Anno Zombus Year 1 (Book 1): January by Dave Rowlands Page B

enough stairs leading up lay behind it.  The girls took the new found guns and ammo to the roof first, and I ran to get the others while Junior held the door for us.
     
 
     
As I opened the door, drawing my sword, I walked into a massacre.  The landlady's corpse lay in the grip of an equally dead Dead.  She had a hole neatly in the middle of her forehead, and the older cop was firing wildly through tears of rage.  Running out of bullets he simply threw his revolver at the approaching Dead, then looked about for something he could use as a weapon.  Eventually he settled on a chair, then when that broke on his first victim, a chair leg.  The leg proved more effective, and I waded through a sea of Dead, slicing heads apart with my blade to stand at the policeman's back.  We moved towards the back of the station, under covering fire from Archer, Copper and The Twin, and the five of us regrouped in the hallway out the back.  The older cop was breathing heavily, face flushed.
     
 
     
“Go.”  He ordered us.  “I'll buy you some time.”  He hefted his chair leg.  The Dead were pounding on the door.  Individually weak, sure, but this many was easily the rotting equivalent of an ocean, and would wear down mountains given enough time and inclination.  They definitely had the inclination, and, already Dead, had all the time in the world.  The door was already shaking more with each surge.  It would not hold long.
     
 
     
We ran past Junior, who closed and locked the door as we ascended the stairs, nearly falling over each other in our haste.  Copper spotted that the girls had found the weapons, and smiled.  He mentioned that those had been confiscated from a compound a few kilometres north-east of here, some cult or other that had committed mass suicide several years before.  This had happened before his time, but his partner liked to tell stories about the good old days.
     
 
     
Looking over the edge of the roof, we saw a massive group of Dead.  More than I had seen yet in any one place, easily several hundred of them.  Apocalypse Girl pointed one out to me, then another.  They were wearing the same prison uniform that the bandits who had attacked the commune had been.  Junior let out a low whistle.  There were an awful lot of Dead prisoners down there.  A yell of pain from below ceased our procrastination, and we leaped from the roof of the police station to that of the Greyhound barely half a metre below it.  Junior landed badly, injuring his knee and nearly falling off into the crowd.  He caught himself on my ankle just as his legs went over the edge.  As I was still kneeling it only barely impeded my balance, and he and I together pulled him to safety.
     
 
     
We pried open the roof-top emergency hatch and lowered ourselves down one at a time.  Apocalypse Girl and I decided, upon surveying the scene, that it would be impossible for the bus to start moving with this horde surrounding us, so we figured someone should be up top clearing the path of the Dead with these shiny (dusty) new (old) machine guns.  The ammo crate had easily several thousand rounds contained within.  Archer looked at the weapons closely and laughed.  It turned out he had smuggled these very guns out when he had left the army following the Vietnam war.  Looking them over, he judged them fit for service, and showed Copper how they were used.
     
 
     
Up they went, and we heard scratching, dragging, clunking sounds as they set up the guns.  Moments later the pair opened up on the Dead directly ahead of the Greyhound.  Junior shouted with glee and started the engine.  A moment later the rooftop gunners had cleared a swath of Dead in front more than the width of the bus, and three times its length and we began to move.  A bumpy ride to begin with, as we had to roll over the corpses of a couple of hundred Dead, but once we got rolling we ploughed into the wall of Dead ahead, plunging through into the freedom