But Torrento’s place in the hills, it was worth the risk.
A farmhouse might be enough in the movies to keep zombies away, but, in real life, here and now, Barcomb thought, these sons of bitches were fast and tough. The fresh ones, a fresh dead skull is just as hard to get through as a living one. At least Barcomb imagined so, not being the kind of guy who’s shoved a knife through a human skull before that night. We need a fuckin’ fortress, he thought. And the kind of guys Dutroux knows, they’re probably the exact kinds of guys rich enough and paranoid enough to live in one.
The horde of zombies in the impound didn’t move in any kind of predictable way. They swarmed around like a hive of angry wasps. They were attacking each other at random, moving to strike at anything that caught their half-rotted eyes.
An overweight zombie woman in a bikini wobbled towards Barcomb. Barcomb watched her out of the corner of his eye, trying not to make any big moves to attract her attention as they neared the larger crowd. Eyes ahead, Barcomb put a hand on his glock, just in case.
They were within ten yards of the hole in the fence. It was still blocked by a half-dozen zombies of all shapes and sizes: doctors, police, hookers, all soaked in blood, most missing hands and arms and eyeballs. Suddenly, the doctor’s head popped open on one side and his brains hit the side of the crashed bus with a slap. Almost at the same time, a little after, Barcomb heard the crack of a gunshot.
Ash ducked down instinctively.
Barcomb saw right away what the problem was: someone was firing from the top floor of the station.
After Ash ducked, there came a shout. She’d given herself away to the sniper who was just thinning out the zombies.
“There’s someone out here!” the shout came.
“Move!” Barcomb shouted, dragging Ash to her feet and towards the hole in the fence. Haws was way ahead of them, slamming his sledgehammer through heads and kicking some zombies to the ground. Barcomb drew his glock and got headshots on two zombies, flooring them. He fired a shot towards the station window as he made it into the impound, but it bounced off the brick beside the window.
Ash took out a couple of zombies with headshots which shredded faces and evaporated brains at close range with her Taurus and she and Barcomb hunkered down behind a tow truck inside the compound. Haws ducked behind a wreck as a bullet ricocheted off the metal inches from his head.
“What now?” Haws shouted.
“Improvise!” Barcomb shouted back, taking out a couple more zombies that were closing in. “We gotta get in there fast before we run out of ammo!”
Barcomb peered around the side of the tow truck. He fired at the sniper in the window twice, making him take cover. Barcomb took the opportunity to pull the AR-15 from under the back of his shirt. He lined it up on the window and waited for the sniper to show his face.
The sniper popped up again and looked for them, a bolt-action rifle in his hand.
The sniper was James Dutroux.
“Motherfucker,” Barcomb said.
Chapter 10: Cop Killer
Dutroux fired from the top floor of the police station. Soon, the cop who stole the Humvee, the Texan, he joined him and started firing down too.
He joined them, Barcomb thought. I should’ve expected that.
The cars in the impound were arranged in long rows. Barcomb turned to Ash and said, “Get down. We’ll crawl through. We can’t risk running out in the open. Fuckin’ Dutroux is up there shooting at us, so we can’t return fire either. We need him alive.”
Ash’s face turned pale. “Dutroux? James fuckin’ Dutroux is up there?”
Barcomb grabbed her, “Listen, we don’t have-”
“That piece of shit cut off my husband’s head and sent it to you in a box and you’re telling me not to shoot at him? That’s what you’re fucking telling me?!”
Ash turned and emptied her Taurus at the window. Barcomb spun her around and kissed her. She was stunned.
“Listen to me,” Barcomb said. “You have to survive. I couldn’t live with myself if anything happened to you. This place he knows, this fortress in the hills, this is our best shot at outlasting this bullshit. We kill him, we’ll never find it. We keep him alive, he might even be able to get us inside without a fight.”
Ash shook her head and wiped away her tears.
