by S. Ganley
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Kyle's plan had been to drive to one of the fire stations in the area and hopefully connect up with the rest of his patrols. He should have been able to reach the station he had in mind in under ten minutes under normal conditions but he kept coming upon road after road completely clogged with traffic. It wasn't your normal mid-morning rush hour traffic either, cars, trucks, buses and anything else with wheels had been left parked helter skelter in the roads and along the medians of all the major arteries running through the area. In most cases the vehicles had just been left abandoned in the middle of the road and the occupants had simply walked away not even bothering to shut the doors. Using the side streets, he was able to make his way slowly through town until he reached the back road that led behind the station he had in mind. Used as an alternate 911 call center, this station was the largest in town and even had a small section dedicated to police patrols for report writing, storage of riot control equipment and a two person holding cell. He figured that this would work for the time being as an alternate command center for him to work on reorganizing the patrols they had remaining on duty. Periodically during the drive he had made attempts to contact different units over his patrol cars radio with no success, the best he could get was a few moments here and there of confused and excited voices overlapping one another. Since the car radios were boosted through the repeater back at that station house he thought it possible that during the fighting there the high gain antenna had been damaged, resulting in his signal bouncing off civilian sets as well as those from other agencies. He hoped that if the fire house was still intact, he could get the transmitter online and reestablish communications with his patrols and state police units to learn what was being done at the state level in response to the worsening situation.
As he rounded the corner leading up to the fire station his hopes for a refuge and chance to regroup were dashed when he saw the still smoldering ruins of the large building along with the post office and government office building that had shared that end of the block with it. His heart sank even further when he spotted the scorched remains of three patrols from his department parked in road block positions on either side of the road leading to the station. Bodies were scattered all about in front of the cruisers and it looked as though his men had thrown up hasty defenses to protect the station and more than likely were overrun by sheer numbers just like he found back at his station house.
Shellie had been quietly observing the scene along with him and as the realization that their one hope for help and protection was now gone she lowered her head into her hands and softly wept as her body shook in waves of sorrow and despair.
Kyle pulled the cruiser up to within fifty feet of the first roadblock on that end of the street and then executed a uturn to point them back the way they had come in case they had to leave the area quickly. He put the car in park and then put his hand gently on Shellie's shoulder.
"Shellie, look, I want you to stay here in the car. I will lock the doors once I get out but I need to check this out real quick just in case there is a chance any of our guys made it." Even though he doubted he would find anyone, the area appeared clear of any zombies at the moment and he wanted to see which of his guys he had lost here and at least look over the communications room inside the station in case any useful equipment may have survived the fire.
She looked up at him with tears still streaming down her cheeks and fear evident in her eyes, "you are going to leave me here?" she asked.
"I will just be a minute or two. You can see down the road in front of us and if anything starts coming this way just honk the horn and I will come running." As he said it he knew it sounded like a weak plan, but he didn't want the burden of having to deal with her out there amongst dead and disfigured bodies where there was a better than average chance that she would lose it. "If the radio equipment inside the station survived the fire we might be able to use it to call for help."
That last part seemed to help give her a shot of hope and Kyle suddenly wished he had just kept that to himself. The chances of finding any working equipment in that smoldering ruin of a building were very low and by pinning their hopes of rescue and salvation on it, he was setting her up for a crushing blow when he returned with the bad news that help was not going to be coming any time soon. But at least it seemed to convince her to remain there in the car while he made a sweep of the area. He popped the trunk of his cruiser before stepping out and then walked around to the back and retrieved his M4 rifle and spare magazines from the storage compartment before moving out to the roadblock. As he closed the trunk he spied Shellie turned around in her seat and watching him with a spark of hope and contemplation in her eyes. He gave her a thumbs up and then turned and walked towards the half charred cruiser that he now recognized as having belonged to Patrol Officer Givens, their canine officer who would have come on duty with the day shift that morning.
