The Dead Series (Book 4): Dead End by Jon Schafer

know how bad it will be, but I don’t want anyone going deaf from the concussion.”
    Hands rose to do as they were told as Connie looked unsure at the detonator in her hands. She didn’t know when to press the transmit button, so she looked questioningly at Brain.
    “I’m going to say , ‘Fire in the hole’ three times, and then you press the button,” he told her. Looking to Steve, who nodded, he said loudly, “Fire in the hole, fire in the hole, fire in the hole.”
    ***
    The dead thing looked at the lump lying beneath the shuffling feet of its brethren before dropping to its knees and picking it up. The object had seemed to fall from the sky just seconds ago to bounce off the head of what had once been a shopkeeper to land in front of it.
    When it had been alive, its name had been Ethan, but it had no recollection of this or how it had died or where it had come from. It would be impossible to explain to the raggedy , dead thing that it once had a mother named Lena and a sister named Megan, or that it had been infected and died when it had gone on a foraging trip with his sister and that she couldn’t bring herself to put a bullet into its brain. It didn’t know that after it had died and come back that it had wandered westward for days before coming across a group of things just like it.
    Instinct told it to join them.
    Since then, they had come across three separate bands of travelers that they had fallen upon and eaten, but now humans had become elusive. It had dug for grubs and termites to try and feed its insatiable appetite, but even those had become rare. The lure of food had brought it and its herd across this area four times before they ended up outside the mansion.
    The thing that had been Ethan might not have known any of this, but when it saw the thing lying on the trampled grass at the back of the mansion, the faint memory of a word passed briefly through its shattered mind.
    ‘Ball’.
    Holding the white blob of plastic explosives against its chest, it made its way through the tightly packed mass of dead. Being only eleven years old helped, as it occasionally dropped down to weave its way between the legs of the mob and finally into the open.
    After reaching the outer edge of the mass of dead pressed against the building that held the food, it suddenly stopped. Looking at the open area leading to the fence, it turned its head and looked back at the mansion. It had completely forgotten about the object in its hands or that it had wanted to get away from the rest of its kin so it could play. Reasoning was gone forever from its brain, so instead of asking itself what it was doing out here, when only moments before it had been less than twenty feet away from the food that was very reason for its existence, it turned and started moving back the way it had come.
    The blast came before it took its first step, disintegrating what had been Ethan and shredding all those close by with shrapnel as it knocked them down.
    ***
    The explosions came so close that they sounded like one. Dust dropped from the ceiling from the concussion, and the walls shook so hard that a picture of Jesus holding a lamb in his arms fell with a resounding crash. The noise from the blast was barely a memory when the two men with crowbars jumped up and ran into the room to frantically pry at the storm panels covering the window.
    Steve, Heather and Tick-Tock followed , stopping to stand a few feet behind them with their rifles at the ready. The lights flickered for a moment and then died as the generator gave out, leaving them with nothing but a few rays of dust-filled sunlight shining in through the cracks around the panels. One of these widened as the panel on the right pushed outward, but then it stopped after only a few inches to be pushed back.
    The man that had been working on it stepped back and raised his foot to kick it, even as Steve yelled at him to stop. He had seen that the storm panel had been pushed back by something on