’s just fainted. He’s still breathing.”

“We don’t know if he needs to die, or if he--” she started, her voice mostly drowned out by the rasping desperation all around them, combined with the crackling and popping of the building.

Victor opened his eyes, glassy now, and lifted his unbloodied arm and wafted it at them, his lips parting.

“He’s turning,” Denslow insisted, her voice shaking. “I’m going to do it.”

Liza didn’t stop her. Denslow took a second to aim, and then Victor began to push himself to his feet. She raised the gun with his movements, and then when he reached his apex and let out a steady rattle, she squeezed her trigger with a grimace and it sliced clean through his skull. He fell back, tipping the chandelier.

“Push back!” Liza yelled, leaning with all her strength to counteract his bulk. The chandelier landed again, slicing a hand here and a collection of rotting digits there. Learning from poor Victor’s bad luck, they kept in the middle as best they could.

She inspected the door and repaired it to pause the pouring of zombies, noticing that those furthest away seemed to be flickering with flames, and having them come outside to catch the rest on fire would bake Denslow and her like a squirrel caught in a barbecue.

550 points to repair the door, but she had gained much more than that fighting her way out.

To her surprise, when the glass reappeared as if it had never not been there, every zombie who had been in the doorway was … sliced cleanly in half. Their atoms could not exist in the same place, so they had been quietly pushed aside by the system. The halved corpses slid to the ground.

???COMBO  x 25

Wow … so even Malcolm had not known that would happen? It hadn’t even given her any points for it. Liza dismissed the prompt and looked around for something else that would help her. The zombies were going to stop coming from the burning building, for now, but there were still a hundred strong all around them, pushing from every direction.

“How long can we stay here?” Denslow yelled over the rattling snarls all around them, drowning out even the noise of the crackling cathedral. The heat was becoming unbearable. Their fingers were damaged almost beyond repair and they had no bandages to hand.

And the copper coil was starting to bend under the pressure all around them.

“Cheap, crappy chandelier!” Liza cried. “What are they spending all that donation money on?”

“Fuck, Liza, what do we do?” Denslow screamed. “What the fuck do we do?” She looked over at her, black hair wild and tangled across her face. “We’re stuck here, in a fucking chandelier.”

“Words you never thought you’d say, right?”

Denslow just let out a frustrated scream.

“I’m thinking!” Liza yelled in response. “Talking a lot helps me think, let me think!”

She looked around. Glass double doors leading to the archives. Burning cathedral. Chandelier. Grass. Zombies.

The copper coil bent in further and Denslow shrieked again. “Plan! Plan! What’s your plan?!”

Liza paused. “Help!” she yelled. “Help us! Help!” Her voice was lost in the raging battle of noise. She looked up. Three tiers. They could climb to the top and balance on the highest copper coil for just a few moments. But then what? The copper bent inward another half inch.

She pulled out her rifle in desperation. She could upgrade it however she knew how to, but … what did that include? Making it generally stronger required no knowledge. Increasing the capacity could be done immediately. But what else? Her guns were loaded and she had one more clip handy.

“Nothing to do but shoot,” she said, lifting her rifle with a grim smile. Denslow lifted her handgun with a look of total resignation. Back to back, they shot, taking down zombies left and right.

She could upgrade the chandelier but with what material? There was nothing around them. She could upgrade the … zombies. Maybe.

She kept shooting, slicing through soft skulls, punching through eye sockets, until her gun began to click. 10 rifle bullets.

Headshot COM...

She dismissed it.

A lighter in her pocket. Incendiary bullets? But no, there was only lighter fluid and a spark. That wasn’t actually enough to make fiery ammo. Hollowpoint bullets? If she was killing them all in one shot anyway, what was the point?

“We have to climb,” she said, looking upwards. A high branch stretched over them. Too far to reach, really, but what the hell else could they do?

“Liza!”

Denslow was almost sitting, she had sunk so low in her distress, but the sound made her look up. “Was…”

Liza strained her neck. “Here!” she screamed, and then pulled in a breath of smoke and started to cough.

“Who is it?” Denslow hissed.

“Here! We’re here! Help!”

Nothing. The coil bent, this time by more than an inch, and the girls stifled their screams. There was a beat, where Denslow’s fingernails clutched at Liza’s arm, and then with a screech a small car cannonballed through the masses and pulled up right beside their makeshift cage.

“Climb, now, climb and jump,” Liza ordered, and scrambled up the inside of the tiered chandelier, balancing on the top and feeling the copper sink underneath her. She hopped onto the back of the car, dancing to avoid the grasping hands. Dozens of them.

