Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead

by Darren Barcomb

  They were coming up on the Strip in Elizabeth, Barcomb realized. This meant trouble. Elizabeth was by no means a tourist-friendly spot. It appeared on no lists of “Places to visit on the East Coast”. In fact, the only lists Elizabeth routinely appeared on was “Most dangerous cities in the USA”. This, however, didn’t deter visitors. It merely changed the type of visitors the city drew in. Elizabeth drew in the criminal element and the sleaze, the low-stakes poker crowd and the retirees who didn’t know any better. These people crowd out the Strip every night until sun-up, looking for marks, johns, lays or coffee houses with nice waitresses. The Strip was up and on the right.

  Don’t turn right, Barcomb said to himself. Don’t you fuckin’ dare turn right.

  Barcomb swooped around a fist fight in the middle of the street and righted himself. He looked up just as the Humvee turned right onto the Strip.

  Shit, Barcomb thought.

  *

  The Strip was lit with a hundred neon lights for topless bars, massage parlors, xxx-rated movie theatres and second-rate casinos. The moon was hidden by the neon haze that blocked out the night sky. The sound of the Strip was usually one of shouted offers, mumbled replies, screamed demands and hurled abuse. Tonight, it was all shrieks and screams. Barcomb slowed the Fireblade and glided around onto the Strip. There must have been a thousand people on the street, two-dozen police cars and a score of ambulances. A couple of bloodied fire trucks were parked outside the Lucky Larry Casino. A group of firefighters lay face down with holes in their heads as huge flames licked out of the windows of the hotel above the casino. The road was littered with corpses and smashed and burnt-out cars, debris of all kinds. But Barcomb didn’t give a shit about what wasn’t moving. He was too busy looking at all of the people and the zombies running and fighting and bleeding and killing. He could barely tell who was alive and who wasn’t. Some areas were just fine red mist flying in the air with arms and legs thrashing beneath. Others were clearer, with groups of zombies literally tearing people into pieces, yanking at heads and tearing at necks and chewing at arms.

  Human beings still tried to scream even after their heads had been separated from their bodies. This is a fact that Barcomb could have lived happily without knowing. Now, he had seen the evidence first-hand. He could sense the nightmares in the future, if he lived long enough to have them.

  Haws was approaching behind, the Toyota slowed through the barrage of bodies that had bounced underneath it and become tangled in the inner workings. Barcomb didn’t have time to wait. It was dangerous to go ahead, but he couldn’t lose them. He couldn’t lose the supplies. The Humvee charged forward through the crowds of people, crushing them under its huge wheels and smashing aside any wreckage on its way through. Barcomb hit the throttle and followed in its wake.

  The wheels of the Fireblade struggled to gain traction on the road slick with blood. Barcomb had to take it down to forty miles per hour and go easy on the turns, which was tricky with so many bodies and so much scrap metal lying around and being bounced back by the Humvee twenty yards ahead. Zombie hands grasped for Barcomb as he rode by, coming close to unseating him when they touched the bike.

  Barcomb’s radio buzzed with static. He forgot it was clipped to his belt. A voice sounded from it, Texan and brash. The other handset was in the Humvee.

  “Give it up, partner,” the man said. “You ain’t getting anywhere in this shit storm. Do yourself a favor: tuck your tail between your legs and run off home now, ya hear? And don’t you worry about your friends. We’ll take real good care of them. Especially the woman. Gonna treat her like a real princess, aren’t we fellas?”

  Laughter sounded in the background. Munday started to scream, but the radio cut out.

  Calls himself a cop and he pulls shit like this, Barcomb thought. I’m gonna fuck him up.

  Barcomb gunned it, maxing the bike out. The Fireblade got right up to the rear of the Humvee. Barcomb drew his glock to shoot a tire. Fuck it, he thought. Better fuck the whole thing up and get our shit than have this prick keep it!

  The Humvee suddenly jerked under the weight of a huge crash as it slammed between two wrecked cars. The wrecks span violently in the road, their rear ends closing fast on Barcomb as the Humvee pushed through. Barcomb cleared the first car and the second slammed into the back wheel of the bike.

