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sending them tumbling to the pavement below and
into the hungry arms of the wandering dead. That thought sent a
cold thrill of panic through him. He was able to force it down only
with the greater fear of causing Kat injury during their landing or
worse, alerting the zombies beneath to their presence.
    They soared over the abandoned street, now
occupied solely with slowly rotting examples of what were once
human beings. The breeze caused Kat's short, blue hair to flutter
as she and Jake sped along their impromptu zip-line, and the pretty
Asian felt like laughing aloud with exhilaration. It was moments
like this when everything became more real. Betting the bank
against impossible odds, thumbing your nose at the gods in the face
of certain death. She understood why Allen enjoyed skydiving prior
to the dead rising to consume the living, but also realized jumping
out of a perfectly good airplane over and over again wasn't
thrill-seeking, it was simply repeated unsuccessful suicide
attempts. Far too much could go wrong with a parachute and you
could end up burrowing into the ground like Wile E. Coyote from
those old Loony Tunes cartoons. But risking everything on her own
long-developed skills, her physical abilities?
    That was part of what made life worth
living.
    Kat felt the shaking in Jake's arms and
grinned. It was somehow comforting to know the man who'd charged a
baker's dozen of hungry zombies with nothing but a crowbar had a
bit of a problem with heights. It made him human, gave him a sense
of fallibility and vulnerability that she found attractive.
    Hey! No time for nookie-thoughts,
remember? Kat brain piped at her. Focus!
    They were approaching the opposite roof
faster than she'd have liked, probably due to their combined
weight. Usually, Kat didn't have any passengers when she practiced
her ninja thing. She'd drastically underestimated the rate of their
acceleration, and that was going to make their imminent landing
more than a little interesting.
    “Remember to go limp when your feet hit,” she
reminded Jake. “That should keep you from breaking—”
    “There's something on the roof.” he
hissed.
    “Huh?”
    Sure enough, as they slid closer Kat began to
make out human silhouettes moving on the rooftop. As she and Jake
sped onward, even though specific details weren't visible yet, she
realized the shadowy figures moved about with the trademark
zombie-clumsy slouch. This was bad. She and Jake were coming in
swiftly and there was no possible way to halt their forward
momentum. Even if they could stop mid-slide, the pair would be
trapped on the line with no way to return to the safety of Old
Hall. All this went through Kat's mind in a second and a half, just
before they passed over the roof's edge and their landing site
became visible in the darkness.
    “Oops,” Kat muttered.
    Her grappling hook had found purchase in the
protective grating of a large air conditioning unit. It stood
roughly four feet off the surface of the roof, just to the right of
center, and was surrounded by a group of zombies. Evidently, the
sound of Kat's hood impacting into the steel housing had focused
their attention causing the creatures to cluster about the dormant
machine. This had allowed Cho and O'Connor to zip-line over the
clustered dead to what they'd believed to be safety, but would
surely get them noticed by the rooftop ghouls. Jake saw the open
stairwell door at the roof's corner, and realized the zombies
unknowingly waiting for them hadn't gained the supernatural ability
to climb sheer walls. The rotten bastards, possibly attracted by
just a domestic house cat, had simply walked mindlessly up the
interior stairs in search of prey. That was the good news. The bad news was, even though there were only seven or eight of
the things on the roof, he and Kat were latched together, unable to
use their weapons, and heading directly for them.
    Not wanting to play a game of body-based
ten-pins with the things, Jake jammed his booted feet