Chương 21: Chapter 20 - The Second Battle

I dodged through the patch of trees as fast as my legs could carry me. Conrad ran parallel to me a few trees away, timing his pace so we'd emerge from the grove together. There were no zombies yet, but I knew they'd be there. Conrad's nose had given us a head start. As I burst into the next clearing, my eyes raked the whole area. Off to my right was a zombie nest—a new one—closer to the mansion than the other nests had been. The cover stone wasn't shoved aside; it was tipped over.

It looked like a cellar door that had been swung open on one side. The cover was lying at an angle on the displaced dirt that had once been on top of it. Its bare rock face was turned up to the sky. Two zombies were squatting on top of it, knees by their ears, their fingers between their feet, grabbing the edge of the stone. More zombies were walking or climbing out of the hole behind them. All of them stopped. Their heads and eyes turned to follow me. Oh, geez. They looked even worse in the sunlight.

The two squatting on the cover stood up. My racing heart skipped a beat, causing a wave of pressure to squeeze my chest. I tore my eyes away from them to focus on where I was running. They were never that big, my brain insisted. They were never that big! They were all naked, and each one was at least six and a half feet tall. Some of them could've stood in front of Conrad and looked him in the eyes without tilting their head.

Their muscles were large, long, and they didn't fit on their frames the way they should have. They looked fake. They looked like they'd been stuffed under a discolored, too-small skin. If they're that big, that means they'll be slower, right? a naive and optimistic part of my brain proposed. One of the zombies on the cover lunged at me, clearing most of the fifteen feet of distance between us. Conrad ran into it, milliseconds after it landed, grabbed the zombie's skull, and dug his claws in.

He yanked it forward and around. I heard its neck crack. Conrad threw it to the ground.

"Keep running," he growled—as if that wasn't already Plan A through Z. The other zombies converged on us. They ran faster than any human could, and they were smart. Rather than mindlessly running after where I'd been a second before, they sprinted in front of me to block my path. I swung my metal pipe around as hard as I could. The end of it slammed into the temple of one of the zombies, dragging its head to the side as the pipe finished the arc. A splash of black blood followed the curve. Oh! This!

This was much better than punching them! Three other zombies leapt at me. I planted my foot and swung again, twisting my hips as if I was unloading a full-body punch. I was Babe Ruth with an agenda! The zombies that ate my swing let out grunts that were more air than noise. I tried to kick another that got close to me, but it grabbed my leg and yanked. I hit the ground on my chest and flipped onto my back so I could see what was coming.

The zombie holding me had a dent on the side of its forehead, and its right eye was hanging free from its socket. It glared at me with its remaining eye. In it, I read murder. There was no hatred, no passion—only a single driving will. I convulsed, as if every cell in my body shivered with disgust at once. It jerked my leg free from the zombie's grip. I kicked away, but my legs hit another zombie. Cool fingers tried to close around my neck, but missed their grip because I was moving.

I got my feet under me, clutched my pipe, and came up swinging. There was no form or style—I could've been a drunk, fighting off a bee with a broom handle—but my attack had an effect. Arms and hands were knocked away. Blood went flying. Heads were concussed. Scattered thuds and airy groans sounded around me. The zombies in front of me stepped back, giving me room to take my stance for a full swing. They were right to be scared! Point to the outfield! I was going for a home run!

My swing stopped short with a thud and a much louder grunt.

"Conrad!" I screamed. He was bent over beside me, cradling his left arm. He'd come running in to save me, and instead he got a metal pole across the back of his elbow and his ribs. He grabbed my hand before I could drop the pole.

"Good girl," he whispered.

"Keep swinging." He moved his shaky hand to my shoulder.

"Weapon lessons when this is over." Conrad's eyes went from me to the zombie charging us. He stepped forward, grabbed its shoulders with his right hand, skewering it with his claws. He turned his body, flinging it to the ground at my feet. His claws ripped free, creating a shower of dark drops. He stomped on the thing's face with his boot, breaking the jaw and scraping loose a flap of rotten flesh.

"There's only five left," Conrad said.

"If you see an opening, get to Igor. Tell him what's happening." Igor. The house. But there were only five left! And they were here! Then I remembered the outer circle of nests surrounding the mansion. There was no way only one nest had been raised this time. Not with our luck. Something touched my leg. I looked down. The zombie at my feet was trying to grab me. Its face was destroyed, its skull, concave, but it flailed at my leg, bouncing its forearm off my shin without ever managing a grip.

