The Coalition: Part II The Lord Of The Living (COALITON OF THE LIVING Book 2) by Robert Mathis Kurtz

fist. Without thinking at all, he strode across the cramped room and began to swing the tool at the monster who was doing its best to sink its gnashing teeth into Oliver’s exposed face. He smashed the thing’s greasy skull again and again until it fell limp, sliding to the side to lay inert on the floor.
    Turning then to Jean, he saw that she had jammed her fist into her attacker’s mouth. Only her thick leather gloves protected her from what would be a lingering death if those filthy fangs penetrated the fabric. She was doing her best not to scream, thinking of course about the six-ton animals just on the opposite side of what could be, to it, a very flimsy barrier.
    Instead of striking out at the thing, and perhaps causing it to bite down with even more pressure, he put his left arm under its drooling chin in a choke-hold. Pulling back with all of his strength, he peeled it free of his lover.
    “Jesus,” she said.
    He saw her stand to her full height, draw a knife from its sheath on her thigh, and without wasting another split second, she jammed the eight-inch blade into the rotten brain that animated the goddamned thing. It went limp in Ron’s grasp and he allowed it to drop to the floor in a wet heap.
    Gasping for breath in the close quarters with the stench of the dead things all around them, the family stood weakly. Ron glanced at each, one after the other. “Are you bitten?” he finally asked.
    Oliver shook his head.
    Jean pulled her right glove off and examined her fingers and knuckles, turning her hand over and looking closely at the skin. Even a slight nick, she knew, would mean death. “I’m okay,” she said. He could hear the relief in her voice. And without word, he suddenly had his arms around the both of them, the ball peen hammer clattering to the hard, concrete floor that was stained with the bloody, stinking excretions from the pair of dead things.
    Only Oliver’s coughing brought him out of the sense of euphoria that was coursing through him , with the realization that his new family was safe. It was the stench of the deaders, he knew, and not some other toxin in the safe house. For the first time, he looked down at the things, seeing them for what they were.
    “I recognize this one,” Ron said, pointing at the one who had been gnawing on Jean’s gloved hand. “His name was Daniel Weller.” His eyes drifted to the one whose head he had caved in. It had been a teenaged girl, her jeans gone from blue to a tacky black, what was left of her yellow shirt hanging in wet tatters like the petals of a wilted flower around her waist. “I didn’t know her,” he said.
    “They must have come in here to escape from the deaders,” Oliver said, now that he had caught his breath and could speak. “They used your combination to get in, but they…well, they must have been bitten and died in here.”
    Jean was nodding in agreement. “We’ll have to get them out of here. I can hardly breathe. Is there a way to dump them out without opening the door?” she asked.
    Ron pointed to the open doorway that led to an even smaller room in his safe house. “Yeah,” he told her. “There’s a bolted window in there. I can open it and push them out. It leads into a little loading dock on the other side.” He snorted, trying to get the smell out of his nose. “Fuck ‘em,” he said. And without hesitating, he pointed to the feet of the man he’d known as Weller. “Get his ankles. I’ll take his shoulders. Let’s get them the hell out of here before we get sick.”
    In a few minutes they had dragged them into the other room. Opening the steel-shuttered window, Ron and Jean pushed the dead weight of the two corpses out into the shadowed, damp space that had once been the loading dock Ron had described. Zombies at the far side of the space out there saw the activity and moved toward them. But before they could take more than a few steps , they had finished their work and the dead things were left with