hotel, almost everyone got out alive and they weren’t even armed yet. Once Brick got his hammer he was able to take out eight of those things like they were nothing.”
Junko points her chainsaw at his face.
“You don’t understand,” she says. “The zombies in this area haven’t been in hunting mode for decades. They’ve been in hibernation and are just now waking up. Over four million infected people lived in the area we have to cover, and by the end of today they will all have woken up. They’ll know we’re here and every single one of them will be coming for us.”
“Four million?” Scavy says, his rifle shrinking toward the ground.
Junko nods. “And they’re all waking up as we sit here wasting time.”
After Junko says that, there is a bang in the wall of meshed vehicles behind Popcorn. They turn around. Another bang.
“Let’s go,” Junko says, pulling her bag over her shoulder.
The others go to investigate the noise.
“Forget it,” she says. “Let’s go!”
A zombie bursts out of the mound of rusted metal and charges for Scavy. Most of it is black and charred. Car parts have been fused with its flesh: a steering wheel is jutting out of its shoulder, a muffler is melded into its left leg, rusted engine parts run down its abdomen. Junko guesses that the creature had been hibernating in there for a long time, before the vehicles had decomposed together into one lump.
“Braains…” it says in a deep, barely-audible growl.
The girls get away from it, but Scavy doesn’t back down. He swings the rifle over his shoulder and points his spear at it. The thing stumbles awkwardly forward, tripping on its muffler-fused leg.
When Scavy swings his naginata spear, his gun strap falls off of his shoulder and lands on his wrist, weighing down his arm too much for an effective attack. The blade misses the zombie’s chest by a foot. The creature raises its arms as it comes closer.
“Forget it, come on!” Junko yells.
“Braains.”
Scavy drops the rifle and swings the spear at its neck to cut off its head, but the blade bounces off of the steering wheel. The zombie grabs the shaft of the spear before Scavy can make another attack. The punk kid pulls back, but the skeletal fingers have too strong of a grip. He can’t pull it free.
Junko shakes her head and sighs. Then she turns on her chainsaw arm, revs it up.
“From now on, you listen to me,” Junko says as she cuts the arms off of the zombie.
Scavy pulls back. The zombie’s arms are still attached to the shaft of the spear.
“Now come on,” Junko says, and turns to run.
Scavy picks up his rifle. Then he looks up at the skeleton hands attached to his spear, wondering how the hell he should take them off.
“Braains,” the zombie says.
Scavy shrugs and continues on, leaving the arms still attached to the weapon.
Alonzo finishes boarding up the stairwell to the second floor of the hotel. He decided not to leave with the others. He stayed back, where it was safe. After he saw the writer, Charles Hudson, ripped into pieces from the second floor window, he knew he couldn’t go out there. He just couldn’t.
“Will that hold?” Adriana says.
He looks over at her, the hammer shaking in his hands. “It better.”
They had found extra wood, hammers, and plenty of nails in Housekeeping. The Zombie Survival work crew, who had dropped them off and boarded up the building for them, must have ditched their leftover barricade supplies in there. Alonzo made good use of them.
“There’s only two stairwells we have to worry about,” Alonzo says, then collapses against a wall to catch his breath. “Plus, I don’t think they realize we’re still up here. They went after everyone else.”
“What about Heinz?”
“He’s on the roof,” Alonzo says, breathing so hard he can hardly speak. He pulls off his coat to reveal massive sweat stains under his armpits. Adriana cringes when she sees them. She’s not used to being around fat
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