Far down the hall, Dault was yelling for help, begging for someone to help him. No one seemed to.

  Dahlia kept herself pressed against the door. There were no locks on the bathroom doors. There were no other exits. Behind her on the floor were three things. A dead girl who had been every bit as fierce as the two attacking the door. A cell phone that had seemed to try to tell her that something was wrong with the world.

  And the knife.

  Dad’s knife.

  Just lying there.

  Almost within reach.

  She looked at it as the door shuddered and shuddered. She thought about what was happening. People acting crazy. People—go on, she told herself, say it—eating people. Marcy had been bitten. Marcy had gone into some kind of shock and seemed to stop breathing. No. She had stopped breathing. Then Marcy had opened her eyes and gone all bitey.

  As much as Dahlia knew this was insane and impossible, she knew there was a name for what was happening. Not a name that belonged to TV and movies and games anymore. A name that was right here. Close enough to bite her.

  She looked down at Marcy as if the corpse could confirm it. And … maybe it did. Nothing Dahlia had done to the girl had worked. Not until she made her fall down and smash her skull. Not until Marcy’s brain had been damaged.

  All of those facts tumbled together like puzzle pieces that were trying to force themselves into a picture. A picture that had that name.

  Began with a z.

  “Aim for the head,” whispered Dahlia, and her voice was thick with tears. “Oh God, oh God, oh God.”

  Tammy and Joe kept slamming into the door. The knife was still there. Very good blade. And Dahlia was very strong. She knew how to put her weight into a punch. Or a stab.

  “… God …”

  When she realized that she had to let go of the door to grab the knife, it changed something inside of her. She waited until the next bang on the door, waited for them to pull back to hit it again, then she let go and dove for the knife, scooped it up as the door slammed inward, spun, met their charge.

  Tammy, smaller and faster, came first.

  Dahlia kicked her in the stomach. Not a good kick, but solid. Tammy jerked to a stop and bent forward. Dahlia swung the knife as hard as she could and buried the point in the top of the girl’s skull. In that spot where babies’ skulls are soft. The blade went in with a wet crunch. Tammy dropped as quickly and suddenly as if Dahlia had thrown a switch. One minute zombie, next minute dead.

  That left Joe.

  A freshman boy. Average for his age. As tall as Dahlia.

  Not quite in her weight class.

  She tore the knife free, grabbed him by the shirt with her other hand, swung him around into the sinks, forced him down and … stab. She put some real mass into it.

  Joe died.

  Dahlia staggered back and let him slide to the floor.

  Outside she heard Dault screaming as he ran in and out of rooms, through openings in the accordion walls, trying to shake the pack of pursuers.

  Dahlia caught a glimpse of her own face in the row of mirrors. Fat girl with crazy hair and bloodstains on her clothes. Fat girl with wild eyes.

  Fat girl with a knife.

  Despite everything—despite the insanity of it, the horror of it, the knowledge that things were all going to slide down the toilet in her world—Dahlia Allgood smiled at herself.

  Then she lumbered over to the door, tore it open, and yelled to Dault.

  “Over here!”

  He saw her and almost stopped. She was bloody, she had that knife. “W-what—?”

  “Get in here,” said Dahlia raising the blade. “I’ll protect you.”

  Yeah.

  She was smiling as she said that.

  This story was written at the request of George R. Romero, the writer-director of Night of the Living Dead, and the godfather of the entire modern zombie genre. George was a friend and colleague, and we co-edited an anthology, Nights of the Living Dead (St. Martins, 2017), which was released just five days before he passed. George had asked me to take a character from Fall of Night and bring him into the world of his landmark 1968 movie, and this is that story.

  Lone Gunman

  -1-

  The soldier lay dead.

  Mostly.

  But not entirely.

  And how like the world that was.

  Mostly dead. But not entirely.

  -2-

  He was buried.

  Not under six feet of dirt. There might have been some comfort in that. Some closure. Maybe even a measure of justice.

  He wasn’t buried like that. Not in a graveyard, either. Certainly not in Arlington, where his dad would have wanted to see him laid to rest. And not in that small cemetery back home in California, where his grandparents lay under the marble and the green cool grass.

