The Post

by Kevin A. Muñoz

  Jake lets out a muffled scream. A spray of blood splashes against the corrugated wall and the man collapses in front of his teammates, who lose their grasp on him as the hollow-heads drag the body toward the gap in the wall. Even as they attempt to leave with their prey, they can’t resist biting chunks of flesh from his neck, hands, and face—any exposed part of his body. The revulsion hits me like a punch: the thought of being torn open by dull, carious teeth is sickening. And the knowledge that Jake is dead is only marginally tempered by knowing that he won’t have to suffer the loss of his mind.

  More of the hollow-heads try to come through the breach, but they press up against the ones trying to drag Jake back, giving the rest of the sweep team an opportunity. A stream of bolts and arrows splashes against the frenzied cannibals, but the chaos prevents most of them from hitting in the places that matter: the neck and chest. My rifle is a bolt-action Remington 700 SPS with a four-round magazine; it won’t do me any good at this distance, against this many. I drop it to the platform and draw my pistol, which I’ve kept with me since the Coast Guard: a SIG P229 with a fifteen-round magazine, loaded with .40 S&W hollow-point rounds that I salvaged from a house a few weeks after the collapse. I shout for the sweep team to get the hell out of the way, and they scatter off the platform, jumping down to the rough gravel below to continue the fight from the ground.

  I ignore the clanging of my moral alarm as I raise the weapon and aim for the nearest hollow-head, which is chewing on Jake’s left cheek as it yanks his arm toward the gap. The first shot rips across the back of the hollow-head’s neck, severing the spinal cord. The next shot is higher, into the chest of the naked, dirt-covered man behind her.

  The third shot paralyzes an ancient-looking hollow-head as it climbs over the two dead ones. It falls on its face, arms reaching out to pull itself toward me. The fourth shot obliterates the skull. Shots five and six, and my ears are ringing, and two hollow-heads fall from the platform, where they are killed by the sweep team.

  I take shot seven on the move, going forward, pressing the advantage of my intelligence. These creatures don’t react like human beings: they don’t flee at the sound of gunfire. They don’t retreat when their numbers are thinned. If they have any thoughts at all, they are of nothing but meat, and they don’t care which meat is hurting them the most.

  The hollow-heads below, on the outside of the wall, are now too few to climb up to the gap. The last two that made it onto the platform die as quickly as the others, but I use up four more rounds to make it happen.

  A shriek rattles in the tunnel, catching me by surprise and making me feel the exhaustion of the fight more strongly. But it’s a distant shriek, farther out, and it redirects the attention of the remaining members of the horde below me. Like a cargo ship turning in harbor, the crowd of hollow-heads veers away from the wall. They wander off to follow new prey, slow and shambling, leaving us to our grief and ambiguities.

  Carpenters arrive with a temporary replacement panel for the wall, and I climb down from the upper platform to give them space to work. The smell of blood saturates my senses. I need to step away from this place.

  No longer focused on the immediate problem, however, I am again confronted with tonight’s unexpected reality. Luther is waiting for me at the bottom of the ladder, blood drying on her hands and arms. “It gets worse,” she says after I tell her about Jake Yanic. “I went to the apartment. Someone broke in and must have left just before I got there. It didn’t look like anything was taken, but there was a struggle in the bedroom. The girl was stabbed. I got the docs in there, but she was already dying. I left them working to save the baby, if they could, but—” She shakes her head, arms akimbo, trying to process what she saw. “Jesus fucking Christ, Chief.”

  The full moon accuses from its height, a reminder of our inadequacies. The streets are dark except for the silver reflections. In ten years we lost more than just the ability to keep the lights on. We lost our way, our methods, the expanse of knowledge beyond what is passed on from mother to daughter and father to son. I can hold the wall and fight off the monsters at the gates, but no one had the chance to teach me how to be a detective. Everything I know I learned from books.

