Arizona Afterwards - a Zombie novel

Chapter 19

They were coming through the roof.  Jessup yanked Jay’s broken cell door open and dragged him out.  “Alright, time to go, I reckon.  Your shotgun’s reloaded, and I put a box of shells in that backpack of yours.  Go grab them and let’s get a move on.”

Jay did as he was told whilst over in Cell 1 Frank hadn’t budged, not even when one of the cheap ceiling tiles came crashing down on a desk in the other room.

“It’s okay,” Jay called from in there.  “They’re working hard, though.  I think that tile came down because they’ve loosened up part of the frame or something, but they aren’t in yet.”

“Just keep that gun pointed in the right direction.”

Jessup turned around and left the holding area.  He knew the smart thing, the ‘right’ thing to do would have been to put a round into Frank before he left, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.  He’d never liked zoos, and those ‘canned hunts’ that he’d read about in Newsweek a couple years ago made him sick too; bunch of rich people shooting a tiger as it stumbles out of some cage in the middle of nowhere.

If Jay was right, then Frank had killed already.  Jessup was positive that he’d kill again if given the chance, but that didn’t mean he was going to gun him down in a cell.

Not when he had better things to do.

“Right,” he said when he came back into the cop’s workspace.  Jay was peering up into the gap left by the fallen ceiling tile.  It was dusk, too dark outside to hope for daylight to stream down to show them if they had a breach.  In another couple of minutes the two of them would have to rely on their hearing and their reflexes alone.

And that’d be a feat.  Jessup knew for a fact that he was so deaf that Bev down at the diner had to repeat his order to him two or three times each morning, regardless of the fact that he usually ordered the same thing.  He’d have no chance of getting the jump on these things in the dark.

Jessup pulled a Maglight from the top drawer of the nearest desk and shone it out between the bars on the station’s front windows.  There were six or seven Zombies out there, clearly visible, but what worried him more was the predator flash of eyes further down the street.  He’d lived out here all of his life, driven roads at night where the only other illumination in the world was the moon and the stars and the shine of coyotes and tarantulas as they threw his own headlights back at him.  Jessup knew when a critter was looking at him.

 “We are about to have a whole lot of company,” he said, sliding the flashlight into the empty loop on his belt where he’d carried it while he was on the force.  “If we’re still here when they show up, we’ll wish we weren’t.”

Jay took his eyes away from the ceiling for a second.  “So what do we do?”

“Well, we’re going to bust Beth and Hattie and Nicole out of there, but we can’t do it tonight.  Those things are faster and stronger than we are, and something in my gut tells me that they’re going to be better able to see in the dark than we can.  We need to get out of here now.”

"Don’t forget about Dean."

Jessup swallowed hard.  "Dean.  We’ll get Dean too.  Of course."  When the words finally came out, they were too fast, and he wondered if he'd given himself away.

“Good.”  Jay nodded to himself and went back to aiming the shotgun at the ceiling, then said, “How?”

Jessup sighed.  He was hoping the kid would have had an idea, something they could work with.  He could hear the Zombie’s tearing away the roof,  the clatter of shingles on the sidewalk outside and, yes, just there and growing louder, the howls of more of them as the ones he’d spotted up the street rushed toward the source of the light.