  The soldier was in some shit-hole of a who-cares town on the ass-end of Fayette County in Pennsylvania. Not under the ground. Not in a coffin.

  He was buried under the dead.

  Dozens of them.

  Hundreds. A mountain of bodies. Heaped over and around him. Crushing him down, smothering him, killing him.

  Not with teeth, though. Not tearing at him with broken fingernails. That was something, at least. Not much. Not a fucking lot. And maybe there was some kind of cosmic joke in all of this. He was certain of that much. A killer of men like him killed by having corpses piled on top of him. A quiet, passive death that had a kind of bullshit poetry attached to it.

  However, Sam Imura was not a particularly poetic man. He understood it, appreciated it, but did not want to be written into it. No thanks.

  He lay there, thinking about it. Dying. Not caring that this was it, that this was the actual end.

  Knowing that thought to be a lie. Rationalization at best. His stoicism trying to give his fears a last hand job. No, it’s okay, it’s a good death.

  Except that was total bullshit. There were no good deaths. Not one. He had been a soldier all his life, first in the regular army, then in Special Forces, and then in covert ops with a group called the Department of Military Sciences, and then freelance as top dog of a team of heavily armed problem solvers who ran under the nickname the Boy Scouts. Always a soldier. Pulling triggers since he was a kid. Taking lives so many times and in so many places that Sam had stopped counting. Idiots keep a count. Ego-inflated assholes keep count. A lot of his fellow snipers kept count. He didn’t. He was never that crazy.

  Now he wished he had. He wondered if the number of people he had killed with firearms, edged-weapons, explosives, and his bare hands equaled the number of corpses under which he was buried.

  There would be a strange kind of justice in that, too. And poetry. As if all of the people he’d killed were bound to him, and that they were all fellow passengers on a black ship sailing to Valhalla. He knew that was a faulty metaphor but fuck it. He was dying under a mountain of dead ghouls who had been trying to eat him a couple of hours ago. So … yeah, fuck poetry and fuck metaphors and fuck everything.

  Sam wondered if he was going crazy.

  He could build a case for it.

  “No.…”

  He heard himself say that. A word. A statement. But even though it had come from him, Sam didn’t exactly know what he meant by it. No, he wasn’t crazy? No, he wasn’t part of some celestial object lesson? No, he wasn’t dying?

  “No.”

  He said it again, taking ownership of the word. Owning what it meant.

  No.

  I’m not dead.

  No, I’m not dying.

  He thought about those concepts and rejected them.

  “No,” he growled. And now he understood what he was trying to tell himself and this broken, fucked up world.

  No. I’m not going to die.

  Not here. Not now. Not like this. No motherfucking way. Fuck that, fuck these goddamn flesh-eating pricks, fuck the universe, fuck poetry two times, fuck God, fuck everything.

  Fuck dying.

  “No,” he said once more, and now he heard himself in that word. The soldier, the survivor, the killer.

  The dead hadn’t killed him, and they had goddamn well tried. The world hadn’t killed him, not after all these years. And the day hadn’t killed him. He was sure it was nighttime by now, and he wasn’t going to let that kill him, either.

  And so, he tried to move.

  Easier said than done. The bodies of the dead had been torn by automatic gunfire as the survivors of the Boy Scouts had fought to help a lady cop, Dez Fox, and some other adults rescue several busloads of kids. They’d all stopped at the Sapphire Foods distribution warehouse to stock up before heading south to a rescue station. The dead had come hunting for their own food and they’d come in waves. Thousands of them. Fox and the Boy Scouts had fought their way out.

  Kind of.

  Sam had gone down under a wave of them and Gipsy, one of the shooters on his team, had tried to save him, hosing the ghouls with magazine after magazine. The dead fell and Sam had gone down beneath them. No one had come to find him, to dig him out.

  He heard the bus engines roar. He heard Gipsy scream, though he didn’t know if it was because the hungry bastards got her, or because she failed to save him. Impossible to say. Impossible to know unless he crawled out and looked for her body. Clear enough, though, to reason that she’d seen him fall and thought that he was dead. He should have been, but that wasn’t an absolute certainty. He was dressed in Kevlar, with reinforced arm and leg pads, spider-silk gloves, a ballistic combat helmet with unbreakable plastic visor. There was almost no spot for teeth to get him. And, besides, Gipsy’s gunfire and Sam’s own had layered him with actual dead. Or whatever the new adjective was going to be for that. Dead was no longer dead. There was walking and biting dead and there was dead dead.