"Hey!" Conrad barked. My face jerked up. I stared at him.

"You understand?" I nodded. Conrad shifted his pipe to his good hand. The zombies hovered barely out of range.

"Are you ready?" Conrad asked. I returned my pipe to my shoulder and bounced my weight back and forth between my front and back leg. I had gigawatts of frenzied energy to burn, and, this time, I would not hit my packmate!

"Ready!" I yelled. Both sides charged. Thanks to his sheer size, Conrad claimed the brunt of them. If the zombies all ran at us, most of them would, by default, be heading more toward him. I only had to deal with one of them. I dodged to the right so it would have to recalculate. While it was trying to get its half-decayed brain to do that, I turned into my swing. It was standing upright, and my best swing was at shoulder height. The metal pipe struck its chest.

I didn't manage to knock it far, but it stumbled into Conrad's warpath and was swept into a take-down that included another zombie. That created the opening I was looking for. I shuffled my grip to the center of the pipe and ran. No looking back! There was nothing to worry about. Conrad was the strongest guy in the whole world. He'd survived after taking nine bullets to the chest! He had already decimated an army of zombies!

As I wiped the tears from my eyes so I could see where I was going, I almost tripped over the blue line of magic under my feet. It was only thirty feet away from the zombie nest. Part of my mind noted it. The rest of me dismissed it. I kept running. As I was coming up on the back of the mansion, I considered my options. The stone wall that covered the driveway in front of the old carriage house was too tall to jump, but with my speed, I could easily launch myself over the shorter stone wall to the side of it.

Before that, I wanted to make a stop. I slammed into the door of the hunter's hut. It banged against the wall. I grabbed the rusty ax, a rusty sledge hammer, and two more metal pipes. I was out the door four seconds later. I threw my arsenal over the short wall and jumped it. When I landed, my legs wobbled. They felt like vengeful jello. I had no time for jello, vengeful or otherwise. I scooped up the weapons and staggered toward the back of the mansion. The moment I was in the kitchen, my arms and legs failed.

The weapons clattered to the floor, and I dropped with them. Igor wasn't there. No one was. How dare he? That man was always in the kitchen! And I'd picked out a sledge hammer, just for him!

"Igor!" I screamed.

"Zombies!" I recognized the fast shuffling coming along the hall and briefly closed my eyes from relief and exhaustion—which was, admittedly, not brilliant. It wasn't like we were in the clear. Igor came through the doorway. He was holding his bat.

"We've seen them." He came over and lifted me to my feet with one arm. Yes. The sledge hammer would be perfect for him.

"Where's Conrad?" he said.

"We ran into a nest on the way back," I said.

"He'll come as soon as he's dealt with them." Igor gathered all the weapons under the arm that was holding the bat, hooked his other arm through mine, and marched me out of the kitchen toward the grand staircase.

"What can you tell me?" he said.

"They're faster. And bigger. They look fake. They're smarter too." Igor started grumbling under his breath. It sounded so much like Igor's everyday grumbling (only with more curse words mixed in) that a fierce, hysterical amusement rose inside me. If you listened to him, you'd wind up thinking that fighting off a horde of zombies was just another unsavory chore.

"I love you, Igor," I muttered.

"How bad did you hit your head?" he demanded. This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

"Can we trade? You get the sledge hammer, I get the bat? I like bats. My hands hurt from squeezing the pipe."

"Be my guest." He passed me the bat.

"I'll take the hammer and the ax. How many zombies are there?" I tried to think through the haze of exhaustion. How many had crawled out of that hole? Not many. Not more than seven or eight.

"Fewer. I think." We reached the grand staircase. Igor gave me a shove toward the stairs.

"The others are on the great landing," he said.

"Go up."

"I can fight!"

"Good! Then you know what I'll ask you to do!" I did know. Protect Iset. The only one protecting her at the moment was Mrs. Park, and she didn't have a weapon. I could improve on that.

"Then I want my lucky pipe too," I said.

"Do you know which one it is?" I grabbed it and drew it out from under his arm. It made a nice metallic hiss, like a rough sword being drawn from a scabbard.

