Authors: Joe McKinney
“A whole crap load,” he said. “I don’t know. I went down the south stairwell. They’re all over the place.”
“Great.” The zombies from the third floor were turning the corner above us. “Any ideas?”
He shook his head. “How many bullets do you have left?”
“I don’t know. Maybe ten.”
“Me too.”
The first few zombies were coming into sight above us. The ones from the first floor were having more trouble coming up than the others were coming down, but it was just a matter of time. They would make it up eventually.
“I guess we make them count,” I said.
“Yep. But save your last round for me, okay?”
“With pleasure.”
A couple of zombies rounded the corner above me and I shot them. Every shot sounded like an explosion in the tight confines of the stairwell.
“There’s too many of them,” I said.
“Keep shooting.”
I turned my attention back to the zombies coming down the stairs. Marcus was pulling on the second-floor door with everything he had. He put one foot on the doorjamb and grabbed the handle with both hands. He yanked on it with his whole body weight, and the door flew open.
Marcus fell backwards and landed on his butt. Two older male zombies in very expensive suits came through the door, and in the split second before Marcus put holes in their heads, I recognized one of them as Captain Ibsen from the Media Relations office.
Marcus stepped in front of the door and kept it from closing with his foot. “Come on,” he said. “It’s now or never.”
But he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was out the door and onto the second-floor reception area before he finished his sentence.
The second floor was the home of the department’s Interagency and Media Relations offices, and the ten or so zombies I saw there were all dressed in the finest style.
At least they had been.
Now all those expensive clothes were soaked through with blood and bile.
Marcus did the shooting for both of us, clearing a path through the zombies and across to the west side of the building.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Can’t take the south stairwell again. There’s too many of them that way.”
“But where are we—”
“Over here,” he said, and pushed open a gray metal door on the back wall. “This way.”
I followed him through the door and into the night air. The sign on the door said OBSERVATION DECK, but that was a little optimistic for the scrap of cement and metal railing that we were standing on. It was maybe four feet wide and fifteen feet long, with a canopy overhead that didn’t even cover the whole deck. There were a few ratty chairs next to the door and about a million cigarette butts on the cement, and the only view the observation deck provided was of the fenced-in portion of the employee parking lot and the back side of a long-since-vacated bakery.
“Where to now?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m making this up as I go.”
“That’s cute. Seriously, Marcus, where to?”
“I am serious. I don’t know. You got any ideas?”
He tilted back one of the chairs so that it kept the door from opening, and then looked over the railing to the parking lot below. “I guess we jump for it.”
I looked over the railing and then back at him. “Are you insane? We’re like thirty feet up.”
“Gosh, princess, I’m sorry. Did you want to go back inside and fight zombies?”
“Fuck you.”
“Where else do you suggest we go?”
He was right, of course. There wasn’t any other way out of the building. I looked over the edge again and whistled. “After you,” I said.
“Gee, thanks.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Marcus climbed over the side and lowered himself down until he was hanging from the ledge by his fingertips.
Then he let go.
I heard him land, and a second later he called up to me to jump down. “It’s all right,” he said. “It only looks like a long ways.”
“Asshole,” I said, and then climbed over the railing just like I had seen him do. I held on for a second, then let go.
I knew even before I landed that I was going to mess myself up, and sure enough, when I hit, I felt a stabbing pain go through my right ankle, up my leg, and into my back.
I folded, and stayed that way.
“You okay?” he asked me.
I looked up at him and thought of Carlos Williams. “It’s my ankle,” I said.
“Shit.” He looked around, searching the parking lot for movement. “Do you think it’s broken?”
“No,” I said hopefully. “I don’t think so.”
“Try to move it. Turn it in little circles.”
I tried moving it, and it hurt like hell. Marcus helped me stand up and I put some weight on it a little at a time.
“How does it feel?”
“It hurts.”
“Do you think you can walk it off?”
“Yeah,” I said, taking a few tentative steps. “I think so.”
“Good.”
We turned toward the building just in time to see the back door bust open and a crowd of zombies come pouring out. We both stood there slack jawed at the sudden commotion. Another moment later and they were through the back door and flooding out into the parking lot, coming right for us.
