Hecter yelled something as Ethan shoved his arm toward the back of the drawer, felt his fingers graze the keys.

A shotgun blast followed.

Abbies screaming.

Hecter shouting, “Oh God!”

Shuck-shuck as he racked another slug.

Boom.

Shuck-shuck.

The spent shell falling down the stairs.

Ethan jammed Maggie’s keys into the front pocket of his jeans and started down the hallway.

Hecter screamed.

No more shots.

The smooth soles of Ethan’s boots slid across the hardwood floor as he reached the top of the stairs and tried to arrest his forward momentum.

Blood.

Everywhere.

Three abbies on Hecter, one tearing at his right leg, another ripping the biceps out of his arm, a third chewing its way through the fascia into his stomach.

Hecter shrieking, pounding his free hand into the skull of the abby who was gutting him.

Ethan raised the shotgun.

The first slug decapitated the abby burrowing into Hecter’s stomach, and he shot the second one as it looked up snarling, but the third had a head start and it was airborne, talons out, seconds from crashing into Ethan by the time he got the Mossberg pumped and fired.

It tumbled back down the staircase and crashed into two abbies that had just torn through the front door.

Ethan racked a shell and steadied himself at the top of the staircase, trying to process his next move, fighting panic, the inescapable thought that it was all coming off the rails right now. His left arm was so tender from the Mossberg’s recoil it was agony just pulling the stock snug against his shoulder.

The two abbies crawled out from under the dead abby and started for him, and Ethan shot them both down as they climbed.

The house was hazy with gun smoke and for a moment the only sound was the pneumatic hiss as the femoral artery in Hecter’s leg jetted arcs of red at the front door.

The stairs looked treacherous, soaked in blood.

Hecter was groaning and shaking as he held his intestines in his hands in some kind of horrified wonder.

He was bleeding out mercifully fast, shock-white, with a cold sweat matting down his hair, giving his face a corpse-like sheen that foretold what was coming.

He stared up at Ethan with a look only a dying soldier can give the one the bullet missed.

Fear.

Disbelief.

Please-God-tell-me-this-isn’t-happening.

The front door had been torn off its hinges, and through the opening, Ethan watched more abbies stream into the yard.

They would eat Hecter while he took his last breaths.

Ethan pulled his pistol, clicked off the safety.

No idea if it were true, but he said, “You’re going someplace better.”

Hecter just stared.

I should’ve let you go find the keys.

Ethan shot the pianist between his eyes. As the monsters flooded in through the front door, he was already running down the hall away from Maggie’s bedroom.