by Mark Tufo
But Harry was able to confirm that the zombies did, in fact, move away from the fog. Harry spent those two days on the roof watching the thick grayish fog slowly roll in like a specter arriving to consume all in its path. It was fascinating to see the zombies’ reaction to the fog. Once the moisture touched them, they became as frenzied in their need to move away from it as during their wholesale slaughter of survivors. Whether these things felt fear was unknown, but they definitely had issues with what Mother Nature brought to their doorstep each evening. Harry was now ready to put his plan in action.
With one final glance, Harry left his apartment, feeling the need to lock the door to what would surely become nothing more than a dusty time capsule. Or more likely it would be completely consumed by fire. He then made his way down the main hallway to the building’s front entrance and approached one of the side windows next to the door.
Carefully looking through the small window, he was satisfied that at least for the moment the immediate area in front of the building was clear enough for him to slip out. The Zs appeared to still be distracted by whatever they had found in the building across the street, or whatever zombies did in their spare time, and it was time to move. Glancing out one last time to make certain the coast was still clear, Harry quickly exited the building and made his way down the street, using the many stalled vehicles for cover as much as possible.
Harry’s first destination was the closest police station to the Bay, which was Central Station located on Vallejo Street. He knew that he needed to reach the Bay, the marina specifically, to work his plan, but along the way he wanted to follow Commodore Allen’s suggestion of eliminating as many zombies as possible.
To accomplish that, he reminded himself once again that more firepower was needed. He had been assigned to Central right before retirement, and usually reported there when he was on reserve duty, so knew the layout very well. But the most important thing Harry knew was that this station housed one of the SWAT units, which meant there could be some interesting items still in the armory. Whether anything was left after the heavy April 1st response was unknown, but he needed to start somewhere. Harry figured that not enough officers had been able to make it to the station to have taken all of the equipment and weapons.
When Harry left the apartment building, dawn had just began to break, giving just enough light to see the otherwise darkened streets. He immediately saw it was the typical San Francisco morning he had needed, cold and with a heavy high fog. This was not the typical fog most people recognized, covering everything; rather it was a higher, swirling type.
It was maybe a hundred and fifty feet up from the ground, but with a mist that left a heavy layer of moisture on everything. Exactly the kind he had hoped for. This was the type of morning Harry had worked into his plan, and would use for cover while making his way to the police station.
Harry knew that from his current location on Pine Street, he would need to go west one block and then turn north onto Powell. If he were lucky, he would be able to take Powell the ten or so blocks to where it intersected with Vallejo Street. Then he would turn east on Vallejo, as Central Station was located about half a block down on the left-hand side. Seemed simple enough at first glance, but he knew things were never “that simple”.
As he slipped through the streets, he begin to see zombies roaming the area directly in from of him, although the heavy moisture in the air seemed to be affecting them. They were stumbling around, seemingly disoriented and in a rage, clawing at themselves as if on fire. There were probably thirty to forty that he could make out in the dim morning light.
Thankfully, they were spread out, with the closest one to him being almost two hundred yards away. He was sure there had to be more, but he had to focus on what he could see for now. He knew this was going to become a running battle, and he hoped his alliance with Mother Nature would help him out or it was going to be a very short campaign.
With a sardonic smile, he knew it was time for Dirty Harry Lancaster to start kicking zombie ass and screw taking the names part. It would only be a matter of moments before Harry Lancaster would embark on an all-new form of police work. He was still serving and protecting, but now he would be doing it with a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality.
With one fluid motion, he withdrew his Glock from the breakfront on his right side, pulling back the first trigger safety, and took aim at the nearest zombie. A famous line that Harry Callahan had said from Sudden Impact popped to mind: “To me you’re nothin’ but dog shit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dog shit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits.” With that thought, he completed the finger pull on the trigger and blew the top of the first zombie’s head off.
The Glock is not the easiest weapon to use in an extended firefight due to the safety features built into the trigger pull, and it took practice to master any real accuracy, but once mastered it produced some awesome results. Results Harry was appreciating greatly at the moment.
He continued to fire while steadily moving forward, stopping briefly to aim, watching the zombies approach while trying to zero in on his location, and then falling under the impact of the heavy .45 caliber hollow point slug. Advance, aim, discharge the weapon; advance, aim, discharge the weapon. Drop the empty magazine; place the empty in the left rear pocket of the jeans. Insert a fresh mag, pull the slide, sweep the area for the next threat, aim, and discharge the weapon. A smoothly controlled, automatic process with accurate results.
Several of his shots went low but Harry was close enough that even though the shots to center mass did not kill the zombies, it was enough to put them down, and they were slower to recover. Harry took macabre satisfaction in seeing chests explode, legs and arms blown off, and in many cases, spines shattering. The zombies, paralyzed with those wounds, could then only stare at him while he passed.
