He lifted his flamethrower as the zombie shambled toward the door. He waited until he could read the name on the man’s tag—RICHARD—and then aimed at his chest. Just before he hit the trigger, Josh realized what the man was carrying was a hand. Veins and tendons dripped from the wrist where it had been broken from the arm, and on one of the fingers was a ring.
He has both of his hands, Josh thought as he stared at the zombie. That means that one belongs to someone else.
The man dropped the hand, and Josh stared at it. Something about the ring was familiar to him, although he couldn’t place it. It looked like the body of a snake coiled around the finger, its head biting its tail to form a circle.
“Get down!”
Firecracker’s voice startled Josh. He looked up just in time to see the zombie reaching for him. Instinctively falling to his knees, he covered his head with his hands as Firecracker’s flamethrower roared into action. The zombie wheeled back, shrieking.
“Close the door,” Firecracker said. “Roast him.”
Josh started to do that, then saw the hand again. Trying not to think about it, he reached out and grabbed it, flinging it outside the room. Firecracker cried out in disgust. “What are you doing?”
Josh slammed the door and pressed his back against it as the zombie tried to get out by ramming his body again and again into the door. Josh could feel the heat from the flames passing through the metal, and every time the zombie hit the door, he jolted Josh forward. But slowly the hits became less and less forceful, until finally they stopped completely.
After checking to make sure the zombie was really dead, Josh turned back to the hand. He’d been staring at it while holding the zombie back but had come no closer to figuring out why the ring triggered something in his brain. He knelt and reached for the hand.
“Don’t touch it,” Firecracker warned. “It’s got blood all over it. You get that in you and you might as well be that guy,” he added, gesturing at the closed door. Smoke was seeping out from underneath it and filling the hallway. It burned Josh’s eyes.
“I don’t have any cuts on me,” Josh said as he reached out and pulled the ring from the finger. It came off easily, and he wiped it on his jeans. “I’ve seen this ring before,” he said. “I just can’t remember where.”
A muffled scream came from somewhere else in the building, interrupting his thoughts. “Charlie?” Firecracker asked.
Josh shook his head. “No.” He put the ring in his pocket, and he and Firecracker ran down the hall. Josh completely forgot about checking the rooms until they started to turn the corner into the next corridor. He stopped. “We should go back,” he said to Firecracker.
The scream came again, this time louder and more frenzied. Josh looked down the hall just as someone rounded the corner, running straight for them. Whoever it was moved much more quickly than zombies usually did, with a rolling gait that carried the body forward in weird zigzagging steps.
For a moment Josh was afraid it was Charlie, but in the dim light it was impossible to tell. Then two more figures came around the corner. He saw flames flickering at the ends of two torches and knew the figures were Charlie and Scrawl. Which meant that the screaming figure was a z.
The zombie kept coming. Then, when it saw Josh and Firecracker standing with flamethrowers pointed at it, it stopped. It started to turn, but Charlie and Scrawl were closing in from the other side. The zombie raised its arms as if to cover its face with its hands, and that’s when Josh saw that its right arm ended in a stump.
“On three!” he heard Scrawl shout. “One! Two! Three!”
All four of them fired their weapons at the zombie. It was consumed in a fireball that immediately blackened the walls and ceiling. Flames whipped around the zombie like a tornado. The creature stood perfectly still for a few seconds, then collapsed into a pile like burning leaves. Josh and Firecracker stood on one side of it, looking through the fire at Charlie and Scrawl.
When the flames died down, Charlie ran to Josh. “She knew,” she said. “She knew we were going to kill her. I’ve never seen one run away before.” She choked back tears. “Josh, it was horrible.”
Josh reached into his pocket and removed the ring. “Have you seen this before?” he asked Charlie.
She took the ring and looked at it. Then her hand began to shake.
“Freya,” she whispered. “It’s Freya’s.”
23
“There are eight left,” Josh said as they pounded down the stairs to the second floor. He clenched his fist, feeling Freya’s ring press against his palm. Rage burned in his chest. He looked at his watch. “Forty-five minutes left,” he called out. They had wasted time, and it was his fault. After they torched Freya, he had fallen apart, cursing Clatter and screaming in pain and anger over what his friend had been turned into. The others, not knowing what to do, had let him yell it out.
Now he was filled with new strength. Eight z’s stood between him and Clatter, and he was determined to find them. He strode down the hallway, abandoning the two-to-a-side plan and kicking in every door he saw. The second floor held more examination rooms, as well as what seemed to be offices for the doctors. They found the next zombie in one of those, standing by the wall and staring dumbly up at a framed diploma, like he was trying to read it. Josh noted the name on the z’s tag—PAUL—before giving Scrawl the okay to torch him.
They found two more zombies on the floor, a woman named Gwen sitting in a kind of living room staring at an old broken television set, and a man named Virgil hiding in a closet. They each went down with barely a fight.
“I’ve got to say, these meatbags have been pretty tame,” Firecracker remarked as they regrouped at the head of the last flight of stairs. “I’ve played holo-z’s meaner than these ones.”
“He’s saving the worst for last,” said Scrawl. “I guarantee it. Probably the ones who’ve been turned the longest. They’re totally gone. Nothing inside but pure instinct to kill.”
“Whatever they are, they’re still people,” Charlie said, shooting Firecracker a dirty look. “Remember that.”
“Okay,” Josh said. He checked the fuel level on his flamethrower. “We’re low on firepower and we’ve got five more zombies standing between us and walking out of here. I don’t know what we’re going to find down there, but whatever it is, I’m not going down without a fight.”
“I’m with you,” Scrawl said.
“Me too,” Charlie agreed.
Firecracker nodded. “Let’s do it,” he said.
“What’s our time?” Scrawl asked Josh.
“Twenty-five minutes,” Josh answered. “None to waste.”
They went down the stairs. The first floor was different from the others. There were no examination rooms, no offices. In fact, it looked like a hotel lobby—one that had been bombed over and over again. The walls were covered with water-stained wallpaper that hung in ribbons where it had fallen away. The dusty old furniture had nearly disintegrated into piles of sawdust and scraps of velvet. A huge chandelier that had once hung in the asylum’s grand foyer lay on the marble floor, its shattered crystals sparkling like diamonds in the moonlight that managed to find its way through the boarded-up windows.
“This is the only floor the families ever saw,” Scrawl said as he surveyed the ruins. “The administrators wanted them to think this was more like a country club than a mental hospital.”
“So where do we go?” Charlie asked.
“That way is blocked,” said Josh, looking down the hallway running south. The ceiling there had caved in, and the corridor was impassable. “It looks like we don’t have a choice.”