by Joe McKinney
“No, you’re right about that.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not really sure what happened. There was a lot of smoke. Officer Barnes over there said something about an oil leak. We lost oil pressure, and the next thing I know we’re crashing into that parking lot.”
“You’re not part of the GQRA?”
“No,” he said. “I’m a freelance journalist. I was doing a piece on the Quarantine Authority when this happened.”
“And now you’re screwed here with us?”
Richardson laughed. He liked the way she said it, like there was still a part of her capable of appreciating a sick joke. He hadn’t expected to find that among the uncles.
“And you guys?” he said. “What’s your story?”
She started to tell him when they heard Barnes cussing at his radio.
They both turned and watched him throw it down to the pavement, where it shattered.
“What’s wrong?” Richardson asked.
“What the fuck do you think is wrong?”
Sandra said, “They’re not coming for you, are they?”
Barnes kicked a piece of the radio, looked off into the distance, and huffed.
“No, they’re not,” he said.
She looked at Richardson. “Looks like you guys really are screwed.”
Barnes walked over to the rest of the group and eyed them each in turn. One of the group was standing off from the others, and Barnes’s gaze locked on him.
Richardson noticed it was the man who had been surprised by the zombie in the alleyway. He was sitting on his haunches, hugging himself, rocking back and forth. His breathing sounded ragged. His face was pale and sweaty.
“You,” Barnes said, pointing at the man. “Stand up.”
Barnes advanced through the crowd. Sandra followed him.
The man rose painfully to his feet. He kept his left side turned away from the others.
“You’re infected,” Barnes said.
“No, I’m not,” the man said, but you could hear it in his voice.
“Bullshit,” Barnes said.
He grabbed the man by the shoulder and spun him around. The man had his hand clamped over his bicep, but blood oozed between his fingers and rolled down the back of his hand.
“Show me,” Barnes said.
Sandra came up behind him. “Rob? Are you okay?”
The man’s gaze dropped to the ground. He took his hand away, exposing a nasty bite mark that was already showing the first sign of decay. It smelled bad.
“Oh, no,” Sandra said.
Beside her, Barnes drew his pistol.
“Hey,” Sandra said. “Hey, wait!”
But she couldn’t stop what happened. Barnes leveled the pistol at the man’s face. The man put up his hands and Richardson could see the man’s lips starting to form the words No, wait, but it was wasted effort. Barnes fired a single shot that took the top of the man’s head off and laid him out on his back on the pavement. Then Barnes holstered his weapon with a casualness that suggested he did stuff like this every day.
“What is wrong with you?” Sandra said. She was practically screaming at him. Her face was pulled tight in a grimace of rage and pain and shock. “Why did you do that?”
“He was infected.”
“We have a way of dealing with this,” she said.
“You have a cure?” Barnes asked sarcastically.
“No, we have a way of letting somebody take care of themselves when they get infected. We give them the choice of how they want to—”
“I’m not interested,” Barnes said. “I’m getting out of here.”
“And just how do you intend to do that?” Sandra asked. “They’re not coming to rescue you.”
He ejected his AR-15’s magazine, checked it, then slapped it back into place. “I’m not staying inside the quarantine,” he said. “I don’t care if I have to shoot my way out or not, but I’m not staying inside this city. You people can come along if you want. You can stay here if you want. I don’t care. Me, I’m getting out.”
And with that, he began walking north across the parking lot.
Slowly, silently, the others fell in line behind him.
CHAPTER 9
Billy Kline stopped at the corner of a pink stucco wall and glanced inside the entrance to the Springfield Adult Living Village. There was a guard shack about twenty feet in with gates on either side. Both gates were hanging open.
So where’s the guard? he wondered.
Beside him, Tommy Patmore was almost as far gone as the infected that had just escaped.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him. Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, I really didn’t. God, there was so much blood. So much of it…it got everywhere.”
“Shut up,” Billy said.
They had seen only a few cars that entire morning. One was going by them now on Tamiami Street. Billy watched it roll by. A moment later, he heard a horn and the sound of skidding tires.
There was a crash.
He heard a woman scream.
When her screams were cut short, Billy made up his mind. “Listen,” he said to Tommy. “Hey, you hear me? Tommy.”
Tommy made a low groan that was not quite a sign of understanding.
“I killed him, Billy.”
“I know you did. But Tommy, listen to me. We are in deep shit, you and me. I need you to stay sharp and keep your eyes open. Follow me.”
“Where are we going?”
“Just follow me.”
Billy grabbed his bloody garbage spike and made for the gates. Past the guard shack he could see a wild profusion of shrubs and trees and flowers.
“Seems safe enough,” Billy said.
He grabbed Tommy by the shoulder of his orange scrubs and pulled him along.
But as they came up even with the guard shack, Billy looked over and saw something that made his guts turn over.
Inside the guard shack, seated on the floor against the wall, was the guard. His Smokey the Bear hat was on the floor beside him. His left shoulder and part of his face were dark with blood. In his other hand he held his pistol. He was watching Billy and Tommy as they went by, his eyes two inscrutable milky clouds.