  “Get Pritch and Kloves out with the sweep team. I want them checking every inch of fencing and barricade. They’re looking for a point of entry, or an exit.”

  “You’re thinking someone from outside killed them,” Luther says, recovering herself. “Someone from Dahlonega?”

  “That’s the most likely explanation,” I say. Owen wanted to believe that no one would come after him and the girl; he wanted to convince me, at least, that we weren’t putting ourselves at risk by letting Abigail stay. But clearly he was wrong. And yet—the way that he was wrong doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t their pursuers want to bring them back? I could even understand Owen’s murder as revenge for taking away the prize. But Abigail’s death doesn’t fit. If her abuser was anything like men I’ve known—men like my father—she was a trophy, and her unborn child was a possession.

  “I’m going over to where Owen was killed,” I continue. “By now it’s probably useless, but the apartment will keep, assuming you secured it.”

  “Yes, and I’ll get the perimeter check started,” Luther says. “Kloves is still at the hospital. I’ll grab him on our way to the north end.”

  Luther leaves me to my frustrations. The remains of Jake Yanic’s body have been brought down from the upper platform, laid on the sidewalk, and covered with a tablecloth that quickly soaks with his blood. I don’t want to be here when Jake’s children arrive. After Lukacs, I don’t yet have the strength to cope with another mourning. I’m thankful for the excuse to go.

  Blood still stains the parking lot blacktop where Owen fell. A dozen neighbors have gathered in the street to hear news of the tunnel incursion, trampling any evidence that would point to the shooter. As if conspiring with them to make Owen’s death completely indecipherable, a light rain begins to fall. Blood washes into the gutter. Standing by the skull-decorated door of the bar, I close my eyes and try to reconstruct the moment that I came outside.

  Owen fell forward, shot behind his right ear. I didn’t see it happen, but the aftermath was unmistakable. That put his shooter down the street, possibly as far as the small plaza at the five-point intersection. I walk the distance, scouring the ground for a dropped casing. By the time I reach the plaza, the futility of the whole situation has made itself sufficiently convincing, and I kick at one of the planted trees. I am too tired, and it is too wet and dark. Like a petulant child, I sit down hard on the curb and shield my face with my hands.

  This is on me. I should have been more careful. I should have taken precautions. Abigail should have been able to trust the safety of the Little Five. Death by hollow-head is a fact of life, and we understand it. We accept it, and protect against it, as a community. But when it comes to Owen and Abigail, matters are different.

  I can’t plead to my conscience that I was unaware of what could happen. Abusers don’t let go: letting go is a loss of control. You can run as far as you want; hell, you can join the Coast Guard and take a post eight hundred miles away to start a new life with people who love you. But they don’t let go, and they don’t let you forget, until they are erased entirely from the world.

  She was just a child.

  I force myself to stand again, to focus the remainder of my energy. If Owen and Abigail’s killer is the same person, he wouldn’t have needed much time to get from the sidewalk to the apartment above the bar. There is a staircase around back, unseen from the street. Fleeing the scene wouldn’t have been difficult, either. Behind the row of old shops on the southbound side of Moreland is the road that goes straight south to the Inman Park enclave. Between our two communities is a nine-foot tall fence with what passes for barbed wire strung along the top. It exists not to keep our two neighborhoods apart, but to prevent an overrun of hollow-heads if one of our “fortresses” should be c
ompromised. There is a gate, locked on both sides, that is just as formidable as the rest of the fence. If the killer escaped that way, Luther will find something: damaged wire, cut fence, broken lock. Something. She has to.

  I climb the back stairs to the apartments above the bar, dreading what I will find in the unit that Owen and Abigail shared. Luther has scrawled on the door with a permanent marker in her messy script: “Crime Scene Do Not Enter.” I allow myself to laugh at Luther’s idea of securing the apartment, but she really didn’t need to do much more than this. There is only one other apartment above the bar, occupied by Cassidy and therefore empty at the moment.

