The Dead Come for Us

Chapter 2

It didn't just break; it exploded the glass throughout the living room like shrapnel.

The sprint knocked Rose against her collar bone, both her and the runner slamming hard onto the linoleum. It was Mrs. Gable from three houses down, but the neighbors face was something entirely unrecognizable.

The skin was a sickly, bruised gray where veins bled black ink through its surface and her eyes were dilated, milky, and entirely vacant. There was no scratching or grappling. She snapped at Rose’s throat with the sharp, mechanical clack of a pneumatic piston.

“Dad!” Rose shrieked, pushing against the woman’s collar bones with her hands, pinning the hulking thing down with her small weight.

Mac acted before the scream could get all the way out. His Marine training had cut in front of the horror. Too close for a firearm – one mistake, and Rose would get hit by a bullet. He drove his shoulder forward and stomped a heavy boot right into Mrs. Gable’s ribs, driving his weight into a savage lateral kick to wrench the diseased thing off his daughter.

The thing gave no cry or flinch at what should have been a collapsed lung, but it flew off the kitchen island and onto its hands and knees before lunging back towards Mac with impossible, accelerated speed.

Mac stepped into its path, driving the stock of his Remington shotgun upward.

The solid walnut butt of the gun slammed just under the thing's jaw with a wet crack that sent its head back, but it still rushed him, fingers clawing for his tactical vest.

Mac stomped down with his boot, driving the sole of it through the side of the things head against the linoleum until the last convulsive shudders stopped, spilling dark, pressurized blood all over the kitchen floor.

“Get up!” Mac yelled at Rose, hauling her to her feet by her arm in a single motion. “Isaac! Front door!”

The oak front door shuddered once again, widening the crack in the middle as two more figures hit it from the outside, fingers clawing through the splintered gaps.

Isaac stood like a statue near the hallway, an iron crowbar held white-knuckled in his hand, his face ashen as he stared at the expanding blood pool in the kitchen. Short, ragged breaths pumped his chest against his denim jacket.

He had spent his teenage years listening to his fathers combat stories but the metallic tang of new blood and the growling, animalistic screams from the porch had effectively frozen him in place.

“Isaac! Move!” Lola shrieked, lunging over and with brute strength, dragging the heavy oak kitchen table against the splintering front door frame.

“I… I can’t.” Isaac stammered, his gaze fixed on the twitching, grotesque shape of their neighbor. “Dad… that’s Mrs. Gable… she’s…”

“She is a threat, Isaac. Look at me!” Mac cut across his son’s line of sight, his voice a physical blow. “The kid you were five minutes ago is gone. Get the basement door sealed, or we die in the kitchen. Do your damn job!”

The ferocity of the command somehow severed the knot that held Isaac pinned. His gaze shifted, a flash of pure terror overlaid with a sudden, defensive fury, and he spun to jam the iron crowbar through the handles of the double doors leading to the basement as a heavy concussive blast rocked them from within.

Whatever was in the basement was already downstairs. The handles bent under the strain of the iron bar, but they held.

“We need to go. Right now,” Mac ordered, shucking his shotgun over his shoulder as he drew his pistol. “Front street is a kill box. We go through the back deck, through the treeline, to the drainage canal.”

“We’re leaving? On foot?” Isaac cried out, his voice cracking with teenage defiance as adrenaline finally surged. “We’ve got a fortified basement! Dad, you built the bunker! Why the hell are we on foot in the open?!”

“Because a bunker with no exit is a tomb if a hundred of those things are piled on top of the hatch,” Mac growled, mechanically cycling the slide on his pistol. “Look outside, Isaac. Use your eyes.”

From the shattered window, the violence of the street multiplied. The cul-de-sac was a swirling maelstrom of bloodshed.

Across the street, Mr. Miller’s house was burning, black smoke billowing against the summer sky, yet it was no deterrent to the creatures outside as they hurled themselves from the roof of an overturned Coaster bus onto the hoods of cars in their rush to chase down neighbors…They were acting like one massive, liquid hive, and the mouth of the cul-de-sac had become a meat grinder within seconds.

“Lola, take the secondary,” Mac said, pressing the semi-automatic into her hand. She took it, two-handed, her posture shifting instinctively into a defensive stance identical to his. “Rose, glue yourself to your mothers back. Isaac, cover our six. If anything moves with speed, smash it with the bar. Don’t look it in the face, smash the skull.”

They entered the utility room. Mac unlocked the back door, stepping out onto the elevated wooden deck; the sun glaring blindingly bright, a jarring contrast to the nightmare. Their backyard was long, stretching to a wall of thick red oaks that lined the city’s concrete drainage system.

The discordant chorus of their impending demise filled the air, distant air sirens warring with the rhythmic thumping of military helicopters to their south, and the wet sounds of slaughter from the front of the house.

“Clear,” Mac whispered as he descended the wooden stairs, his weapon raised.

Lola followed with Rose tucked protectively behind her, Isaac descending last, the knuckles of his hands still white around the crowbar. Thirty feet from the house and the woods seemed like a sanctuary, the treeline closing in over their heads like a verdant ceiling.

Rose stopped short. Her head tilted. Her eyes dilated in a sudden surge of acute panic.

“Dad,” she whispered, her voice a breath of wind. “The trees. The leaves are rustling.”

“Move it, Rose,” Mac urged without missing a stride.

“No! Dad, it’s not the wind!” she screamed.

Before Mac could turn his weapon, the dense red oaks parted, and a mass of at least twenty infected, packed in tight like a pride of wolves on the hunt, burst from the brush at full speed, bypassing the street entirely, searching the wooded easement for a meal.

Their eyes landed on the family in the open, and a single, deafening shriek was torn from them all.

They were fifty yards out. At that speed, they would be on them in five seconds.

Mac dropped to one knee, bringing his shotgun up as the lead creature, its teeth bared bloody, rushed towards him.