by Joe McKinney
All at once the radio erupted with the sounds of men shouting in panic. Canavan recognized the voice of Carlton Weir, the gunner from their LAAV, screaming about zombies entering the gunner’s hatch of his LAAV. They heard three pistol shots and a whole crowd moaning as one, and then Weir screaming with sounds that didn’t seem like they could come from a man before somebody got smart and cut the feed to Weir’s headset.
Images of a flooded street in Houston a year before crowded his mind, a young girl being pulled under a sheet of brown water by the living dead, and he had to labor against the confines of his MOLLE gear to breathe.
He raised his right hand to deliver orders to his men and realized his fingers were shaking. Canavan closed his fist and his eyes and forced himself to focus. When he had mastered the fear and trembling in his extremities, he ordered his squad to move out, putting Travis’s heavy gun in the lead. He guided them back toward Delta Sector, keeping them tight. To the north the street was awash in smoke and dust. The air was an ink wash of gray shot through with black roiling clouds of oily soot so dense that in places it seemed to have no depth at all and left him with a terrifying sense of vertigo.
And then, through the swirling dust, he saw a flash of red.
It stopped him in his tracks.
It was a woman. Her red dress was vividly bright against the haze, and he rose subconsciously from his crouch to watch her.
She wasn’t a zombie. He could see that plainly enough, even from fifty meters out. She was looking to the east, toward the silenced LAAVs, her body tensed and uncertain, as though she couldn’t figure out which direction to run. Canavan called to her, but she didn’t look his way.
A screen of dust passed between them, and when it cleared, the woman was gone.
Canavan stood confused.
“Corporal!”
Canavan spun around. Travis was pointing into the haze, at a figure coming their way. Canavan squinted into the swirling dust and saw their lieutenant. He had his right arm bent in front of his chest, his palm showing, waving his arm around in a large horizontal circle.
The signal to assemble.
Travis and the others moved forward obediently, but Canavan stood his ground. Something was wrong. The order made no sense. Not when they needed to un-ass the area as fast as possible.
Only then did he see the blank, dead look in the lieutenant’s eyes, the blood staining the hips of his trousers.
He yelled for Travis to halt, but the words didn’t come in time. The lieutenant fell on the machine gunner and both men went down, the gun sprawling off to one side, the gunner’s arms flailing awkwardly at the air as the lieutenant tore into him with his fingers and his teeth.
Stunned, it took Canavan a long moment to look away.
When he did, he saw dark forms staggering closer through the haze. He turned, looking for a way out, and realized he was surrounded.
His team was gone.
He raised his rifle and fired into the crowd, burning through three magazines as he hunted for a way out.
But there were too many of them.
He screamed into his radio for air support, reloaded, and went on firing.
He was still firing when he heard the whistle of artillery above him. He dropped to his belly, covered his ears and opened his mouth to equalize the pressure. But the explosions were too close, and the blast bounced him violently off the pavement.
For a moment, he was too stunned to think. He was bleeding from his nose and his mouth, and he couldn’t breathe.
He had just staggered to his feet, driven by a desperate, instinctive urge to get the hell out of there, when the second wave of artillery rolled in. A concussion blast knocked him off his feet, but he was unconscious before his back hit the ground.
§
When he came to, Canavan was on fire.
He could smell his hair burning beneath his helmet, and even beneath forty pounds of gear and ammo, his skin felt like it had been splashed with hot grease.
Canavan tore at his clothes frantically, pulling off his helmet, protective mask, body armor, and even his tunic. Right down to his T-shirt. He rose to his feet, swatting at his body as though he were covered in bees, his head reeling.
The air was full of dancing sparks that slanted across his field of vision like snowflakes in a light breeze. He thought his optic nerves had been damaged by the concussion blast. His inner ears, too. He couldn’t walk straight. The ground felt like it was rolling beneath his feet, and there was a throbbing pain in his head that made his eyeballs shake.
He staggered drunkenly and dropped to one knee.
He heard moaning and looked up. A zombie was limping toward him, carrying the stench of burned flesh and decaying meat with it. Most of its clothes had melted into its skin, leaving it encased in a slick, black slime. Only then did Canavan understand that the sparks he saw were actually burning bits of airborne dust. This zombie had no doubt been at the edge of the blast area, for Canavan could see dust mote lances of light passing through the holes in his chest.
Canavan reached down to his right thigh and pulled his pistol from its holster.
The front sight was swimming before his eyes. Canavan fired and missed four times. He teetered backward and took aim again and with his next shot managed to hit the zombie in the left shoulder, blasting off a piece of charred flesh and spinning the zombie around.
But the zombie didn’t drop.
The thing moaned and raised the stumps of its arms as though it were seeking absolution and came at him again.
Canavan stepped back. He raised the pistol and fired through the entire magazine before landing a lucky head shot and dropping the wrecked corpse to the ground. It lay there in a heap, and Canavan, moving backward uncertainly, could only gape at it.