“Look,” Barcomb said, “no-one wants to kill this sack of shit more than I do. No-one. And a day will come - I promise you this, Ash - when we make him bleed. I want him to die. I want him to die so slow that he gets to taste every little bit of it on his way out. But we need to be smart. Please, Ash. This is too big. This place, those supplies they have, that Humvee: that’s our ticket out of here. That’s the difference between us and these dead motherfuckers wandering around. Nobody wants to die. Everyone does their best. These zombies, their best wasn’t good enough.”
“I want him dead,” Ash said. “I’ll wait, but I want it. And I want to be the one who does it.”
“We need him right now. I wish we didn’t, but we do. As soon as we don’t, you can gut him like a fish. I started off tonight with the exact same plan. There’s a cop in there, Officer Munday, and she came with me. God only knows what they’re doing with her, but she came out for your husband to help me kill the motherfucker who did that to him. We’re her only chance. Dutroux is our only chance.”
Ash nodded and wiped her eyes.
She crawled under the tow truck.
“Head straight,” Barcomb said. “You’ll come to the back door of the station.”
Haws jumped the gap between the tow truck and the car he hid behind. He got down on the floor and stood back up. “I ain’t getting under that shit,” he said. He was too big.
“Get ready to run,” Barcomb said. “I’ll cover you.”
“What do we do when we’re inside?”
“Anyone in there you don’t like the look of, you smoke ‘em.”
Dutroux was firing at them from the top floor. He was laughing his ass off.
*
The door caved under the weight of Haws’s sledgehammer and he barreled through. Barcomb and Ash followed and they found themselves in a long corridor. Before they had a chance to catch their breath, they heard the scream of zombies behind them from the impound and a storm of boots and shouted curse words running down the corridor around the corner towards them.
“Get the door!” Haws shouted.
“Up ahead!” Barcomb said. He raised his AR-15. He had to make every shot count.
Ash slammed the door shut and pulled it hard, holding onto it. “This fucking door isn’t gonna hold!”
Barcomb thought fast. He grabbed a fire extinguisher off the wall.
Haws drew his Desert Eagle. “Door on the left,” he said, “where’s it go?”
“Stairwell!” Barcomb said. “Ash! You run for it when I say.”
Barcomb tossed the fire extinguisher down the hall. It bounced down towards the corner just as three guys turned it and raised their pistols. Barcomb fired the AR-15 once and the fire extinguisher exploded.
“Now, Ash!” he shouted.
Ash let go of the door and ran for the stairwell. Barcomb and Haws were right behind her.
The door to the impound burst open and a zombie horde screeched and wailed as they barged and clawed their way past each other to get to the warm meat, the good stuff. At the end of the corridor, the three guys were floored by the explosion from the fire extinguisher and blinded by the powder. The zombies were on them before they knew what was going on. They ran right past the stairwell and piled onto the three guys.
They feasted.
It was a bloody, screaming meal. The kind the zombies loved best.
Barcomb, Haws and Ash took the stairs two at a time and headed for the top. They stopped at the double doors. Ash looked through the glass.
“Looks OK,” she said.
Barcomb looked. He shook his head at Haws.
Ash looked again. Haws pulled her back as the glass exploded
inwards with the crack-crack-crack of machine gun fire.
“Y’all made a pretty big mistake comin’ in here!” the Texan shouted from the other side. “A fuckin’ titanic mistake is what you all have made! For what? For the fuckin’ drug dealer? For the college idiot? For that fuckin’ pig bitch?”
Pig bitch? Barcomb thought. “Where’d you get that uniform, motherfucker?” he shouted.
“I ain’t a goddamn pig,” the Texan shouted. “Truth be told, I always wanted to be. And I done more than you to be a cop, let me tell you. What, you took some tests ten years ago? I had to kill a guy to get to wear this uniform.”
Barcomb scowled and peered through the glass. The Texan was stood in the middle of the corridor. Barcomb fired, the Texan scrambled for cover, and Barcomb pushed through the doors and took cover behind a steel cabinet.
“Oh, yeah,” the Texan said from around the corner. “I killed me a lot of cops tonight, let me tell you.”