"It's the one with the zombie blood on it." Igor gazed at me with the larger of his eyes.

"You always manage to surprise me, Emerra Cole." When I got to the top of the stairs, I immediately learned two things—exactly how much Igor wanted Iset protected, and that my assumption that Mrs. Park was unarmed had been wrong. She was holding a shotgun. It was pointed down the stairs. I ducked a full foot before I realized she wasn't aiming at me.

"Get behind me, Emerra," she ordered. When my heart resumed beating, I obeyed, scuttling around to the side of the stairs and easing past her, eying the gun as I did. It had to be a shotgun. I'd never seen one before, but I had a pretty good idea what a rifle looked like, and they didn't look like that.

"Where did you get that?" I asked.

"Darius's room," Mrs. Park said.

"Is that what he's hiding in there?"

"Mera!" Kappa cried. I turned. He was trying to squirm out of Iset's arms. She was standing back by the seating arrangement. I jogged over to stop his escape attempt. I was uncomfortable with the idea of him hopping around when someone was holding a gun.

"Hey, buddy!" I said.

"I'm here. All ready for the next invasion."

"Where's Conrad?" If he'd asked about some random human, I might have been insulted—you know, why wasn't I good enough for a zombie invasion? —but I could appreciate that an army of me still wouldn't be as useful as a single Conrad.

"He's coming," I said.

"He had a few things to deal with first." A loud crash came from downstairs.

"They're here," Iset whispered. There was a loud crack-crack as Mrs. Park yanked the shotgun's lever down and slammed it back up. I walked over to her and leaned my metal pipe on the stair post. It was easy to see why she'd chosen that spot to guard. She could cover the main stairs with her shotgun, see down the hall toward the backstairs, and see at least half of the entrance hall below by looking in the huge mirror that was hung halfway down the stairs. I could see Igor.

He was standing in the hall, facing the front doors. In one hand was the hammer. In the other was the ax. He didn't have Conrad's height or physique, but he had a menacing aura all his own. Three of the zombies, working together, managed to rip the front doors open. A crowd of them streamed in. It was hard to watch Igor fight them, but I didn't dare look away. After a few seconds, I stopped wincing at the gore. Some weird chunk of my brain, buried way in the back, took over.

It watched with a calm, detached air, analyzing everything. The rest of my brain stood back and watched it work in mute horror. Who was this stranger? It bothered me to think that the only times I might be rational were when I was under attack. My Emergency Rational Brain noted something: Igor wasn't merely good at fighting—he was terrifyingly good. He knew how to move, even with his misshapen body. He knew how to handle his weapons and how to use their weight and shape to inflict the most damage.

Some unknown sixth sense informed him where the next closest enemy was, and the man never stopped moving! But no matter how good Igor was, he was only one man against a platoon of souped-up zombies. When the zombies around him were too thick to see through, the stragglers walked by him without noticing. Two of them looked up as they approached the stairwell. Their eyes met mine in the mirror. They started running toward the stairs. Others followed.

"Here they come," Mrs. Park yelled. Igor tried to stop them. He landed a vertical ax-blow deep in a zombie's back and used the ax to yank it off the stairs. But protecting us meant that he'd turned his back on all the other zombies. They descended on him. The zombies coming for us swarmed up the stairs. Their speed made it hard to count them. Mrs. Park blew a hole through the chest of the first one that rounded the curved banister.

Nothing could've prepared me for the sound of that gun blast or seeing so much of a body disappear into a bloody tatter. Mrs. Park had finished jerking the lever down and back up before the zombie's body hit the stairs. The other zombies moved to the side or crouched. One jumped onto the railing, then leapt and grabbed the banister on the second floor. As it pulled itself up, I took the bat to its head like it was a T-ball. It fell to the floor below. Mrs.

Park let off another shot, but my eyes followed the zombie that I'd hit. As it dropped, I saw the first zombie that Mrs. Park had shot. It was dragging itself up the stairs using only its arms.

"The head!" I yelled.

"You have to aim for the head!" She raised the muzzle of the gun and fired again. My hearing was somehow dull and sharp at the same time, shutting down my response to the shotgun, but trying to take in everything else. I could hear whenever Mrs. Park fired, but I couldn't care. My eyes had switched into a different mode. I felt like I was seeing in panic; everything was a zoom of movement or a flood of details. I swung the bat over and over again. My shoulders felt as if they were on fire.

