by Joe McKinney
“Okay.”
I glanced at Sandy in the rearview mirror. She wasn’t sobbing anymore, but she had a fixed, road-worn look in her eyes.
“You going to be okay for a minute?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”
Marcus went up to a blue Volvo, opened the door, and shot the zombie behind the wheel as casually as if he were ordering a beer at a bar. I jumped when I heard the shot. Marcus reached in, grabbed the body, and pulled it out onto the pavement. It made a dull thud as it hit the ground.
He pointed at a green Kia, meaning for me to drive it.
I nodded. There were no zombies in mine. I got in, and Marcus got in his Volvo. We backed the cars into position, then gave them some gas, and rammed the light pole out of the way.
It made a fierce grinding noise, but eventually we got it moving, and after moving a few more cars, we had one lane open.
“That ought to work,” Marcus said.
“Yeah, I can get through here no problem.”
We were congratulating each other on a job well done, heading back for the car, when we heard Sandy screaming.
We ran for her at a dead sprint, but when we rounded a row of cars between us and her, we saw a thick knot of zombies beating on our police car, trying to get at the meat inside.
A few of the zombies were on top of the trunk, pulling at Sandy through the busted-out rear window.
Others had opened the driver’s side rear door and were already inside the car. I thought I saw Sandy, her back against the opposite rear door, kicking at the hands and teeth clutching for her, but it was dark and I couldn’t really see her that well to be sure.
I jumped onto the hood of the car, ran over the roof, and kicked a zombie that had yet to get inside square in the jaw. He flew backwards and landed on his head behind the car.
Next I grabbed a pair of legs belonging to a zombie who was headfirst in the backseat and pulled as hard as I could, extracting him from the backseat. I heard Sandy howling in pain, and I could barely see her, thrashing at the hands and faces pressing down on top of her.
Her screams filled up the night. I fired into the backseat, hitting at least two of the zombies in the head, maybe three.
Meanwhile, Marcus had gone around the passenger side of the car and got Sandy’s door open. He managed to grab her beneath the shoulders and pulled her from the car. As he moved her I heard a nasty sound, like a large piece of fabric being ripped in half, only it was the sound of her flesh ripping.
Several zombies tumbled out of the car after her.
Through a gap in the mass of bodies I caught a glimpse of Sandy, and nearly gagged. She was covered in blood, and her left leg was missing below the hip. Most of her stomach was shredded.
She started to gasp, gulping for air like a fish out of water.
“Get them!” Marcus shouted.
I jumped down next to him and started firing at the faces inside and on top of the car. I did it quickly. In thirty seconds they were all dead.
When I turned around, so was Sandy. She had bled out.
Marcus pushed her body off him and then the two of us pulled the other bodies out of the backseat. It was grim work, and we did it without talking.
When it was done, we got back in the car and drove away.
After we got rolling again, Marcus happened to glance in the backseat and made a disgusted noise.
“What?” I asked.
“We left her leg back there.”
“I’ll pull over so we can get rid of it,” I said.
“No,” he said, and sat back down. “Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to have this car very much longer. Downtown’s only two exits away.”
“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”
“I’m sure,” he said. “A pity, though. She really did have great legs.”
Chapter 22
By the time we drove into the police vehicle ready lot to get a new car, the one we were in had almost died. Three of the tires were in good shape, but the rest of it looked like warmed-over crap. It was making a grinding noise on Marcus’s side that sounded like part of the undercarriage was dragging on the ground and a thin wisp of steam or smoke was coming from underneath the hood.
We had to bust the fence at the entrance to the yard and, when we did, the car slipped out of gear and wouldn’t go back in.
We left it by the guard shack, shot a zombie there that used to be a city mechanic, and stepped into the ready lot.
There were rows upon rows of white Crown Victorias, all of them exactly the same, and all of them ready to go.
I could tell Marcus was in heaven.
He clapped his hands together and said, “You ready, Eddie? Let’s go shopping.”
“After you.”
“Thank you, sir. I hear they’re not much on selection here, but the prices can’t be beat.”
What we wanted was on the west end of the lot. The cars there were already outfitted with push bumpers, which we figured we would probably need again. The only thing they were missing compared to a regular patrol vehicle was the decal package.
Marcus pointed to a dealer’s sticker still stuck to one of the windows. I watched him run his finger down the columns with a sparkle in his eye that made it seem like he was fingering fine jewels.
“Look at this,” he said. “Can you believe it? Look at how much these things cost. The city’s getting their eyes poked out on this deal.”
“That’s a lot,” I said, without even looking at the sticker. I was looking around for more zombies. We were out in the open, and it was making me nervous.
I saw one stumbling past the yard on the other side of the fence. A little farther beyond him was a homeless shelter, and dark, slow-moving figures moved through the maze of filthy mattresses and trash piles that surrounded the building.
