by Joe McKinney
It rained off and on throughout the afternoon. Eventually, the crowds of infected thinned out, and here and there they saw small groups of the uncles making a break for it.
“I think we should chance it,” said Sandra. She and Barnes and Richardson were standing at the window, watching the street.
Richardson thought it was a good idea, too, and said so.
Below them, they heard a young man yelling. They all looked down. He was standing across the street from a trio of the infected, throwing rocks at them and taunting them with a ridiculous string of obscenities. It seemed ridiculous to Richardson, anyway. A zombie didn’t care what you called it. It didn’t matter what you said his mother sucked in hell, because he wasn’t going to get mad. He’d eat you regardless of whether you were kind or profane. You tasted the same either way.
“What’s he doing?” Richardson said.
“Distraction.” Both Barnes and Sandra Tellez said it at the same time, and they looked at each other in good-humored surprise.
“Distraction?” Richardson said.
“Just watch,” Barnes said.
Richardson did. The zombies began shambling after the young man, who was still throwing rocks and yelling. He was slowly backing up, but was careful to keep an eye out for anything moving behind him. He let the zombies get much closer than Richardson would have, and then he turned and trotted off, leading them away from a large hole in the quarantine wall.
He continued to yell. More of the infected stumbled out of the doorways on both sides of the street.
Soon, the street was filled with zombies. It had seemed nearly deserted moments before, but now there had to be at least forty of them staggering after the man.
And then his attitude changed. He stopped waving his arms. The bravado left him. He stopped, looked around, seemed to be gauging the distance between two points that Richardson couldn’t see.
“Okay,” he yelled. “Do it. Move, move.”
Richardson heard running footsteps on the pavement to his right. He glanced that way and saw a small group of people, mostly young women in their late teens and early twenties, a few of them carrying children, running for the hole in the quarantine wall.
The young man watched them go. When the last of them had made it past the barricades and entered the breach in the wall, the young man grew suddenly animated. He was getting ready to run.
“Oh, no,” Sandra said.
She was pointing at the young man, who was yelling now, waving his arms over his head in an exaggerated pantomime of a semaphore flagman.
Behind him, a zombie was pouring out of a wrecked car.
Richardson could see what was going to happen. The man would let the others get too close. He would turn to make his break around the bunched-up crowd, and he would step right into the waiting arms of the zombie behind him.
He had to yell out, warn the man. But it was impossible to speak. The words were frozen in his throat and he couldn’t force them out.
And then a rifle went off in Richardson’s ear. He fell to one knee, cupping his ringing ear with one hand, looking up at the profile of Officer Barnes, who was standing as still as a sentry, the butt of the smoking AR-15 tucked into the crotch where his shoulder met his cheek.
“What the hell?” Richardson said.
Then he glanced down at the street. The young man was looking at the headless zombie on the ground behind him. Then he turned and scanned the windows of the building above him until he saw Barnes, Sandra Tellez, and Richardson.
He gave Barnes an exaggerated flyboy salute.
Barnes nodded back at him.
A moment later the man was gone.
A few zombies followed after him, but slowly, no real chance of catching him. Others had turned with the sound of the shot and were moving toward the building, their ruined faces directed upward to the window.
“We need to leave now,” Barnes said.
“Yeah,” Sandra said.
“You ready?”
“We’ve been ready for a year and a half.”
“Well, it’s time.”
Crossing through the breach was sort of an anticlimax for Richardson. He had expected some kind of celebration from Sandra and her group, but there was none. They stepped through just like they were leaving yet another abandoned building. The guarded edge of weariness never left them.
“It’ll be dark soon,” Sandra said.
“Yeah. We need to find transportation,” Barnes said. “We’ll need something that’ll give us some temporary protection.”
Barnes scanned the area. There were dead bodies everywhere, and the infected were still walking around, though none of them were close enough to be an immediate threat.
He said, “I got it. Come on.”
They walked along behind him until they came to the Quarantine Authority outpost. With Barnes taking the point man position, they circled around to the back of the building and came up to a covered carport that Richardson hadn’t been able to see from the building.
Under the carport was a large bus with armored sides and armored skirts coming down over the wheels.
“Oh, my God,” Richardson said.
“Wow,” Sandra said.
“Yeah.” Barnes looked around. “It doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence though, knowing the guys from this outpost weren’t able to use it for their evacuation.”
He scanned the vehicle dubiously.
“Well.” he said, “We might as well use it, right?”
“I hope they left the keys,” Sandra said.
Barnes chuckled.
“No worries there.” He reached onto his belt and unclipped a key ring. “All these vehicles are keyed alike,” he said.
Sandra smiled. “Beautiful.”
The bus made it seven miles before the transmission slipped out of gear and refused to reengage. The mood on the bus had been one of waxing elation, a terrible thing slipping away behind them, a brave new world rolling out before them, but as the bus lost momentum and eventually trundled to a stop, the smiles died away.
