“Over here,” Tanya said. There was a set of double doors nearby that I hadn’t seen earlier. Tanya ran to the doors and yanked them open. “They’re unlocked.” She looked in. “And zombie-free!”

Anything was a better option than getting eaten. “Get in there then.” An arrow hit a nearby zombie in the chest. The thing rocked, but then kept walking, oblivious to the shaft sticking out from between its ribs. “Quit dinking around and move!”

Trip walked backward toward the doors, firing methodical, single, aimed shots the whole time. Edward was on the other side, and in a flash of movement, zip zip zip, three zombies fell to the floor, their heads rolling away. I emptied my pistol magazine on the way over to them. There was quite the pile of corpses all around us by the time I got there.

The four of us got through the doors, and they swung shut behind us. Edward found something on the ground, picked it up, and shoved it through the twin handles to form a makeshift crossbar.

We were in a long, straight, industrial-gray hallway. There were rows of green lockers on each side and multiple wooden doors with small glass windows inset in them. The fluorescent lights above us were flickering and humming.

I braced my shoulder against the door, reloaded Abomination, and got ready for the inevitable zombie onslaught. “We’ll hold them until help comes. If they break through the door, the hall’s narrow enough to funnel them down. Let’s stack these sons a bitches, Trip.” He didn’t answer. Trip was busy staring down the hallway. I looked past him, but couldn’t see anything worth fixating on. The hall terminated at a bulletin board. That wasn’t nearly as interesting as an onslaught of flesh-eating zombies. “Trip?” I snapped my fingers. “Trip!”

My friend spoke very slowly. “This is bad…Really, really bad.”

Shit. It was unlike Trip to lose it. “Ed, help me.” The orc put one boot against the base of the door, sheathed one sword, then took the other one up in both hands, ready to thrust it through the intersection of the two doors to surprise-kill a zombie. With Captain Slice ’n’ Dice by my side, any zombie hands that broke through were going to get lopped off real quick. We just had to hold until Harbinger hit them from the other side.