by Joe McKinney
“Do not lock this door,” I said to him. I pointed to the door. “Don’t lock it.”
He didn’t look like he understood.
I walked into the hallway and found Carlos was still leaning against the wall. He was coughing, and there were wet lines of black fluid around his lips.
“Hey,” I said, shaking his shoulder gently. “Carlos, can you hear me?”
His eyes were speaking volumes about how much it hurt.
“There wasn’t much back there. Just some children’s aspirin. I got some clean bandages, though. I’m gonna change this one because it’s soaked through.”
He turned his face to the wall as I unwrapped the bandage on his arm.
The wound was much worse.
The first time I cleaned it the wound looked dirty and mean, but at least it looked like a wound.
It didn’t look like that anymore. It had festered and changed from the white and pale red of a fresh, deep cut, to a sickening yellow and black crust. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said it had been festering for days, not just an hour or two. It actually looked like it was decaying while it bled. And it stank of rotting meat.
If he had been more aware, he would have heard me force the bile back down my throat
I changed the bandage as quickly as I could and gently put his arm back down at his side.
The hallway had been quiet while I worked on him, the only sound coming from the swinging light panel as it rotated on its wires, but now I heard something new coming from farther off.
Even before I could separate out the elements of it, I knew it was the sound of footsteps sliding across the tile somewhere off in the dark ends of the hallway. I let out a deep breath of frustration.
“They’re coming again. Can you hear me, Carlos? We have to move. They’re coming again.”
I slid a hand under his shoulder and tried to lift him, but there was no strength in his legs.
The man in the landscaper’s uniform was standing by the office door, watching me, and I called over to him to come and help me.
He didn’t move.
“Help me, damn it.”
He shook his head. “El está enfermo.” He seemed horrified I had even asked him to help.
“Come here and help me.”
He shook his head again and stepped back. “No.”
From behind me I could hear the footsteps getting closer and I knew we only had a minute or two at the most to get going.
As I watched him back up toward the office I got so angry I stood up, drew my gun, and pointed it at him, muttering something under my breath about him being a fucking little coward.
“Get over here and help me,” I said, closing the distance between us.
He stared at the gun, and for the briefest moment I’m pretty sure he was thinking about running the other way.
But he didn’t run. He nodded and walked over to where Carlos sat against the wall. Together we lifted him up and carried him over to the office.
“We have to get out of here. It’s not safe. Entiendes?”
He didn’t understand.
“Más muertos,” I said, pointing down the hallway. “We have to go.”
That much he understood.
“Do you have a car? Maybe a truck?”
Again, I got that puzzled look.
“A truck, damn it. You know—” and I made a hand gesture like I was steering a car, “—a truck.”
He nodded. “Sí, una troca. La escuela tiene una troca.”
Glory hallelujah, now we’re getting somewhere.
“Great. ¿Dónde?”
He pointed toward the corridor Carlos and I had taken to get to the office.
That wasn’t good.
I didn’t remember seeing anything down there except classrooms, and that was the same direction the footsteps were coming from.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“¿Cómo?”
I pointed down the same hallway. “No. No troca. Muertos. Mucho muertos that way.”
“Sí.” He nodded at me like we were speaking the same language.
I shook my head at him. I didn’t understand.
He pointed at me, and then at my gun. He pointed down the hallway again and made like he was shooting a gun.
“Oh,” I said. “I get it. You’re fucking insane.”
There was no way in hell I was going to go down that hallway with those things while he and his friends made for the truck.
“No,” I said, showing him an empty magazine from my belt. “No más bullets. No más.”
It takes a trained poker face to cover up the realization that you’re completely screwed, and he didn’t have it.
Seeing that empty magazine melted all the smugness from his face and I didn’t need to speak Spanish to know exactly what was in his mind.
He swallowed a lump down his throat.
“What about that truck?”
“¿La troca?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sí.”
His eyes went down to his feet. He looked back at the office. The others were standing up at the windows now, watching the two of us argue.
Finally, after he couldn’t stall any more, he pointed down a hallway that led past the office and toward the back of the school.
It was the opposite direction he had pointed out to me the first time.
“You were going to leave me here, weren’t you?” I said.
He looked at me blankly.
I was pissed, but I didn’t let it show. I pointed to the hallway. “Go on,” I said. “Lead on.”
Just then his gaze shifted to the hallway behind me and his eyes got big.
I knew that look.
I turned just enough to see two zombies entering the main hallway in front of the office.
He almost dropped Carlos in his hurry to back away.
“Hey.” I reached across Carlos’s back and grabbed the man’s shirt.
He tried to pull away, but I held him tight.
He looked at me pleadingly.
“No,” I said. “You help me with him.”
“No, señor, por favor.”