It dawned on Harry, as he kept up his steady progress down Powell Street that he did not have to achieve kill shots on every target. Although many of the rounds he discharged were effective in removing large portions of zombie heads, he just needed to inflect severe enough damage to slow them down. The .45 caliber hollow point round obliged very nicely toward that end. Harry began to target center mass along with the pelvis area, which would take the legs right out from under them.
11
Harry was making headway, and had gotten maybe six blocks when, as he feared, more zombies began to appear from some of the buildings; they were drawn, he was certain, by the noise from firing the gun. As he had already seen, they knew he was there, somewhere, but they still could not focus enough to get his precise location. He even watched, to his horror, a group of at least eight of them start running in his direction as he was changing out magazines. “Fuck me!” was all Harry could say. But to his surprise they ran right by him.
The zombies knew he was there because they stopped just a few yards past him, moaning and growling in apparent frustration, arms extended with hands almost claw-like, turning their heads as if on a pivot to look for him. It appeared as if the moisture in the heavy fog caused some serious sight distortion in their unblinking eyes.
Harry didn’t waste time in contemplating the reasons; he just got his ass in gear and took advantage of this newly confirmed information. He was not going to stick around to find out how keen their sense of smell might be.
Harry had been able to put some distance between him and the last grouping of Zs. Realizing they were probably being drawn more to the sound of the gun discharging than actually seeing him, he decided to try a slightly different tactic. Down to two full mags, twenty-six rounds, there was little choice.
He did not think he could call a time out to reload the three empty mags that were in his back pocket. Reloading the rather bulky .45 round into spring-loaded mags, even ones well broken in, could be a bitch in the best of times, let alone
when there were zombies trying to eat one’s face off.
Making sure there was a fresh mag inserted, Harry holstered the gun and deployed his ASP expandable baton that was located on the left side of his belt. He cross drew it across the front with the dominant right hand for greater control. He had carried several different forms of batons over the years, which were striking weapons to force compliance, and were very effective in most cases.
With all the shit a cop had to carry on a duty belt, the reduced size and comfort of an expandable baton soon outweighed some of the downsides. Also, an expandable was always on the belt, so during the adrenaline rush of a pursuit or hot response an officer no longer had to worry about forgetting to grab their baton as they exited the car. This tended to happen more frequently than one would think.
Harry flicked his wrist, extending and locking the baton to its full 26” length. The ASP had been touted as the more reliable and effective baton on the market. It was made from 4140 steel tubing, and had been purported to be twenty-five percent stronger than the standard steel shaft competitors, with a much higher tensile strength. Having used the ASP many times over the years, training extensively on the proper methods of body strikes to effectively force compliance, Harry had never considered, nor attempted, to use it as a lethal weapon.
But circumstances certainly dictated thinking outside the box right now. “Let’s just see if the sales hype was all that,” he said as he advanced on the nearest zombie. Swinging the baton with a standard side sweeping blow to complete a peroneal nerve strike, hitting the area roughly a hand span above the knee towards the back of the leg, brought no results from the zombie. Normally, this strike would have taken down a person almost instantly; now all it did was assist the infected to hone in on Harry’s precise location.
“Well that’s not going to work,” Harry said aloud while immediately changing his stance and bringing the full force of the next strike directly across the side of the zombie’s head. The thing went down and Harry instantly delivered an obviously fatal blow to the thing’s forehead, caving it in with a wet, cracking sound. The zombie remained motionless, apparently truly dead. One down, a few hundred thousand to go, Harry thought dismally.
12
He began to jog the rest of the way down Powell, reciting a cadence of “I’m getting too old for this shit, I’m getting too old for this shit, I’m getting too old for this shit,” punctuating the words as each foot made contact with the street. He would momentarily stop to deliver his newfound striking technique to the head of any zombie in his path, and then continued his advance, finally reaching Vallejo Street. Rounding the corner, he nearly collided into possibly the largest woman he thought he had ever seen except on maybe a vintage Russian exercise film.
Harry had been fairly close to many of the zombies he had taken out, but had never really looked at them in his haste to keep moving. This time, however, he noticed every detailed feature of this particular zombie who was preparing to rip him apart. The eyes were like those of a corpse, yet at the same time appeared feral. The ever-moving mouth, like it was chewing on something, contained a bloody, white frothy discharge around broken and blackened teeth, those having all manner of obscene sinew stuck between them.
There were chucks of skin and muscle missing from the Z’s cheek and both arms. Its clothing hung mostly in torn rags. One foot was missing a shoe and was at an impossibly wrong anatomical angle. The long hair was matted, with a large section missing on the right side revealing the ivory skull below. There were streaks running down the inner thighs but Harry did not even want to consider what might have been the source. With each exhalation of breath as it emitted the ever present moaning, the putrid odor that emanated from it engulfed Harry’s personal space, gagging him and bringing tears to his eyes.
