He dove for the gun, fingers closing around the grip— The tall zombie's foot came down on his hand. Crunch.White-hot pain. At least two fingers broken. But Kínitos held onto the gun. He couldn't pull his hand free. The zombie's weight was too much, even with its damaged hands.
So he activated unstoppable momentum in his
trapped arm and yanked upward.bHis arm moved with that same inevitable force. The zombie's foot was in the way.
The unstoppable force went through it.
A perfect hole appeared through the zombie's foot—through boot, through flesh, through bone. A cylinder of matter just gone.
The zombie collapsed sideways, its foot no longer able to support weight.
Kínitos rolled away, gun in his broken hand, and came up firing.
BANG.
The bullet caught the tall zombie in the shoulder. It kept coming.
BANG.
BANG.
Chest shots. Still moving.
"Headshots. Only headshots," Kínitos muttered.
He aimed, his broken hand shaking, and fired.
BANG.
The bullet took the tall zombie in the forehead. It stumbled but didn't fall.
BANG.
Second headshot. The back of its skull blew out.It collapsed.Actually dead this time. The bald zombie was crawling toward him now, its ruined foot dragging, its holed hands still grasping uselessly.
Kínitos stood over it and put two rounds through its head. It stopped moving. Kínitos stood there, breathing hard, pain radiating from his broken hand and ribs. The hallway was a wreck—cratered floor, bullet holes in the walls, two dead zombies leaking dark blood.
And from the stairwell, he could hear more coming. The wet, shuffling sound of more dead things climbing toward the sixth floor. Many more. He checked the gun. Two rounds left. He looked for the second guard's body, searching for more ammunition—
And then he heard it. A woman's scream.
Not the woman they'd rescued.
Kínitos activated his speed and ran toward the scream, blurring down the hallway toward the service stairwell. He burst through the door and descended to the fifth floor, following the sound of gunshots and panicked shouting.
He rounded the corner and froze.
Marco Delgado was there—expensive suit torn and blood-stained, gold chains hanging crooked around his neck. He had a pistol in his shaking hands, firing at three zombies that had cornered a young woman against the wall. She was screaming, trying to press herself through the solid wall as the dead things reached for her with jerking, grasping hands. Marco's shots hit them in the chest, the back, the shoulders—everywhere but the head.
"THE HEAD!" Kínitos shouted, raising his own gun. "SHOOT THEM IN THE HEAD!"
The zombies stopped, their heads turning in unison—first toward Marco, then toward Kínitos. The movement was wrong, too synchronized, like puppets controlled by the same hand.
Then one of them moved.
That same horrifying burst of speed, going from shambling corpse to blurred motion in an instant. It launched itself at them, arms outstretched, mouth hanging open in a silent scream. Kínitos pulled his gun up in a hurry, barely getting it level before firing.
BANG.
The shot caught the zombie square in the forehead. Its head snapped back, brain matter spraying, and it dropped mid-lunge, crashing to the floor at Kínitos's feet.
The second zombie was already charging, moving toward Marco with that same terrible speed.Marco fired, his hands shaking but his aim true.
BANG.
Headshot. The zombie's skull exploded, and it collapsed in a heap.
The third zombie stood there for a moment, swaying. Then it turned toward the young woman still pressed against the wall and lunged.
Purple smoke began to leak out of Marco's body—wisps at first, then thicker, curling around his arms and torso like living fog. He reached into his pocket with his free hand and flipped a coin into the air, catching it without looking.
He fired at the charging zombie.
BANG.
Missed. The bullet went wide, sparking off the wall.The zombie lunged at him with terrifying speed, one massive fist cocked back for a devastating punch— And then it just fell.
Not stumbled. Not tripped. Fell straight through the floor.
One second it was there, mid-lunge. The next, the floor beneath it simply wasn't, and the zombie dropped through the hole that had appeared, crashing down to the fourth floor below in a shower of broken wood and concrete.
The purple smoke around Marco intensified for a moment, then faded back to wisps.
Kínitos stared at the hole in the floor, then at Marco.
Marco stared back, looking just as surprised as Kínitos felt.
"Did you just—" Kínitos started.
"I don't know what I just did," Marco said, his voice shaking. He was still holding the coin, flipping it nervously between his fingers. The purple smoke continued to leak from his skin in thin streams.
The young woman against the wall was still screaming, hyperventilating, her eyes wide with terror.
From below, they could hear the zombie getting back up, that horrible scraping sound of dead limbs finding purchase.
And from the stairwells—both of them now—came more sounds. More shuffling. More wet breathing.
More dead things coming.