  The door jamb has been broken, forcing the lock off the strike plate and splintering the wood around the knob. I push through into a small but comfortable living room. The tranquility of the space belies what happened here, but once I can see the hallway, the truth makes itself known. A long streak of blood is spread across the hardwood floor, from the back bedroom to the threshold of the living room. Following the trail leads me to where the attacker found Abigail in bed. Blood soaks the disheveled sheets and the particle board bedside table is in pieces on the floor. A hunting knife rests among the pieces, the handle just as red as the rest of it.

  I step back to the doorway, only in part to preserve the evidence. The blood is dark in the silver light of the moon shining through the window, and my head swims in the quantity of it. Maybe it was quick. I can hope it was quick. But maybe she had time to think about her unborn child. Maybe she had time to pray that the baby would live.

  My stomach heaves momentarily, but I catch it in time. I swallow hard and lock the memory away.

  The killer could have come here first, then gone down to the sidewalk to shoot Owen after discovering that he wasn’t in the apartment. Luther’s implication that Abigail was killed after Owen depends on how quickly she bled out. If the girl was still alive when Luther found her, it certainly doesn’t seem likely that she was the first one attacked. There is too much blood here.

  And whoever killed the girl would have been covered in it. If I had been able to search the area just after it happened, I might have been able to catch him. The shrieker’s interruption served as such a perfect diversion that I begin to wonder whether the killer had an accomplice: someone to bait the hollow-heads at the appointed hour, to distract me and my officers from the hunt. I feel like I’ve fallen into a trap I saw from a mile away. I shout a curse into the empty room and retreat to the kitchen.

  I find a cloth to wrap the knife, hoping that I will be able to recover fingerprints from the handle. There are no courts, no juries, that will need such a thing as evidence, but if we do find the person responsible, I want to be sure. I set the knife on the couch near the front door and am about to go back into the bedroom when I notice the edge of a piece of paper protruding from under one of the couch cushions.

  The small stack that I pull from its hiding place is a collection of pages covered in text from a mechanical typewriter. The contents are gibberish: random letters arranged into six-letter combinations, suggesting a secret code. Some of the pages look like lists, with two “word” pairs that could be names. Nothing about them is recognizable or decipherable.

  I sit down and shuffle through the papers, conceiving of too many wild theories on no evidence, while the simple fact is that if these pages had anything to do with the deaths of Owen and Abigail, it’s unlikely the killer would have left without them. They were too poorly hidden, too easily found. Unless the killer didn’t know what they were or had no time to retrieve them.

  The living room’s mundane cleanliness, its antiseptic emptiness, is trying to convince me that nothing is wrong. That tonight hasn’t been brutal, exhausting, and that I don’t have to be responsible for solving two murders. I could use sleep, and the couch is comfortable, but I cannot forget what Marilyn said about the stripes of the whip on Abigail’s back. She deserves every ounce of my energy. I fold the cipher pages into my back pocket and head across the street to the hospital.

  Marilyn is seated at the front of one of the examination tables, her back to me, rubbing her eyes. On the table in front of her is Abigail, looking nothing like she did when I saw her here the first time. Her body is uncovered, and I feel an instinct to turn away, but I force myself to look even more closely. Abigail’s belly has been cut open, adding to the blood that is caked on her face, chest, and arms. A pair of bloody latex gloves is piled inside-out on the floor near her feet, and to her right is another examination table with the tiny, lifeless body of Abigail’s son.

  The doctor, hearing the door shut behind me, turns and stiffens. Her clothes and hands are covered in drying blood. She may have been crying, though I don’t expect she would admit it. Like all of us, she wasn’t prepared for the sudden changes in the world around us, but by the time the Little Five had become my first post as chief of police, she had already distinguished herself as a steel-nerved medic. Then Dr. Colbart, her mentor, died. So it was Marilyn who was there with me when I lost Jeannie, and for a time afterward it was Marilyn who comforted me in my grief. But that was years ago now, when we both still felt young and had to find ways to express our feelings of overwhelming inadequacy—pretending we still had that luxury.

