Undead Rain (Book 3): Lightning (Fighting the Living Dead) by Shaun Harbinger Page A

it dried, some fresh. He grinned at us.
    “Run!” I shouted. I turned and splashed toward the elevators as fast as I could.
    When I reached the elevators, I took a left turn toward the main stairs. If I had turned right, I would have hit the locked access door, and I wasn’t sure if I would have time to swipe my card through the lock before Vess caught up with us.
    But when I barged through the swing doors, I realized my mistake; the stairs were swarming with zombies, probably the ones that had been driven here by the sprinklers. I tried to halt my forward momentum but barreled into an undead woman dressed in a lab coat. She snarled at me and tried to bite my face. I pushed her away with my bat, wincing at the fetid smell that seeped from her decaying flesh.
    Sam came through the door and started swinging his bat. I heard the dense wood make contact with rotten flesh as zombies began falling onto the stairs.
    There were too many zombies for us to fight our way through, and Vess must be right behind us. I backed out through the doors into the corridor and turned to face Vess. He wasn’t there. He was running toward the access door, where Jax was desperately sliding her card through the lock, her blue eyes wide as she watched Vess get closer.
    For some reason, she had turned right where we had turned left.
    The doors mercifully opened. Jax ran through. The doors closed before Vess reached them.
    Through the glass, I could see Jax look over her shoulder, slowing her pace as she realized Vess hadn’t made it through the door. She made it to the end of the corridor before she winced, grabbing her right arm and doubling over just as she had in the lab. She leaned against the wall, grimacing.
    I was sure Vess was going to come back this way. We had no chance to get to Jax, but the emergency stairs door was on her side of the access door. If Johnny or Tanya could come up those stairs, they could get Jax to safety.
    I hit the button on the walkie-talkie. “Jax is in trouble.”
    “Johnny is already on his way,” Tanya replied. “As soon as he saw her heading for that door, he was out of here and running into the building.”
    The doors behind us swung open and the zombies came shuffling through, moaning and reaching for us. We backed away toward the elevators. I shot a glance over my shoulder, preparing myself for when Vess finally turned around and came for us.
    But he didn’t do that. After watching Jax for a moment, he climbed up into an air vent.
    “Oh, fuck,” I said, “he’s going to come out on the other side of the door.”
    Jax was still leaning against the wall in obvious pain. She slid down the wall, clutching her stomach. She was helpless.
    An air vent on the other side of the access door smashed open and Vess jumped down into the corridor, his feet splashing the water on the floor.
    Seeing that he was on the same side of the door as her, Jax tried to crawl away.
    Vess walked forward toward her as if he had all the time in the world.
    The emergency stairs door burst open between them and Johnny appeared, Desert Eagle in his hands. He pointed it at Vess and shot.
    Vess went down, falling backward into the water and lying still.
    As the zombies advanced, we backed up past the elevators and into the corridor Jax had taken when I had stupidly headed for the zombie-infested main stairs.
    “We might as well go this way,” I told Sam and Doctor Colbert. “The zombies are blocking the elevators now.” The threat from Vess seemed to be over. Now all we had to do was get to those emergency stairs and out of the building. We could figure out later how to get to Apocalypse Island.
    We turned and started heading for the access door. Through the glass in the door, I could see Johnny carefully approaching Vess’s unmoving body, the Desert Eagle shaking a little in his hands. Beyond him, Jax was sitting in the water on the floor, her face ghostly white. Her eyes were shut tight, her features twisted with pain. If her