The zombies behind us shuffled closer. The one in front was close enough that I could see the blood-stained floral print running up the side of her skirt. The heel of her left shoe had come off, making her clop and scrape the ground with each advancing step.
I didn’t move and I didn’t let up on my grip. I wanted him to know I meant business.
“Señor.”
Clop and scrape, clop and scrape.
“Okay,” he said at last, and put his shoulder under Carlos. To his friends he said, “Octavio, vamos a la troca.”
The others were gone in a flash. They poured out of the office like runners at the gate and went down the hallway so fast we could barely keep up.
We followed them through the hallway to the gym, where we made a right and then a quick left again.
When we came around the corner we nearly ran into their backs. They had stopped, and were staring at a sight almost as gory as the one I had seen under the tree.
Maybe as many as twenty zombies were on their knees, eating arms and legs and other unidentifiable bits of human detritus.
The floor was awash with blood.
Beyond them was a doorway, green metal just like the gym doors, and I guessed that was the way out. It might as well have been on the other side of the ocean, though. There was no way we could reach it.
One of the women gagged.
“¿Señor?” the second gardener said to me. He pointed his finger like a gun, hopefully.
I shook my head. “No más bullets,” I said.
He said something to the others, quietly, in Spanish, and I guessed he was telling them we had to leave. The others backed up, but not before several of the feeding zombies looked up.
A few of them got to their feet.
“Let’s go,” I said, and we all turned around and headed back the way we came.
But that was
a bust, too. There were six or seven zombies coming our way, and I could see more behind them.
“Señor,” the gardener said, and I caught the obvious implication that this wouldn’t be happening to him if I had left him well enough alone.
We were caught at the bend in the hallway, only a short few feet from our escape.
Carlos groaned and tried to make me drop him.
“Not a chance,” I said, and tightened my grip on him.
He winced and stopped fighting.
Just then we heard somebody whistling. All of us stopped and looked at each other. It was a carefree, lilting sound—one high, one low, over and over.
We heard it again, and that time I placed where it was coming from. I looked beyond the feeding zombies and I saw a man in a white, short-sleeve collared shirt and brown slacks.
Our eyes met. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and nodded to me.
Then he whistled again.
A few of the zombies turned around to face him. Calm as could be, he walked over to the wall and banged on it with his fist.
That got the rest of the zombies looking at him, and while the others and I watched, dumbfounded, he yelled at them, baiting them with his own body away from the door that led to the truck.
He walked slowly backwards, making sure they followed him around another corner at his end of the hallway.
As the last zombie disappeared around the corner after him, my little party ran for the door. It had a little slit window in it, looking out on a small courtyard.
I tried to get a good look, but it was too dark to see much beyond some vague hulking shapes that looked more or less like a truck and some machinery.
“La troca,” Octavio said to me.
I nodded to him and then helped Carlos take a seat along the wall.
I propped the door open and poked around a little with the flashlight.
The truck was right where they said it would be. It was an old white dualie one-ton, a big Ford F350.
The trailer wasn’t hooked up, which was good, and most of the equipment was out of the way, so it would be fairly easy to get the truck out of the courtyard.
There was a dark pile of mulch near the front of the truck, and beyond that was a hurricane fence like the one Carlos and I had climbed.
A few zombies were on the other side, alerted to our presence, I guess, by the movement of the flashlight beam. They were slapping the fence with slow, incessant slaps.
I closed the door. Then, while I was trying to figure out what to do, I heard a door open from around the corner where the man with the glasses had gone.
He was yelling again, but not for help. It sounded like he was herding the zombies. I could hear desks and chairs being thrown around.
I heard a door slam.
A moment later, he came trotting around the corner and made his way through the gore strewn across the hallway like he didn’t even see it.
“I locked them in the classroom,” he said, and pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Are you guys leaving in that truck?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Mind if I come?”
“Suit yourself,” I said.
He was smiling, but when he saw how bad Carlos looked, his smile slid off his face.
“You still want to come?” I asked.
He studied my face, and I think he understood Carlos was something we weren’t going to argue about.
He nodded.
I looked back at my little group and asked, “Do any of you speak English?”
They all shook their heads.
“Just my luck,” I said.
“You’re a cop on the west side of San Antonio and you don’t speak Spanish?” the man with the glasses asked, incredulously.
“No,” I said. “Do you?”
“Well, no.”
“Well then, you’re part of the problem, not the solution.”
I turned back to the others and said, “Look, I have to get that truck. We’re going to have to bust through that gate. ¿Entiendes?”
Blank stares all around.
“Of course you don’t.”
I tried again to make them understand. “I’m going to come back and get you. Don’t worry. I won’t leave you.” I looked around for some kind of understanding, but it wasn’t happening.
“Do you have the keys?” I asked, making a sign like I was turning a key.
