Free Season of Rot by Eric S. Brown, John Grover Page A

or whatever it was that gave the dead life.
    Taking his opponent by surprise, Riley ripped
the weapon from its hands and sent the creature sprawling to the
pavement beside him. It rolled at him, biting and clawing for his
flesh. The thing never saw him draw the .45 automatic. He blew the
brains out the back of its head.
    “Hannah!” Riley screamed, praying for an
answer.
    In the distance, the monsters’ jeep roared to
life. Riley scrambled for his gun, then stopped and let out a
whoosh of breath as the vehicle retreated. The road fell
silent.
    Blood stained the front of his shirt, leaking
from the wound on his shoulder, but he didn’t feel it. He bolted,
his legs pounding beneath him, to where he’d heard the shot from
Hannah’s rifle. He skidded to a halt as he reached the tree line
and saw Hannah in the dirt. His heart felt like it stopped beating
as she looked up at him, revealing the tears on her cheeks, the
blood on her hands. She was kneeling over Brandon, who lay in a
growing puddle of red.
    Spots engulfed Riley’s vision, and Hannah
watched him collapse.
    9
    Scott and David put on a show for the two
guards accompanying them outside the breeding center. They held
hands and acted eager to reach a place in the hills where they
could be together intimately. The guards led them about a mile and
a half from the compound before the group stopped and one of the
dead men pulled out a stopwatch from its pocket. “This is as far as
we’re going,” the guard informed them, and he started the watch.
“You better get to it. The clock is ticking.”
    “You’re going to watch us?” David asked,
horrified. “That wasn’t part of the deal.”
    “Tough,” the other guard grunted. “Get to
jerking each other off or whatever so we can get back.”
    “What’s the matter?” Scott laughed. “Are you
horny too? Wanna join us?”
    The guard blinked his single eyelid while the
other laughed at him. Scott sprang forward, grabbing the laughing
guard’s head and twisting it around so fast the neck broke
with a sharp crack. It wouldn’t kill the dead man, but
breaking his neck would immobilize him and leave him
helpless. 
    The remaining guard raised the barrel of its
weapon toward Scott, tightening its finger on the trigger, but
David tackled the dead man; they went down in a mess of tangled
limbs as the guard’s rifle blazed away.
    Scott instinctively ducked out of the line of
fire and snatched up the rifle of the guard he’d killed. He whirled
to see David lying atop the other guard, his intestines scattered
everywhere. The burst from the thing’s weapon must have
disemboweled him.
    Scott squeezed the trigger of his rifle and
held it, emptying the clip into David’s corpse and the guard below.
Done, he tossed the rifle aside. Neither David nor the guard would
be getting up again.
    He felt a pang of loss and guilt over David’s
sacrifice, but he didn’t have time to think about it—the whole
compound must have heard the brief battle. So Scott sprinted into
the trees and didn’t look back.
    10
    O’Neil and Captain Steven studied the map
spread out on the table before them. Steven stabbed at a point on
the map with his finger. “We’ll put in here.”
    “South Carolina?” O’Neil asked.
    “Why not? This port here is out of the way in
terms of the old commercial traffic routes, and it’s close enough
for us to reach it within two days.”
    “It’ll still be guarded. If nothing else
there’ll be those things all over the docks. I don’t like the idea
of taking the Queen that close to land again.”
    Steven smiled. “We’re not. Not this time.
We’ll sail in just close enough for the lifeboats to make it
ashore.”
    O’Neil looked at the captain and blinked,
completely baffled.
    “Stealth, Mr. O’Neil. It’s something we
haven’t tried before. If we go in at night instead of all guns
blazing, the Queen herself may still face an attack, but the
dead may not notice our smaller boats until we’ve had