Free Shades of Gray by C. Dulaney

swing inward, and three security bars were anchored, to be slid into place once the door was shut.
    I topped the stairs and took a right, throwing a hand up behind me in greeting to Abby, who was stationed in the watchtower to my left, and headed toward Jonah in the right watchtower. These two stations flanked the gate. There were two more on the left and right ends of the wall, close to the river. The watchtowers were little more than platforms with roofs, enough to protect the person on duty from the weather. Inside the station itself the shooter had his own gun bench and room for a cooler or whatever else he might want to bring with him to help pass the time.
    “Hey, Jonah,” I said and stepped inside, the roof giving me a false sense of cover from the zombies reaching up at me.
    Granted, they were twenty feet down, but it was still unnerving as hell. Over a dozen bloody, raging mouths all crying out at the same time, hands torn from months of ripping and destroying stretched high. Maybe unnerving isn’t the word for that. Demoralizing suits that situation better I think. At least to me.
    “Hope you’re gonna shut those things up. The noise is startin’ to get on my nerves,” he replied before taking a slow drag of his cigarette. I grinned; it was hard not to when talking to this guy.
    “You think I’d be up at this time just to come out here and bullshit with you?”
    He chuckled and rocked in his seat, having kicked his boots up onto the ledge and crossed them at the ankles. “Touché.” He gave me a lazy salute and looked past to watch Michael and Mia climb the staircase. “She still on your ass?”
    I waved the question away with one hand and propped my bow in the corner. “It’s nothing to worry about. Just a disagreement between old friends.”
    I shrugged the quiver off my arm, letting it fall gently next to my bow. I reached my hand out for his cigarette, took a drag once it was offered, and watched Michael set up directly above the gate. Mia was already setting up in Abby’s platform.
    I turned back to Jonah. “Let’s get this party started.”
    He reached for his cigarette, then relaxed back in his seat and motioned with his other hand in a “be my guest” gesture.
    I picked up my bow, pulled an arrow from its quiver, nocked it, and calmed my body. I had to look over my left shoulder to watch for the signal from Michael. He was already prepared, and after looking over at Mia, he turned his head to me and nodded once. I returned it and pulled back. The slicing sound of the bow string was lost in the deafening screams of the crowd below. I didn’t need to wait for the other two to start firing; the signal had already been given. I picked my first target and sighted him in quickly. A slight caress of the release and the arrow found its home between the eyes of a man. I was glad for the noise the runners were making; it masked the sound an arrow makes as it punches through skull and brain.
    Not wasting any time, I lowered my hand and grabbed another arrow. It wasn’t a competition, yet I wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible. There was something about killing zombies with a bow that I never could get used to. Perhaps it was the proximity, being so close you could see every single gory detail of their bodies, smell every bit of their death, that bugged me. Either way, I nocked and released my arrows as fast as I could without getting sloppy. I had ten arrows in all, making thirty between the three of us. I missed a few times, that was to be expected. These runners moved constantly, jerking and jumping around. It’s hard to get a good bead on them with a rifle, let alone a bow.
    The more we put down as a team, the more sounds we could hear that weren’t there before. Such as the arrows when they hit true. It’s a sickening sound you never get over. Add that to the fact there were children in this group of dead bastards, and I’m surprised we were able to make it to the end.
    Those