Chapter Eleven

Gabriel reached the far side of the quad, pausing on a ghoul-free patch of grass to make sure we were behind him before setting off in between the Student Union and Fine Arts building. Trees and bushes lined the sidewalk in between the two buildings, ideal cover for opportunistic zombies if they had the brains to stage an ambush. But they didn't, so the few that tried to grab at us just shambled, grabbed, and tried to bite without subterfuge.

It wasn't too hard to dodge them; they were slow and uncoordinated. I wonder if zombies felt frustration when their would-be meals evaded their clutching fingers so easily. I thought about how I'd feel if my dinner jumped off the plate whenever I reached for it. It would suck.

And there went my brain again, wandering down a weird path when it should be focusing on the here and now, specifically the now being a really disgusting male zom lurching directly in front of me. We're talking a face not even a mother zombie could love, and one I recognized from my creative writing class. He'd asked me out and I'd turned him down, not so much because of his looks (although his resemblance to Cletus the slack-jawed yokel did not go unnoticed), but because his certainty in his own superior intellect and unaccountable chauvinism added up to an impossibly pompous asshole.

He'd also suffered from mega acne when alive, and. Let's just say zombification did nothing to clear it up. Talk about insult on top of injury, you know? Its skin was covered with little volcanic eruptions. The word “juicy” sprang to mind. I wish it hadn't. It reached for me as I skidded to a halt. Lily banged into me and Kai completed the Three Stooges moment by barreling into her. The impact sent me stumbling forward, right into Acne Boy's eager arms. In what had to be luck, its fingers clutched my arms at the elbows, right in between the padding. Bloodstained teeth gnashed in anticipation of its first bite, graying tongue lolling out between its blubbery lips.

“No way, pal,” I growled. “I wouldn't date you and I sure as hell won't let you eat me.” Jamming the M4 between us, barrel pointing down, I drove the stock up and into its chin. Its mouth snapped shut and a piece of tongue plopped onto the sidewalk. Okay, eeww on top of gross.

“Oh, that is just so wrong,” said Kai.

Fighting the urge to throw up, I used the length of the gun to shove against the zombie's chest, trying as I tried to pry its fingers off my arms. Amazing how much strength there was in those rotting hands.

As a young and stupid five-year-old, I'd had my finger pinched by a pissed-off crab. I still remember how much it hurt until I'd stopped screaming and hopping around so my dad could pry it off me. The zombie's grip felt a lot like that.

Lily and Kai, recovering from the collision, each grabbed one of Acne Zom's hands and yanked the fingers backwards. I could hear the snap of its bones breaking as my fellow teammates forced it to let go. I gave my ex-classmate one more shove with the gun, then hip-checked it off the sidewalk into a bush.

Kai swatted me on the butt. “Nice hip action, girl!”

“Stop playing around and move your asses!” Gabriel glared at us from next intersecting sidewalk, the Sciences and Administration buildings behind him.

I rolled my eyes, but moved my ass. Rising moans from behind told us the zombies we'd bypassed in the quad were headed our way. Their numbers thinned out when we reached the dorms, but I saw lurching silhouettes through some of the windows. Was anyone alive in there, maybe cowering in a barricaded closet, hoping against hope to go undetected? Maybe Zara was one of them. Or maybe she stalked the halls of our dormitory looking for flesh instead of face scrub.

No time to think about that now. Time for a search, destroy, and rescue mission (and didn't I sound all military and official?) in all the buildings after we cleared the open areas of the walking dead.

The number of zombies thinned out a bit as we passed the dorms. We jogged easily through their decreasing numbers until we reached the gymnasium, athletic fields, and parking lots, the last part of campus before the blackberry-bush-strewn fields and old growth redwoods.

There was lots of activity. Large, sturdy military-looking vehicles (kind of cute the way they even dressed their trucks in woodlands camo), klieg lights set up on temporary wooden platforms casting their glow over the parking lot as dozens of men and women in protective suits hustled around like large sterile ants.

Some were unrolling coils of razor wire (it looked like the world's nastiest Slinky), while others fiddled with the nozzles of hoses attached to small tanker trucks. Gabriel stopped by one of the trucks and we all gathered round him.

“What are they gonna do?” I said out loud. “Hose the zombies down? Challenge them to a water fight?”

