“Your house locked?”
“No.”
“Which one is it?”
“Pink with white trim. Wreath on the front door.”
Maggie and Spitz headed into the school.
Ethan started to turn away but Kate grabbed him, her hands cold on the back of his neck. She pulled him toward her and kept pulling until their lips touched, and then she was kissing him and he was letting it happen.
She said, “Be careful,” and disappeared through the door.
Ethan looked at Hecter.
The abbies were howling.
“Two blocks,” Ethan said. “We can make it.”
They ran through the schoolyard, between picnic tables, into an open playing field, heading straight for the fence.
Ethan glanced back, saw movement in the street behind them—pale forms on all fours.
With the shotgun slung across his shoulder, he put two hands on the fence and leapt over the top, hit the ground running on the other side.
Streaked into an intersection.
Right—clear.
Left—four abbies en route, still several blocks away.
Halfway down the block, an abby broke through the glass of a front window and charged Ethan.
“Keep running!” he screamed at Hecter, then stopped, squared up, and racked a fresh shell.
Hecter blitzed by and Ethan put the monster down with a head shot.
He chased after Hecter, and as they reached the last intersection before Maggie’s house, it occurred to him that he never asked what her car looked like. There were loads of them on this block, and two parked on the curb in front of Maggie’s place.
Abbies appeared straight ahead, coming toward them from Main Street, one block away, and Ethan looked back just in time to see a half dozen round the corner two blocks back near the school.
He and Hecter covered the last thirty feet through Maggie’s yard.
Up the steps, onto the covered porch.
Jerked open the screen door.
Abbies screaming.
Converging.
Hecter beginning to lose his grip.
Ethan turned the doorknob, put his shoulder into the door, and rushed inside.
“Lock the door!” Ethan yelled as Hecter stumbled inside. “Stand halfway up the staircase and shoot the shit out of anything that gets in.”
“Where are you going?”
“Car keys.”
Ethan doubled up the stairs.
Screams audible through the walls.
At the top he turned right and raced toward the closed door at the end of the hall.
Smashed through without slowing.
Yellow walls, white crown molding.
Soft curtains, drawn.
A terrycloth robe draped over the back of a chair.
A big, pillowy bed, neatly made.
Stack of Jane Austen novels and an incense burner on the bedside table.
The cold air still redolent of fragrant smoke.
Maggie’s haven.
Ethan hurried to the bedside table, pulled open the drawer.
Downstairs, the sound of glass breaking.
Wood splintering.
Snarling.
Hecter yelled something as Ethan shoved his arm toward the back of the drawer, felt his fingers graze the keys.
A shotgun blast followed.
Abbies screaming.
Hecter shouting, “Oh God!”
Shuck-shuck as he racked another slug.
Boom.
Tight squeeze.
He climbed up onto the lip of the bathtub and looked out the window into a small backyard, fenced and empty.
The staircase creaked, the abbies coming.
Out in the hall, there was a great collision, like something had crashed at full speed into one of the doors.
Ethan stepped back down into the bathroom and grabbed the shotgun.