  Barcomb was airborne.

  *

  Something ached. Something else stung. There was one part which was hurting like a bastard. He thought he heard something crunching when he tried to move. It wasn’t pleasant.

  That’s good, Barcomb thought. I suppose that means I’m alive

  He opened his eyes.

  “Fuck me,” he said.

  The world was upside down. Upside down signs flashed red at him, asking him if he wanted a massage. Upside down cars burned in the street. Upside down zombies looked in his direction and screeched. His upside down AR-15 had been thrown from his back and lay a few yards away. Barcomb righted himself. He was lying on the now broken windscreen of a VW beetle. He stood up. The woman sat behind the driver’s seat might have been angry with him if she still had a face with which she could express emotion. Her skin had been torn from her face and the muscles and fat underneath had been chewed to the bone. She lay there dead, looking awfully sorry for herself. Barcomb cracked his knuckles and rotated his shoulders. His left shoulder gave him a poke, shooting with pain. He looked and saw a shard of glass sticking out. He yanked it free and tossed it to the ground.

  “Goddamn,” he said.

  Even more zombies were looking in his direction.

  Barcomb pulled his glock and checked his mag. Seven rounds left.

  The AR-15 was close, but not close enough. A horde of zombies we slowly coming to the realization that Barcomb was alive and alive meant tasty. The Fireblade lay amid the horde. Barcomb lifted his glock and fired at the gas tank. He missed with two shots, tried again and only hit the seat. A zombie stepped in the way. Barcomb grimaced. He lined up his sights properly, head shot the zombie and then pinged the gas tank exactly right, sending it up in a huge explosion which threw the zombie horde back and set them on fire.

  Barcomb jumped down from the car and grabbed the AR-15. He looked up and the burning zombies were running at him, noisier and madder than ever before. They were too close to take one at a time, so he sprayed their legs and cut them all down in their tracks.

  The smell of their burning flesh and hair was unbearable.

  Barcomb spun around to survey his surroundings. He’d been thrown quite a way. He was right in the middle of the Strip. Zombie blackjack dealers and undead hookers were everywhere. Barcomb was, in a word, fucked. He ran to the fire trucks outside the burning casino and climbed up the back. The explosion had brought a huge crowd of zombies, all of them starving, hungering for warm flesh. Barcomb had seen them attack one another - it seemed any flesh was good when times were hard - but they clearly preferred their meat warm and wriggling in agony.

  Over the rabid screams of the undead, Barcomb heard a familiar voice. He didn’t like what it said.

  “Fire in the hole!” Haws shouted.

  Barcomb looked just in time to see him pull the pin on two grenades and toss them into the crowd surrounding the fire truck. Barcomb ran towards the other end of the truck and jumped onto the ground. He got to his feet and the explosion threw him back down. Limbs and bones, the flesh disintegrated off it, erupted in the middle of the street, like a morbid geyser. Barcomb moaned in pain and slowly pushed himself up off the ground. He looked at Haws, stood a few feet away next to the shitty Toyota.

  “Was that really necessary?” Barcomb said.

  A warm, red shower started as the blood from the victims started to fall from the sky. Barcomb accepted it, standing there frowning as he was soaked red.

  Haws nearly smiled.

  “Where the fuck is my Humvee, Barcomb?”

  “They got away,” Barcomb said.

  Haws shook his head and cursed under his
breath. “Well, we’ll get it back. We’ll get it.”

  “Damn straight,” Barcomb said. “Does it have GPS?”

  Haws nodded.

  “We’re gonna need some help getting it back,” Barcomb said, “assuming they stay in the city.”

  “I need a computer to track it,” Haws said.

  “I know someone who has one.”

  “Ash?”

  Barcomb nodded. “She’s pretty handy with a gun as well.”

  “Maybe she can lend a hand?”

  Barcomb nodded.

  “OK,” Haws said. “Lead the way.”

  Barcomb opened the driver’s door on the Toyota.

  “Fuck that Toyota shit, though,” Haws said. “Let’s get us a real fuckin’ car.”

  “What you got in mind?”

