Free Well Fed - 05 by Keith C. Blackmore

of near disbelief. Almost right away, they picked up a few killer-slick military-grade weapons straight out of a sci-fi movie, sick instruments of wrath none of them had ever seen before. Plenty of guns… but no ammunition. In the end, they left the arms where they’d found them.
    “That is a problem,” Gus stated.
    “You gonna listen?”
    “Go on.”
    Talbert scratched at his head and continued.
    After he and his boys had gone back out into the main hall, the door was closed. Worse, a steel plate had slid across and finalized their trapped asses. They were actually working on digging through the wood and seeing if some rewiring might open that bunker-sized slab of steel when the gimps attacked in force—a whole township, it seemed.
    “And the lights were on?” Gus interrupted.
    “The lights were on, but it gets better.”
    They fought a running battle though cathedral-like halls and were holding their own when voices started coming out of speakers built into the walls. Giggling voices. Also, the halls had tiny cameras fixed in nooks and crannies, little black snowdomes turned bottom up and stuck to the ceiling, watching every move. Talbert and his men stuck to the side rooms, running through doorways, securing the ones with locks. They managed to evade the zombies in the beginning until they turned a few corners and wound up on an indoor bowling alley. Busloads of dead men, women, and children trailed after them, pinning them in the alley, which had no windows and no other door besides the one they came through…
    A door that had mysteriously unlocked itself after Talbert himself had locked it.
    “That’s what’s up with this place,” he said. “About half the rooms on the bottom floor are safe. They can be locked. The others got dick-all, and some… can be locked and unlocked remotely . You have to pay attention to where you are.”
    Talbert cleared his throat before continuing.
    They fought through the mass of zombies. Matt “The Machete” Miller was in his element, hacking and cutting like an electrified dervish. Benny swung his hammer while Talbert and Sheldon used their bats, and after a while, they actually thinned out the dead, enough to leave the alley. Back in the hall, however, Donald introduced himself from the third floor by sinking one of his arrows into the back of Sheldon’s neck.
    The memory of the attack left Talbert speechless for a moment, and Gus didn’t press him.
    Talbert started again, recounting how they tried to get upstairs to Donald. The voice on the speaker system started speaking. They were trespassers, the voice said, and as such had no rights to anything except a slow death. Sheldon had died slowly, painfully, kicking and twitching in his own blood. The point of the arrow had cut through his Adam’s apple, and no doctor was needed to tell he was a goner. Sheldon slipped and staggered about like a wounded buck, the others too damn stunned to do anything, listening to that horrible rasping of air being forced through bleeding airways. Sheldon actually started clawing at his throat in the end, and that was the last image before the lights flickered off. Benny and Matt started freaking out while Talbert gave up trying to compose them and flailed his way through the dark as a fresh wave of undead piled into the corridors. Though he couldn’t see it, behind him, in that suddenly suffocating darkness, he heard Matt Miller swinging his machete and calling out for his companions. Talbert heard the harsh connections of the machete, heard Miller straining against that black pitch tide of limbs and mouths. Heard the curses become shrieks then muffled gargling before that horrible, nerve-slicing sound of… feeding … filled the hallway. Talbert wanted to help him, but that writhing midnight soup of limbs and mouths stopped him cold. His own panicked screams drowned out the dying Miller.
    “Matt went down swinging. Give him that. Right in the center of a mob. Didn’t know what