He started to move.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake,” Billy said.
He reached for Tommy’s shoulder again to pull him back, but Tommy was already walking toward the man.
The man rose to his feet.
“Tommy, what the hell are you doing?”
“I didn’t want to,” Tommy said. He dropped the shank on the pavement and walked toward the guard with his hands spread wide, a sinner begging forgiveness. “Please, I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. You’ve got to believe me.”
“Tommy, for Christ’s—”
The guard stepped out of the shack. His head was leaning to one side. His left arm hung limply. But in his right, he still held his pistol, and this came up with his hand as he reached for Tommy.
Billy saw the guard’s fingers clutching for Tommy, and he knew what was going to happen.
A moment later, there was a shot.
The bullet hit the ground between Tommy’s feet and glanced off into nowhere with a high-pitched zing.
The second shot hit Tommy in the gut.
Tommy dropped to his knees, a look of profound surprise on his face, a startled grunt stuck somewhere in the back of his throat.
Billy backed away.
The guard fell on Tommy and both men tumbled to the pavement. Tommy tried to roll away. He was groaning in agony from the gut shot, and it kept him from regaining his feet.
The guard latched onto him and took a bite of Tommy’s calf. Tommy screamed as blood began to darken his pant leg.
Billy turned to run back into the street.
Three of the prisoners from the Sarasota County Jail were coming toward him, all of them freshly turned. Meanwhile, beside him, the guard was tearing into Tommy with his teeth. He turned his bloodstained face to Billy a
nd started to rise again.
Billy just shook his head, spun on his heels, and ran for the cottages inside the Springfield Adult Living Village.
He sprinted across the lawn and reached the nearest of the pink stucco cottages. From the shows he’d seen while frittering away his days in the Sarasota County Jail, Billy knew that loud noises attracted the infected, and once those few infected zeroed in on an uninfected person, they would begin to moan. The moans carried, drawing more of the infected into the area. All the reports of seemingly empty streets suddenly flooding with the infected weren’t exaggerations.
Billy kept himself low and out of sight. He got to cover, scanned his surroundings constantly, just like the documentaries about the quarantine zone said to do, and tried not to make any noise. His plan was to reach one of the cottages, get to a phone, call for help, then sit tight and wait for somebody with guns to come and rescue him.
But that plan went out the window when he stepped around the front of the cottage.
Just ahead of him was a narrow hallway, a courtyard farther on. To his left, just before the courtyard, was a gently rising slope of green grass. The courtyard was packed with the infected. More were coming down the grassy slope. They were headed for the doorway to a single cottage, where two old folks were trying to hold their door closed against the infected.
“Ah, for Christ’s sake,” he said.
He didn’t want any part of it. Billy turned away and stepped right into the path of the three prisoners he’d seen from the guard shack. Behind them was the guard. Tommy wasn’t with them.
He looked for the gun and was both surprised and frustrated to see that the guard no longer had it with him. He had been a fool for not picking that thing up back at the guard shack.
Billy raised his trash spike and started to run. He was going to flank the three prisoners, sprint around the shambling, slower guard, and take his chances out on the street. But before he could put that simple plan into motion, one of the prisoners broke forward in a furious sprint, crashed into him, and knocked him to the ground, landing on top of him.
Billy landed with his spike across his chest in a port arms position. He jammed it up under the man’s chin and twisted, tossing him to the side. Billy scrambled to his feet and jammed the spike into the back of the zombie’s head before he had a chance to move. Satisfied the zombie was dead, Billy put his foot on the side of the zombie’s head and yanked his spike free from the corpse.
But now he was surrounded.
Some of the zombies coming down the grassy slope had diverted in his direction, and Billy found himself checked everywhere he turned by the mangled arms and faces of the infected.
Billy jabbed his spike into every face he saw and batted at their hands with his pole as he twisted and spun away from their grasp. He rushed into the crowd and ducked away just as a pair of zombies reached for him. At the same time, he brought the pole around in a sweeping path that caught one of the zombies in its upward arc, impaling its left hand. Unable to control his arm, the zombie bobbed on the spike like a balloon on a string.
In the melee, Billy had worked his way halfway up the slope. The zombies were slogging after him in a graceless, clumsy mass, and Billy, still swinging the impaled zombie around by its arm, flung him downward, into the advancing crowd. The zombie flew off and tumbled down to the grass, where it bowled into the others like logs crashing downhill.
Billy ran around the pile and a moment later found himself standing before the old woman and the bent wreck of a man who stood behind her.
“Are you folks okay?”
They just looked at him. The woman’s eyes slipped from him to the carnage behind him and then rolled slowly back to Billy.
“Ma’am? You okay?”
She blinked at him.
“They’re behind you,” she said.
He turned around. At least a dozen of the infected were rising to their feet. Others had already gained their footing and were closing in fast.
“Can we hide in there?” he said.
“They pulled the door out of the jamb,” she said. “It won’t close.”
