“Freeze, motherfucker,” she said.

“God! No, please … don’t!”

“What’s your name?”

“Polk. Teddy Polk. Sergeant, Pennsylvania Army National—”

“Skip that bullshit.” She pulled the pistol out of his eye and hit him on the top of the head with it. Not hard, but hard enough. Not a love tap. “Okay, Polk, why were you trying to shoot me?”

“We have to. You’re infected…”

“Do I fucking look infected?”

“How can I tell? It’s easy to hide a bite.”

“I wasn’t bitten.”

“We were told that some of them spit infectious materials and—”

Dez stiffened. The Russian woman had spat the black goo at her. So had Andy Diviny. Had she gotten any of it on her skin? She was almost certain she hadn’t.

Almost.

“I’m not infected,” she said again, her voice hard and cold. “Point is, you fuckers didn’t even bother to check.”

Polk’s eyes shifted away toward the approaching dead and came reluctantly back. “I … they said…”

“They said what?”

He flinched. “We were told that everyone in town was infected.”

“Christ. Well, news flash, Einstein, they’re wrong. Your commanding officers are lying to you. I’m not infected … The people in the school aren’t infected, the—”

“Were you in there?” he cut in.

“No, but—”

“Then you don’t know. Everyone outside is infected.”

“Someone inside is shooting. Have you seen any of them fire a gun?”

“Some of them drive cars and—”

She hit him again. Harder.

“Ow! Goddamn it…”

“You dumb shit. If they’re driving a car or shooting a gun—or speaking, for Christ’s sake—then they’re not infected. Are you asswipes just killing everyone in town?”

Polk did not answer.

The rain was thinning, the roar of the wind was less intense, and they could hear the moans of the approaching dead.

“Please,” he said desperately.

Dez felt her anger flare to the boiling point. “‘Please’? Seriously? How many of the infected said that to you? Please?”

She wanted to shoot this son of a bitch so bad it made her teeth hurt.

“We only know what we were told. What were we supposed to do?”

Dez said nothing. Polk was right and she was picking a fight with someone too many pay grades below policy level.

She backed away, keeping the gun on him.

“Listen to me, Polk,” she said sternly, “I’m going into the school. I know that there are people in there. Uninfected people. Kids. This is the shelter for the whole county. This is where people go because it’s supposed to be safe. You hear me?”

He nodded.

“You get back and tell your commanding officer that Officer Desdemona Fox, Stebbins PD, is in the school with the survivors. I’ll make sure everyone who isn’t infected is kept safe and in one place. I’ll get the uninfected to safety inside the school.”

“What if there are infected people in there?” he countered. “They said this thing spreads so fast that it can’t be contained. Once a person’s bitten or whatever, they’re done. It’s just a matter of time, and not much time, either.”

“The people in there are fighting back. They’re not sick.” She said it with venom, but in truth the gunfire from the upper window had stopped and she had no idea at all about what waited for her inside that old building.

Polk was staring at her, reading the doubt on her face. “They’re probably dead inside there…”

Dez raised her hand to backhand him across the face and he flinched, but she did not hit him. Instead she lowered her hand. “What did they tell you about this thing? How did it start? What is it?”

Polk rubbed his bruised head and looked past Dez.

She smiled without turning. “Yeah, I know, company’s coming.”

“We got to get out of here—”

“Talk to me, Polk, or I’ll kneecap you and leave you here for those dead fucks.”

He squirmed as if weighing his need to run against the chances she’d really gun him down. “They didn’t tell us much. Mostly about how to avoid the infection.”

“They must have told you something…”

“Terrorists,” said Polk. “They said that this was a terrorist bioweapon.” He licked his lips as he looked past her again. “Come on … please…”

Dez smiled. She could feel the ice in her own lips. “Yeah, Polk … the big bad monsters are coming to get you. Sucks, doesn’t it? Sucks to be afraid. Now—imagine how those kids in that school feel? They were counting on you. People believe in you guys. You’re the heroes, you come and save people.”

He said nothing.

“Except when you don’t,” she sneered.

There was a sound behind her. Dez turned in place and fired four shots. Double taps. One to the chest, one to the head. Twice. Two of the infected fell. The others were still far out of reach.

