And I was worried. Della, for all intents and purposes, could take care of herself. She grew up hard in the South Bronx and, despite just celebrating her sixty-fifth year, you didn't want to p.i.s.s her off. But all that aside, she was kind. She treated me like a son and she was the one who'd given us the down payment on our house. Despite having deep pockets from when her husband (Ricki's father) died on the railroad, you wouldn't have known it. She still did most of her shopping at flea markets and rummage sales.

"Della...where are you?" I said under my breath.

With the TV off, I could hear the almost claustrophobic silence of the house. I heard more shooting in the distance. I looked everywhere and saw nothing. Everything was in its place. I had no reason to suspect anything weird had happened...that was, until I peered out into the backyard and saw all the sheets flapping on the line.

I went outside.

I found a house slipper in the gra.s.s. Nothing else. No blood, no nothing.

I called Ricki. "I don't know where she is," I told her, leaving the slipper and TV out of it. "Everything looks fine. Maybe she's out."

Ricki was not convinced and I didn't blame her. But I'd done my bit and now it was time to leave. As much as I cared for Della, I didn't like the idea of leaving Ricki and Paul alone any longer than necessary. As I was getting ready to leave, I heard that gunfire again. And it was closer. Real close now. I went outside to my pick-up and stopped right on the sidewalk.

The dead were coming.

And not just the dead but the men fighting them.

It was an awful cacophony of rifle fire and screams, vehicles squealing their brakes and men shouting on bullhorns. Overhead, a chopper buzzed the neighborhood.

Driver ants, is what I thought.

I'd seen a program on TV. South American driver ants cutting a killing swath through the jungle. Trees and bushes stripped, animals eaten down to bones. Nothing escaped them, not even men who were stupid enough to get in their way.

The dead were coming on in much the same way.

They were coming from the direction of Downtown.

If I had to reduce it to military terms, I would have said the walking dead I had thus far seen were reconnaissance units and now here was the main force. There were literally hundreds of zombies pushing forward, a huge and voracious machine of destruction. They overflowed the street, they filled lawns and sidewalks and boulevards. People-normal people-were pushed before the wave of the dead, screaming and crying out as the hissing army bore down on them. I saw zombies eating people. I saw zombies eating each other. I saw two women who were running ahead of them fall and disappear amongst a flurry of clutching hands and swarming bodies. Blood was flowing and gathering in a heaving, stinking mist over the streets. And still the killing and atrocities continued.

Out on the Avenue, people tried to run cars right through the crowds of zombies, to blast through their numbers. But that was a mess. They smashed into one another, into zombies, popping curbs and slamming into houses. The dead were caught in the traffic pile-up, their own crushed-but still animate-bodies becoming ramparts until that forced the traffic to stop. And then, of course, it got worse as cars and trucks backed-up, trying to escape the snafu and bashing into one another, tangling things up worse. The zombies were the sharks in the confusion and chaos, of course. Like some reaction force of the living dead, they thronged in, throwing themselves against windshields. Battering themselves b.l.o.o.d.y, thrashing and biting and forcing their way into cars, feeding on flesh and burying screaming people in their ma.s.ses.

A jacked-up four-wheel drive Chevy Blazer with balloon tires came screeching in, smashing zombies to pulp. In the cab and in the bed, men with shotguns and hunting rifles kept shooting into the legions of blood-maddened ghouls. There was so much confusion and screaming and dogs barking you could barely hear the reports of their guns. Zombies were dropping, but never enough. It was like some pipe had burst and Dunwoodie was being drowned in an ocean of the undead.

Finally, even the four-wheeler was overrun as zombies got into the cab. The driver and his shotgunner were yanked out and offered to biting mouths and tearing fingers.

The zombies got up into the bed, too, and the men dove for freedom and were instantly inundated, shrieking as they were dismembered and torn to shreds.

One of the zombie hunters escaped the crushing swarm. He had produced a machete and was frantically chopping at the dead, but, he too, was overwhelmed. I saw a man stumble free. A zombie that was nearly split in half hung from his belly by its teeth.

I wanted to help, but there was nothing I could do. There were too many and they were pouring forward in a tide. If selfishness is the key to survival, then I was selfish. I went to my pick-up, refusing to watch the slaughter any longer, my guts shriveling like fruit in a drought. This was it, I thought. This was really it. Civilization was falling. The dead were rising. They were gutting society, making more and more of themselves. And if it was this bad here, I didn't want to think of the slaughterhouses that Manhattan and Los Angles and Chicago had become...or the Bronx, which was just minutes away.

For one frantic insane moment, I couldn't find my keys.

They weren't in my pockets.

They weren't in the truck.

I had left them in the house.

Jesus.

It was a habit of mine built up by many years of repet.i.tion. I always set my keys on the table in the foyer of Della's house. I ran inside and they were right where I'd left them. As I got outside, the dead were converging. They were no more than fifty feet away. I could smell their putrescent stink which was hot and seething. My heart banged against my ribs as I dashed for the pick-up and came around the side and two zombies were waiting for me.

The first was a heavy woman in a flowered bathrobe.

The other was a priest. He still had his Roman collar on, his eyes fixed and glaring, his mouth open like that of a rattlesnake ready to strike. They both came at me simultaneously, moving with slow and economical strides, but persistent, endlessly persistent.

I didn't have time to aim.

I put two rounds into the woman to drive her back and I turned and fired twice right into the priest's face. The bullets split him from chin to scalp and his face literally fell off. Somehow, the bullets had not punctured his brain. Maybe they were deflected by the skull itself and maybe my aim was poor (it was).

His mold-speckled fingers brushed against my shirt and I jammed the muzzle of the Browning right up to his left eye and jerked the trigger. His skull blew apart with a grisly splashing sound...then the woman grabbed me. I spun from her grip seconds before she would have bitten into my shoulder. I cracked her in the face with the b.u.t.t of the Browning which made her stumble back a few steps. Then I jumped up and drop-kicked her, slamming one foot into her sternum and driving her to the pavement. It was a wild and insane thing to do-something from a f.u.c.king Chuck Norris movie-but it was the first thing that entered my mind.

I threw myself in the cab of the pick-up and turned it over.

It jumped in my mind at that point-the wall of zombies was twenty feet away-that this was the part in every cheap-a.s.s horror movie I'd ever seen that the car or truck won't turn over. I felt a white blossom of fear in my chest at the very idea. But she cranked and I threw her into reverse just as five or six zombies that stumbled along in front of the pack reached the truck.

They slammed their hands against the windows.

Two of them climbed up on the hood.

I stomped on the accelerator and squealed out into the street, hitting a parked Volvo and throwing my riders.

I heard their fingers fumbling at the door handles just as I threw the locks. Then one of them with a face of septic rot became more enterprising: he smashed his head into the pa.s.senger side window like a hammer, his skull coming apart like a juicy, rotten plum and spraying the window with gore until it spider-webbed out with cracks and fell in.

I threw the truck into drive just as the undead army were seconds from converging.

But my other rider wasn't letting go. He was forcing himself in through the window and I pulled the Browning and drilled three slugs into the mush of his face until his head exploded in a spray of gray matter, bone chips, and strands of coa.r.s.e hair.

Another had climbed into the bed and I jammed on the brakes, throwing him up against the cab. I stomped the accelerator and he was thrown back, flipping over the tailgate and into the street.

And then I was driving.

Driving like a bat out of h.e.l.l, shaking and sweating.

end.