So far, they hadn’t noticed us, but I’d always hated dealing with the homeless, and I sure as hell didn’t want to mess with them now that they were zombies.
“What do you think?” I asked. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah, yeah. Which one do you want?”
“The white one.”
“That’s cute,” he said. “Get in. I’m driving.”
Getting through downtown wasn’t as difficult as I thought it would be. There were zombies everywhere, and most of the roads were choked up with abandoned cars, but it wasn’t anything close to as bad as it had been in the Medical Center.
We got almost all the way to headquarters before we ran into our first real gridlock.
“I’m gonna turn right here,” Marcus said. “We can park up front. The back gates will probably be locked anyway.”
“Okay.”
Marcus turned down Watson Street and we rode up the sidewalk all the way to the front steps of headquarters.
It looked like there had been a fierce battle near the front of the building. On the other side of the street was an old Spanish-style limestone wall, and in front of that, a little strip of grass ran parallel to the sidewalk.
Three enormous live oaks draped their dew-soaked branches over the street, sheltering the bodies of a dozen or so people.
They were collapsed on the pavement and in the grass in poses that made them look like they were sleeping in the sun on a lazy, sunny afternoon. But there was something uneasy and unwilling about the way they laid there.
Most were on their backs, with an arm stretched out above their head or a knee cocked up into the air.
One man was facedown in the grass, and a dried puddle of his own blood had stained the grass below his cheek. Most of his right leg had been eaten and his pants were in tatters, clinging to the gore. It reminded me of a half-eaten cob of corn.
I even saw a few uniforms among the bodies.
“Come on,” Marcus said from the front doors. “Don’t look at it.”
“Yeah, okay.” I turned away and followed him up the steps, but even as I did I got t
he feeling that we weren’t going to find our answers inside.
We walked through the open front doors and into the lobby. Debris was everywhere, and in the bluish-white glow of the building’s emergency lights it looked like the seat of desolation.
The whole building was running off the generators, and they were making a monotonous, mechanical droning noise that seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.
In the middle of the floor was a dead woman in an expensive-looking dark gray skirt and a white blouse. I could see the receiver of her Glock poking out from underneath her leg. Marcus said he recognized her, but I had never seen her before.
“She’s a robbery detective,” he said. “Was a robbery detective, I mean.”
“She’s got a cell phone on her belt,” I said.
“You want it?” Marcus asked, his eyebrows arched, asking why in the hell I would.
“Maybe it still works.”
He shrugged. “Get it if you want it.”
I walked over to her corpse and turned her over with the toe of my boot.
I reached for the phone and then backed up in a hurry, just to be on the safe side.
“Well,” he said. “Does it work?”
I flipped it open, dialed April’s cell number, and got two rings before it cut to static.
“It rang,” I said.
“Anything?”
“No. It cut out.”
“Might as well keep it,” he said. “We’ll try again later.”
I put the phone on my belt.
Beyond the detective’s body was a vestibule where the security people sat. The rest of the building was behind that and closed off behind bulletproof glass doors.
I couldn’t believe the damage I saw. To the left were the cashiers’ windows and the door that led to Records and Accounting. Two middle-aged, heavy-set women and a tiny little man in a brown suit were crumpled up in a pile next to one of the doors.
Through the cashiers’ windows I saw a woman in her early twenties staggering between the rows of filing cabinets, unable to figure out how to get through the maze to where we were standing.
To our right was a hallway that led off to Personnel, and beside that was what used to be a glass trophy case. Now all that was left of it was crunching beneath our boots.
The stain of death was all around us. It seemed to hang from the walls and permeate the air like a fog. I almost didn’t want to breathe, afraid that somehow I might become corrupted by it.
“You done looking?” Marcus asked me.
“What?”
“I don’t feel like wasting time standing here, okay? First place I want to check out is Communications. I want to see if there’s some sort of regrouping site.”
“Okay,” I said, but I was watching the zombie in the Records office. She had managed to get out of the maze of filing cabinets and was trying to climb through the glass windows.
“Right,” he said, but didn’t sound convinced. “Eddie?”
He shook my shoulder. “Eddie? Hey.”
“What?”
“You with me? Come on. I need you sharp.”
“I’m with you,” I said. “I’m just tired.”
“Me too,” he said. “Come on. Through here.”
We jumped over the security desk and started back. Most of the doors were controlled by electronic key cards, and neither of us had one. Only people with regular business at headquarters get those.
The first floor was mainly support services and meeting rooms.
What Marcus really wanted was on the third floor. That was where we’d find the 9-1-1 emergency dispatch system, and it was there, according to Marcus, that we would learn whatever there was to learn about what was happening and what those in charge were doing about it.
Marcus shot a zombie at the entrance to the south stairwell who used to be a Sex Crimes detective. Then we started up the stairs.
The generators were humming, which meant the elevators were probably working too, but neither of us wanted to risk getting stuck inside of one.