  Haws nodded to a sky blue Dodge Challenger with twin white stripes. It was parked on the side of the road, untouched but for a few scratches. “I’m driving,” Haws said. “Where’s this chick live?”

  “Next to the cemetery,” Barcomb said. “There might be a lot of these zombie bastards around there.”

  Haws grinned. “Let me just grab my sledgehammer.”

  Chapter 7: Cemetery Dance

  The moon was yellow in the sky, but it was at least visible now away from the neon glow of the Strip. One or two stars - they might have been planets, Barcomb wasn’t sure - shone through the light orange haze created by the streetlights. Looking at the stars, it made Barcomb wonder about how all this shit started and it was all going down in the rest of the country. Was it radiation from a crashed satellite? Maybe it was a science experiment gone wrong, some kind of disease warfare? Could be it was just Hell had come to Earth and these were the last days. Barcomb decided it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he survived it with enough - enough people, enough supplies, and enough guns - that he could have something approaching a life afterwards.

  He turned on the radio.

  Static with small snippets of speech. He fiddled with the dial.

  “What was that?” Haws said. “You had something there.”

  Barcomb turned the dial a tiny amount at a time, the static breaking way for a voice underneath the noise here and there.

  “Unprecedented violence-” it said.

  Barcomb twisted it.

  “global-”

  Barcomb frowned. He tried again.

  “After the death of the US President-”

  “What the fuck?” Haws said.

  “-and the resignation of British Prime Minister David Cameron after he accepted responsibility for the crisis, the world looks for leadership. Reports of wide-scale destruction and death tolls in the hundreds of thousands are reported all across the country, with little sign of it slowing down. Elsewhere, the effects have been no less devastating as France is left without a functioning government and London has been evacuated. The US government has called on island nations to accept American refugees, but Australia and Ireland have refused, despite having successfully contained the crisis in their nations.”

  “That’s it then,” Barcomb said.

  Haws nodded. “The world is fucked,” he said.

  “We’re on our own.”

  Haws said, “How the fuck is it even the Aussies can get their shit together, but we’re flapping around like dumbasses and can’t even protect our own president?”

  Haws took the car around the burning wreckage of a news channel helicopter. Barcomb tried not to look at the thrashing arms and legs within the fire. Haws leaned over and rummaged in the glove box.

  “Let’s see what we have,” he said.

  He pulled out a stack of CDs and then opened his window. Leaning on the steering wheel with his elbows, he started tossing the CDs out the car one at a time.

  “Shit. Shit. Lame. Shit. Embarrassing. Shit. Shit.”

  Barcomb looked out his window just in time to see a man plummet to his death from an apartment window. Shit is just too much for some people, he thought. Have a safe trip.

  Haws laughed. Barcomb looked over. He held up a CD and grinned: “Motorhead,” he said.

  The zombies could hear them coming from over a block away, but Haws drove so fast there wasn’t a thing they could do to get in their way. They entered the nicer part of town, but the scenery didn’t improve. Death and chaos at every turn. There were more dead bodies than alive people, and more hunger-crazed zombies than either. A couple of the zombies tore at each other, which interested Barcomb because they could just keep going until both were literally just a torso with a pair of arms attached. The zombies didn’t care after a while if they were attacking a human or a zombie; they’d rather go after a human for the warm meat, but instinct was instinct and cold leftovers would do just as well. Zombie gladiator matches. There’s something in that, Barcomb thought. Zombie MMA. ZFC.

  The arrived outside Valhalla Cemetery and pulled over.

  “This girl,” Haws said, “I didn’t want to say shit before, but she’s living in a fuckin’ cemetery?”

  “Nah,” Barcomb said. “She’s not a fuckin’ vampire. She lives on the other side, but it’s a thirty minute drive to get there or a five minute walk through here. Road system in this city, man. It’s fucked. I’d say go round, but we don’t know what the fuck is waiting around there. Least this way, we know these motherfuckers are all old dead. There shouldn’t be much fight in them.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah. I’d be surprised if half of them even got out their fuckin’ coffins. You see Kill Bill? Took that woman fuckin’ hours to get out of her coffin and she was a fuckin’ kung-fu master. Some dead as shit old corpse isn’t getting out of that shit without some real fuckin’ effort.”

