by Joe McKinney
“Officer Barnes.”
“What do you want?”
“Can you come here for a second, please?”
Barnes lifted the towel, annoyed at having his nap interrupted.
“Please?” Richardson said, and waved him over.
Barnes crawled over to him.
“What do you want?”
Richardson pointed at the zombies clustered around the doorway across the street. “Look at them over there,” he said. “Why are they doing that?”
The tide was starting to ebb again, and most of the zombies were only up to their knees in water. They were all at a fairly advanced stage in the infection. Their skin was gray and leprous, open sores on their arms and neck and face, but they moved with a confidence that the more freshly turned Stage One and Stage Two zombies couldn’t match.
Beside him, Barnes studied the crowd. He was frowning. He pulled himself up and peered over the side of the building at the group that was gathering around the door to their own building.
“How long have they been there?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Richardson said. “I just saw them.”
“Shit,” Barnes muttered.
“What is it?”
“They’re getting ready to make entry,” Barnes said. “We’re gonna have company pretty soon.”
“What do you mean? How can you tell?”
Barnes pointed at the zombies out in the street. “I thought you went through the Shreveport School.”
“Well, I—”
Barnes cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You see those zombies there? The ones walking there? If you watch them long enough, you’ll notice that they’re circling the building. The same ones have been doing it all morning, making that god-awful racket. These others have broken away from the main group, though. They’ve given up trying to flush us out. They’re coming in to get us. Those ones over there, they’ve probably trapped something inside that building. A dog, maybe. There’s still lots of dogs around here.”
Richardson was shocked.
“You’re serious? They’re capable of that kind of cognition? They can set up a diversion?”
“Of course,” Barnes said. “They’ll fuck you up if you’re not careful. Bubbas like these guys can do basic problem solving. They can open doors and crawl through windows and hunt in packs. I watched four of ‘em trap a raccoon once. I don’t know if you ever tried to catch a raccoon, but it ain’t easy.”
“You call them Bubbas?”
“Stage Three zombies, like those guys. They’re not real bright, but they’re bright enough to get the job done.”
Richardson shook his head in amazement. He’d heard rumors that some of the Stage Three zombies had limited cognition. At Shreveport, they told him some of the more advanced zombies could respond to their names or cooperate on kills, that kind of thing. But he hadn’t believed those rumors. It seemed more like wishful thinking from the growing sector of the American public that wanted the government to go in and try to administer a cure for the necrosis filovirus, even if that meant risking the quarantine.
Richardson had seen it before with Dr. Sylvia Carnes’s expedition into San Antonio. She’d taken twenty-eight college kids, all of them members of the University of Texas at Austin’s Chapter of Ethical Treatment for the Infected, into the quarantine zone, and gotten most of them killed in the process. Richardson had been along as an embedded reporter on that disastrous trip, and was one of three to make it out of San Antonio alive. It was there he’d solidified his opinion that the infected were beyond help. But seeing the infected like this complicated things.
“So what are we going to do?” he said to Barnes.
“We’re gonna need to get out of here. You ready to move?”
There was a loud crash from somewhere downstairs.
“What was that?”
“Shit,” Barnes said. His rifle was leaning against the wall next to the stairwell door. He ran over and picked it up, ejected the magazine, checked it, slapped it back in. “How you doin’ for ammo?”
“I only fired twice.”
“Okay, good.”
Barnes leaned against the door, listening. Even from where he stood, Richardson could hear moans inside the building below them. Something was crashing around inside the stairwell, making its way up.
Barnes looked back to Richardson. “We’re about to get some company. Remember, make your shots count. Don’t rock back and start firing or you’ll burn through that magazine in a heartbeat.”
Richardson nodded.
There was a booming crash against the metal door. It rocked against its hinges.
Another crash.
“Next one and they’ll be through,” Barnes said.
Richardson swallowed the lump in his throat and tried to focus. His vision was tunneled around the door.
There was a final crash and the door exploded outward. A zombie stood there, three more behind him. The first one lumbered out onto the roof. He looked half-starved. His shirt was little more than a scrap of soiled cotton looped around his neck and his left shoulder. Richardson could count the man’s ribs down his right side. They protruded like ripples in a pond through his yellowish-gray, abscessed skin. But his eyes were clear, intent on aggression, full of feral intelligence behind a curtain of wet, dark hair.
Richardson’s finger twitched against the trigger, but he didn’t fire. Barnes did that for him. Four quick, well-aimed shots. The man looked like he was practicing on the range. He kept himself in a crouch, making every move count.
The exchange lasted maybe three seconds.
Barnes advanced into the doorway without saying a word.
Richardson went after him.
There was one more zombie in the stairwell but Barnes put it down with another well-aimed shot.
In the stairwell, the sound of the AR-15 was like two boards being slapped together. It echoed inside Richardson’s head.
A moment later, they stepped out onto the fifth floor. From there, they were going to have to take the exposed interior stairwell that led down through the center of the building and into the lobby. Debris had collected all over the floor, and Richardson had to scramble over it just to keep up with Barnes.