Just then he heard a gunshot from the courtyard. He turned that way and saw an old dude in a cowboy hat with a pair of pistols in his hand. He had just shot one of the infected and was motioning two old women and two little kids through a corridor on the opposite side of the courtyard.
The dude in the cowboy hat glanced at Billy, and the two of them made eye contact. Even at a distance, Billy could see the man’s face grow momentarily hard with recognition at the orange scrubs Billy wore. But the look faded just as quickly as it formed, and the next instant he was motioning Billy and the two old-timers with him to follow them into the courtyard.
Billy looked behind him again. They weren’t going to be able to make it to the street.
To the old woman, he said, “Okay, you two come with me.”
“He can’t walk fast enough,” the woman said.
“I’ll carry him. Here, hold this.”
He handed his spike to the woman, who took the gore-stained thing like she’d just been handed a pile of dog shit.
Billy picked up the old man, and the next moment, they were all running for the courtyard, a moaning wake of the infected trailing out behind them.
CHAPTER 10
Jeff Stavers was caught up in the parking lot over LAX for nearly an hour before they landed, and now that they were finally taxiing to their terminal, he was feeling irritable and restless.
The fat lady from Chicago and her even fatter little nine-year-old boy both unbuckled their seat belts at the same time, and the woman groaned as she let her gut relax. The boy’s name was Alex. Jeff knew his name was Alex because the fat woman hadn’t stopped saying his name since Denver, where Jeff had joined their little family drama already in progress. He’d sat down in the window seat next to the woman because it was the only available seat on the flight, and he was immediately sorry for it. The woman hogged the armrest and her bulging elbow kept oozing into his side. For nearly four hours, he felt like he was crammed into the back corner of an elevator. Plus, the kid wouldn’t stop coughing and sneezing. It was a nasty, nostril-clearing sound, and the woman would immediately slap him in the back of the head and say, “Alex, I told you to cover your mouth.”
The boy would flinch, then slowly uncoil himself and say, in a high, nasally voice, “Sorry, Mom.”
Once, Alex’s sleeve had pulled up, exposing a fresh bandage around his elbow. His mother rushed to cover that up, and then whispered something into his ear.
“Sorry, Mom,” he said.
Right before they landed, the woman turned to Jeff and said, “Allergies,” and rolled her eyes.
He just smiled and nodded and waited for the brown hazy air of Los Angeles to appear on the horizon.
But they were here now, finally, and he could feel the tension headache that had plagued him for the last week slowly going away. When he got back to Littleton…Well, he would worry about Littleton when he had to. Right now, all his thoughts were on seeing Colin Wyndham again. Back when they were roommates at Harvard, Jeff would have sworn there wasn’t a woman alive who could lasso the irredeemable and profligate Colin Wyndham into marriage, but apparently L.A. had produced such a woman.
This was going to be the bachelor party of the century.
The intercom chimed and the flight attendant spoke up, telling them the local time and temperature and informing them to keep their seat belts fastened and to refrain from using electronic devices until they were stopped at the terminal.
“Will do,” Jeff muttered, and took out his cell phone and flipped it open.
He sent a quick text message to Colin.
on the ground finally
A moment later, Colin wrote back:
took you long enough. got a surprise for you. you’re not gonna believe it.
Jeff laughed. Typical Colin. He wrote:
what kind of surprise
The flight attend
ant was looking his way. Jeff put the phone down and tried to look innocent. It was a silly thing to do. He knew that. It wasn’t like she was going to call in the air marshals on him. Images flooded his mind of dark-suited men with pistols in their hands boarding the plane, demanding his cell phone, dragging him kicking and screaming and pleading into a bare room for hours of absurd questioning that would make him feel like a character in an Albert Camus novel.
The thought made him laugh. But then he thought of the questions the real police were likely to ask him and the laughter died in his throat.
After all the good times at Harvard, he and Colin had gone their separate ways. Colin was heir to the Mertz family fortune, all $1.3 billion of it. Harvard had been a C-average joke to him. He had no worries, no need to bother with graduate school or law school or medical school or anything, really. There was college, because he had to, and then after that, the world opened up like a sun-dappled delta plain of privilege and pampering.
For Jeff, there were scholarships to keep, which he did. He graduated with a fairly respectable 3.86 GPA, left Cambridge and went to Colorado University for law school, where he did two years before the crack-up that led to flunking out, which in turn led to missing payments on his student loans and racking up $18,000 worth of credit card debt. Now, he was working as a store manager at Blockbuster and waking up everyday in a shabby little efficiency apartment over a garage in Littleton, Colorado, with the constant panicked feeling that he was drowning.
Colin knew the bit about law school, and he knew about the Blockbuster job. He could probably infer the rest. He wasn’t stupid, after all. He was a drug-addled party animal, but he wasn’t stupid. That was probably why he offered to pay for this whole weeklong party to Vegas. But of course Jeff couldn’t allow that. There was a deep vein of pride in him that would rather deny the truth than let it be said out in the open. And that was why he had steadily, over the last week, taken cash advances from the credit cards his customers used at his store. All told, it was $9,200 in cash, making his wallet feel fat as a brick under his right butt cheek.