Dead City - 01

by Joe McKinney

  A fast-mover came at me through the trees, moving just as fast as I was. I tried to change direction on him, but he was on me before I could get out of the way. He tried to tackle me, but I kept my feet and managed to push him down to his knees.

  I lit him up with my pistol, but he was moving too fast for me to get a clean shot. My first shot hit him in the chin. My second and third shots grazed his cheek and ear. I used my last two bullets to put him down for good.

  Then I ran through the trees until I hit pavement again. It was a small, unlined road, and on the other side of that was a small white church, dark at the windows and square as a country barn.

  The zombies came out of the woods on both sides of it, and there were even more behind me. There weren’t any more fast-movers, but there were a lot of the slow ones.

  I was completely surrounded.

  I was freezing too, wet all the way up to my waist. I looked for a hole to run through, but there wasn’t one. I was trapped.

  I holstered my weapon and pulled out my baton.

  Slowly, deliberately, I searched the crowd for my first target.

  “I love you, April,” I whispered, and said a little prayer that it wasn’t going to be my good-bye to her. “I love you, Andrew.”

  A zombie in a black shirt and ball cap closed on me. His teeth were slick with blood, poking through flaps of shredded skin where his lips had once been.

  I drew the baton back and I was timing the stroke when the shot rang out.

  The zombie slumped to the ground without a sound. There was a bullet hole in the side of his head that looked like a black flower.

  I turned, stunned, toward the shot. Four black men with rifles were standing on the front steps of the church. One of them waved at me to hurry up, while the others sent a volley of bullets buzzing in the air around me.

  Chapter 28

  I ran for the porch, bullets whistling past my head.

  The men on the porch were knocking down zombies all around me, giving me a clear shot right up to the door. I hit the steps at a full sprint and the man who was waving at me caught me and pulled me over to the door.

  “I got him, Simon,” he yelled to one of the other men. “Let’s go.”

  A big guy in his early twenties was down on one knee at the leading edge of the porch, firing through the rails. He glanced back over his shoulder and gave me a hard look.

  “There’s too many of them out here to leave around,” he said to the one who had grabbed me.

  “I ain’t staying out here,” my guy said. “We got him, now let’s go.”

  “Get going if you’re going,” the one named Simon said, and then he pointed at me with his chin. “Give the cop your gun if you’re going.”

  The first man hesitated.

  “Get going,” Simon barked at him. “Hey cop, you know how to shoot one of those things?”

  “Yeah,” I said, and took the rifle from the first man. “I got it. How much ammo you got?”

  “A whole damn church full,” Simon said.

  The first man hesitated, but I pushed him back gently towards the door and told him it was okay. “Are there more of you inside?” I asked.

  He nodded.

  “Go inside.”

  He slipped inside the church without a word. There was a green metal ammunition box on the porch behind where he had been standing, filled to the top with loaded magazines for the rifles.

  I looked at the rifle in my hands and read Remington on the barrel. There was no shoulder harness and no scope, and the action still had clumps of packing grease at the corners.

  I ejected the magazine, checked it, then stuffed it back in.

  The others started firing. “Come on, damn it,” Simon said to me. “Fucking help us out here.”

  I looked across the yard at the zombies closing in on us. The parking lot went right up to the front walk and then continued on around to the right side of the building. A white rail fence separated the parking lot from the road, and about a hundred feet or so beyond that was the line of black elms I had just run through. The zombies were coming in from all sides now.

  “How many of them are there?” Simon asked me, his voice just a notch or two away from an animal’s growl.

  “A couple hundred at least,” I said, taking a post to his left. “A lot more than this.”

  An older man standing off to Simon’s right threw some magazines at my feet and then went back to firing. The three of them were unorganized. They shot at whatever crossed their path without thinking about maximizing their coverage, and a few of the zombies got in too close.

  I walked down the length of the porch railing, firing at the ones who got through. I put four down in short order, and then made my back to the center where the three of them were firing.

  I grabbed one of the men and pointed him toward the parking lot. “Focus on those over there,” I said.

  Then I grabbed the other guy and told him to get the ones coming from around back on the left side. Simon and I focused on the ones coming out of the elms.

  Marcus once told me that I couldn’t shoot my way out of a wet paper bag. He meant with a pistol. With a rifle, I was a completely different kind of shooter. I learned to shoot a rifle when I was a kid, deer hunting with Dad up in Minnesota, and it always felt like a perfect fit in my hands. Once I had the stock seated against my shoulder, it was a massacre.

  I went through magazines in a hurry. The infected were falling all over the parking lot, and soon it was thick with their corpses. I even started knocking them down on the other side of the fence, while they were still out in the street.

  The acrid smell of gun smoke filled up the porch, but still I kept on firing. I was hitting targets on both sides of the porch and didn’t stop until the box of magazines was almost empty. I didn’t even notice the others had stopped shooting.

  When I finally stopped shooting, the yard and the street and the parking lot were stacked deep with bodies. A few zombies were still on their feet and moving slowly toward us, but the crowd had thinned down considerably.

