Arizona Afterwards - a Zombie novel

Chapter 43

Christ, Jay thought, he's not back five minutes and I'm already sighting down a rifle at the back of my brother’s head.  All because Dean was in the doorway, doing a fairly efficient job of getting in Jay's line of fire.  "Watch out," Jay shouted over the blare of the lyrics.  “Get out of the way!”

It was a dumb thing to say, and Jay knew it.  After all, where the hell did he really expect Dean to go?  From where he was standing, the doorway was nothing more than a narrow aperture in the wall, just about as big across as Dean himself.  He couldn’t see into the room from the angle he was at, and when he moved all he saw beyond his brother’s shape was cramped darkness.  When Dean did try and back out, if only a step or two, it gave Jay an opening to pump a round into one of the Zombie's chest and walk another higher up into the center of its face.

Then Dean leapt forward into the room and Jay took his finger off the trigger.

More glass shattered in the office, and when he rounded the corner Jay saw his brother standing over the body of a second Zombie, this one twitching a little and contributing its grey matter to the floor courtesy of a well-placed chair Dean still held in his hands.

Up until three seconds ago, Jay wouldn’t have thought a chair could take one of them out, but Dean was strong before this Zombie thing got in him and he was even stronger now.

Jay scanned the room and didn't see anything hostile, so when Beth poked her head in, he let her.

"Are you alright?" she asked Dean.

"I am."  Just like that, like he was reading the headlines out loud on a particularly slow news day.

“Be careful.  I just got you back.  If there’s a door that needs to be broken down, can we let the guy with the gun do the breaking, for a little while?”

Dean smiled and seemed to come back to himself.  “Sure thing Baby.  Sorry.”

She grinned too.  “You should be.”

Jay poked the Zombies with the end of the rifle.  They’d never played dead before and it appeared they weren’t doing it now, but he didn’t trust them just the same.  “What the Hell was that all about?”

“I don’t know.”  Dean’s voice was strange, and Jay looked over to watch his brother.  Only a couple of seconds had passed since Dean had been smiling.  Now he’d traded it in for a puzzled expression that Jay hadn't seen him use very often.  Dean wasn't a thinker, not habitually, and seeing him like that made Jay nervous enough to put his finger back on the trigger.  "You sure you're okay, man?"

Dean nodded.  "It's just strange, that's all.  Like Beth said before, these things aren't stupid.  Far from it.”

“I hear you,” Hattie said, her voice so short and sharp it made Jay jump.  He took his finger back off the trigger, just in case.  She turned around and lowered the volume of the music in the immediate area.  “So why didn't they jump us when they had the chance, is that what you’re thinking?  When our backs were turned, playing with this P.A. System.  You’d have to agree, we'd have been pretty good targets."

Beth reached out and touched the door Dean had broken down, then turned the handle.  It cranked around without a sound, a product of the well-oiled design the polish and materials hinted at.  Jay shook his head.  The Council had spent a pretty penny on this place.

"The door wasn't even locked,” Beth said.  “Were they just hiding, or lying in wait in here?"

Hattie frowned.  "If they were hiding, they weren’t doing a very good job of it.  Not if you consider the fact that they’ve got the whole city to hide in, if that's their game, and if they were going to ambush us they badly missed their chance."