They Sawed Me Open, So I Stocked the End of the World novel · Chapter 14 of 24
Chapter 14: The Gate
Jessa reached the gate with a rifle she did not want and a wall she could not yet trust.
Rhys had the squad in position before she got her boots laced.
Jethro and Emmett held the gatehouse, Joel stood behind them with a bag of dressings, and Corin was on the wall above the road with a long knife in his hand.
"Nobody fires," Rhys said. "Not unless I say it. Gunshots carry down this valley for a mile."
"Then what do we use?" Jethro asked.
"Anything that doesn't go bang."
Jessa looked at the road.
Four figures were walking up the gravel, slow and tilted, with their arms hanging.
She had seen ten thousand of them in the first life, and her stomach still turned over.
"Aim for the head," she said. "Nothing else stops them."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure, Rhys."
It had rained at midnight, and the road was dark and wet from ditch to ditch.
She walked to the iron gate, put her right palm flat against the bars, and thought of the cold.
Level three was a thin, patient cold.
It crept out of her hand in a white line, ran down the gate post, and spread across the wet gravel in a skin of ice.
The first dead man stepped onto it and went down hard on his back.
The second fell across him.
"Now," Rhys said.
Jethro was through the side door first, with a fire axe, and Corin dropped off the wall to land beside him.
It took less than a minute.
It was ugly and quiet, and nobody said anything until the last one stopped moving.
Jessa stood with her hand still on the gate, shaking.
That was one road and four dead men, and her ice was already gone.
In the first life she could have frozen the whole road to the bend.
Joel walked out and knelt beside the nearest body.
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