by Eddie Patin
His dad had to be dead—he had to be...
Those two creatures were sitting up there right now on their dead bodies, unless they had moved on to other families walking behind them. And that other one with four arms was up the street eating Zack and his parents, too...
Tommy clenched his eyes shut, and felt his whole body vibrating with exhaustion, and wanted nothing more than to just drift away into darkness right then and there...
He held onto the small body of his little sister, alive and quivering under all of her warm clothing.
They were alone...
He’d have to lead the two of them on to the high school alone.
But not yet.
Those things were probably still out there...
It was amazing that they were able to get away without being noticed!
Or did the monsters know that they were here? Tommy thought, an icy feeling growing in his belly. Were they up there eating his parents, intending to just climb down into the culvert—maybe from both sides—to finish them off in a little while? Would they pull Jody away from him and tear her little arms and legs off in front of him??
Tommy shook his head violently, inciting Jody to open her eyes and look up at him.
Her face was scared and sad, her bright, green eyes big and dark in the dim light of the culvert.
“You’re crying, Tommy,” she whispered, reaching up to wipe his eyes with her small fingers.
It was too much.
Tommy started to sob against his sister’s hair, pulling her close to him. He thought of his dad, his big, comfortable body and strong arms and hands. He thought of the man’s big, gruff smile; the dark eyes that always looked on him with so much adoration.
He cried, then Jody started to cry again, and they held each other in the darkness, until a sudden, loud hiss made them freeze...
Tommy held his breath and looked up at the culvert’s ceiling.
The sounds of the creatures moving around up there filled the boy with a flood of fear. He could hear their claws scraping at the asphalt, and the thumping of their footsteps as they communicated like animals with strange, alien chirps and growls.
One of them roared suddenly, like a mix between a great cat yowling and a huge bird of prey crying out into the air, and Tommy heard a sound that reminded him of shooting a flamethrower in one of his computer games!
The boy released his breath, and looked back down to his sister, who was watching him with wide eyes.
“Shh,” he whispered, and she nodded.
Her face was dirty, streaked with mud and oil.
The creatures made more sounds to each other, pacing around up there with grinding sounds against the pavement, and Tommy listened to the crunching.
Slurping.
Swallowing.
Tommy leaned back against the cold, curved wall, supported by his backpack, and pulled his little sister in close to him. The boy closed his eyes, and tried not to think about the monsters up there eating his parents...
6 - Officer Harvey Swanson
Las Vegas, NV
The only thing in Harvey’s jean pockets was an extra Glock magazine.
Everything else he had been carrying—his wallet, light, keys, pocketknife, chapstick, and everything else—was presumably still sitting in a desk back in the precinct from when he was thrown in that basement cell last night.
As the detective’s AR fired again and again, pelting the goat demon’s chest and large, muscular neck with tiny craters, flinging chunks of filthy fur and fiend blood into the air, the demonic-looking beast grimaced with sharp, red teeth as it reached for the fallen belt-fed machine gun, still smoking in the pile of corpses...
Harvey hit the mag release button on his Glock and dropped the empty magazine at the same moment as his other hand pulled the fresh one from his pocket and guided it expertly into the mag well.
Like a practiced dancer, Harvey’s left hand then flew straight up to the weapon’s slide in the same fluid motion, pulled it back just enough, then dropped down to support the front of the grip as his gun was suddenly back into action!
Several zombies, mouths wide and showing way too many steely, jagged teeth—long tongues whipping around like tentacles—collided with the group as Harvey focused on one thing...
He moved his front sight to just under the left, glaring eye of the goat demon. Focusing on the sharp, white dot for an instant, Harvey squeezed the trigger.
The Glock popped, the monster’s eye disappeared into a dark red hole, and it bellowed a shuddering goat sound as the beast fell sideways onto the pile of bodies!
“Good shot, Swanson!” Becker called.
Harvey became aware of the chaos closing in around them—the many remaining zombie creatures were starting to engage the other officers in hand-to-claw combat, more monsters were approaching the gap of the front gate, appearing from the red haze outside, and the wet, plopping and slithering sounds behind him said that the body-part abominations would be on them at any moment...
“Everybody move!” Swanson shouted. “Get outside!”
Becker relayed the information, as if he still had to remind everyone that he was in charge. “Move it! To the—” Harvey saw him pause to smash a zombie in the face with the butt of his rifle. “Get to the gate before we’re overwhelmed!”
Harvey’s eyes dropped to the goat demon’s M60 machine gun...
His feet moved toward the large Vietnam-era weapon sitting on top of the bloody pile of bodies before he even completed the thought. Sure, it would deafen him even more, but his ears were already fucked up...
A zombie turned away from the plain-clothes detective with the AR, and swung out at Harvey with a pale, filthy hand tipped with thin, unnaturally long talons. The creature’s claws raked across the Cordura nylon exterior of Harvey’s plate carrier with a zip!
As the monster came in close, Harvey pressed the muzzle of his Glock up under its chin and fired twice. The zombie fell away after the top of its head exploded.
“Where are you going, Swanson?!” Becker called out as Harvey climbed through chunky pieces of zombies and goat demons away from the group. “Let’s go!”