I couldn't stop the zombies. I knew that. My goal was to slow down the ones on my half of the stairs until Mrs. Park could shoot them. One was running up the stairs, crouched, keeping to the side of the wall. It was almost to the top. I was so focused on fending it back that I crossed into Mrs. Park's half of the stairs without realizing it. I swung, hitting the zombie's neck. Its head slammed into the wall. For less than a second, it froze in a dead-eyed daze, then its hand whipped out and grabbed the bat.

It ripped the bat from my adrenaline-fueled grip and threw it away. My hands screamed with pain. I had to stare at them to convince myself that my fingers hadn't been torn off.

"Get down," Mrs. Park shouted. My body dropped without waiting for my brain to approve the order. Mrs. Park blew its head off. The body arched back and sailed through the air before landing and sliding down several stairs. It was stopped by the body of a zombie with only a sliver of its head left. Both of them laid there, twitching. Some of the zombies below—the ones not fully occupied by trying to avoid having their heads smashed in by a sledge hammer—noticed the commotion.

They turned and started walking toward the stairs. My voice rose at the end, mimicking my rising terror: "Mrs. Park!"

"Cover me" was her choked response. Cover her? my outraged brain screamed. Is she insane?! I glanced back. Mrs. Park's face was pale all the way to her lips. Her hands shook as she reached deep into the pocket of her apron and pulled out a handful of shells. She started loading them, one by one, into the gun. A shell slipped out of her trembling hand. She cursed, kicked it away, and kept loading. I ran over to the stair post and grabbed my lucky pipe.

I hoped, with every fiber of my being, that it was luckier than I knew. The zombies that I had assaulted were already back on their feet. Another zombie—not one of mine—was standing up on shaky legs. It turned to me, revealing that half its head had been shot off. Now that it was upright, it was steady, and it glared at me with one hazy eye. My chest locked up. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't scream. I wanted to—I was screaming in my head like some berserk animal. The terror was so deep it left me raw inside.

How could it still move like that? How strong were they?! How could one small girl with a metal pipe stop them?!? My Emergency Rational Brain cut in to remind me that I didn't have to stop them. All I had to do was keep them busy until Mrs. Park finished reloading. Half-a-Head and another zombie came running up the stairs. When their heads were level with my chest, I took a strong stance and did a full swing, trying for at least three-hundred degrees of rotation, hoping to take them both out at once.

The end of my pipe buried itself in the remaining half of the first zombie's head with a splatter—no, the splatter! the splatter to end all splatters! —of dark blood and brain matter, but it stopped there. It didn't seem fair that Conrad could take out three or four zombies with one swipe, but I got stuck on the first one. I yanked the pipe free and hit its head again out of sheer petty outrage and kicked it down the stairs. The other charged me. My body moved aside on its own.

The zombie staggered when there was nothing to grab. They have the bull tendency, my rational brain noted. These zombies were smart enough to hesitate when there was obvious danger, but once they were charging, they didn't dodge. While we were training, Conrad had spent months pointing out my own bull tendency and trying to get me to break the habit. Every time I charged him without thinking, he would step aside and, next thing I knew, I would be flat on the mat, hurting.

"Most people aren't trained to fight," he'd said.

"All they know is aggression. If you learn to dodge, you'll have a clear chance to hit them back. Learn to dodge." God bless that wolf-boy, I thought as I brought the metal pipe swinging down on the back of the zombie's skull. There was a dull crack, and the zombie hit the ground on its knees. It swayed, then stopped. Without moving, it let out a loud, breathy hiss that, in any other throat, might have been a scream. It wasn't a scream of pain. The thing was angry.

All the other zombies let loose with their own half-air groans in a kind of nightmare game of Marco Polo. I backed away. Mrs. Park stepped forward, worked the lever, put the muzzle less than five inches from its head, and pulled the trigger. It couldn't scream without a head, but it was too late; the groans seemed to be coming from all around us. In their eagerness to get at us, three zombies were trying to climb the walls. One of them jumped and managed to pull itself up on the outside of the railing.