The huge Amazonian zombie began to close the very short distance that separated it from Harry. It was too close to execute an effective blow with the baton, so Harry brought the ASP up and simply shoved it into the gaping mouth with enough force to collapse it completely back into the ready position. If a zombie could look surprised, this monstrosity certainly did. It stumbled back a step, clawing at the piece of metal shaft protruding from its mouth, not seemingly aware enough to grasp and pull it out.
Taking advantage of the momentary distraction, Harry pulled the Glock and put a round into the zombie’s face point blank, which blew most of the head from its shoulders, and unfortunately taking the ASP with it.
“Asshole! I really liked that stick! ” Harry said, looking back at the headless body as he continued to jog to the station which was now just a few yards in front of him.
Central Station was a bulky four-story over lobby building, very linear, fortress-like and blockish, with a façade mostly of concrete. Built in the 1960’s, the style of the building was referred to as Brutalist, or Modernist, architecture. This style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centers in order to create functional structures at a low cost. This certainly described the visual appearance of Central Station. Being one of the oldest district stations in the City, and closest to the Bay and the consistent sea air, it needed constant maintenance on its façade to repair cracks.
There were four entrances into the station: a garage level and the main entrance on the Vallejo Street side, and a garage and prisoner entrance on the Emery Lane side, which was just a narrow alleyway on the east side of the building. Harry saw immediately that the Vallejo garage roll door was down, so he assumed the main entrance would be secured. He continued to jog around the building onto Emery Lane. He hoped that he could somehow gain entrance on that side.
As he got closer to the doors which were toward the end of the building, he slowed to a walk, scanning the area for any threats. Emery was a very narrow alley so there was only police vehicle parking allowed, and at the moment he only saw two radio cars alongside the building. One of them looked very clean, as if it had been recently detailed. The other, however, looked as if it had just been driven down Main Street in Hell. It was covered in what appeared to be drying blood, along with bits and pieces of flesh and hair. The left side windows were all completely broken out, and as he passed the front he saw both headlights were gone. Both the front and rear ends were severely damaged, but what really caught Harry’s attention was the arm protruding from between the front push bar and the grill. He could only imagine what had happened to this car.
13
Continuing past the cars, he cautiously approached the prisoner entrance and pulled on the door, which was normally electrically locked and could only be opened from inside the station. To his surprise, the door easily pulled open. Apparently the backup generator for the building was down; even though the electricity in this part of the City had been out for several days, this door should not have been unsecured. He entered, closing the door quietly, then turned the inside manual lock to secure it.
The area in which he stood now was like a sally port in a jail. There was the exterior door, which he had just locked, and then another door directly in front of him which allowed entry into the booking area. This sally port controlled access to the station proper. Harry approached the second door and also found it unlocked. He began to think the building had been abandoned, because this door also had a manual lock that obviously had not been used.
When he entered the booking area, he was surprised to find the emergency lighting on, which meant the generator was in fact operational; otherwise, he would have walked into pitch blackness. The feeling of not being alone in this building instantly hit Harry. He immediately drew his Glock, crouched down, and listened.
Satisfied that there were no imminent threats, Harry moved toward the hallway with his weapon locked forward while looking down the sights. The direction he looked was where the weapon was pointed. Entering the hallway, where doors on either side led to various offices, conference rooms, and storage rooms, he slowly and quietly walked to the end, then turned to his right.
This
took him to another short hallway, with only one door at the end, and he immediately walked up to that door and put an ear against it. He couldn’t hear anything from the other side, so he grasped the doorknob and turned it; once again, to his surprise and dismay, he found it unlocked. This door led into the station armory, and finding it unlocked was not a good sign.
As he entered the brightly lit room, he saw empty racks where weapons should have been. There were still several shotguns, but what brought an immediate smile to Harry’s face were the three Colt AR-15A3 tactical rifles in the furthest rack at the rear of the room. That was his reason for coming to the station. This was the heavy firepower he was looking for, although without ammunition for the ARs they were just pieces of aluminum alloy and synthetic materials.
Turning to his right, he walked up to the large steel reinforced door of the ammo locker. This was actually a medium-sized room that contained the live ammunition, less-than-lethal rounds for the shotguns, a few riot shields, and other pieces of equipment. What he needed to find was the 5.56 mm ammo for the ARs. He quickly discovered that the door was locked.
Okay, I knew it wouldn’t be that easy, so now I … Harry didn’t get to finish that thought as a shout from directly behind him interrupted it.
“FREEZE, POLICE! SHOW ME HANDS! DO IT NOW!” This command appeared to come from someone very young. The shaky male voice cracked a bit, like a kid just going through puberty. It was obvious whoever Squeaky Voice might be, he was at the armory door, and he was scared.
“I’m a police officer,” Harry replied, beginning to turn. “My ID is in my pocket, so if you’ll allow me …”
“I SAID DON’T FUCKING MOVE AND SHOW ME YOUR HANDS GODDAMN IT OR YOU’RE DONE!” Squeaky Voice said.