  “Get her,” Simon said to the man at my left, pointing at a young girl of maybe thirteen who was dragging her useless left leg toward the porch.

  Simon loaded up another magazine and shot the last four zombies still walking the yard.

  “Anybody got movement?” he asked, scanning the yard over the sights of his rifle.

  “They’s done on this side,” said the man watching the parking lot.

  “Over here, too,” said the other man.

  “Good.” He swept a pile of brass off the porch with his toe. “You shoot real good,” he said to me, but it wasn’t exactly a compliment the way he said it. More like an accusation.

  I could sense his hostility. The way he stared at me was more than just posturing. There was real hatred there. Not the kind of hatred one man has for another, but the kind of hatred men feel for symbols, for forces that control their lives and keep them down.

  I watched his eyes, very much aware of the guns we all held and the unspoken something filling up the air around us.

  I knew what he was doing. It was a gangbanger’s game, to see if I would flinch. On the street, it’s a way of establishing dominance. Once somebody makes eye contact, they hold it, and won’t look away.

  If you’re a cop and you look away first, you’re in trouble, because they know they own you.

  I lowered my shoulders slightly and got ready for whatever was coming next. He stood square, trying to intimidate me. He was a good four inches taller than me, with a wide, flat nose and a couple of good-size gaps in his teeth. His flannel jacket made him look bulkier than he probably was, but I’d say he still had at least fifty pounds on me.

  The other two men didn’t get it. I knew what the stare meant, the rules of the game, but even I didn’t know why we were doing it. Had he really bailed me out just to do this?

  The moment dragged out uncomfortably, both of us waiting for the other to show some signs of weak
ness.

  While we stood there, staring at each other, the church door opened, and I heard a very calm voice call out from the darkness, “It’s time to come inside. Both of you.”

  Chapter 29

  The door was open, but neither of us moved. We were still face-to-face, waiting for the other to flinch. I saw his eyes flick to my badge just for the thinnest fraction of a moment, and when our eyes met again, I could tell there was a lifetime of hate stored up there. That was the symbol he hated so much. I was every cop that had ever bullied him, made him feel small, fucked with him just for the hell of it.

  “Simon,” the voice from inside the church said. “Come inside.”

  Simon didn’t want to leave. He wanted to put his hands around my neck and squeeze. But there was something that wouldn’t let him do that, and I sensed it was that voice from the darkness.

  At that point, I knew there wasn’t going to be a fight, and Simon knew it too. He snorted at me like I was lucky and walked back inside the church.

  The other two men followed Simon inside, leaving me alone on the threshold. It was dark inside the church, and all I could see were a lot of silhouettes standing between the pews.

  Somebody coughed. Feet shuffled on the wooden floor. The voice said, “Officer, come inside please.”

  I took one last look at the yard full of dead bodies, remembering the last church I’d been in, and stepped inside. It was dark, but I could still see the faces closest to me. Simon was standing in the corner, giving me a smoldering, hateful look. The man who let me use his rifle was standing next to an older woman and two young children. The others stood in groups, watching me.

  “Thank you,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “You people saved my life out there.”

  Simon said something under his breath and turned away.

  “You’re welcome,” one of the other men said. It was the same voice I had heard through the doorway. “Come in. We don’t have much here, but it’s warm and dry, and you look like you’ve had quite a night.”

  A very distinct change came over the room when he spoke. The others made way for him, and even in the dark, I could see that he was their center, their leader.

  We shook hands. His grip was powerful and confident, and I got a sense from just that handshake why the others looked up to him. He carried himself with natural, unassuming confidence, like one who always seems to be in charge, and accepts the responsibility as easily and with as much grace as another man might put on a coat.

  I decided right away that I liked him. Simon had already made it clear that if it were up to him, I’d be a bleeding piece of hamburger out there in the elms, but this man was not that way. He welcomed me, and because these were his people, they welcomed me too.

  I looked him over quickly while I shook his hand. He was an older black man, maybe five-seven or so, and about 150 pounds. He wore clean blue work pants with a sharp crease, a black belt, and a starched, light blue button-down shirt, fastened at the neck. His eyes danced with fiery intensity behind fragile, gold-rimmed glasses. His boots were brightly polished. I guessed he was in his sixties, with a good splash of gray at the temples, but it was hard to be sure because his body was thin and ropy with muscles.

  “I’m Tiresias Maple,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir. I’m Eddie Hudson.”

  “Call me Tiresias,” he said warmly. “Everybody here does.”

  “Are you the minister here, Tiresias?”

  “No,” he said. “No, unfortunately, the Reverend Joshua Jones died earlier this evening.”

  “Oh,” I said, and then a long, uncomfortable moment followed. “I’m sorry.”

  “Please, don’t be. You had no way of knowing. And besides, we’re glad you’re here. We’ve been inside since before nightfall and haven’t heard anything about what’s going on. The radio and TV have been off the air for a long time now.”

  I looked around at the others in the room. They were watching me expectantly, and I could tell they wanted good news. Better news than I could give them.