  “Oh, hello, Chief,” she says, as if using the words to bring her back to reality. Once again not using my name. “She was unresponsive when we got to her room. We brought her back here as quickly as we could, and I performed a Caesarian section, but the baby was stillborn. He died in the womb. The man, Owen, is in the cold room in back. Jake’s there, too.”

  The news exacerbates my fatigue, and I slouch into a chair to accept the quadruple tragedy. Marilyn starts to clean up at a water barrel in the corner, scrubbing the blood from her hands. “Do you know anything yet?” she asks with a commiserating tone.

  I am grateful, at least, for her empathy. “No. Luther and the sweep team are checking the fences. I can’t see one of us doing this. No one here even knew them yet.”

  Marilyn nods, but adds, “Wasn’t Abigail starting to make friends with Regina’s kid? She didn’t really talk much, though, did she? I suppose it makes sense. You think maybe—?” She comes to my side and squeezes my shoulder with a half-cleaned hand. “Never mind. You look like you need sleep.”

  “I should wait for the fence check.” I look at the bundled knife in my hands, wishing the world were different.

  “I think I still have some coffee in the cold room. We haven’t gotten anything since the last time the Covington traders were here, so it’s not going to be very good, but it’ll keep you awake.”

  “That sounds wonderful,” I say, and watch her walk away, her dreadlocks swaying behind her. I don’t recall her returning from the cold room; the next thing I know, the roosters are crowing again.

  DAY TEN, 7:00 A.M.

  The northern half of the Little Five is almost entirely converted farmland. The Carter Center, which we now use as the mayor’s administration building, is at the far corner of the field that used to be a scenic wooded area, complete with foot and bike paths. A single row of houses separates the fields from the perimeter fence, and on the other side of the boundary are block upon block of abandoned homes. The road that used to be the main artery for this section of Atlanta, Ponce de Leon, is still clogged with the rusting cars and buses that survivors tried to use to escape the city. The Virginia Highland area to the north was overrun immediately after the collapse and has never been reclaimed, except for the occasional raid in the early years that depleted its drugstores and restaurants of everything valuable. A little farther north is the Emory University campus, which, for many years, was probably the most secure place in the city. But they ran out of food eventually, and some combination of internal division and external interference led to the whole zone being burned to the ground three years ago.

  In other words, virtually everything from I-85 in the west to Clairmont Road in the east belongs to the hollow-heads. So it makes
no sense at all that I am standing at the corner of Moreland and Freedom Parkway, an intersection in the middle of the corn and bean fields, staring at a damaged section of the perimeter.

  Someone has cut the fence with wire cutters and bent the chain links outward, leaving just enough of a gap for a man to squeeze through. I squat down and look at the cut links, hoping to find some trace evidence—a piece of fabric, some blood—but there is nothing that I can see.

  “This is an exit route,” I say, leaning into the opening. “You didn’t find any other gaps?”

  Luther, who came to me this morning in the hospital shortly after the roosters woke me, rests an arm against the fence a few feet away, eyes half closed. Her voice is grainy with fatigue. “I’ve got some people checking again now that it’s light. We didn’t find anything earlier, but we didn’t exactly have the best conditions.” She crouches beside me at the opening. “Do you think the bastard is gone?”

  “I don’t know,” I mutter, realizing that my uncertainty is only going to get worse the longer I investigate this. In the beginning, I was given this post because I was the only person in the Little Five with any law enforcement experience, however unconventional it was. And at first, that wasn’t much of a problem. In the early days, before we had fully secured the perimeter, our problems were straightforward. Hollow-heads at all hours, looters and poachers mainly at night. There were a few people in the Little Five who really didn’t belong, and eventually it was my job to firmly ask them to leave or throw them out if necessary.