Others were coming up the stairs, trampling the bodies that littered the way. The two zombies with gunshot wounds to their chests were still crawling, heedless of the blood and viscera they left behind. And to our left, in the dark hallway, four large shapes hidden in the shadows groaned as they moved toward us. My body went cold. The zombies had found the back stairs. Before I had time to recover—or, given how bad the situation was, despair—Iset shouted, "No!"

My eyes flew her direction, and I saw a blue-green streak—Kappa—barreling toward the zombies in the hallway. I ran after him without a first thought, let alone a second one, but Kappa was faster than me over short distances, and he had a head start. The bog-monster dodged in and out of the zombies' legs, then launched himself at them from behind. He'd bite one, then jump away to bite another, randomly assaulting all four of them. He was a pint-sized barbarian rager, doing his best to gnaw their calves off.

Zombies didn't feel pain. Biting their calves wouldn't stop them, but—thank god—it could distract them. The zombies stopped and looked down, meaning that none of them saw the large shape coming up the hall behind them. Conrad and I arrived at the same time. The wolfman emerged from the shadows, grabbed the heads of the back two zombies, and slammed them together, doing the kind of damage I could only manage with a metal pipe and an ocean of adrenaline.

He kicked one away so he could focus his attention on the other one. I did my best to take down one of the front two zombies. The pipe hit its arm with enough force to break the bone. I dodged back before it could grab me. As it took a step toward me, Kappa sunk his teeth into its leg. The zombie reached for Kappa, but Conrad grabbed its neck and slammed its face into the floor.

"Get Kappa out of here," he growled. I put my free arm around Kappa. I had to yank twice before he unlocked his jaw so we could get away. As I scrambled backward, I realized I was still clutching the pipe. I raised my head to shout at Conrad, to see if he wanted to use it, but he seemed to be doing fine on his own. I backed up until I was standing next to Mrs. Park. She was reloading the shotgun again.

"Zombies?" I said.

"I dealt with most of them," Mrs. Park muttered. Her voice sounded strained, and her hands were shaking more than ever, but she finished shoving in the last shell and looked up.

"Igor pulled down the stragglers. He's dealing with the last of them." I turned to watch Conrad, in case he needed help. That was a waste of magic eyeballs. Conrad didn't need help; he needed us to stay out of his way while he systematically dismembered each zombie in turn. Kappa kept wiggling, hissing, and rawring as he watched Conrad fight—no doubt furious at being denied his share of the carnage. When Conrad had finished slaughtering the zombies in the hall, he jogged up to us.

"I've taken care of the ones coming up the back way. Where's Igor?" I nodded toward the staircase. We could hear the sounds of fighting still going on downstairs. He reached for the shotgun Mrs. Park was holding.

"May I?" That was my wolf-boy. There was no emergency so dire that he would forget his manners.

"By all means," Mrs. Park murmured. Conrad took the shotgun. Rather than wade through the bodies on the stairs, he moved to the banister and threw himself over the railing. I dropped Kappa, and we both scrambled over to the stairs to watch what happened. Conrad had landed in a crouch. As he stood up, he put the shotgun to his shoulder and swung the lever— crack-crack.

"Igor," he yelled, "drop!" Igor let go of his weapons and dived for the ground. Conrad fired. The barrel barely moved. Crack-crack. He turned, fired— crack-crack— turned, fired again—five times in all, removing one zombie head with each blast. When the last one went down, I dropped to my butt as if I'd been hit too. All the gun smoke in the air made me feel like I was breathing acid, but I gulped it down in heaping lungfuls and tried to stop myself from shaking. Kappa came over and patted me on the back.

Conrad kept the shotgun ready as he turned slowly around the room. When he finished a full circle, he lowered it.

"Holy shit, Igor," he said.

"That is a lot of bodies."

"Well, somebody was late," Igor said, "leaving me to guard the front. Thoughtless—that's what I call it." Conrad stepped toward him.

"Are you hurt?"

"You told me to drop! I dropped!" Igor grunted.

"I may stay here a while. At least until the room stops spinning." After a second he raised his voice to ask, "Are you hurt?"

"I took damage, but nothing I couldn't heal from."

"Mr. Bauer, it's an honor to be going through this hell with you."

"Likewise," Conrad said. Behind me, Mrs. Park mumbled, without a trace of irony, "Well, isn't that nice." She wandered over to the nearest wall, collapsed against it, threw up, and slowly slid to the floor.