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Jacob shifts beside me, relaxed but ready. His voice comes easy, friendly enough to be insulting. “Nice setup you’ve got. We’ll just be on our way and avoid this little area of the city. Clearly you called dibs on it.”
The kid smirks. “Nah. I think we’ll take your guns and supplies and be on our way.”
Trish lets out a grunt. “Not a chance.”
He tilts his head. “Pretty sure it is. We’ve got guns pointed at all of you. You have none on us. So I think our odds are better than yours.”
Another infected drags itself into view behind us, jaw hanging, one hand missing. Its groan rolls down the street.
The girl with the pistol flinches. Her finger tightens on the trigger.
One breath away.
Lyla tsks, and the smile that slides over her face belongs in a nightmare. “Why don’t you come over here and see if they can pull the trigger before I slit your throat?”
Leave it to Lyla to escalate things with an invitation to murder.
The kid’s grin falters.
Then a gunshot cracks from above.
The pavement explodes near Clair’s boot.
Clair flinches behind me, and every muscle in my body turns to wire. I pull her closer to my back.
The dead answer immediately.
Groans swell from every direction.
Windows rattle with the sound. The infected from the alley drag themselves faster, awakened by gunfire and fresh prey. Somewhere to our left, a body slams against the inside of a storefront window hard enough to spiderweb the glass. Then another. The window bursts outward, and two infected tumble onto the sidewalk in a mess of limbs and black blood.
Jacob’s hand leaves his gun. Both palms lift higher. “Nobody needs to do that again.”
The kid snaps a glare upward. “I said wait!”
Clair’s hand closes around the back of my jacket.
She steps out from behind my shoulder.
Every muscle in my body locks.
“Clair,” Jacob says, low.
She doesn’t look at him.
Or me.
Her rifle stays slung across her shoulder. The crowbar hangs at her side. But her other hand slips into her jacket pocket and comes out holding one of the little taped bottles she rigged last night.
A small plastic bottle.
Cloudy. Dented. Wrapped in strips of gray duct tape, with something dark shifting inside when she turns it.
The little thing has the unmistakable wrongness of a hand grenade.
My heart stops.
The kid clocks it.
