ZWD: King of an Empty City by Thomas Kroepfl Read Free Book Online Page A

black puffy hands were a stark contrast to his pasty white skin. The blood had started to pool in his hands. I wasted no time, the shovel was swinging and his head rolled to the floor. Chuck, chuck, chuck came again a little more furious now till it settled into a steady rhythm.
    As we pulled the body out of the elevator I could see his legs and feet were bloated as well, and black. He must have been standing there in that elevator for a long time. My guess was from when this all started. This was when I noticed something; flies never hung around zombies. You would expect them to be having a feeding frenzy, but I can’t recall ever seeing one buzzing around a zombie. We found garbage bags and stuffed him inside. It took about thirty of them because all we could find were little waste bin bags. This made me think there was a basement we would have to clear too, with all the cleaning supplies and a boiler in it, and I remembered only too well in Dawn of the Dead that’s where the nasty zombie was hiding. I didn’t want there to be a basement. We threw his body and head onto a book cart and rolled him into the elevator with us. Better to keep him in sight, right? We pushed the button for three and were ready to push him into whatever we met when that door opened.
    By this time it was two o’clock at night, if the clocks were still correct. We’d moved through most of the third floor fairly quickly till we got to the door where the chunk, chunk, chunk sound was coming from. This floor was filled with little cubicles and reading rooms for group study. There were a few offices here and not much else. Near the front of the library we came to the noisy door that had been driving me mad all this time. These doors opened out. They had one of those bars that stretch across most of it, waist high, so you can pop it open with your hip. Something on the other side was trying to open the door from the stairwell. We needed to know what we were facing on the other side, so we moved to one of the other exits on this floor and opened it to see what the landscape looked like. Here there was a landing and stairs going up or down. On the back of the door was a hip bar that was more consolidated, built into the door’s mechanics. I’m not a door expert; I have no idea what those door things are called. I can tell you they didn’t stick out like the single bars did on our side of the door. So whatever it was hitting, it was doing so with no force.
    We went back to the noisy door and talked about what we were going to do. I wanted to push our book cart friend out there as a battering ram and attack behind it. That turned out to be a bad idea because it was really close quarters out there on that landing, and there was the chance that someone could fall down the stairs. It was better to let it in and kill it here where there was a better battlefield. Then the question came as to how we could open the door and let it in. The doors swung out. Someone would have to hold it open and let it in. That wasn’t going to happen. We went back to the other door and tried different ideas about how to get the door open. We tried holding it open with the Ice Pike, but that didn’t work, it slid off the door. We tried popping it open and shoving a book into the space behind the hinges. The door closed, popping the book out.
    Finally we decided on what we thought was a good plan of action and we went back to the noisy door. Since I had on the thick canvas coveralls I was more insulated from bites, with only my hands and head exposed. She stripped off her coat and gave it to me, freeing her up for more mobility. I took the coat and on the count of three pushed the door open as hard and fast as I could. As it swung out I tried to put myself behind it with the coat covering my head. Not much of a shield, but I stood there behind the door pretending to be invisible and hoping that she could entice this thing into the main room. She stood in the door with the Ice