Our plan was to get in, learn what we could from anybody we could find, and get out.
But as we stepped out of the stairwell and onto the third floor, I realized we were in trouble.
The whole floor was quiet.
Usually, the third floor of headquarters was a zoo. Even in the middle of the night you could usually count on there being fifty or more people running around, stomping out fires of one sort or another, and generally filling the place with noise. It was never this quiet.
“Come on,” Marcus said. “Let’s be quick about this.”
We headed for the Communications entrance on the northeast wing of the building and stopped around the corner from the glass doors that led into the dispatcher’s pit.
Marcus motioned for me to loop around him and move to the other side of the doors. I got into position and then peered around the corner.
“Holy crap,” I said, whispering to him. Inside there were more than fifty zombies who had once been our dispatchers. “We’re not going to go in there.”
He nodded and then lowered his head like he was thinking what to do next.
There was a sudden crash, and then the doors flew open.
A slender female in blue jeans and a bloody green shirt erupted into the hallway. I had my shoulders turned away from her when she broke out, but I spun around just in time to catch her by the neck as her face came down next to mine, mouth open and teeth wet with blood.
She was one of the fast-movers. She fought like mad, clawing and kicking and sticking her dirty mouth in for the bite that would kill me. The force of her attack knocked me backwards and my gun slipped from my hand.
I yelled out for Marcus to help, but he was already on top of her. He grabbed her by the hair and pulled her head backward, twisting and guiding her face away from me.
She went sprawling into the wall, and before she could get up, he peppered her with bullets.
I rolled toward my gun.
Marcus stepped into the doorway and start firing. He said something to me that I couldn’t understand, and the rest of it was drowned out by the sound of his gun.
He fired again and again, trying to pick off the zombies before they made it through the doors, but there were just too many of them, and they swelled into the hallway like an ocean wave.
It only took a few seconds before Marcus and I were separated by a widening gulf of bodies. They were so thick all I could see was a mass of moving arms, and in flashes of pistol fire, moving farther and farther away, was Marcus as he fought to hold his ground.
I could still hear him shouting, but I couldn’t see him anymore. The zombies were piling into the hallway and I had nowhere left to go. They were painting me into a corner. I fired I don’t know how many rounds, but it was like trying to dig a hole in the surface of the ocean. One would fall and three more would step into the gap he left behind.
There were just too many of them. I glanced right and saw a middle-aged woman with a flattened and bloody face standing in front of a gray metal door. The others had pushed her to the wall as they poured into the hallway.
I put a hole in her forehead. She fell back against the door, but I didn’t let her fall to the ground. I caught the back of her shoulders and used her as a shield against the crowd.
The others reached around her body, clutching at me.
The split second that I bought using her as a shield was enough to reach the door and pull it open. I let the woman’s body fall to the floor and ran through the door, only dimly aware that I was stepping into another stairwell.
Behind me, the door was still wide open and the zombies started coming through.
I turned and fired until I was out of bullets. By then there were so many bodies stacked up in the doorway that the rest of the infected were having to climb over them to get to me.
I kicked at the bodies and somehow managed to get the door closed.
As I shut it, the sound of the crowd died to
a muffled roar, and I was left alone on the top landing of the stairwell, surrounded by blue cement walls and a gray cement floor that was covered with puddles of black blood.
They were banging on the door, but they sounded miles away. Everything sounded hollow and distant except the blood pounding in my ears.
“You gotta move,” I said, trying to make myself do it.
I saw the door open just a crack, and that lit a fire under my ass. I went down the stairs as fast as I could go, but it was narrow, and the steps were steeper than a normal stairwell. I had to make each step deliberate just to keep from tumbling down.
The door to the second floor was locked. I pulled it hard, but it wouldn’t budge. Only when I stepped back to kick it did I see the black electronic key card pad to the right of the door jamb.
The first floor had the same set up, and it was locked too.
I ran back to the second floor and pulled on the door again, frantic with claustrophobia and rage.
I kicked the door, then backed away and kicked it again in desperation.
“Motherfucker!”
Above me, I heard zombies entering the stairwell. I switched out magazines and ran up to get them before they could get me.
I made it to the third-floor landing just in time to see a dozen or so zombies come tumbling through the door and land right in front of me.
I slowly backtracked down the first few steps, never taking my eyes off of them as they advanced.
The lead zombie took the first step, stumbled, and came tumbling down to my feet. I raised my gun and was just about to fire when I heard a door down below me open up.
“Marcus?” I said, hoping that it was really him and not more trouble.
“Eddie.”
I turned and flew down the stairs, yelling as I took the steps two at a time, “Don’t close that door. Keep it open.”
But he was already running up the stairs toward me.
“Catch the door. Don’t let it close.”
We met on the second-floor landing, him coming up as fast as I was running down. “Can’t go that way,” he said, panting hard.
I jumped down next to him. “Can’t go up either,” I said, just as winded.