Remains of the Dead by Iain McKinnon

straps on his webbing.
    The bitter taste of rancid flesh crept up Cahz’s tongue. He felt the saliva ooze in his mouth and the bile rise in his throat. He tried to spit, but the thick mucus wouldn’t leave his lips. Instead it dribbled down his chin and onto the headless cadaver swinging from his chest.
    Around him a dozen raw and weeping outstretched arms grabbed for him. Too close and too numerous for him to club, Cahz raised his pistol. He leaned into his firing stance and shot the remainder of his magazine into the crowd. A score of zombies fell inert around him.
    “Don’t fire unless you have to, eh?” Ryan said from behind him. “That didn’t last long.”
    Cahz unhooked the corpse from his gear. “Change of plan,” he said as he refreshed his pistol. “We’ve got to get in cover. Head for the that building.”
    “You’ll never land a chopper on that roof,” Ryan said.
    “Then we’ll need to be winched off,” Cahz replied.
    “He’s right,” Cannon said. “But we’ll never get far in these crowds.”
    Cahz wiped his cheek, smearing some of the pulverised zombie onto his glove. “What’s that building there?”
    Ryan hesitated. “Offices of some sort?”
    “Okay, that’s our destination. Cannon, thin it out.”
    Cannon hugged the heavy machinegun against his side and fired. The buzzsaw noise ripped through the air, obliterating both the sound of the chopper and the moans of the undead. Bullets punched into the zombies ahead, knocking them down like pins.
    “Go, go, go!” Cahz bellowed, slapping Ryan on the shoulder.
    As Cahz ran off into the machinegun-hewn swathe, Ryan looked back.
    The old woman was stumbling through the freshly mown corpses, the baby clutched tight in her arms. Her eyes were red with tears, her footsteps uneasy and faltering.
    “Here, Elspeth,” Ryan said softly as he put a steadying arm around her.
    Some of the zombies stopped by Cannon’s burst were starting to get up. Even with chunks torn out of their decaying bodies, unless the bullets had pulped their brains or shattered their spines, they would keep coming.
    Cannon let out another burst, knocking over a handful more. He knew that without a head shot they wouldn’t stay down, but there were too many to take time picking shots. For now all he could do was waste ammo trying to knock them down and hope it would buy enough space to get through to safety.
    Cahz charged forward, his pistol barking as he dispatched the most immediate threats. His lips felt cracked and sore from where he’d wiped the atomised zombie with the back of his glove. His cheeks still felt wet, plastered as they were with infected brain matter. He spat out the saliva building up in his mouth and tried not to swallow the bitter infected tissue that was forming a scum over his tongue. Trying to ignore the fetid taste, he pushed on.
    More and more of the undead fell as the party fought their way through. Bludgeoned with rifle butt or shot at point blank range, dozens of walking dead were destroyed or pushed from their path.
    With a point-blank coup de grâce, Cahz dispatched the final zombie between him and the office block. It had been a new building before the Rising, a towering icon to corporate power, but like a million other homogenised offices the world over it now lay abandoned. The standardized architect of glass and steel and sandstone now wore a coat of grime. A shabby veneer smoke stained grey with green trails of moss marking the tributaries from burst pipes and leaky gutters. Here and there in the thin troughs between steel and stone a resilient plant clung, its leaves turned skyward in triumph.
    The expansive vista-exposing front window was a broken mosaic of splintered glass. A burnt out car sat rusting in the foyer where it had smashed to a stop.
    Cahz stepped through the broken window and peered into the gloom. His boots crunched on the broken glass. Instantly a damp chill permeated his lungs and the smell of musty plasterboard hung