Gabriel snorted, a surprisingly inelegant noise coming from him. “Those tanks contain an experimental foam designed to harden on contact with air to create effective barricades in wartime situations as quickly as possible. In this case, it'll be a secondary barrier.”

“Wow, that's totally James Bondian,” I said, impressed. “Does it work?”

He nodded towards one of the trucks. “Watch.”

One of the suited engineers aimed a hose nozzle at the ground in back of the wall of razor-wire Slinky and flicked a lever. Immediately a flood of white foam poured out of the nozzle. The man moved the nozzle slowly back and forth, building a wall of what looked like shaving cream butted up against the razor wire, except shaving cream wouldn't immediately start to solidify. I could see the stuff go from snowy white to a dinghy grayish-white as it hardened.

“How much of that stuff do they have?”

“We have twenty of those trucks on campus,” said Gabriel. “They each hold enough foam to put up a hundred yards. So if we use the buildings as part of the overall barrier, we should be in good shape.”

I watched in fascination while the engineers continued to put up what looked like a Gillette ad for a giant. Rollout razor wire ran along the front of the white foam. Hard to believe something that looked like shaving cream could possibly stop a crowd of hungry zombies.

“It won't hold them forever,” said Gabriel, as if he'd read my mind. “But it should do the trick long enough for us to clear the campus and erect something more permanent to keep everyone behind the barricade safe.”

“You think it's going to have to be permanent?” The thought horrified me.

“Just a figure of speech. If we handle this right, this outbreak will be just another file for the archives.”

“And if we don't?”

Gabriel put a hand on my shoulder. I felt its warmth even through the body armor. “The end of the world as we know it.”

“I so didn't need to hear that,” I said.

“Don't worry.” He looked at me intently, those gorgeous blue eyes serious and concerned at the same time. “We can do this.”

“I know we can,” I said just as seriously. “It's just now I'm gonna have that damn song running through my head all night.”

Gabriel laughed, an honest-to god-real sound of mirth. That's right, out and out laughed, as if I'd startled it out of him.

Absurdly happy with the accomplishment, I grinned up at him, noticing how the corners of his eyes crinkled up when he smiled. Meanwhile, another part of my brain wondered why the hell I noticed something so irrelevant to the current situation. A third part of my brain told me it didn't matter; the way Gabriel looked back at me made such questions unimportant. I'd never seen such warmth in Gabriel's expression before, at least not directed towards me. All the lustful thoughts I'd had about him when I'd first met him—before he opened his mouth, that is—came rushing back in seconds. Talk about lousy timing.

I don't know if he could actually read my mind, but even in the weird illumination thrown off by the klieg lights I could see his eyes darken from their usual denim blue to indigo as his pupils dilated. I caught my breath as his hand tightened on my shoulder and something sparked between us, something so primordial it went straight to my groin and spread like lustful wildfire through the rest of me.

Holy shit.

Gabriel felt it too; I could tell by the way his eyes widened with surprise as an almost visible layer of heat and desire flowed between us. The warmth of his hand felt almost radioactive. I wanted him so badly I almost forgot what we were doing outside in the first place. I was a millimeter away from making a total fool of myself.

“Incoming!”

The shout came from one of the lookouts. Both Gabriel and I immediately looked out beyond the half-finished barrier to see shambling, staggering corpses making their way out of redwoods and into the fields. A few had already reached the parking lot and headed towards the engineers with a frightening single-mindedness of purpose.

The dull pop of gunfire intertwined with the ululating moans of the undead as the Alpha Team sharpshooters went to work. None of the zombies made it closer than twenty feet to the men and women erecting the barrier.

Thank you, ravenous zombies.

Gabriel's hand dropped off my shoulder and his expression morphed back into dead-serious business mode before I could blink. “Wild Cards, listen up! You know the plan. Follow the perimeter and start closing the circle. Kill every zombie you see, rescue survivors if you can without compromising the mission and meet back at DBP Hall. Watch each other's backs. You've got walkie-talkies if you get separated from the rest of the team. Let's go.”

With one last unreadable look at me, Gabriel took off, following the line of the trucks, razor wire, and super-duper shaving cream. Lust superceded by adrenaline, I unsheathed my tanto and short katana and nodded to Lily and Kai. “Ready to kick some zombie butt?”

Lily grinned and nodded back.

Kai slapped us both on our butts. “Let's do it!”

Lily and I exchanged looks. We'd get him back for the butt slaps later.