They were on the second-floor landing when they spotted their next zombie. It crashed out of an office to Richardson’s right, and Richardson gasped in surprise as the thing clapped a mangled hand on his shoulder.
He ducked away from the woman and spun around, bringing the muzzle of his rifle to bear on the woman’s head.
He fired, and the woman’s head exploded all over the wall behind her. The headless corpse fell backward against the wall and sagged to the ground.
Richardson lowered his rifle and looked at the damage he had caused.
“My God,” he whispered.
But when he turned around, Barnes was out of sight.
“Officer Barnes?”
He heard the sound of footsteps below him. He looked over the railing and saw Barnes moving in a crouch across the lobby.
Realizing that Barnes had no intention of waiting for him, Richardson ran down the stairs as fast as the debris in his way allowed. All sorts of trash had floated into the lobby with the ebb and flow of the tides, and scrambling across it was hard. Barnes made it look easy, never letting his weapon dip from the low ready position, but for Richardson, it was humiliatingly difficult to navigate the mess of chairs and tables and plastic boxes and piles upon piles of plywood that seemed to be everywhere.
He came up next to Barnes and looked out into the street. The noise of their firefight had attracted scores of the infected. They stumbled out of every doorway, from around every corner, advancing through the knee-deep water with varying degrees of skill. Some almost seemed to bound through the water. Others moved in fits and starts, like badly handled marionettes.
Richardson raised his rifle, but Barnes put a hand on the muzzle and forced it down.
“No,” he said. “Save your
ammo.”
“What are we gonna do?”
“We’re gonna move fast. Come on.”
They ran up the narrow street, zigzagging through the wreckage, hugging the walls of buildings wherever possible. Richardson kept as close to Barnes as he could, but the man was fast. By the time they reached the corner of the building, Richardson was a good ten yards behind him, and losing ground.
But then Barnes stopped. He peered around the corner, then looked back at Richardson. His gaze didn’t stay on Richardson, though. It drifted to the area behind him, and his face took on an odd, puzzled expression.
Richardson stopped and turned to see what Barnes was looking at. None of the infected had followed them. They had run right through the crowd, but now the infected were all turning away and forming a tightening ring around a knot of people who had just emerged from the building across the street from the Clear Lake Title Company.
Even from a distance of two hundred feet or so, Richardson could tell they weren’t infected.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Officer Barnes, do you see—”
“Uncles,” Barnes said. “Come on.”
He made a move to duck around the corner.
“Hey, wait,” Richardson said. “We have to help them.”
“They’re uncles,” Barnes said. “They’re dead already.”
“You’re kidding. You’re just gonna leave them? You can’t.”
“Just fuckin’ watch me.”
Barnes turned away. Richardson stared at his back, amazed that the man could disengage from the scene so effortlessly. He only had a moment to make up his own mind: follow Barnes or do what his gut told him was the only humane thing to do.
He went with his gut.
While Barnes slipped around the corner, Richardson ran out into the middle of the flooded street and began to scream at the top of his lungs, “Hey, hey, hey. Over here.”
He jumped up and down, splashing water everywhere. He waved the rifle over his head and shouted some more.
From the shadows, Barnes hissed, “What the fuck are you doing?”
Richardson glanced at him. “Help me,” he said.
When he looked back to the street, some of the infected had broken away and were stumbling toward them. Most were still advancing on the small crowd of people.
“Fuck it,” Richardson said, and charged.
Running and shooting was not easy, and Richardson’s shots were mostly misses. He burned through his entire magazine in seconds and scored only four hits.
Now he found himself in the thick of the fight.
He grabbed the rifle by the still-hot barrel and used it as a club. A zombie in the remains of a business suit staggered forward. Richardson could see its wide, intensely wild eyes. Dark ropes of saliva oozed from the corners of his mouth and down his neck. As it reached for him, Richardson brought the rifle over his head and slammed it back down again on top of the zombie’s skull.
The gun sent a painful shudder up his forearms, like he had hit a baseball with the neck of the bat instead of with the sweet spot, but the zombie folded to the ground and went facedown into the water. Dark blood oozed from the wound and into the water like a curl of smoke coming up from a pipe.
When he looked up, four more zombies were right in front of him. The one to the far left looked emaciated to the point she could barely hold her arms up. Her face was dark, the cheeks sunken, and her eyes appeared to protrude oddly from the sockets, like the skin had puckered around them.
He flanked her, intending to use her as a barrier between himself the others. Then he brought up his rifle again and prepared to swing it at the woman’s head.
He heard gunshots instead.
Two of the zombies behind the emaciated woman dropped. Then the third. Then the woman.
Richardson looked toward the sound and saw Barnes strolling almost casually down the center of the street, firing as he advanced, dropping zombies with every shot.
He stopped a little forward of Richardson’s position and kept on firing. His skill with the rifle was almost beautiful to watch. He was so smooth, every gesture one of complete control, the shots coming like the ticks of a metronome. He shot through his magazine, ejected it, slapped in a fresh one, and with barely a pause went right back to firing.