Richardson moved forward, the images of the bus ride he had taken into San Antonio in the early days of the quarantine with Dr. Carnes and her UT students suddenly flaring back up in his mind.
He put a hand on the back of Barnes’s chair.
“What’s going on?”
“Transmission’s fucked,” Barnes said.
Richardson could hear the engine revving. He could see Barnes’s foot pumping the clutch, but the transmission wouldn’t engage.
“What does that mean?” Richardson asked.
Barnes looked at him angrily. “You know what? You’re starting to piss me off with your fucking questions.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just…I don’t understand.”
“We’re fucking stuck here. You understand that? This bus ain’t going nowhere.”
CHAPTER 15
Ed Moore hadn’t slept for thirty-six hours. He and Julie Carnes and Margaret O’Brien and the others had been up in this attic with no food, no water, no air-conditioning to speak of, all that time, and they were demoralized. Ed could barely keep his eyes open. His eyelids weighed a ton. His back and his legs were stiff and achy. Sleep seemed so deliciously seductive, and yet his forehead burned with a fevered alertness that wouldn’t let him relax. He could see the same thing on the faces of the others. Nobody looked up, nobody spoke. They sat, staring, eyes glazed with exhaustion, all eight of them baking away in silence.
And, worst of all, he had to go to the bathroom so badly he wanted to cry. A few of the others had been able to go—by tacit agreement, they were using a low-ceilinged corner that, thankfully, hadn’t started to smell yet—but Ed couldn’t make himself go in front of the others. Peeing, of course, hadn’t been a problem. But pulling down his pants and steaming out a loaf was another matter. Of course, if they were up here much longer that would have to happen, and he was dreading it.
The constant moaning and banging around below them
didn’t help either.
He scanned the crowd he’d collected, and a wave of pity and helplessness swept over him. Julie Carnes was sitting next to Art Waller, trying to make him comfortable. Barbie Denkins was stretched out on the floor, sleeping fitfully, her face glossy with sweat. Margaret had the kids nuzzled up against her. The boy looked like he was close to falling asleep. The girl was sobbing quietly into Margaret’s shirt.
Only the guy in the prison scrubs, Billy Kline, was doing well. He was awake, but he looked bored and angry.
Ed rose to his feet, his knees cracking like pistol shots, and for a moment he wasn’t sure he’d be able to straighten out his back. He went over to Julie and nodded at Art. “How’s he doing?”
“He’s not good, Ed. I think he’s dehydrated.”
I believe it, Ed thought. Barbie Denkins would probably start showing the same symptoms here in a little bit. He put his palm on Art’s forehead. It was hot and damp. His face looked flushed. Not a good sign.
“How about his medication? I know he takes something for his heart.”
“He doesn’t have it with him.” She touched his arm. “Ed, we can’t stay up here.”
“I don’t see where we can go,” he said.
She just looked at him. She didn’t have to say more. He understood exactly what she meant. The same feeling had been worming its way into his brain within a few minutes of coming up here. It was like they’d painted themselves into a corner and now they were just sitting, waiting on the paint to dry.
And then she surprised him. She said, “Ed, how far do you think this thing has spread?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it’s possible it could have spread pretty fast. From what I’ve read, it depends on the severity of the initial injury, the health of the person infected, and probably a hundred other factors that nobody’s really sure about. A person can turn anywhere from a few minutes to several hours after they’ve been bitten. That leaves a lot of time for the outbreak to spread before anybody really knows what’s going on.”
Julie glanced over at Margaret holding her two grandchildren. Margaret met her glance and nodded, then squeezed the children tighter.
Julie wiped the back of her hand across her forehead and to Ed it looked like she was trying to conceal her tears.
“Where’s your family?” he asked her.
She smiled faintly. “What are you, a mind reader?”
“Body language.”
“You get that from interviewing suspects?”
“Something like that,” he said.
“I have a daughter in Chicago. She’s forty-two.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gwendolyn.”
“That’s pretty.”
“It was my mother’s.”
“Ah. Grandkids?”
She nodded, not trying anymore to wipe away the tears. “Three. All girls. The youngest is twelve. How about you?” she said. “You said you’d been on your own for six years.”
“No family,” he said. “We never had kids.”
“You were too busy fighting crime?”
“Too much of a cynic,” he said.
“You can’t leave me with just that,” she said. “Come on, tell me.”
He looked down at his hands and picked at a callus on his thumb. “I always told myself I couldn’t see bringing a child into a world I didn’t trust. I lived through all that crazy stuff you see on the news, you know? The wars, the riots, the sickening things people do to each other because of drugs and racism and religion and just plain meanness. And the more I saw, the easier it got to tell myself I was never going to have a child. It would seem like a betrayal, bringing them into a world like the one we’ve got.”
He held out his hand and made a useless gesture around the room that was meant to include the whole world.
She didn’t say anything.
He stood up again, and all at once he felt like an ass. Nobody wants to hear you rant, he thought.
“Sorry about that,” he said. “Usually, I get to know people a little better before I go off like that.”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I understand.”