Chapter 23
We stood there in the parking lot and watched as the crowd of zombies got bigger.
“There are so many of them,” I said. “Why are there so many of them? The first floor was empty when we came in.”
Marcus checked his magazine and then slapped it back into his gun. “I’ve only got four rounds left.”
“We need to get out of here.”
“I know. How’s your ankle?”
“I can make it.”
He nodded and looked out over the parking lot. I could see his wheels turning. The lot was maybe a third full and surrounded on three sides by a fifteen-foot-high green wrought-iron fence. There was a guard shack and a gate on the south end of the lot, but it wouldn’t open without a key card.
“Looks like we’re gonna have to climb over,” he said.
Of course that was easier said than done. Every April, during the Fiesta celebrations, some drunken idiot gets stuck at the top of the fence while trying to climb over so he can piss on a cop car, and some cop has to risk his fat ass going up there to get him down. The fence did really well keeping people out, but now it was doing just as well keeping us in.
I looked around for something we could climb up on to help us get over, but there was nothing close to the fence.
“Looks like that’s going to be kind of hard to do, Marcus.”
“Again,” he said, “would you rather we go back inside and fight zombies? I don’t think the zombies would mind much.”
“One of these days I just might take you up on that.”
“Just follow me,” he said.
We started toward the west side of the parking lot. If we could get over the fence there, it was only about twenty yards to our car.
But we hadn’t made it more than half way to the fence when we heard a woman screaming to the south of us. She sounded really close.
We both stopped, and listened.
She screamed again. She was close. Marcus took off running across the lot and I hobbled after him as fast as I could go.
The zombies coming out of headquarters were spreading out, and as I looked behind me I saw a line of them backlit by the building’s emergency lights. It was hypnotic in a way, watching them. They moved so slowly, so painfully, and yet with such a relentless need to put their hands on us that I found it hard to look away.
The girl’s screaming brought my attention away from the zombies. I watched Marcus disappear at the edge of the lot, and I was still maybe thirty yards away from him when I heard him fire the first shot.
I got to him as fast as I could. He was standing at the fence, facing a young girl of about sixteen who was on the other side. She was screaming for help and reaching between the bars to grab hold of Marcus’s clothes.
Behind her was the body of the man Marcus had just shot.
More zombies were lumbering toward us from the bakery behind the girl.
“Open the gate,” she said. “Please. Let me in. Please!”
Her face was wet with tears and sweat. When I looked into her eyes I immediately recognized that look—that look that said there was nothing anybody could do to reach her. She was only seeing fear.
Marcus fired again, but even in the low light of the alley way I could tell there were more of them than we had bullets. They were thick in the darkness behind her, and there were more entering the alley farther off.
She turned her hunted gaze on me. “Open the gate. Please. You’ve got to let me in.”
I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came out was a pantomime of the words, “I can’t.”
“Run,” Marcus said to her. “Run. We can’t open the gates.”
But she was so scared she couldn’t take that in. The words weren’t breaking through her wall. She pounded the wrought-iron bars so hard they rocked inside their concrete mounts. She cried to be saved.
Marcus fired again, and out of the corner of my eye I saw his slide lock back.
“I’m empty,” he said.
“I got it,” I said, and came up next to him, firing what I had left. I fired three times, and each time I put one of them on the ground, but all I did was make room for other hands to reach for her. We had nothing left to protect her with.
“Help me. Jesus, why won’t you help me?”
“Run,” Marcus said to her. “Come on. Run.”
“Please.” She said it over and over again until she just gave up and slid down the bars to the ground. She wasn’t listening to anything anymore.
“Run.”
The girl turned her huge doe eyes up at Marcus. He knelt down next to her and showed her his gun.
“Do you see that? Do you? When it does that it means I’m out of bullets. We can’t open the gate. We don’t have the key. If you want to live you have to stand up and run. Run. That way.”
Marcus tried to grab the sides of her face through the bars.
“You have to run,” he said, lowering his voice and speaking as calmly as he could. “Run.”
He tried to pull her up, but she slipped out of his hands and collapsed to the ground.
“Run, you stupid bitch. Get your ass up and run. Right now.”