Dez turned back and pointed the gun at Polk. “You remember what I said. You tell them that people are alive in there.”

“It won’t matter what I say,” he said. “They won’t care.”

Dez stepped forward and touched the hot barrel to his upper lip. Polk hissed in pain.

“Make them care,” she said.

Polk stared up at her. His eyes were filled with doubt and fear and anger. But in the end he nodded.

Dez lowered the pistol and stepped aside. “Get your friends and get the fuck out of here. I’ll cover your ass.”

As he rose he continued to stare at her. “Why?”

“Because,” Dez said with a faint smile, “that’s what we’re supposed to do. Now go on. Git!”

Polk went past her, giving Dez a wide berth. He pulled the groggy machine gunner out of the crumpled turret. The man was badly banged up, but he was able to walk after a fashion. Together, he and Polk pulled the driver out of the wrecked Humvee. The man, a corporal, groaned but did not wake up. Polk and the gunner lifted him and they hobbled off at a limping pace. Dez watched them go and then turned to the wall of living dead that was coming toward her.

When the three soldiers were at the fence, Polk paused and looked back at Dez for several seconds. She was tempted to shoot him the finger, but she didn’t; and before he turned way Polk gave her a single, short nod.

Dez frowned, trying to ascribe meaning to it.

A moan drew her attention and as she turned, her bravado melted away like fog on a hot morning. There were dozens of the things. Mangled faces torn to raw meat, eyes missing, legs twisted … and with all that they kept coming. Dead things pretending to be alive, their mouths working with hunger.

The open door of the school was on the other side of them. Seventy yards. Might as well be on the moon.

“Shit.”

Dez holstered her pistol and quickly searched through the wrecked Humvee and found two M4s. She did not have time to look for extra magazines. They had to do the job or the job wasn’t getting done.

She pulled the bag of weapons out of the Tundra, slung it over her shoulder, groaning a little at its ponderous weight. She slung one of the M4s on the opposite shoulder, worked the bolt on the other, and stepped out from behind the wreck of the two trucks. Dez took a breath, set her jaw, then set the selector switch on the M4 to semiauto and started running, cutting to the left of the leading edge.

The dead turned to follow her, but she didn’t fire. Not yet.

She moved in a wide arc, hoping to draw more of them away from the entrance so she could make a run at the doorway. They came for her, hungrier for her flesh than they were for whatever waited inside the building.

Finally, she had no choice, and she fired a burst at the closest infected. The unfamiliar weight of her burden threw off her aim and the bullets stitched holes in the chests of the dead closest to her. She corrected, steadying the gun, and fired again. One of the monsters staggered back with two new black holes above its empty eyes. As it fell, Dez fired again and again. Some of them went down, but by the time she’d burned through the magazine, only five of them were down. With the gun bag on her shoulder she had no aim at all. Without stopping, she dropped the first M4 and unslung the other, tried to aim better, fired, fired, fired. And it clicked empty.

“Shit!”

She dropped the second rifle and pulled her Glock. The rear security door of the school was closer now and she could see a couple of the creatures standing just inside. She fired at them, dropping one but wasting three rounds on the brick doorframe trying to hit the other. The angle was all wrong.

She ran into the rain, toward the school, sloshing through the muddy grass, firing at everything that moved. She was only halfway there when her foot came down on a Frisbee lying in a puddle and she was sent sprawling onto the grass. The big bag of guns came off and went sliding away into the darkness. She kept her grip on the Sig, but the barrel punched three inches into the mud, totally clogging it.

Something moaned and she rolled onto her back as Harvey Pegg, the school’s gym teacher, lunged at her. His hands closed around the open V of her jacket and his head ducked down to bite her arm with terrible force. Dez screamed and brought her knee up into Pegg’s crotch, knocking him forward and over her. As he tumbled over, she tore her arm out of his mouth and gave it a quick, desperate look. Pegg’s teeth had scored the leather but hadn’t bitten through.

“Thank you, Billy Trout,” she said between gritted teeth.

Dez started to get to her feet even as Pegg got to his. He was a second sooner and began to rush at her, and there were three other dead behind him. Dez fired two shots and then the slide locked back.

Shit.

There was nowhere to run and no time to grab another weapon. She was done and she knew it.