“It’s them!” Mrs. Helton exclaimed, jumping to her feet. “We’ve got to help them!” By the time Ted and Billie turned to look she was already at the door. Her hands were on the crossbolt.

“No!” Ted lunged across the room without a hope in hell of getting to her in time.

The bolt slid back. “You get in here, and hurry!” she said, swinging the door open. “They’re all over the place!”

The doorway was dark, but not from the night. From the bodies. They were standing three deep there, clogging the solitary entrance, dark shadows with white clown faces and sardonic smiles. And at the lead was Rusty Sanders, now wearing his blood-streaked deputy’s uniform and tarnished badge, his revolver in hand and the barrel still smoking. “You get in here and hurry!” he repeated, mocking a petrified Mrs. Helton with perfect mimicry of her own voice. Then he took her by the shoulders and put his leering death’s face right down in hers and he laughed, “Was that an invitation?”

Something rigid bumped his sternum—the barrel of a shotgun sticking out from under the woman’s arm. Ted looked over her shoulder at him and grinned. “Hey, Rusty. Whaddayasay?”

Boom.

The close proximity of the blast threw Sanders completely back through the doorway, his face frozen in a look of utter shock as he died. Again. The other creatures knocked him aside and started through the door themselves, but by then Bart and Billie had joined Ted to form a skirmish line and they began firing into the doorway, firing at anything that moved, pumping two and three rounds into the same bodies until the damn things were completely and unquestionably dead.

“I’m out,” Ted called when his trigger clicked on an empty chamber. “Cover me!” He went forward while skirting their direct line of fire and came up behind the door and tried to push it shut. But it would only swing halfway. There were too many corpses blocking the threshold.

A wave of bodies surged against the half-closed door and knocked Ted Cooper to the ground. His shotgun went sliding away as a heavy weight landed astride his back and drove him to the floor. Hands snarled in his hair and pounded his head into the concrete once, twice, three times, till his skull made a soft sound and the teen stopped struggling altogether. Only then did Doreen Moody turn him onto his back and begin to feed.