Beside them, Art Waller groaned and bent over, holding his gut in his hands. His skin had turned an ashen white, and sweat was popping out all over his face.
Julie caught him in her arms. “Art? Art? Are you okay?”
He shook his head.
Julie looked up at Ed and her expression was desperate.
“Hold on,” he said.
He crossed over to the other side of the attic and knelt down next to Billy Kline. The younger man looked up at him and frowned.
“What the hell do you want?”
“I want to see if we can get out of here.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” He pointed down at the floor. “You hear that, old man? All that moaning? Tell me you ain’t so deaf you can’t hear that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with my hearing,” Ed said. Then he leaned forward and whispered, “I’m worried about these people here. They need water and food and medicine. If we stay up here much longer, we’re going to be sharing space with some dead people.”
“Well, shucks, Mister. How about I jump down there and let those things tear my ass to pieces? That way you and the fucking Geritol Brigade over there can just waltz on out of here. That what you had in mind?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Ed said. “These are human beings. Why do you have to act like a fool?”
Billy was silent, his face inscrutable.
“I just want you to help me,” Ed said. “If there’s a way to get out of here, and to do it safely, we need to do it.”
“Safely? Old man, you are fucking nuts, you know that?”
“Please watch your language while you’re up here with us.”
“My language? Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m not. These people are from a different generation. It’ll only scare the others.”
Billy laughed. “You want to see scared?” he said. “I’ll show you scared.”
Then he got up and went to a spot where the insulation was exposed. He balled his fist, and before Ed could tell him not to, he punched a hole through the floor.
“Come here, old man. Take a look down there.”
Walking in a crouch, Ed stepped over to the hole and looked down. Flakes of Sheetrock and pink cotton candy strands of insulation rained down on the infected below them. The office was packed with zombies. At least a dozen pairs of hands were reaching up for them, bloodstained and snarling faces below those.
“How’s that for fucking scared?” Billy said. “You think that’ll scare ’em? Because it sure as hell scares me.”
Ed sat down on the floor and looked at Billy. He had no idea what they were going to do. All his life, he’d been the one responsible for making decisions. Now he could barely think straight.
“Well?” Billy said.
Ed shook his head. He looked away.
Later that afternoon they heard muffled voices. At first, Ed wasn’t sure he was really hearing what he was hearing. He looked up at the others.
“What was that?” Margaret asked.
“Shhh,” Ed said.
He heard more voices, getting louder, turning to shouts. Then the crackle of gunfire.
“What is that?” Billy asked. “Cops?”
“Maybe,” Ed said.
The sound of fighting grew suddenly intense, like it was right below them. Ed recognized the sound of fully automatic M16s, fired in well-controlled, short, three-round bursts.
He crawled over to the hole Billy had made in the floor, and the two of them looked down into the office below. The few zombies they could see were turning away from the ceiling and to the front door.
As they watched, three of the infected were knocked backward by head shots.
Another shambled out of a side room and got a full burst of machine-gun fire to the chest.
They
heard a man’s voice yell, “Clear!”
“Hey!” Billy shouted. “Hey, we’re up here!”
The sounds of movement from below came to an abrupt halt. A man’s voice, different from the first, said, “Who’s there? Show yourself.”
“We can’t,” Billy said. “We’re up here. In the attic.”
“Stand by,” the man’s voice said. “Don’t move.”
A moment later, a man in a SWAT uniform was shining a shotgun-mounted flashlight up at them.
“Easy,” Billy said. “Don’t shoot.”
The man lowered the weapon, and Billy thought he’d never been so glad to see a cop in all his life.
They were taken to the rounded driveway in front of the office. About twenty soldiers and cops stood by with M16s. Most of them looked tired and bored now that the initial rush of fighting was over. There were dead bodies everywhere, and Ed recognized quite a few of them.
A few other survivors were being led from their cottages to waiting city buses nearby.
“Are we being evacuated?” Ed said to a National Guardsman standing next to them.
The man looked exhausted. His eyes were rimmed with red and his cheeks were dark with dried sweat and dirt. He nodded without really looking at Ed.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, Mister. Albany, Georgia’s the last I heard.”
“Georgia? That far? What’s happened?”
“I look like a general to you? How the hell should I know?”
The soldier started to walk off.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Ed said. “You can’t just expect us to climb on a bus and go to Georgia without being told what’s going on.”
“Mister, this whole area’s under martial law. If you’re told to put your wrinkled old butt on a bus, then that’s what you’re going to do. You can have an opinion about it if you want to, but nobody around here gives a shit what that opinion is.”
“You don’t need to cuss at me like that,” Ed said.
“Mister,” he said, “I don’t give a shit what you think one way or the other. I’ve just spent the last thirty-six hours fighting zombies and rescuing crusty old motherfuckers like you, and I ain’t even had so much as five minutes to myself to call, my wife and find out how she’s doing with my three kids. So if you think I give a shit about you or what you think, you can go—”