“Sí,” the first landscaper said, nodding his head vigorously. “En la troca.”
“In the truck?”
“Sí.”
I took a deep breath and tried to get a grip on my situation. This was going to have to be quick, but that was no reason it had to be sloppy. Sloppy gets people hurt, and I wasn’t going to let that happen if I could help it.
Finally, I said, “Wait here. I’m going to come back for you. Wait.”
“What are you going to do?” the man with the glasses asked. He looked as worried as the others.
“I’m going to get the truck. Some of these people are going to have to ride in the back. I can’t bust through that gate with them in the back. They might get knocked out. Or worse.”
“Oh,” he said. “That’s right.”
As I opened the door and got ready to run to the truck, the first man grabbed me by the sleeve.
“No,” he said. “We come too.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “Wait here. You come too.”
He still wouldn’t let me leave.
But I couldn’t make him understand what I had to do. We were having a first-rate breakdown in communication.
Then I heard something from Carlos. It was a wet, barely intelligible string of words in Spanish. I couldn’t understand it. I barely recognized it as his voice.
But the others understood it. The first man let go of my sleeve and said, “Okay.” He nodded toward the truck.
“Okay,” I said.
I sprinted out the door and over to the truck. As I opened the driver’s side door I could hear the zombies beyond the gate, still slapping against the fence. I didn’t even look at them. The keys were still in the ignition, just like the landscaper promised they would be, and the big diesel motor fired up with a roar.
When it settled down to a steady knocking chug I put the stick shift in reverse, stepped on the gas, and left two sets of parallel ruts through the grass all the way to the gate.
The whole truck jolted when I hit the fence. The back end on the passenger’s side bounced up and lost traction for a second before it slammed back down to the ground.
I think I hit two or three of the zombies after I broke through the fence, because I felt two smaller jolts—like I was going over a big speed bump.
I didn’t waste any time worrying about how many of them I’d taken out. I put it back in gear and peeled out toward the doors where the rest of the group was watching, dragging a huge section of hurricane fence behind me.
I slid the truck sideways right up to the door.
“Jump in,” I said.
The first landscaper was a stronger man than I gave him credit for. He picked Carlos up from the floor and dragged him all the way up to the front seat without any help at all. I hadn’t even been able to lift him.
He jumped into the back of the truck and he and Octavio got the section of fence loose and tossed it to the ground.
The man with the glasses helped one of the women into the truck bed, while the first gardener got everybody loaded up.
He slapped his fist against the back window of the cab. “Vete,” he said. “Vete pronto.”
I stepped on the gas and tore through the courtyard.
At the gate two of the zombies were already coming through and two more were trying to get their mangled bodies to stand up.
I ran over the first two and tore off towards the parking lot.
I let off the gas a little and relaxed my grip on the wheel. It was a boat compared to the Crown Victoria I was used to, but I got the hang of it pretty quick.<
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Soon we were flying across the playground, over the curb, and into the street.
I looked in the rearview mirror and saw everyone was still secure in the truck.
The first landscaper gave me the thumbs up sign, a huge smile on his face.
“You said it, brother.”
Chapter 7
The closest fire station to the school was Independence Station at the corner of Resolution and Independence.
Getting there should have been as simple as turning left on to Elgin, another left on Fern Hill, then a right on Independence and go ten blocks up to the station. On any given day it was a five minute drive. Ten, if I caught all the red lights.
But I should have known better than to go to that fire station. I should have known better than to go right into the thick of things.
Elgin and Fern Hill weren’t too much trouble because they both went through small neighborhoods that hadn’t seen a lot of activity yet.
I saw a car on its side after we turned on to Fern Hill. Once I looked between some houses and saw a dark figure moving through the bushes.
But what I saw on the smaller side streets was nothing like the absolute carnage erupting on Independence.
Independence was one of the biggest and busiest streets on the west side—five-lanes-wide both ways and every inch of curb space filled with restaurants and car lots and grocery stores and strip shopping centers. There was almost always a lot of traffic, but what I saw put even five o’clock rush hour to shame.
Traffic was completely gridlocked, and there were people all over the street. That’s what it would have looked like from a distance, anyway.
The truth was that the cars were all abandoned, and the people moving through the gaps in traffic were zombies, looking for a meal amongst the ruins.
They moved in knots, and the street looked like the host of a thousand separate slow-moving riots. The knots broke apart and reformed with amazing speed, especially considering how slow most of the zombies were.
At one point, I saw a woman fighting to get away from a group of the zombies. They knocked her down on her stomach as we were driving by. She turned her face toward us, and her expression was confusing. It seemed, even as they tore into her with their fingers and their teeth, not to be a look of pain, but rather of someone who just doesn’t care anymore.