But the zombies closed in around her. We were less than a yard away from her, and we were powerless to do anything to help her. As I watched, the color bled out of her face and she stopped struggling. Her screams were muffled into silence.
When the zombies had finished with her, some of them stood up and clutched at me through the fence with their bloody hands.
“Fuck this,” I heard Marcus say from behind me. But I didn’t turn to look at him until I heard the roar of an engine.
It was Marcus, behind the wheel of one of the Gang Unit cars. I saw the headlights come up, and then the back tires began to spin as Marcus backed it up.
“What the hell are you doing, Marcus?”
He skidded the car to a stop halfway across the lot, paused there for just a moment, and then the car lurched forward. He was barreling down on the spot where I was standing.
“Marcus,” I said, “you are one insane son of a bitch.”
I jumped to one side just before he reached me. He never hit the brakes or slowed down at all. The car blasted through the gate in a splash of sparks and broken metal.
Some of the zombies at the gate were thrown clear by the impact; others were mowed down under the car.
The Crown Victoria went all the way across the alley and smashed to a stop in a crumpled mess against the wall of the bakery.
Chapter 24
Marcus was stuck in the car, jammed up beneath the steering wheel and the air bag. I held the air bag off him like a drape. He turned towards me. There was a little bit of blood on his face and a musty-smelling white cloud inside the car that made me feel like I was inhaling ash.
“Hey, Marcus, can you hear me?”
He let out a shallow, tired sigh and opened his eyes very slowly. “Oh, man,” he said, and a thin grin crossed his face, “that sucked.”
I smiled too. I couldn’t help it. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”
“You’d think I’d have that figured out by now, wouldn’t you?”
“Can you move?”
“No.”
“You can’t? What’s wrong?”
“You’re in the way.”
“You’re killing me, Marcus. You know that?”
“Not yet,” he said, chuckling as he pushed his way out of the car. “But I’m working on it.”
The smile didn’t last long, though. After I helped him out of the car he looked at the scene, at the bodies, at the girl whose torso had been ripped open and mostly eaten.
“What was she thinking? Why didn’t she run like I told her to?”
The force of the impact had thrown her body several yards to the right of us. She had been wearing a pair of blue jeans and a soft baby-blue camisole, but the camisole was shredded now and the jeans soaked with her blood. From the neck up she looked human. From the waist down, too. The part in between looked like the floor of a butcher’s shop. Even Marcus had a hard time looking at it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Just scared, I guess.”
He shook his head. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do. Why would anybody just lie down and die like that? She just gave up.”
“It’s a waste, that’s for sure.”
Marcus and I hobbled away.
Neither of us were able to make a very good pace. My ankle was still hurting, though not nearly as badly as it had been just before Marcus nearly ran me over, and Marcus was banged up something fierce. He said his whole right side felt like it had been hit by a wrecking ball.
A lot of the zombies from the alley were still moving, but they couldn’t catch up with us. The ones from headquarters were still inside the parking lot, stuck behind the fence and not much of a threat. We dodged a small group that was outside the fence at the northwest corner, and then had a clear shot all the way to the car.
Both of us went for the driver’s seat. “I’m driving,” he said.
“Yeah, right, not after what you just did.”
“I called it back at the gas station, remember?”
“What does this look like? Third grade? Plus, I let you drive from the ready lot to here. It’s my turn now.”
“I’m driving.”
“No way. You’re hurt.”
“So are you.”
“We’re going to my house,” I said.
“I know the way.”
“Fine,” I said, and threw up my hands. “But we’re going to my house. Straight there. Nowhere else.”
“I know. Get in.”
Marcus pulled the car off the sidewalk and we turned north on Vespers. We were going to take Vespers northbound all the way through downtown, because it joined up with the access road for the freeway and we should have been able to take that all the way out to my house.
Provided we drove outbound on the inbound lanes to avoid all the traffic, it was less than twenty minutes from headquarters to my house.
But we didn’t even make it three blocks before we were stopped by massive traffic congestion at the emergency entrance to Children’s Hospital. Everything was shut down to the north and to the west of that by debris and abandoned cars.
Marcus turned the car onto the sidewalk again and drove us east.
“Maybe we can cut through Washington Square and double back.”