More zombies were coming into the street from all directions.
“They’ve got us surrounded,” he yelled to Barnes.
Barnes stopped firing just long enough to scan the scene.
“Get them,” he said, pointing at the crowd of people.
“Where are we going to go?” Richardson asked.
“Through there,” Barnes said. He was pointing at a narrow alleyway between two buildings off to his right. “Hurry,” he said.
Richardson made his way over to the crowd and did a quick count of eleven people, four women and seven men. One of the women was Hispanic, about forty, dressed in clothes so worn and weathered they looked gray, though they had clearly once been some brighter color. Next to her, clinging tightly to her waist, was a scrawny white kid about fourteen years old. All of them were armed with makeshift clubs, pieces of rebar, baseball bats, metal pipes. Richardson got a sense right away that the woman with her arm around the fourteen-year-old boy was the leader of the group, the others seeming to gather behind her.
“I’m Ben Richardson,” he said. “We’re gonna help you. Come with me.”
“Okay,” she said.
Richardson pointed the others through the alleyway. They crossed the street behind Barnes, who fell in behind the group and covered their retreat. The woman moved into the alleyway with confidence, and Richardson realized that she almost certainly knew her way around here. She and her group had probably been living as scavengers in these ruins since the first days of the quarantine. He fell in behind her and let her take the lead.
They emerged into a jumble of wreckage. A seemingly endless field of wheels, paint cans, sheets of plywood, refrigerators, TVs, a huge metal frame like the skeleton of an overhead street sign, toppled trees, light poles, cars, the frame to somebody’s boat trailer, and a whole profusion of bricks and pillows and mattresses and mud stretched out before them.
“Can we get through that?” Richardson asked.
“Yeah, through here,” the woman said.
But before they could move out, there was the sound of a scuffle behind them. An infected woman in a blue dress had stepped out of the doorway of the building to their right and fell on one of the group.
The man wrestled with the woman for a moment and then managed to toss her to one side. Two other members of the group stepped up with their makeshift clubs at the ready and battered the infected woman into a motionless pulp with a few well-placed blows.
“Okay?” the woman leading the group said.
The man who had tossed the zombie to the ground nodded.
Behind them, Barnes was firing. He paused long enough to shout, “Get moving up there,” and went back to firing.
“This way,” the woman said.
She led them through the maze of debris with surprising ease, pointing out the tricky parts for Richardson to avoid.
“It isn’t easy for the infected to get through here,” she told Richardson. “They get confused easily.”
He nodded. He noticed that even as they threaded through the densest parts of the debris field, she never let go of the boy’s hand.
Ten minutes later they were standing in a parking lot, not a zombie in sight. Off to their right were the remains of a shopping mall. Richardson could still read the signs on a few of the buildings.
“Where are we?” Richardson said to the woman.
“South side of Baybrook Mall,” Barnes said, coming up behind them. He had a GPS in his hand.
“Thank you for helping us back there,” the woman said. “We would have died if you hadn’t helped us.”
Barnes just grunted, didn’t even look at her.
She turned to Richardson. “We saw your helic
opter go down. We were going to see if we could help you, but we got caught in that building across the street from you guys.”
Barnes moved off from them and took out his radio.
Richardson watched him for a moment, then turned to the woman.
“I’m Ben Richardson,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “You said that already.”
And then she smiled, and it was a surprisingly pretty smile. Even after two years inside the quarantine zone, her teeth looked white and healthy.
“I’m Sandra Tellez,” she said. She put her arm around the boy and said, “This is Clint Siefer.”
The boy didn’t speak. His face was lean and dirty, yet his forehead had a thoughtful heaviness to it that left his eyes in shadow. Richardson had always prided himself on his story radar, that gift he had for spotting the people in a crowd whose story seemed to capture the essence of a disaster. That radar was going full tilt in his head right now, looking at these two. They had a story. He only hoped there’d be time to hear it.
A young man was standing next to Clint. He looked to be about twenty-five, though it was hard to tell for the layers of grime on his face. His eyes kept darting to the pouch clipped to Richardson’s shoulder.
“What’s your name?” Richardson asked him.
“Jerald Stevens,” he said. “Hey, do you have any food on you?”
His eyes flicked to the pouch again.
“Uh, yeah,” Richardson said. “I think I got a candy bar.”
“Can I have it?”
Richardson laughed, though a bit uncomfortably. There was disturbing urgency in the man’s attitude, something that didn’t seem quite sane.
“Yeah, sure,” he said.
He unzipped the pouch and removed a Snickers bar and a small bag of smoked almonds.
“You want the almonds, too?”
The man nodded, and in that moment, Richardson had him pegged. He reminded him of that hyperactive weasel from the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and Richardson had a sudden image of the young man with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, his hands dangling limply in front of his thin, spoon-shaped chest, eagerly bouncing on his toes in nervous anticipation of a morsel.