Some vital connection between Canavan’s mind and muscles and bone had short-circuited. Walking was a painful, doubtful process. He felt like he was moving through water, and in his confusion, his mind tumbled back across the last year to the flooded streets of Houston in the wild days following Hurricane Mardell, the city whelmed beneath the oil-streaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Once again the air was unnaturally green and cool and wet, like it was made of damp cloth. He was up to his hips in water the color of melted caramel. It stank like raw sewage and shone with an unnatural, chemical luster. The living dead were in the water with them, survivors waving their arms over their heads frantically as they screamed for help from the helicopters racing overhead.
For two days, he and his twelve-year-old daughter, Sarah, had wandered the wreckage in a numb stupor, chased ever onward in a blind frenzy of helplessness by the living dead and the looters and the flood waters. Shots rang out constantly. The bodies of deer and dogs and humans festooned the limbs of fallen trees. And worst of all, they were unable to tell the difference between those bloated, lifeless corpses bobbing in the water and the infected zombies that could seem part of the trash but were in fact only waiting for someone to come too close. All the hospitals had become necropolises, and they learned quickly to avoid those. The flooded houses, too—for the moans coming from the attics were not all made by the living, and they could never be sure when a submerged section of a roof had been punched through by the limbs of a live oak or a snapped telephone pole, allowing the zombies an easy place to hide.
On the morning of the third day, they saw a bass boat appear from behind the leafy top of an upturned pecan tree. A National Guardsman with a rifle was waving them on.
Turning to Sarah, Canavan stuck out his hand. She was holding a pink backpack by the straps, splashing frantically as she struggled to keep up. “Come on,” he shouted at her. “They’re right there.”
The girl was exhausted, and every word out of her mouth took the form of a plaintive whining that at first had touched the atavistic protectiveness all fathers possess for their daughters but now met only an impatient hardness and more shouting.
“Daddy, help me.”
“Come on, move!”
A zombie sprang out from beneath the canopy of an immature live oak next to Canavan, and in a moment of pure, base fear, Canavan leapt onto the roof of a nearby car. He spun around only to see his daughter bent forward at the waist, her hands reaching for him, her eyes flashing with fear as the dead man wrapped his arms across her middle and pulled her down.
She sank beneath the debris-strewn water yelling, “Dad-dy! Dad-dy!” He reached for her, but she was already gone.
“No!” he shouted. “No.”
He scanned the water, unable to believe what had just happened, when more of the living dead emerged from the water.
Another wave of burning ash hit his skin, and he swatted at his face.
The memory of Houston vanished, and he was back in the dusty ruins of downtown San Antonio, disoriented at first because the memory had seemed so vivid and so very horrible. A small crowd of zombies, about a dozen or so, were closing on him. There were more behind them, picking their way through the rubble of a collapsed building.
With his mind still numb with guilt and loss for Sarah, he raised his pistol and tried to fire.
Nothing happened.
Confused, he looked at the weapon. It took him a moment to figure out it was empty.
He had two more magazines on his thigh, next to his holster, and muscle memory took over as he ejected the spent magazine, slapped a fresh one into the receiver, and released the slide.
Canavan fired through his second magazine and reloaded the third.
Moaning behind him.
He turned and saw another badly burned zombie coming toward him, trailing a shredded leg. Canavan pointed the gun at the zombie’s head and fired until it fell. Then he dropped his hands to his side and staggered into the swirling clouds of ash and dust, the moans of the dead trailing away behind him.
§
He walked on until he heard a woman sobbing.
It was coming from a white stone building with all the windows on the first six stories blasted out. The lobby on the ground floor was littered with plaster and garbage, lath visible through the walls. There was an acrid, dusty taste of aerosolized concrete and ash in the air that collected in Canavan’s mouth, leaving his tongue dry, like it was wearing a sock.
Looking through one of the openings, he saw the woman in the red dress, the vivid splash of color he had seen earlier muted now with a fine powdering of dust. She was sitting on the floor, her legs spread out in front of her like a little child, her hands on the floor between them. Her hands were wet with blood.
He stepped inside the lobby, and the crumbled plaster and broken glass on the floor crunched beneath his boots.
The woman in red spun around and screamed. Her sudden movements scattered photographs across the floor. Canavan watched the pictures skid toward his boots, then turned his attention on the woman. Her chest was heaving, her eyes wild. She held her injured hands out in front of her, as though to push him away, the gore dripping from them a stark contrast to the bloodless pallor of her face.
“Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered. “Please.”
She thinks I’m one of them, he realized. Without his gear, and with the blood leaking from his nose and mouth, and the punch-drunk stagger in his walk, he must have looked just like a zombie.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
A long pause.
She lowered her hands and made a low, huffing noise that came from the somewhere deep in her throat.
Canavan reached down and picked up one of the photographs. It showed the woman in front of him, younger, smiling, nestled in the arms of an overweight, dark-haired man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. They were on a small boat, a heavily wooded shoreline in the distance behind them.
He held the photograph out to her. “Your husband?”
“My brother, Paul.”
He nodded. When she didn’t take the photograph from him he dropped it in front of her. “What’s your name?”
“Jessica Shepard.”
