Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead

by Darren Barcomb

  “I ain’t scared of any friend of yours,” Barcomb said.

  Dutroux rose and fired. His glock clicked. Out of ammo. He reached for another clip. By the time he had his hand on it, Barcomb had put a bullet through his forearm. Dutroux screamed, dropped the clip and ran for the clock tower. Barcomb followed and aimed for his legs. Running and gunning all night had taken its toll and Barcomb cursed himself for being a little off with his aim. His entire body was aching, but he pushed through. He crashed through the door and Dutroux waited on the other side.

  Dutroux hit Barcomb with the butt of his glock and drew blood. Barcomb stumbled back a moment and it was enough of a window for Dutroux to throw a punch with his other hand. Barcomb recovered fast, though - faster than Dutroux anticipated - and grabbed his wrist and twisted it around, using the force of his punch against him and slamming his head into the wall behind him. Dutroux dropped his gun and Barcomb made him all kinds of hurt. He slammed his head three times into the wall and punched him in the spine. He twisted his arm until it snapped and Dutroux dropped screaming to the floor.

  Barcomb kicked him in the stomach until he coughed blood and screamed, “New Providence!”

  “What the fuck did you just say?” Barcomb said.

  “New Providence, man.” Dutroux said. “That’s where Torrento at!”

  “I told you I don’t give a fuck.” He kicked him again.

  Dutroux groaned in pain. “I told you, homes! Guns! Ammo! Enough shit to last a year! You think your boy Haws is a survival freak, man. You ain’t seen shit. This motherfucker has built himself a fuckin’ fortress and got enough shit in there to survive a nuclear fuckin’ holocaust, man.”

  Barcomb thought for a second. He needed somewhere. The world had gone to shit. Torrento sounded dangerous. Zombies can be out-run and out-thought; human beings were a whole other headache. If they were gonna survive this shit, zombies were only half the problem.

  “I see you thinkin’,” Dutroux said, laughing through broken teeth.

  Barcomb shook his head. “Keep talkin’,” he said.

  Dutroux laughed. Barcomb picked him up and threw him against the wall. Dutroux slumped down. Barcomb stamped on his other arm and broke it.

  “Garfield Drive!” Dutroux said after a minute of straight screaming.

  Barcomb decided right there. He couldn’t afford not to go.

  We need out of Elizabeth, Barcomb thought. This is our shot.

  “Barcomb!” Ash’s voice sounded outside the tower.

  Barcomb turned for a split second. It was enough. Dutroux kicked out at Barcomb’s knee. He buckled for a moment and Dutroux was up the stairs, headed for the top.

  “Motherfucker,” Barcomb said.

  “Barcomb!” Ash called again.

  Barcomb followed Dutroux.

  Barcomb’s lungs burned and his knee was on fire as he pushed himself up the stairs, making footprints in Dutroux’s blood. He’s got nowhere to go, Barcomb thought. He’s unarmed. What the fuck is he thinking? Barcomb got to the top and Dutroux was looking out over the city. The top of the tower was framework with no walls, a clock hanging from the frame. The sun was coming up slowly. The sky was as red as the streets below. Dutroux knew he was beaten. Barcomb could see it. One arm was broke, one was shot, and the guy was beat all to Hell.

  “You’re one stupid motherfucker,” Barcomb yelled.

  “Man,” Dutroux said with a chuckle, not even turning around, “the world got overrun with fuckin’ zombies and I still get killed by some white fuckin’ cop. Fuckin’ zombies, homes.” He shook his head.

  “You’re going out either way, man. You were on your way out the moment you set foot in my city. You put my partner’s head a box? Well, there we are.”

  “There it is, man.”

  Dutroux turned around. He sniffed. He was crying. Barcomb laughed.

  “Yeah, man,” Dutroux said. “Big, bad drug kingpin badass goes out cryin’ like a bitch.”

  “Funny stuff,” Barcomb said.

  “You know, I never had a chance, homes. You know where I come from? You know how I come up, what I went through?”

  “I don’t give a fuck,” Barcomb said.