“Yeah,” I said, as I watched a group of zombies walking across the street from the hospital. “Let’s try that.”
While he drove up the sidewalk I went to work on the remaining ammunition, splitting it up between his gun and mine.
“Twenty for each of us,” I said, and handed him back his pistol and his extra magazine.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Really? I thought we had a whole—” He slammed on the brakes, hard. “Holy shit!”
“Oh my God.”
My jaw went slack and I sat there gaping at a crowd so big I couldn’t see the end of it. To the north of us, and again to the west, the streets were filled with zombies. Cars in the middle of the street looked like rocks in the middle of a fast-moving stream.
The bus station on the northeast corner was on fire, and the windows of the glass buildings above us were painted with fire. Large pieces of rubble filled the streets, and through the charred frame of an exploded bus we could see where the gas pumps had once been. The fire was still at a healthy rage, and in the orange and yellow glow I watched the infected coming for us.
“Where are they all coming from? Look at that, Marcus. They’re everywhere.”
Marcus spun the car around under full acceleration and left a pair of black looping streaks down the sidewalk as we headed south.
He took us down two blocks, and then turned east again where we hit more abandoned cars and more crowds.
It was maddening, like trying to find our way out of a maze, only the game was rigged so that every direction was a dead end. We couldn’t stay on any one road longer than a block or two before having to change direction and start all over again.
By the time we cleared downtown we were on the near east side and caught between traffic and another crowd of zombies. I looked from one obstacle to the other, my mind racing for an idea of what to do next.
Marcus chose a third option. He turned the car onto a pedestrian walkway that led over the freeway and came down in the park-and-ride terminal for the Convention Center.
“Hold on,” he told me as we started down two flights of steps.
I saw the ground ahead of us drop away into empty space, and then all of a sudden we were pointed straight down and the ground was rushing up to meet us.
We hit so hard I could actually hear the car’s frame bending. Marcus struggled with the wheel, caught the car before it could drift all the way sideways, and then landed it in the middle of Mount Olive Street.
He let the car drift to a stop and waited for me to say something.
“What?”
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Go on, say the words. That was some of the best driving you’ve ever seen, wasn’t it?”
“Are you kidding me?” There were pieces of broken windshield glass in my hair and my door wouldn’t close anymore. “Marcus, that was the most fucked-up thing I have seen you do all night. I never did anything like that when I was driving.”
“Oh, come on.”
I was still brushing glass out of my hair. I held one up so he could see it. “What did I do that was worse than this?”
“You’re kidding, right? Eddie, look in the backseat. Do you see a dead fat guy back there? No, you don’t. And you know why there’s not a dead fat guy back there? Because what I just did was some incredible fucking driving. Tell me it wasn’t. Go on, tell me and then call yourself a liar.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
I laughed at him. “No. No way.”
“Fine.”
He put the car in gear and started off down Mount Olive, pouting the whole way. He amazed me like that. It cracked me up that someone capable of kicking as much ass as he did could still be capable of pouting like a four year old when he didn’t get his way. But there it was.
The car was so messed up the best he could get out of it was about thirty miles per hour, but he still threw in a parting shot before he gave up the argument.
“I don’t care what you say. That was some incredible driving, and you know it.”
Mount Olive curved around the east side of the Convention Center, then went north until it turned into the on-ramp for the highway.
We weren’t able to make it that far, though. There was a massive amount of traffic congestion before the ramp, and it was completely impassable. We didn’t even have room to drive up the grass embankment because there were so many cars wedged into the gaps between the guardrails.
We had to back up and cross over at Dove Street into the East Division service area.
Neither one of us had ever worked the east side, so everything east of Mount Olive was uncharted territory for us.
I had heard the neighborhoods east of the Convention Center were tough, but I was shocked to see how different they were from the perfectly manicured gardens and clean streets of the Convention Center’s grounds. We were just one block over, separated from the center by a long line of enormous live oaks, yet it seemed like we had stepped into another world. Even the pavement was different. Where the Convention Center’s streets were smooth and accented with russet-and ochre-colored bricks, we were on raw asphalt that had buckled from the railroad tracks that crisscrossed all the streets in the area. The lingering, filthy stench of backed-up sewage and rotting garbage hung in the air.