He looked back for an instant, and saw the remaining four officers shuffling toward the open carport gate, each of them pushing zombies back, firing when they could, and reloading when it couldn’t be avoided...
The slithering pile of pink and green flesh of the abominations, pulling along after them all with a sick conglomeration of random pieces of human limbs, flopped and plopped and snarled with rude mouths in between elbows and fleshy creases, revealing long needle-like fangs.
My god, Harvey thought. With this many demons in here trying to take them down, the streets of Vegas would be crawling with monstrosities...
How could they possibly survive??
Harvey stepped up onto the hot, furry body of a goat man, stuck his pistol into his waist band, then and reached down, hefting up the long, heavy machine gun. The belt of ammo still remaining, attached to the receiver, swung through the air, and Harvey felt his cock pressing uncomfortably against the front of his jeans...
He knew that he had to be grinning.
The huge rifle must weigh twenty pounds or more! Instead of using the carry handle, Harvey shouldered the weapon into low-ready, and took a quick glance at the controls for a safety.
What am I thinking? he thought. Those goat fuckers wouldn’t have put the safety on...
The belt of ammo swinging from the gun was somewhere between three and four feet long.
How many rounds was that? Forty? Fifty?
“Better than nine millimeter!” Harvey said to himself, then hustled to catch up to his squad. “I’ll take point!” he shouted to the wide eyes that greeted him.
“Get up here, Harvey!” Becker said.
“Bad ass!” Mendez shouted, then yelped as a zombie grabbed his shoulders. “Oh god—help me!” The officer in yellow pushed his Remington 1100 out against the monster, unable to fire,
but held the creature’s mouth away from his neck for the moment...
The plain clothes detective smashed the zombie in the forehead with the butt of his rifle, which let Mendez shove it off of him. The creature fell backwards to the ground, and Mendez blew its head off against the pavement.
As Harvey navigated the chunks of demon bodies toward the front of the group, he raised the front sight of the M60 at the two zombies approaching the gate to the street.
With a quick pull of the trigger, two rounds of 7.62mm boomed out of the front of the gun, its stock slamming into Harvey’s meaty shoulder, and the head of the first monster popped open in a spray of gore! Adjusting his aim, Harvey squeezed off one more rifle round into the face of the second, dropping it just as easily.
His head was ringing from the blast of the machine gun, but Harvey was grinning from ear to ear!
“Exit clear!” he exclaimed. “Let’s go!”
Leading the team into the street, Harvey looked up and down Sierra Vista Drive—toward and away from the Strip—then down Swenson Street to the south. The parking lot in front of the police station was full of cars, and the streets themselves were choked with abandoned vehicles of all sorts, many with doors left open and windows smashed. Outside the building and its enclosed carport, the air was tinted red, and standing under the vast, circling swirl of the black, upside-down whirlpool in the sky was dizzying!
Becker ran up behind him, putting a gloved hand on Harvey’s shoulder to let him know that he was there.
In the red haze of every distant direction, Harvey saw the forms of enemies and fleeing civilians. A large pack of zombie creatures were closest to the east, prowling down the streets, weaving through all of the dead cars, heading in their direction. Several screams drifted through the air from the large apartment complex catty-corner the station, and Harvey saw the distinct horned heads of the goat demons hurrying through a space in between buildings.
Flying demons batted their wings in the distant sky, occasionally diving for victims...
Far off, Harvey saw a black cloud moving like an inky vapor, dodging through the street.
He didn’t want to know what that was...
“What do we do, Sarge?” Officer White shouted.
As far as Harvey could tell, other than the screams and animal sounds of the demons and various creatures peppering the landscape, the world seemed pretty quiet.
Then again, he was partially deaf now...
“Where should we go?” Harvey asked Becker. “What’s the plan?”
The sergeant paused, lowering his rifle and looking down at the mag pouches on his vest. He pressed one big hand against them. Harvey saw that they were all empty except for one. The big man then raised his rifle and looked at the little plastic window in his current magazine to get an idea of how many rounds he had left.
Becker frowned.
“First things first,” he said. “We’re almost out. We need more ammo. Some of you need more guns.”
“But the armory’s overrun and everybody’s dead!” White said, cracking open his pump shotgun to make sure he still had a round chambered. He reached into a dump pouch on his vest for more shells, and started pressing them into the tube.
“Yeah,” Becker replied. “We need to hit a Walmart or gun store or something.”
“There’s no Walmart around here,” Mendez said. “Closest one is on ... Eastern or something...”
“Hey, there’s the mall a few blocks that way!” White replied, pointing to the red haze to the east.
The detective spoke up after checking his own mags on his plate carrier. “There’s no fucking ammo in the mall, dumbass,” he said. “This isn’t fucking 1980.” Harvey still didn’t know that guy’s name.
“There’s a gun store to the south,” Harvey said, shouting so he could hear his own voice, “a little ways down, on Paradise and Flamingo.”
“You sure?” Becker asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” Harvey said. “I bought a revolver there a few months ago.”
“Oh yeah!” Mendez said. “Next to PF Changs?”