  “Ain’t nobody ever given shit to me. Everything I ever got, I had to take that shit for myself. Someone else had to lose out? Some fuckin’ pieces of shit had to fuck up they live on my shit because they weak and they can’t say no to a fuckin’ needle? Not my problem. Some fuckin’ cops fuck up their careers because they take my money? Not my problem. Not my shit. All my shit, that was tight. I had it all locked down before tonight.”

  “I came into your building and your boys had been fucked up by the competition already. Me and Munday, we came into your fuckin’ house just to kill you. And we got in. I don’t give a fuck if the world is ending, man. If you can lose all your shit in one night, you never had shit to begin with. You’re a fuckin’ bull-shitter. There’s a billion out there just like you.”

  “What you got that’s so special, huh?” Dutroux squared his shoulders up and frowned. The blood from his forehead was blinding him in one eye. He spat some blood out of his mouth. “What makes you the shit? Who made you the boss man, motherfucker? You just a cop. You just some punk who couldn’t do shit for himself so had to join some bullshit and get the government to give you a badge so you can act like you own shit. You got nothin’, you never had nothin’, and ain’t never gonna have nothin’. You ain’t got the fuckin’ balls for it.”

  Barcomb looked down at the rooftop. Ash was watching them. She had a gun in her hand and tears in her eyes.

  “I grew up with cops like you,” Dutroux said. “Little dicks, all y’all. You gotta beat on kids to make yourselves feel like a man. Shit’s turned now, though. Now you the little bitch. Now you runnin’ scared. Your whole life - all two fuckin’ days of it, I say - you’re gonna be runnin’. You ain’t never gonna get to Torrento.”

  Barcomb holstered his glock and took a step forward as he pulled out his knife.

  “Wait” Dutroux said. He took a step back and was about to fall backwards off the clock tower to the street below. He was off balance, falling away from the clock tower. Barcomb reached out and grabbed him by the scruff of his shirt. The only thing keeping him upright and from falling to his death now was Barcomb.

  Dutroux was panicked, his bravado disappearing: “You need me!” he shouted. “You need me, man!”

  “I don’t need you,” Barcomb said. “We’ll get into that fortress ourselves, make it ours. Your friend, I’m gonna kill him just for associating’ with a son of a bitch like you.”

  “Listen,” Dutroux said. “Listen. This guy Torrento. He’s not like me. He’s nothing like me.”

  Barcomb started to loosen his grip on Dutroux’s shirt. Dutroux felt himself going back and it scared him.

  “No, wait!” Dutroux screamed. He looked down at the ground below and back to Barcomb. “Torrento,” he said, “this guy is a big time motherfucker. You know the Columbian cartel guys? They guys who’ll kill your entire families you even look at them wrong?”

  “He’s with the Columbians?”

  “No, man! Those guys are the worst motherfuckers on the planet. You fuck with them, you’re gone. You fuck with them, you wish you’d never been born. You wish your wife never been born, your kids, your moms, your dad. The Columbians will ruin your life so hard you wish you never had any of it.” Dutroux closed his eyes. “But even the Columbians,” Dutroux said, opening his eyes again, “are scared of Torrento.”

  “Bullshit,” Barcomb said.

  “Listen to me,” Dutroux said. “I’d been trying to get this guy’s business for years. You wanna know how I finally got it?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Barcomb, I cut off a cop’s head and fuckin’ sent it back to them in the mail. I did that to impress Torrento. That’s what it takes. That’s what he expects. That’s who he is.”

  Barcomb pulled Dutroux forward a second to shift his grip. He grabbe
d Dutroux and held him now just with a hand clenched around his throat.

  Ash burst through onto the rooftop, the door banging hard into the wall. She looked up at the bell tower and saw Barcomb and Dutroux. Barcomb looked down and met her eyes. She was scowling, her face wet with tears. Barcomb looked back to Dutroux.

  “Listen to me,” Dutroux said, struggling to talk with Barcomb’s hand gripping his throat, and he was as sincere as he’d ever said anything in his entire life, “if you go up against Torrento, that’s it, man. You are going to get your people killed.”

  Barcomb shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He smiled at Dutroux and said, “See you later, motherfucker.”

  Dutroux’s face fell. He knew he was about to die. He knew it before, but now he could feel it. The knowledge took over his whole body and he slumped. For a second he found his strength. He looked Barcomb right in the eyes and said, “You’re all gonna die.”