After turning onto Dove, we were lost. Streets that seemed like they should have gone north-south seemed to fade away into vacant lots or curve back on themselves, and we suddenly found ourselves in the warehouse district with absolutely no idea how we got there or how we would get out.
The buildings we passed were dying. Graffiti covered the faces of the buildings in unbelievable profusion. In places the long, unintelligible scrawls were covered up by weeds growing at the base of the foundation.
It didn’t really make sense to call what we were looking at the warehouse district, because there was really nothing more to it than one decaying hulk after another stretching on into the darkness. What I was looking at was the dead city, the cancerous growth in the bowels of a dying culture.
I was thinking that way, about the death of things, and staring out the window at the gaping black holes in the sides of the buildings we passed when Marcus slapped me on the arm.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing a good ways down the road at what looked to me to be smoke.
But it wasn’t smoke. Even from a distance I knew it wasn’t smoke. It was moving faster than smoke, but thicker and blacker.
“It looks like a flock of birds.”
“You may be right,” he said. “Probably grackles.”
They were grackles. It was the biggest flock of birds I’ve ever seen. As we pulled up on another dead end we saw hundreds of thousands of fat black birds sitting on every available perch. They lined the edge of the roof of the building straight ahead of us, and they were all over the power lines and the parking lot and the gutted carcass of a Country Fields Bread Company eighteen wheeler. Red-and-white plastic bread bags fluttered into the air all around us. The grackles were tearing the loaves of bread apart, feeding like sharks in an ocean of blood.
The noise they made was tremendous.
We saw movement again. From off to our left, a small section of the flock fluttered into the air, flew a short distance, and then settled down to the ground again.
“Look at that,” Marcus said. His voice had a strange, exhausted breathiness to it that I hadn’t heard before.
Then I saw why the birds were taking off. There were zombies moving through the parking lot. At first I saw just a few, but as I watched, more zombies streamed out from between the buildings. Soon we were facing a crowd of maybe sixty or more.
A few of the grackles started screaming, and soon the whole flock was agitated and squawking like they were being murdered, though the birds didn’t have any trouble avoiding the infected. Small sections of the flock took to the wing in violent fits and then settled down again a short distance away.
“We should go.”
“Yeah,” said Marcus. “I think so, too.”
He put the car in reverse and turned his head to look behind us. He frowned, and then dropped his head and cursed under his breath.
“What is it?” I looked back in my rearview mirror and saw what he was looking at. There was a huge crowd of zombies behind us. “Crap! Where do they keep coming from?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re everywhere.”
He put the car in drive again and peeled off to the left. He cut between two long white buildings and sped down a broken, puddle-filled alley. We broke out of the alley at Shiloh and he stopped the car.
Shiloh was blocked off to the west of us by a gutted fire truck. All of its hoses were laid out next to the smoldering black corner of a vacant warehouse. Either something had exploded or a section of the building had come crashing down because there was debris all over the road and there was no way we could get around it. More crowds were gathering to the right of us. Big crowds stretched out deep into the darkness.
Marcus turned the car into the crowd and punched it. I leaned back in my seat, bracing myself against the dashboard, but before I could yell at him not to do it, we were diving headfirst into the crowd.
We hit the first bodies while we were still accelerating, and then everything started happening too fast. There was a hideous rush of wet thuds as bodies hit metal and glass and rolled off the hood. I saw faces, but no features. Everything was a blur, and roaring above it all was the straining engine of the Crown Victoria, fighting a losing battle as it pushed through the crowd.
We started to drift to my side of the street. The car was rolling sideways by the combined weight of all the human bodies it was striking, like a boat caught in a strong crosscurrent. I could feel the car start to lose acceleration, almost as if it had been knocked out of gear. Marcus had it floored, but we were slowing down, and we were still caught up in the thick of the crowd.
We were an island in a sea of bodies when the car gave out altogether.
“Run for it,” Marcus said as he opened his door and took off toward a three-story gray and white building to his left.
But I couldn’t get out.
Already there were dozens of zombies pushing up against my side of the car, and it was all I could do to hold the door closed. If there hadn’t been so many of them pressing against the ones closest to me, they would have been able to rip the door out of my hands.