The Living Dead 2 (The Living Dead, #2)(62)

“Come on. The reception office has the thickest walls, and we can get a couple of doors between us and them,” I told him, dashing around the side of the pool’s pump house. The dead were hot on our heels but we had no problem outrunning them. I rushed out onto the pool deck with my bow in my hand, an arrow already half-nocked. Good thing, too, because a dead woman in a pantsuit was already there waiting for me. She came stumbling toward me with her arms out, like she wanted to give me a big hug. I put my arrow right through her eye and jumped over her as she collapsed.

“But what then?” Finster demanded. “We just wait for them to go away?”

“No! We wait for Vance and the others to come rescue us,” I told him. Why couldn’t he see what we needed to do? I saw a dead man wearing a police uniform come stumbling through the weak part of the fence and shot an arrow through his forehead. “Just stick with me, Finster. We’ll be okay if—”

Finster screamed. The dead woman I’d put down was still moving. She had grabbed at the leg of his pants as he stepped over her.

He kicked at her furiously, even as her teeth came closer and closer to his flesh. One bite and it was all over—nobody ever survived a bite. I nocked another arrow, but couldn’t be sure of hitting her the way Finster was jumping around.

“It’s okay, I’m okay,” he shouted, as he stumbled away from her. “She didn’t get me.” She was still crawling toward him so I put another arrow in her ear. That stopped her. “I made it,” he said, gasping for breath. “I—”

He wasn’t looking where he was going. So happy that he’d escaped a fate worse than death, he didn’t watch his step, and he fell into the pool.

I rushed over to the edge of the pool and looked down. He’d fallen into the deep end and he was crying in pain. One of his legs was bent the wrong way.

“Finster, come on, get up!” I shouted at him, and he waved one hand at me to indicate he just needed a minute, that he would get up any time now.

We didn’t have a minute. The dead were streaming around the sides of the pump house, coming straight for us. I felt Candy stir against my back as she woke up. Why couldn’t she just have slept through this?

I should have left Finster there, of course. That’s how it was supposed to work. If you couldn’t walk, you couldn’t survive. But then, Simon couldn’t walk, either. Vance had changed some of the rules. He’d changed who we were. He’d made us into good people again. Given us something to live for.

“Take my hand,” I shouted at Finster, thrusting my arm down into the pool. “Take my goddamned hand!”

He blinked away his tears and struggled to get up. When he tried moving his broken leg he screamed in agony.

I looked away to check on the dead. They were very close now. Before I could look back at Finster, he reached up and snagged my arm. I hauled him upwards, pulling so hard I thought my arm might come out of its socket. He got his free hand over the lip of the pool, though, and helped me pull him up.

“Stand up. Lean on me. We have to run, now,” I said, once he was out of the pool. “Think of it like a three-legged race, okay?”

He didn’t say anything. His face was a mask of pain. But he hopped on his good foot, his arm clutched tight around my shoulders. We were still faster than the dead.





Inside the reception lobby it was dark and cool once I closed all the window shutters. The dead hammered on the steel core door from the outside, their fists banging away at the wood veneer. It was holding, for the moment. I locked it, though I doubted any of them were smart enough to try to turn the knob. Then I headed into the back office, where I’d left Finster and Candy.

I barricaded the door of the reception office as best I could, shoving furniture up against it in a way that might slow the dead down for a minute or two. Candy had fully woken up by that point and wanted to know what was going on.

“Nothing, honey, we’re safe,” I told her. And she believed me. It’s amazing how trusting a three-year-old can be.

I had Finster laid out on the desk, his leg propped up on a pile of old file folders. There was blood on his jeans. That could mean one of two things. Either when he’d fallen his leg had suffered a compound fracture—which was very bad—or that he’d lied when he said the dead woman hadn’t bitten him.

Which would be a lot worse.

The only way to find out was to take his pants off, which I didn’t have the time or the steady nerves to do just then. I shoved my back up against the wall farthest from the door and sank down to sit on the floor. I just needed to calm down. I just needed to breathe carefully. This didn’t have to be the end for us. We could survive this.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream and bang on the walls with my fists, and shout for the dead to go away, and tear my hair out, and curl up in a ball, and throw up in horror. I didn’t do any of those things, because Candy was watching me very closely.

I could have been a good actress. I could have won an Oscar.

“Darcy,” Finster said, his breath coming in ragged spurts, “I want you to know something. I want you to know how I feel, since I may not get another chance, and—”

“Save it,” I told him. Which was maybe a little cruel. But I couldn’t afford to hear what he was going to say.

I pulled the walkie-talkie off my belt and checked the battery. Still about twenty minutes of talk time left. “Vance,” I said. “Vance, if you can hear me, come in.” There was no response, so I waited a minute and tried again. After that I waited five minutes before I tried a third time.