Ten
I don’t really know how long it took to fight my way back to my team, but I know Kevin and his college cultists were long gone by the time I locked eyes with Hannah once more.
“Damn,” she said quietly, looking at all the gore strewn across my body.
“I know. I’m sure I smell terrific. Let’s just focus on getting out of here.”
Staccato bursts of fire from the remaining Hunters, punctuated by the heavier-hitting shots from Blitz’s rifle, kept the zombie horde at bay as we slowly moved our way back to our modified postal truck.
Io’s drones were circling overhead, occasionally swooping down to punch through a couple zombie heads or light a few on fire, but when one of them got knocked out of the sky by a lucky swipe from a zombified arm, Io backed off before she cost us our only air support.
“About that,” Blitz cut in, “I don’t see how we’re gonna make it. Ammo count is too low, and the truck is too far away.”
I waved away his concerns. “Oh, no worries. I’ll bring it to us.” Getting my breathing under control after my intense battle getting through the horde, I pulled up my wrist-screen and tapped a command to activate the truck’s autopilot and bring it over to us.
Nothing happened.
“The kids slashed the tires and fucked up the engines,” Selene explained. There was a subtle shift in her voice that I could not quite place but for some reason I knew it was her speaking and not Hannah.
I looked at her and reached out, my blade-arm reshaping itself into my normal hand, gripping her shoulder comfortingly. “We’ll make it. I promise.”
Selene smiled softly and raised her borrowed assault rifle to her shoulder. “I know we will, Ryan. As long as you’ve got my six, everything’s gonna be fine. Besides, Hannah has something in the works that should help us even the odds.”
In hindsight, that was the moment I started falling for Selene too. Up until then she had just been a mildly annoying hot girl playing host to the phantom of my dead ex. But the way she transformed from the frightened girl crawling backwards over a taxi cab to escape a single zombie to now bravely fighting off an entire horde, something in the way I viewed her had started to shift. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, mind you, but I realize now that yeah that was a pretty key moment for me.
Hannah’s phantom form rose from Selene’s shoulders like a set of ghostly wings unfurling. Her entire figure burned a blinding white. She spread her arms out wide and screamed so sharply that the glass of several lamp posts ringing the graveyard shattered.
All those ghosts we had seen earlier suddenly looked at Hannah and their eyes gleamed with the same pale radiance she was emitting from every piece of her form.
As one, every ghost suddenly converged upon us from all directions and were absorbed into Hannah’s gleaming figure like…like someone sticking a vacuum up into the air right after someone breathed out a cloud of smoke. It was practically instantaneous. And she only grew brighter and brighter the more ghosts she absorbed.
When at last the graveyard was empty (of ghosts anyway, still plenty of zombies), Hannah’s figure dimmed just enough for her features to be revealed. All except for her eyes. Those remained gleaming with that pale light.
She raised her hand and suddenly headstones all round us cracked in half and began orbiting our little formation like the blades of a weed whacker. Half of the headstones were spinning clockwise while the rest spun counterclockwise and Zombie bodies were being ripped apart like so much grass.
“Go,” Hannah commanded, her blazing eyes locking onto me and begging me to listen.
I nodded. “Blitz! You and I are clearing a path. Hunters, suppressive fire!”
My arms reformed into blades and I charged towards the truck. Yes, it was damaged, but it still had a bunch of gear in it that could probably help us. Blitz put away his rifle in favor of his katana and moved at my side.
Together we cleaved our way through the zombie horde. With the Hunters, Selene, and Hannah all working together behind us, we forged a new path amidst the dead and fought our way back to the living world one step at a time.
At some point much closer to the metal fence than last time, we passed back through that magical barrier and the world regained its color. Night had fallen on Eastport during our time in the graveyard. Long shadows dominated the surrounding area and, after Hannah’s display of ghostly power, there were no lamp posts around to help light our way.
We navigated by the light of a hundred fires blazing all across the city, clogging the night sky with smoke and casting an orange glow across all of Eastport.
I leapt clean over the fence and pivoted in place. Swapping blades for hands and rapidly reloading my remaining pistol (the other one was still somewhere in the graveyard), I opened fire and helped clear the way for Blitz and Selene. They both raised their rifles and helped the Hunters get back across the line, so I darted towards the truck and moved into the driver’s seat.
A little holographic display flickered to life from where the radio would have been in a regular car, informing me that all four tires of the truck had been slashed to pieces, and the engine had been ripped apart. There was only enough power left in the dying battery for me to deploy one countermeasure.
I selected the button with the minigun.
A mechanical clack sounded overhead as a hidden panel slid aside and an auto-turret raised into position. The entire front windshield became a targeting display that highlighted every incoming zombie as a potential target and asked me for confirmation. I tried to tap another flickering button that would indicate that yes, I really did want the auto-turret to target the incoming undead and smoke them all, unfortunately the vehicle’s low battery meant that it took no less than seven tries to finally get it to register my command.
When the turret spun to life though, it was well worth the wait.
The graveyard became a mess of zombie parts as the auto-turret shredded through everything nearby and utterly decimated the undead in droves. It took every last drop of power the truck still had, but the immediate zombie threat was ended just in time.
No telling what all that noise would summon next though.
Ryan? We’ve got an extraction team on their way to your location. Hold position, Tabitha announced in my ear.
A sharp pang of regret lanced through my heart as I realized how close I had come to being zombie chow and how poorly my last interaction with Tabby and Euna had gone. I stepped out of the truck and saw Blitz scanning the surroundings for more incoming undead.
Luckily for us, all the zombies that were headed our way were too far off to get to us before our extraction arrived. A helicopter sped through the skyscrapers and came to a stop over our heads, dropping off ropes on either side so we could ascend quickly.
Hannah and Selene merged once more and she was the first one up the rope. She paused and said, “That was a close one, hero. But I knew you had me,” before giving me a wink and pulling herself up into the chopper.
Blitz and the Hunters climbed up after her, and I started up after them all, my eyes lingering on the graveyard for a half-second longer before I started to climb.
This Kevin was a problem. He had to go.