The corridor was where the top brass worked, with glass fronts and many attractive houseplants on this floor as there were damp spots and mice holes on the lower floors. Barcomb had nothing to work with here. The Texan started speaking with someone behind him around the corner as he hugged the wall. Barcomb had been up here only once. He’d been a little hard on a suspect and the police chief needed to get in a room with him to make it look like he had been slapped on the wrist. In reality, they shared a drink and talked boxing for thirty minutes. The chief even gave him tickets for that weekend’s fight. Barcomb had taken the head of a suspected kiddy fiddler and given it a few solid whacks against the wall. What Barcomb remembered now, however, was how he could hear every word from the office next door and the office the door down from that.
Thin walls, Barcomb thought.
He fired through the glass at the end office and the Texan ducked. He fired three shots into the wall and the third drew blood. Barcomb had hit the Texan’s second man in the head. He saw his hand hit the floor past the corner. The Texan shouted something which was lost amid the noise of him firing four rounds down the corridor in retaliation.
Barcomb heard the Texan shout off behind him, “You bring that bitch down here right now!” And as he did, Haws and Ash barged through and dived into the first office on the right. Barcomb made for an office on the left and tore the blinds down inside. He flipped a table and took cover behind it as it was pressed up to the window. He could see the Texan from inside the office.
Then he saw Officer Rachel Munday. The Texan grabbed her from another of his guys and she almost fell over as he dragged her towards her and wrapped his arm around her neck and put his gun to her bruised and bleeding head. Munday was stripped down to her underwear.
“Oh, yeah,” the Texan said, laughing. “Another one of my boys got himself a uniform too! He had a real good time getting it, too!”
Munday was dazed, her left eye half shut and her right eye was swollen shut. Her good eye looked up and met Barcomb’s gaze. Barcomb fought the urge to try a headshot on that Texan motherfucker right there. Barcomb heard a crash from across the way and saw Haws smash through one office into the next, using his sledgehammer to make himself a connecting door. The Texan got nervous and tried to peer around the corner to see what was going on. Haws smashed through another wall.
The Texan fucked up.
He raised his gun, taking it from Munday’s head and aiming towards the noise that Haws was making.
Munday bit into the Texan’s arm so hard she tore out a chunk of flesh and muscle. He screamed and shoved her to the ground. He moved his gun back towards her, but Barcomb was faster. The Texan’s chest exploded in three places and he hit the back wall with wide eyes, his body completely limp. Munday looked up at Barcomb with blood dripping from her mouth. Barcomb nodded.
The Texan’s buddy jumped out from behind the corner. He was dressed in Munday’s tactical vest.
“Motherfucker!” he shouted.
The wall exploded beside him and Haws barged through like a goddamn freight train. Before the guy could even register how fucked he was, Haws punched him so his nose went up into his brain. It was a KO he’d never wake up from.
Barcomb walked out from the office. Munday shakily stood up. She grabbed the Texan’s gun, put it under his chin and fired. She turned her gun on his friend and unloaded the entire clip.
Barcomb didn’t know what happened with these guys, but, seeing the look in her eyes when she turned around, he knew he could never ask.
“Where the fuck is Dutroux?” Ash asked.
Barcomb heard a door shut upstairs.
“He’s on the roof,” Barcomb said.
At that moment, the stairwell door smashed opened and a host of zombies broke through. They were all fresh. They were all hungry. They were all coming right for them.
Haws stepped forward and gripped his sledgehammer with both hands.
“I got this,” Haws said.
“You good?” Barcomb asked.
Haws looked back and grinned. He rummaged through his pocket and pulled something out and tossed it to Barcomb. It was grenade.
“Found it in that office, bro,” Haws said. “You have yourself a party up there.”
Barcomb smiled.
Haws ran at the zombies even faster than they were running at him.
Barcomb and Ash helped Munday out the other stairwell door. They rested Munday on the wall.
“Ash,” Barcomb said, looking up the stairs and checking it down the sight of the AR-15. “You gotta get Munday outta here.”
“I’m not leaving without Dutroux,” she said.