Denslow hopped to the top of the chandelier and then screamed as it dipped suddenly, taking her down a foot, but Liza gripped onto her arms hard and yanked her the final foot onto the back of the car.

“We can’t balance up here,” Denslow cried.

“Wait, wait.” Liza kicked a hand away and reached down to grab at the copper coil, which had split in half. She pulled it, watching the chandelier shudder with the weight of so many bodies pressing desperately against it. “The car antenna. Thicken it up,” she said out loud.

The system complied, and she managed to upgrade the antenna into a copper pole before their eyes.

“What … just--” Denslow began.

“Hang on,” Liza said, stomping on a reaching hand. Staring out at the sea of open mouths. “Tight!” She kicked at the body of the car underneath her. “Go!” Her stomach lurched as they rammed over a dozen bodies and shot away from the plume of thick black smoke, barely clinging to the now thick, sturdy car antenna with raw and bleeding hands.

The car didn’t slow down until they had left the city centre and came to the country roads leading up the hill that her campus was on. Tucker and Yana stepped out, flushed and grinning, and helped them down.

Liza fell into a grateful four-way hug and didn’t let go until she was aware of a rustling in the trees behind her. “Where now?” she asked them, pulling away.

“They got onto the bus,” Yana told her.

“Great, so let’s go back and rendezvous.”

“We … we couldn’t see much of anything. We don’t know if they got away. From the bell tower, it looked dicy. But we couldn’t see what happened.” Yana and Tucker exchanged a pained look. “If they won or lost. It was just a blur. It’s probably best to just get to safety.”

“Having a huge group of useless people was probably a liability anyway,” Tucker added, and then dropped eye contact and clenched his jaw.

“Where is Blazer?” Liza asked, her palms itching. If he was dead, she would be irritated she hadn’t been able to do it herself. If he had simply disappeared in the commotion, she would be furious. But he wasn’t the priority right now, she had to remind herself. “And Celia, and James,” she added.

“They’re meeting us at the top of the hill. We just thought you might want to get inside the car,” Tucker said with a smirk.

Squeezing in to the back, Denslow raised her eyebrow as Tucker extended a hand to shake. “No, thank you,” she said low. “Thanks for saving us, but … my hands.” She brought them up to show him and he made a face, wordlessly handing them his roll of bandages.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Denslow.”

“Tucker,” Tucker replied. “And this is Yana.” Yana gave a wave from the passenger seat without turning around. “You look familiar. Do you go to Fairacres? Do you do Physics?”

Denslow snorted a laugh, and wrapped up her hands. “I could never do Physics.”

“You don’t go to Fairacres?” he asked.

“Leave the girl alone,” Yana mumbled.

“No, I don’t,” Denslow said, staring out of the window while Liza took her turn bandaging up her hands. She considered handing her one of the headsets, but she figured later would be better to have that discussion. Plus, bleeding palms weren’t life-threatening.

“We need to stock up and leave this place,” Liza leaned forward and said. “There’s nothing here. We need to use the system and upgrade ourselves to the teeth. Celia will know how to upgrade weapons. Has the internet gone down?”

Yana leaned forward and rested her face in her hands.

“What’s wrong?” Liza asked. “Are you hurt?” She started to panic and looked to Tucker, who continued to drive silently. “Is she hurt? What’s wrong?”

“She lost her phone and her iPad,” Tucker said solemnly. Yana nodded into her hands and then sniffed.

Liza leaned back in her chair while Denslow shook her head slowly, still staring out at the fields.

“We’ve all lost so much,” Denslow whispered, mock-heartbroken. Liza cracked a smile at her joke, but then it fell.

All those survivors, were they gone? She had arrived and told them to leave, to get somewhere better. If they were dead, would it be completely her fault?

She allowed herself to feel bad for a little while, until she remembered the breach James had stumbled in through. Those survivors had been one loud noise away from carnage, just sitting in that vestry. Liza had at least tried to get them to London.

Some of them had looked so capable. Big, sturdy men. But she reminded herself that it didn’t matter. They were all one wrong turn, one poorly-placed foot, one extended blink away from death.

She had been right, though. There hadn’t been time yet to sit down and upgrade her weapons and armour but wherever they were going to meet Celia, that was what they were going to do next.

As they neared the hill that would tell her who of her friends and lived and who had not made it, if anyone, Liza was determined she was never going to come that close to death again. No matter what the cost.