  Barcomb thrust the knife up into and through Dutroux’s ribs with a satisfying crack.

  “Not in your lifetime,” Barcomb said.

  Dutroux looked surprised. His mouth dropped open and his eyes went real wide. His hand gripped Barcomb on the forearm. His other hand dropped his empty gun and it fell down to the street below. Barcomb gutted Dutroux, tearing down towards his waist and opening him up. Barcomb threw the knife on the floor, still holding Dutroux by the throat. He took Haws’s grenade from his belt, removed the pin with his teeth, and shoved it inside Dutroux’s open torso. Barcomb pulled him back so he was standing upright and then let go of his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” Dutroux said, unsteady on his feet, tears blinding him.

  “Sorry don’t get it done,” Barcomb said.

  Barcomb shoved Dutroux hard and he flew backwards off the clock tower with a high-pitched scream which only stopped when he hit the ground below and the grenade detonated showering a twenty-foot radius in the blood, the brains and the shit of James Dutroux, drug dealer, cop killer.

  Barcomb looked down at the mess and sighed.

  Chapter 12: Goodbye, Jimmy

  What was left of Dutroux was dribbling down the gutter and into the sewer.

  Just where he belongs, Barcomb thought.

  Barcomb climbed down the stairs to the rooftop. Ash was waiting for him at the door as he stepped out into the cold air of the dawn. The city was turning a golden red as the sun rose. The screams were becoming less and less common, but they were always there. Barcomb, even after one night of Hell, couldn’t imagine life now without screams nearby. It weighed on him.

  But tossing Dutroux from that tower sure did take a lot of that weight off.

  Barcomb saw that it did something to Ash, too.

  Ash hugged him tight. She tried to say thank you, but the tears wouldn’t stop coming. Barcomb held her. He knew why she was crying. Dutroux was dead, but Dutroux wasn’t the end. Her husband, Jimmy, was a dirty cop. Jimmy was her entire world. Jimmy was her life. Jimmy was her future. And Dutroux took that all away. Barcomb hated dirty cops, but Jimmy had a change of heart. Jimmy was OK by him. He wanted to clean himself up, do the right thing and take responsibility for his actions. Dutroux took a machete to Jimmy and Jimmy’s head ended up in the Elizabeth P.D. morgue. Ash’s long-term future, for the longest time, had become a black hole, an empty void. What used to be there, Dutroux took all that away.

  Dutroux took all that away, but a piece of it remained.

  Jimmy’s head was still in the morgue.

  “Let’s go,” Barcomb said.

  He led her by the hand through the building, down through the blood-soaked corridors, over the bodies of the assholes who had tried to fuck with them, past a pile of zombies who had got in, got hungry and tore each other up. It was the first time either of them had seen the destruction in the light of day, and it was like seeing it all for the very first time. Barcomb felt like he’d been through a nightmare and woken up, but it was all still as it was when he was asleep.

  The blood looked a little darker than he imagined it was in the night, more purple. The entrails and the organs and the brains, it all looked a little unreal. Maybe it was his mind, helping him cope, or maybe Barcomb had just killed enough last night that it had flipped a switch. If the switch was flipped, he wasn’t sure it could be flipped back. In this new world, he wasn’t sure he’d want it to be.

  The morgue was in the back corner of the building. Barcomb checked his glock. Good enough, he thought. He opened the door. The cold, steel room echoed with bangs and groans from the refrigerators built into the walls.

  “It’s OK,” Barcomb said. “They’re not going anywhere. I know where Jimmy is.”

  Barcomb went to the last column of refrigerators and pulled the middle drawer. Inside was a plastic black box with a grey lid. It wasn’t moving.

  Ash searched her belt. She’d lost her knife somewhere along the way. Barcomb handed her his knife and she nodded. Her face had turned stern, unreadable. She’d locked her emotions down as tight as possible. Barcomb knew she’d thought about nothing else since the zombie crisis began. This was a moment she’d been thinking about all night.

  “I’ll get the lid,” Barcomb said.

  Ash nodded.