  Sam realized that he was letting his mind drift into trivia. A defense mechanism. A fear mechanism.

  “No,” he said again. That word was his lifeline, and it was his lash, his whip.

  No.

  He tried to move. Found that his right hand could move almost ten inches. His feet were good, too, but there were bodies across his knees and chest and head. No telling how high the mound was, but they were stacked like Jenga pieces. The weight was oppressive, but it hadn’t actually crushed the life out of him. Not yet. He’d have to be careful moving so as not to crash the whole stinking mass on them down and really smash the life out of him.

  It was a puzzle of physics and engineering, of patience and strategy. Sam had always prided himself on being a thinker rather than a feeler. Snipers were like that. Cold, exacting, precise. Patient.

  Except …

  When he began to move, he felt the mass of bodies move, too. At first, he thought it was simple cause and effect, a reaction of limp weight to gravity and shifting support. He paused and listened. There was no real light, no way to see. He knew that he had been unconscious for a while and so this had to be twilight, or later. Night. In the blackness of the mound he had nothing but his senses of touch and hearing to guide every movement of hand or arm or hip. He could tell when some movement he made caused a body, or a part of a body, to shift.

  But then there was a movement up to his right. He had not moved his right arm or shoulder. He hadn’t done anything in that quadrant of his position. All of his movements so far had been directed toward creating a space for his legs and hips to move because they were the strongest parts of him and could do more useful work longer than his arms or shoulders. The weight directly over his chest and what rested on his helmet had not moved at all.

  Until they did.

  There was a shift. No, a twitch. A small movement that was inside the mound. As if something moved. Not because of him.

  Because it moved.

  Oh, Jesus, he thought and for a moment he froze solid, not moving a finger, hardly daring to breathe, as he listened and felt for another twitch.

  He waited five minutes. Ten? Time was meaningless.

  There.

  Again.

  Another movement. Up above him. Not close, but not far away, either. How big was the mound? What was the distance? Six feet from his right shoulder? Six and a half feet from his head? Something definitely moved.

  A sloppy, heavy movement. Artless, clumsy. But definite. He could hear the rasp of clothing against clothing, the slither-sound of skin brushing against skin. Close. So close. Six feet was nothing. Even with all of the dead limbs and bodies in the way.

  Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.

  Sam did not believe in Jesus. Or God. Or anything. That didn’t matter now. No atheists in foxholes. No atheists buried under mounds of living dead ghouls. There had to be someone up there, in Heaven or Hell or whatever the fuck was there. Some drunk, malicious, amused, vindictive cocksucker who was deliberately screwing with him.

  The twitch came again. Stronger, more definite, and …

  Closer.

  Shit. It was coming for him, drawn to him. By breath? By smell? Because of the movements he’d already made? Five feet now? Slithering like a snake through the pile of the dead. Worming its way toward him with maggot slowness and maggot persistence. One of them. Dead, but not dead enough.

  Shit. Shit. Shit. Jesus. Shit.

  Sam felt his heart beat like a hammer, like a drum. Too fast, too loud. Could the thing hear it? It was like machine gun fire. Sweat stung his blind eyes and he could smell the stink of his own fear and it was worse than the reek of rotting flesh, shit, piss, and blood that surrounded him.

  Get out. Get Out.

  He twisted his hip, trying to use his pelvis as a strut to bear the load of the oppressive bodies. The mass moved and pressed down, sinking into the space created as he turned sideways. Sam pulled his bottom thigh up, using the top one as a shield to allow movement. Physics and engineering, slow and steady wins the race. The sounds he was making were louder than the twitching, rasping noises. No time to stop and listen. He braced his lower knee against something firm. A back. And pushed. The body moved two inches. He pushed again and it moved six more, and suddenly the weight on his hip was tilting toward the space behind the body he’d moved. Jenga, he thought. I’m playing Jenga with a bunch of fucking corpses. The world is fucking insane.