  “It’s bad out there,” I said, because if I were in their shoes I’d want to know the truth. “There are fires burning all over the city, and the places that aren’t burning are overrun with those zombie things.”

  “What about the army?” somebody asked.

  “I don’t know anything about the army. Maybe they’ve got troops on the way. I know we could use them. From what I can tell, most of the police officers and firefighters are dead. And I’ve heard this is happening all along the Gulf Coast, from Mexico to Miami. If that’s true, other cities are probably hurting as bad as we are. That’ll probably slow down the military response, too. They’ll have to divide their resources over a huge area.”

  A woman in blue jeans and a black top asked me, “What about a safe area or something? Ain’t somebody coming to get us?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “but what you see is what you get. I just came from Police Headquarters hoping to answer that very question, but it was overrun. If somebody had a plan, it’s out the window now. There’s no one left to take charge, and I haven’t seen another police officer for hours.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” somebody else asked.

  “I don’t know. Find a way to survive, I guess. From what little I’ve seen, you people are better off than almost everybody else.” I looked around at their faces and tried not to think of the folks at the Lexington Baptist Church. These people didn’t need to hear about that. “I guess you just hold what you got till something changes.”

  They turned quiet while they took all that in.

  Tiresias finally broke the silence and said, “It looks like we’ll be on our own for a good while still. The Lord helps those who help themselves, so it’s time to help ourselves. I’d like everyone to continue fixing the damage and boarding the windows. When that’s done, we’ll begin the service.”

  The others went off, murmuring to each other about what I’d said.

  “Officer Hudson,” Tiresias said, “you’re welcome here. There was another police officer here earlier. An Officer Gibbs. I’m sorry to say he’s also passed on.”

  “Gibbs?” I had a classmate at the academy named Gibbs. A big, dumb guy who you couldn’t help but love, even though, God help him, he could hardly tell if he was wearing his uniform frontward or backward. “Did you happen to catch his first name?”

  “No, I’m sorry. He was in pretty bad shape when he came to us.”

  “What does it matter?” Simon said suddenly from the shadows. I hadn’t noticed he was still standing there. “One cop’s just like another. As long as he’s dead, who cares?”

  He came out of the shadows just enough for me to see his face, his eyes searching for a fight.

  “Something you want to say to me?” I asked him.

  “Tiresias, why are you gonna let him stay. After what that first cop done to us, how can you let this one stay?”

  “That’s enough, Simon.”

  “He don’t care about us.”

  “I said, that’s enough.”

  Tiresias put a lot of emphasis on that last word, and it worked on Simon. He backed away, but the hate was still smoldering in his eyes.

  Under different circumstances a look like that would have earned him a night in the jail, and probably a lay-over in the hospital too; but things had changed.

  Tiresias told Simon to go and light the candles for the service.

  “From now on,” he said, “we worship in the light.”

  Simon slipped away without saying anything else, leaving me with Tiresias. I saw the blue spurt of a dozen matches, and soon the whole inside of the church began to glow with a yellow, flickering light.

  I could see the others moving around inside, and some were even smiling. God help me, it was the first smile I had seen since before Marcus died, and it filled me with warmth.

  “We’ve had the church blacked out since before nightfall,” Tiresias said, and pointed to the
boards on the windows. “Our thinking was that those persons out there are somehow attracted to light and sound. Anything that might indicate the presence of an uninfected person.”

  I nodded. “You’re not worried about the light attracting them now?” I asked.

  “Actually, I am,” he said, taking off his glasses and breathing on them. He took a moment to polish them on his shirtsleeve, a gesture that reminded me more than a little of Ken Stoler. “But I think it’s more important to give people the small signs they need that things will get better. These people have been through a lot, and they need something more than just huddling together in the dark.”

  “This is the service you talked about.”

  “Yes.” He slipped his glasses back on. “I was hoping you would join us.”

  “I shouldn’t,” I said. “Ever since this started, I’ve been trying to make it back to my family. That’s where I want to be.”

  “You’re a young man, Officer Hudson. You must have a young family.”

  I nodded, and looked away. “I have a son. Andrew. He’s six months old.”

  “That is young,” Tiresias said, and to my surprise he chuckled. “I remember what that was like. I have two daughters myself. They’re both grown.”

  “You must be worried about them.”

  “I am. One’s in Dallas, the other in Atlanta. I’m very worried. I’ve said my prayers for them, though.”

  I had nowhere to go from there, nothing I could say to him. His problems weren’t that different from my own, yet I didn’t share his confidence. Prayers weren’t enough for me. I needed to hold my child to put my mind at ease.

  “You’re welcome to stay,” he said at last.

  “Thank you,” I said uncomfortably.

  He took a moment to glance around the church. The inside was well lit, and the pews were filling up.

  “I take it you’re out of ammunition,” he said

  “I am,” I said. He surprised me with that. “How’d you know?”

  “I saw you holster your weapon earlier. I don’t think you would have done something like that if you still had bullets left in your gun.”