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doing!?” Daniel said with what air he had managed to drag into his lungs. He reached for his gun, but it was nowhere to be seen. Lea charged at him, an unholy howl escaping her lips before Greg clotheslined her. Daniel scrambled to his feet and searched for his gun again, the paranoia the Army instills in you about misplacing your weapon took over his every instinct. Greg screamed like he had when the girl upstairs bit his ankle, this time it was Lea chewing on his exposed flesh. Her left hand plunged into Greg’s gut through a hole she’d torn out of him with her teeth, the fingers wrapped around whatever organ she could find and pulled it toward her mouth while Greg whaled in agony and tried to get away. When he mustered the strength to fight back again, one last surge of adrenaline, she grabbed him by his face and tore a chunk out of his neck the way the zombie had with Mark. She seemed to almost bask in the blood that sprayed from the gaping wound. Like a vampire in a fountain she drank the spray and tore out more chunks of flesh. Their burly friend sank into her arms like a slow dance until he lay beneath her in ruin.
    Daniel pulled the trigger of Greg’s rifle after he’d lunged for it, the 5.56mm round exploded into Lea’s knee and the tiny woman fell, landing face first in Greg’s guts. Before Daniel could pull the trigger again she was up on her feet, the pain of the gunshot completely ignored. Gasping for air as his vision swayed, Daniel flipped the rifle to three round burst and shot Lea in the chest while she flew the last several feet toward him in one great leap. She landed next to him already dead, her fiendish eyes locked on him forever.
    For a moment there was complete silence. Greg was dead, the slower moving infected were still too far away to get to him, and Lea was now laying in her own blood, her fragile body destroyed. Was the virus that easy to spread, that she would have become infected by blood spatter so quickly? Daniel dragged himself to his feet and looked for a place to hide. The closest thing was a car, a Nissan SUV with a flat tire. The door wasn’t locked, but that was because the driver had been dragged out and eaten just behind the car. Daniel locked the doors and got down on the floorboard of the back seat, clutching the M9 with his M4 in the seat next to him. There was a blanket in the back and he pulled that over him too, choking on the insane amount of dog hair he had to inhale. Someone had a Pomeranian, and a filthy flea-bitten one at that.
    The crowd of slow walkers made their way to the bodies of Greg and Lea, audibly feasting on Greg as if he were a free buffet of ecstasy pills and jello. Daniel didn’t move, but could hear the munching sounds like overgrown maggots. Two Hispanic ghouls, one with his face and neck chewed off, the other missing an arm at the shoulder, seemed to know he was in the SUV. They reached out for the windows, smearing their coagulated blood all over the glass, dogs that slobbered too much. The one with no face smacked his head against the rear windows, Daniel was sure they would cave, but instead the last sickening crack was a hollow popping sound and the faceless freak staggered backwards and fell to the ground, twitching. It had cracked its own skull. There was a way to kill them after all.
    The man with one arm swung his good one at the door, but not in a coordinated punch. It was just swinging the appendage for the sake of swinging it, possibly because it was frustrated, if they could feel frustration that is. The slower ones were dumb too, Daniel saw. Gunshots in the distance drew the infected people’s attention and they shambled off in that direction, leaving Daniel alone in just minutes. After making sure the coast was clear he climbed from the car slowly, looking for any threat that might have lingered. His eyes drew toward his dead friends, unable to prevent himself from looking. Greg was little more than a picked clean skeleton, a pool of