  They’d both seen Jimmy’s severed head before, back when it was fresh, when it was news. Now his head was something entirely different; it was a demon, something which had haunted both of their dreams. Barcomb had been seeing it every time he closed his eyes. He came with Ash the first time she had to ID the head. It was nothing like this, and he never thought he’d have to do it again.

  Barcomb lifted the lid. The head was face down. All he saw in the cold florescent light of the morgue was the back of Jimmy’s head. It didn’t look like it was moving.

  “I don’t know that it’s come back,” Barcomb said.

  Ash said nothing. She took a step forward and looked at it. “It’s not moving.”

  “You want me to turn it over?”

  “Leave me,” Ash said. “I’ll handle it.”

  Barcomb looked at her, but her focus was entirely on her dead husband’s severed head. He recalled how he found her in her apartment, cutting the head off the crazy cat lady, just to see if the head survived by itself. That head survived. Ash, as she waited to see if this head re-animated, knew this was going to plague her thoughts, possibly for the rest of her life, however short a time that might be. Barcomb walked over to the door. He looked back at her.

  “You sure?” Barcomb said.

  She was already lifting the head out of the box by its hair, the knife in her other hand.

  Barcomb saw its mouth moving, snapping and wiggling like it was trying to scream and eat all at the same time. He didn’t see the eyes. That nightmare was to be Ash’s alone. Barcomb stepped outside and closed the door behind him. He heard muffled last words and the crunch of a knife through a skull. A minute later, Ash opened the door and walked past him without a second word.

  Chapter 13: Goodbye, Elizabeth

  Barcomb had lived in Elizabeth all his life. It had never been an easy relationship. She had given him a pretty rough ride at times. She could be a real bitch. The town had no visitors, no real tourists, only drug runners and people who took a wrong turn on the way to New York. But Barcomb knew her well enough to know her good side. He saw parts of Elizabeth very few people got to see. He had seen the absolute worst of the worst. He had seen things so terrible he couldn’t even have imagined them, things that still woke him up in the middle of long, winter nights covered in sweat. Elizabeth was home to idiots, to maniacs, to psychopaths, to the poor and the desperate. It was a stage on which every disgusting act known to man had been performed. Usually at three in the morning around the back of Barcomb’s house from the sounds of what his neighbors were up to. But, despite everything, Elizabeth still had people who cared. Elizabeth still had a real community. Elizabeth was beautiful in her own way.

  Barcomb, Haws and Ash stood beside the Humvee on top of the hillside overlooking the town
. None of them could speak. Barcomb knew, looking down, that all of that was gone now. There was no more beauty, no more community, no nothing. There was life and there was death, and things they were gonna have to do to stay alive, he thought, some of those might even be worse than death.

  Munday lay in the back of the Humvee asleep, trying to recover, her mind trying to forget.

  Barcomb tried tightening the makeshift bandage around his head to stop it from falling over his eyes, but it just shifted down. Ash moved his hands away and tightened it for him. He nodded his thanks and she smiled at him. Her smile faded when she looked back to Elizabeth below as the red glow of the dawn crept between the buildings towards them. It had been only a few nights since the sickness took hold, but already Elizabeth was beyond saving. There was no coming back from this. Too many lives had been lost. Too many zombies had torn too many friends and family apart. A lot of people, their entire lives, the whole support structure of people they knew, now lay rotting in the street. And too many people had done things they could never come back from. Society had broken down entirely, and it only took a few days. Barcomb realized how fragile it must have been before, how precious.

  He finally found his voice.

  “We’ll be back,” he said, not sure if he believed it.

  Ash nodded.

  “You know it, brother,” Haws said.

  “We’ll head to the hills, find this Torrento fuck, take whatever he has and regroup. New Providence,” Barcomb said. “After that, we take back the city. Nobody’s coming to save us. Nobody’s coming to help us. Elizabeth isn’t on the radar of anyone important, so unless we do it ourselves, it ain’t getting done.”

  “We’re gonna need more people,” Ash said. “You can’t rely on me to keep saving your sorry asses.”

  “We’ll find help,” Barcomb said. “There has to be more survivors who got out of the city. We still got Buddy and a shitload of guns, and we’re a Hell of a team. Munday’ll be back on her feet soon. She’s gotta be. Then we go.”