  Haws grabbed his sledgehammer and jumped out the car. “Well, I hope some of them did. I’m feeling pretty pumped!”

  Barcomb got out his side and they both approached the entrance. It was locked. Haws smashed the large padlock with his sledgehammer and kicked the iron gates open.

  “Wakey-wakey,” Haws said.

  *

  Valhalla Cemetery was a wooded cemetery with birch and oak trees masking its enormous size and the number of graves inside. Its gates and fences were wrought iron, painted black, and the caretaker’s office was built from stone and had Victorian-style, long windows with wiring. The first grave Barcomb saw as he walked in featured a weather-beaten, stone gargoyle on top, about to take off and snarling viciously. As they walked down the path, keeping an ear out for suspicious sounds and an eye out for moving ground, Barcomb noticed that the older a grave was, generally, the scarier its gravestone was in design. He figured attitudes towards death had become much more friendly in the last fifty years or so, with terrifying gargoyles replaced with statues of kindly angels and photographs printed into the stone of smiling portraits of the dead.

  These zombies will fix all this chicken shit “Death is just another destination” type motherfuckers, and no mistake, Barcomb thought. Nothing brings the terror of death home like having a re-animated corpse tearing the skin off your face and eating it for breakfast.

  Haws was quiet.

  “You OK there, buddy?” Barcomb said.

  “I remember this place,” Haws said. “I been here before. When I was a little kid.”

  “You sure? You always lived the other side of town.”

  Haws nodded. He gripped his sledgehammer tight.

  “I got lost in here once,” Haws said. “Spent the night hiding in the doorway of a crypt type thing in the pouring rain.”

  “All night?” Barcomb said.

  Haws nodded. “No-one came looking for me.”

  “Fuck.”

  “Just being here, it’s making me real fuckin’ angry.”

  Barcomb nodded ahead. “How about you take it out on something?”

  Farther up the path, two zombies were pathetically fighting each other, clawing and biting as they both lay on the floor, their legs too rotten to let them stand up. They clawed slowly and pitifu
lly, doing no damage. Their graves had been dug open from the inside. They hadn’t gotten very far away from them. Haws walked over. He lifted his sledgehammer up, then brought it back down slowly. He put it down on the floor. Then he stamped on one of the zombies, putting his boot heel right through its half-rotten skull. He stomped the other one too, its brains splattering up his pant leg. Then he jumped up and down on them like a little kid jumping in a pool.

  Barcomb watched, his eyebrows raised.

  Haws stopped and looked up.

  “Um,” Barcomb said. “We feeling better?”

  Haws grinned. “Much,” he said. “Though I think I got some blood in my shoe.”

  Haws took off one boot and a sock and wrung the sock out, the blood dripping on the path.

  “If there’s one thing I can’t stand in this world,” Haws said, “it’s wet goddamn socks.”

  There was a low murmuring sound up ahead, around a small hill and past some trees. The two of them moved quietly and quickly. Barcomb was ready to fire. As they neared, the low murmur became a loud collective moaning sound, earthy and guttural, sounds from things which should no longer be making sounds, their voice boxes having rotted into disuse long ago.

  In the middle of the cemetery was a lake the size of two basketball courts with a small island in the center with a single grave in the middle; it had a statue of a dog on top of a small pillar. Barcomb didn’t give enough of a shit why to ask. The whole lake was surrounded by rotten zombies lying on the ground, their eyes turned to jelly and their muscles chewed to nothing by the worms long ago; they were like a huge carpet of blind rotten meat with teeth. There was too many to walk through.

  “Man,” Barcomb said. “We’ll be here all night if we want to kill enough of these to make a path.”

  “How about a swim?” Haws said, pointing to the lake.

  Barcomb spotted a row boat and laughed: “How about a romantic boat ride, bro?”

  “Buy me dinner after?”

  “Not a chance.”

  They headed for the handful of zombies between them and the boat. Barcomb was able to hit them with the butt of his AR-15 and cave their skulls in, no problem, preserving his ammo. Haws took a couple out bare-handed, punching through their temples and coming out the other side.