“Yeah,” Harvey said. “That place.”
“Well let’s go!” Becker exclaimed. “Two big blocks south, and one big block west. We can do that on foot.”
“If we last that long...” White said.
“Conserve your ammo!” Becker said. “Swanson, you take point with that big fucking gun.”
The team of five started to the south with Harvey in the lead, the belt of 7.62mm ammo swinging gently as he walked. Mendez brought up the rear with his semi-auto shotgun, always watching behind them.
For a while, they were slowly walking between an old multi-story apartment building on the east, and a huge, empty lot on the west that had been standing vacant and awaiting development across from the front of the station for a long time.
Wasn’t going to get developed now, Harvey thought.
When he focused on some movement he saw in the vacant lot, hard to see in the red glare of the angry sky, Harvey saw a large, bulbous creature pulling apart dead bodies. All around it, it seemed that the ground was moving, but Harvey realized that it was more of the quivering pink abomination creatures...
He looked away when the monster guzzled down a chunk of someone’s torso like a crocodile swallowing meat.
At first they made their way along the sidewalk, next to the chain-link fence that enclosed the empty lot. But when the sounds of demons attacking shrieking groups of civilians in the apartments made it obvious how exposed the squad was, Becker directed them to continue in between the opposing lanes of the deserted Swenson Street, surrounded by the many dead vehicles.
“What are we gonna do??” White asked Becker at one point.
“Let’s get to the gun store, and then we’ll make a better plan,” the sergeant said.
After a while of walking just in front of the detective, Harvey spoke up, talking back over his shoulder to the man wearing a plate carrier over a blue, button-up shirt.
“Who are you, anyway?” Harvey asked. “I know these other guys, but not you, detective.”
The man’s cold blue eyes connected with Harvey’s.
“I’m Jacob Price,” he said.
“What department, Price?”
“Investigative Services,” he said. “Robbery.”
“Speaking of which,” White said. “What are we gonna do when we get to the gun store? Rob them?”
They walked quietly for a moment.
“We’ll have to appropriate what we need for the better good,” Becker said.
“What are we going to be doing for the better good?” Mendez asked. “How are we gonna help the people?”
Sarcastic.
“Can it,” Becker snapped back. “I’m still thinking about it. If this place is going to hell in a handbasket, we might be able to connect with a larger unit to try and reestablish order.”
“I’m Harvey Swanson,” Harvey said back to Price. “I’m from patr—”
“I know who you are, Swanson,” Price replied. “You’re the metro stalker. You’re a famous man...”
Harvey stopped and looked back, only to see the detective glaring at him.
He opened his mouth to retort, but didn’t really know what he was going to say...
“Put a cork in that shit,” Becker said. “Focus on the mission. Gun store now. Eyes forward, killer...”
“I’ll tell ya one thing,” Mendez said from the back of the group. “I’m sure glad we sprung ya, Swanson.”
“Agreed,” White said.
The team walked in silence for a while, leaving the lot on their west side full of abominations behind, and passing by a newer, more condo-like apartment complex on the east. They crossed a small side street heading west, then continued between apartment complexes on both sides until passing a water-refilling station on their left. Harvey saw a large shopping strip coming up on the east side as they were approaching Twain Avenue.
Up ahead, dozens of creatures ran a
cross the more major street, racing toward the Strip. From the silhouettes of the long claws and flailing tongues, Harvey could tell that they were zombies.
But they were moving fast, he thought. Why were they running?
A sudden and deep bestial roar from up ahead made Harvey stop and crouch. He noticed the rest of his group did the same. The gentle wind blowing to the east sent a flurry of red sand across their path between two abandoned cars...
Harvey had been thankful for the break in fighting. It looked like that break was over now.
“What the fuck was that?!” White whispered loudly.
They were answered by the shadow of a monstrous creature approaching out of the haze up ahead, past the intersection. It was a huge man-shaped creature, taking long, easy steps with gangly legs.
A malformed giant...
“Get down!” Becker hissed, and they dropped down under the tops of the vehicles around them.
The ground thumped as the great creature approached, still over a hundred yards away, and Harvey was able to see a little more. With long arms, the monster weaved around, searching the ground far below it. It had to be at least twenty feet tall! Harvey saw the shape of a thickly muscled neck, and small, curving horns on its head, but it was something different than the goat demon creatures they fought back in the carport. The huge creature’s fingers were long and wide, and its hands flexed open and closed.
Something was wrong with its chest, but Harvey couldn’t quite make it out yet...
The red haze in the air—was it getting thicker?
Harvey looked down at the asphalt and noted that sand as red as blood was starting to build up around the tires of the vehicles around them.
Would the machine gun even hurt the giant demon?
.308 was a big round, but how thick was the monster’s skin? Some people used this round for hunting big game, but would it be enough to take down a giant?
There was a scream from the upcoming intersection, and Harvey raised his head a little to see what was going on...
With a speed that belied its size, the giant demon reached down, and pulled the door off of a car in the road with a loud, metallic pop, then tossed it away through the air. The monster roared again—a deep and rumbling sound that Harvey felt vibrating his damaged ear drums.