“I got him,” Barcomb said. He caught Munday as she was about to fall. Barcomb took off his tactical vest and shirt and gave them to Ash, leaving himself with just a black vest and his combat pants. “Put these on her,” he said.
Ash grabbed Barcomb’s arm as he was about to leave.
“Listen,” Barcomb said. “It’s one motherfucker. I work better alone. I got this asshole. Take Munday down a flight and head right. There’s an office there. Get in. Lock it. Wait for me.”
“Barcomb,” Ash said.
Barcomb kissed her. She didn’t know what to say. She kissed him back. “Get out of here,” Barcomb said. “I know what he took from you. I can’t put you in harm’s way again. You stay down in that office. Look out the window if you hear a noise, you might just see that son of a bitch on his way down to the sidewalk.”
Ash smiled.
Barcomb checked the clip of his glock. He had ten rounds. He took off the AR-15 and hung it around Munday.
“You giving up your baby?” Munday said, trying to laugh through a mouthful of blood.
“I’m coming back for that bad boy,” Barcomb replied.
Chapter 11: Beat down
Barcomb burst through the door to the rooftop and checked his surroundings. There was a cluster of air ducts sticking up from the flat roof, a maintenance shack and a clock tower in the center. He spotted movement behind an air duct cooler and fired. Barcomb took cover behind another duct and looked around. He listened. He could smell burning flesh in the air. It was almost dawn and the city was alive with the sound of death. The zombies had been tearing through Elizabeth like a tornado, ripping apart everything and everyone in their path. Barcomb saw nothing in them. There was no humanity left. He saw them as a force of nature, like a plague or a flood, and he dealt with them in the same way. It wasn’t murder if they were already dead. It wasn’t self-defense even, thinking about it. It was pest control. It was flood prevention. Every zombie he killed saved a life tonight, and not just his own. Every zombie he killed was tens, maybe hundreds of victims. That’s how he saw it.
That’s not how he saw Dutroux.
Dutroux was straight revenge.
Dutroux had no more power. His thugs were gone; his drugs were gone; his criminal empire had been decimated. All Dutroux was now was a fat fuck with a gun and no second chances. He must’ve joined these motherfuckers almost right away. They didn’t lo
ok like his boys. Too white. Too country. They gave him a gun and he let them have Munday. For Barcomb, that was enough. Killing Jimmy was enough. Being a drug-dealing scumbag, slinging dope in local schools and using little kids as runners, that was enough.
The man don’t deserve to live, Barcomb thought. And, as shit as this world has become after this night, it’ll still be a better fuckin’ place if I take this son of a bitch out right now.
“You don’t fuckin’ quit, man!” Dutroux said. “You killed the others?”
“Don’t worry,” Barcomb shouted, “you’ll get your turn, motherfucker!”
Dutroux fired twice. Barcomb heard the whistle of the bullets flying by over his head. Dutroux was using Munday’s glock. Barcomb bared his teeth just thinking about it. He nearly growled.
Dutroux moved for a maintenance shed at the corner of the roof. He ducked behind it as Barcomb fired. A ricochet caught Dutroux’s arm and he spun to the ground. He crawled back behind the small iron shed.
“Look!” Dutroux shouted. “We can stop this shit right here, man!”
“Why would I wanna do that?” Barcomb shouted and ran for the shed. Dutroux jumped out from behind it and started firing. Barcomb felt a hot slice in his arm as he ducked for cover behind an air duct. He wasn’t gonna let a small thing like a bullet through the arm stop him, and he’d be damned if a lowlife like James Dutroux was gonna be the one to stop him.
Dutroux got behind an air duct next to the clock tower. “You want to get to Torrento, you want yourself a fuckin’ zombie-proof hideout,” he shouted, “you go through me! He ain’t gonna let you in without me!”
“Fuck your zombie castle bullshit!” Barcomb said.
Dutroux laughed. “You think that’s it? You think it’s just a nice fuckin’ house?” he shouted. “That man, he got enough firepower to fuckin’ roll through you, wherever you go, homes. You got no fuckin’ chance without me. You don’t need his house, man. You need him dead.”
Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead Page 9