  The weight on his helmet and shoulders shifted, too, and Sam pushed backward, fighting for every inch of new space, letting the weight that was on top of him slide forward and into where he’d been.

  There was a kind of ripple through the mass of bodies and Sam paused, afraid he was creating an avalanche. But that wasn’t it.

  Something was crawling on him. On his shoulder. He could feel the legs of some huge insect walking through the crevices of jumbled body parts and then onto his shoulder, moving with the slow patience of a tarantula. Nothing else could be that big. But this was Pennsylvania. Did they have tarantulas out here? He wasn’t sure. There were wolf spiders out here, some orb-weavers and black widows, but they were small in comparison to the thing that was crawling toward his face. Out in California there were plenty of those big hairy monsters. Not here. Not here.

  One slow, questing leg of the spider touched the side of his jaw, in the gap between the plastic visor and the chinstrap. It was soft, probing him, rubbing his skin. Sam gagged and tried to turn away, but there was no room. Then a second fat leg touched him. A third. Walking across his chin toward his panting mouth.

  And that’s when Sam smelled the thing.

  Tarantulas did not have much of a smell. Not unless they were rotting in the desert sun.

  This creature stank. It smelled like roadkill. It smelled like …

  Sam screamed.

  He knew, he understood what it was that crawled across his face. Not the fat legs of some great spider but the clawing, grasping fingers of a human hand. That was the slithering sound, the twitching. One of them was buried with him. Not dead. Not alive. Rotting and filled with a dreadful vitality, reaching past the bodies, reaching through the darkness toward the smell of meat. Of food.

  Clawing at him. He could feel the sharp edges of fingernails now as the fingers pawed at his lips and nose.

  Sam screamed and screamed. He kicked out as hard as he could, shoving, pressing, jamming with knees and feet. Hurting, feeling the improbably heavy corpses press him down, as if they, even in their final death, conspired to hold him prisoner until the thing whose hand had found him could bring teeth and tongue and appetite to what it had discovered.

  Sam wrestled with inhuman strength, feeling muscles bulge and bruise and strain, feeling explosions of pain in his joints and lower back as he tried to move all of that weight of death. The fingers found the corner of his mouth, curled, hooked, tried to take hold of him and rip.

  He dared not bite. The dead were filled with infection, with the damnable diseases that had caused all of this. Maybe he was already infected, he didn’t know, but if he bit one of those grublike fingers it was as sure as a bullet in the brain. Only much slower.

  “Fuck you!” he roared and spat the fingers out, turning his head, spitting into the darkness to get rid of any trace of blood or loose flesh. He wanted to vomit but there was no time, no room, no luxury even for that.

  And so, he went a little crazy.

  A lot crazy.

  All the way.

  -3-

  When the mountain of dead collapsed, it fell away from him, dozens of corpses collapsing down and then rolling the way he’d come, propelled by his last kicks, by gravity, by luck. Maybe helped along by the same drunk god who wanted more of the Sam Imura show. He found himself tumbling, too, bumping and thumping down the side of the mound, the jolts amplified by the lumpy body armor he wore. Kevlar stopped penetration of bullets, but it did not stop the foot-pounds of impact.

  He tried to get a hand out before he hit the pavement, managed it, but at the wrong part of his fall. He hit shoulder-first and slapped the asphalt a microsecond later. Pain detonated all through him. Everything seemed to hurt. The goddamn armor itself seemed to hurt.

  Sam lay there, gasping, fighting to breathe, staring through the fireworks display in his eyes, trying to see the sky. His feet were above him, one heel hooked over the throat of a teenage girl; the other in a gaping hole that used to be the stomach of a naked fat man. He looked at the dead. Fifty, sixty people at least in the mound. Another hundred scattered around, their bodies torn to pieces by the battle that had happened here. Some clearly crushed by the wheels of those buses. Dead. All of them dead, though not all of them still. A few of the crushed ones tried to pull themselves along even though hips and legs and spines were flattened or torn completely away. A six-year-old kid sat with her back to a chain link fence. No legs, one hand, no lower jaw. Near her was an Asian woman who looked like she might have been pretty. Nice figure, but her face had been stitched from lower jaw to hairline with eight overlapping bullet holes.