“I’m James Canavan.”
There was a beat. The muscles at the corners of her mouth twitched, as though she might smile. “Are you a James or a Jim?”
“Either. Jim to my friends.”
“Well, Jim, pull up a chair. The place is kind of dead tonight.”
He couldn’t really laugh, but he liked the easy way she used his name, the gallows humor, the way it gave him a glimpse into her personality.
She was staring up at him, her eyes yellow and bloodshot and almost lifeless, rimmed with red. Her face was lost in shadow, and her hair clung to her damp forehead and cheeks like wet thread. When she breathed, she made a labored, painful sound, as though she had fluid pooling in her lungs.
“Can you get me out of here, Jim?”
He shook his head. “You’ve been infected.”
She closed her eyes and let her chin sink to her chest. She was silent for so long he thought she hadn’t intended to answer. But when she lifted her head again there were tears cutting rivulets down the dust on her cheeks and a knot was working itself up and down furiously at the base of her throat.
The look in her eyes made him turn away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry? You fucking bastard. You God-damned fucking pig-headed bastard.” She wiped a forearm across her eyes, her bloody fingers trembling. “I’m dying,” she said. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be one of those things.”
The air seemed to go out of her lungs.
Then, so faintly he barely heard her, she said, “I’ve been one of them for too long as it is.”
Canavan had no idea what to say, and it shamed him. She was pleading for some sign of human compassion, and it was just her lousy luck to meet with a man who could no more give it to her than he could cure the riot raging in her bloodstream.
“Will you do it?” she asked.
“Will I...?”
“Please. I don’t want to be one of those things.”
He followed her gaze to his right hand and was dumbfounded to see his pistol still there, the slide locked back in the empty position.
“I don’t,” he said, and trailed off. “It’s empty. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.” Her voice was muted in resignation. “Stop saying you’re sorry. It only makes it worse.”
He nodded.
A helicopter passed overhead, its blades a padded staccato rhythm. Soon they would start hearing more gunfire, he realized. He’d need to be ready to signal the rescue squads before they gunned him down like one of the dead.
She started to cough, and to Canavan it sounded like her insides were being shredded by knives. The coughing went on for a long time, and when it subsided and she could once again lift her head to look at him, the deep valley between her breasts was flecked with black, clotted blood.
“Can’t you do it? Please, Jim. I don’t want to be one of them. I can’t….”
Canavan forced himself to swallow, as though there were an almond stuck in his throat. His chest hurt when he breathed. The shame of his own impotence in the face of this woman’s pathos at first left him speechless, but gradually, his feelings of sympathy gave way to a vague, unfocused anger. He resented her for making him remember how lost and helpless he could feel.
He turned to leave.
“Wait!” she said. “Please, don’t go. Please. God, it hurts so bad.”
He knew it did, and he wasn’t without pity. During their training, Canavan and his fellow Marines had been given the skinny on the necrosis filovirus and how it worked its way through the body, how it waged war in the bloodstream and gradually took complete control of the host body, leaving only a staggering train wreck of a virus bomb.
This woman was pretty far along. Infection had probably happened as much as an hour ago. Her temperature was spiking, leaving her face flushed in sweat. Already the blood in her veins was coagulating. A blueberry stain of cyanosis was forming around her mouth as her cells starved for want of oxygen.
Her eyes were milking over. The coughing and the fluid in her lungs had affected her ability to speak, her voice taking on a whiskey-edged roughness that was becoming less and less human with each passing moment.
He wanted very much to leave her.
She began to cough again, the hacking shaking her like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth. She seemed unable to control her movements. A sudden sour odor of defecation reached him, and he knew she voided her bowels. She didn’t have long to go. Complete depersonalization would no doubt happen within the next ten minutes, probably less.
“Please, I need you to do this,” she said, barely able to lift her head now. “One bullet. Don’t you even have one bullet? That’s all it would take. Please, I hurt so bad. I can feel it inside me.”
He shifted uneasily and the glass crunching beneath his boots sounded loud in the sepulchral stillness of that ruined lobby.
She watched his feet. She lifted her milky eyes and webs of wrinkles spread from the corners of her mouth. Within the few minutes he’d been with her, she seemed to age horribly, as though she were a peach left on the sidewalk, puckering in the sun.
And then her face cracked with rage as she screamed at him.
“Why won’t you fucking help me? You bastard. All I want is a bullet.”
Canavan had to force himself not to look away. The look on her face, the baffled anger and desperation, brought images of his daughter into his head. Once again he saw her slipping under the waves. Heard her screaming, “Daddy! Dad-dy!”
He realized he was crying and swiped the tears away angrily. But the dying woman didn’t notice. She had started to cough again. When it subsided, she seemed detached and blunted, as though her mind had been scrambled and left her little more than a babbling idiot.
But he would not have told her about the depth of his self-loathing and shame, even if she had been capable of comprehending it. Perhaps she had her own issues, her own regrets, and perhaps she too had failed someone who had depended on her for their very life, but there were some things that cut so deeply into a man’s conscience that they could not be mentioned to anyone.