Stepping cautiously over and around the bodies leading to the canine car, he examined a couple of the dead and confirmed his suspicions that they had the same signs of undead he had seen in others back at the main station. They also had obvious bullet wounds to their bodies with the ultimately fatal headshot that had sent them back to their rightful place once and for all. It looked as though the officers manning this position had been spraying rounds pretty rapidly, stitching their targets across the torso and then walking their point of aim upward until finally making the final headshot. As he got closer to the cruiser the number of rounds per body dropped as the range decreased and hitting their mark became possible with less shots. There as a gully on the side of the road just before the improvised road block that he had not noticed until he was right there almost on top of it. Looking down from the level of the road he saw a pile of seven or eight more bodies all crumpled together on top of each other. Mixed in with the corpses he also observed the hind quarters of a blood soaked German Shepard and knew that he was most likely seeing the remains of Officer Givens working dog. He recalled that the dog had been named Rocco and he remembered watching an attack demonstration that Givens had provided to a group of citizens the previous month. Rocco had taken down a pair of hefty volunteers who had thought they would be able to just throw the powerful animal around like a stuffed toy but had been embarrassingly surprised when they were taken down by the dog and forced to cry out for the attack to stop. The loss of a working dog like Rocco was almost as bad as the loss of a fellow officer, the members of his department, himself included, had a great deal of respect and admiration for those animals that would lay down their lives in a second to protect their handler. It looked to Kyle like Rocco had lived up to that expectation as was evident by the clear bite marks on the bodies of several of the zombies strewn about in that gully with him, he had gone down fighting hard. Turning his back on the scene before he started crying or lost the nerve to proceed he hefted the M4 up into the ready position and eased past the front end of the patrol car parked in a blocking position in the middle of the road. Clearing the other side of the car he saw that the ground was completely littered with spent shell casings and shotgun cartridges, evidence of an intense and brutal fight. There were no signs of the officers who had held this position though and Kyle figured that as the tide started to turn against them they were forced to fall back on the fire station, just like those officers at his police station who had been pushed back inside by the growing numbers who had eventually just overwhelmed them with sheer volume.
The fire had burned out into the grass in front of the station house and as he walked up the drive leading to the open bay doors he spied four or five skeletonized remains strewn along the smoking black remains of the grass. From the position of the remains it was clear that they had been moving away from the fire hose when they finally succumbed to the flames. He also noticed that next to one of the bodies was the burnt remnants of a rifle just like the one he was carrying, he was pretty sure that he had found at least one of his missing officers. The other bodies may have been fi
refighters or workers from the fire station who had fled in an attempt to escape the fire. A shiver traveled down his spine as he thought of what they must have faced with, trapped inside the burning fire station while under siege by a flesh hungry mob of zombies. Faced with the choice of burning alive or being eaten alive he didn't know what he would have done in the same situation but he imagined eating his own pistol would have been another alternative. He was about to turn back towards the open bay doors of the station when one of the burnt figures made a lunging dive across the blackened patch of earth towards his ankles. Kyle jumped back several steps and raised the rifle to his shoulder ready to fire. He resisted the urge to shoot at the thing because it was not going to be a threat to him as long as he kept out of arms reach. The entire lower body was so badly burned that when it had turned and lunged towards him, the upper portion of its body from the belt line up tore completely free of the lower half. It was so intent on reaching out for Kyle that it didn't have the presence of thought, or whatever may still pass for thought, to try and crawl forward by pulling itself with its arms. Stuck with just rolling back and forth on its exposed rib cage like some type of teetering toy, it just rocked back and forth in place while lashing out desperately trying to reach Kyle. The head still had a partial covering of singed meat over the skull and Kyle guessed that it had been protected from the inferno just enough that the portion of the brain required to allow the zombie to thrive had not died off in the flames. It was unbelievable the amount of body trauma one of these things could suffer and still be just as potent a threat as ever. It was certainly something he needed to keep in mind and not give any corpse the benefit of the doubt until he was sure that there was a hole through its head. He turned away from the morbid scene and left the creature to struggle on its own, the thought of ending any possibly misery it may be suffering occurred to him, but he remembered how the zombies back at the police station had reacted to his gunfire, there was no need to risk attracting any attention to himself.
Stepping inside the bay of the station his thoughts of finding anything of use were quickly shattered when he observed that the entire second floor had collapsed down into the large open garage area and cut off his route to the offices and communication room further into the building. He backed out of the bay and was starting to work his way around the far side of the building after he remembered a service entrance over there that led to the hallway almost directly across from the communications room when he heard the car horn on his cruiser start blaring with a constant wail as Shellie leaned over and pressed against it without letting up. Whirling around back towards the street he saw the source of her concern, rounding the corner and coming on fast towards the cruiser, was a crowd of close to thirty zombies, every passing second that he watched even more were starting to appear from different directions, all of them honing in on the street leading to the fire station. The first ones he spotted had their faces turned towards the sky and he could swear that they looked like bloodhounds following a scent. There had been a moderate wind blowing in that direction ever since he had exited his patrol car and now that he was also aware of how badly he had been sweating he was reasonably sure that the damn things had actually picked up on his body odor and it had attracted them to his presence. Any further thoughts of searching around the fire house were quickly abandoned as he broke into a sprint and raced down the drive to the connecting street directly towards his waiting car. As long as they kept the same pace they were using at that moment he should be able to beat them by a good hundred feet or so to the car, but then he saw one group of about ten or twelve concentrating intently on the patrol car and the blaring horn sounding from under its hood. That group had now focused on the sound of the horn and its telltale implications that a living human being was more than likely responsible and thus a fresh meal may be nearby. They picked up their speed and started racing towards the car while the remaining zombies stayed true to their original stimuli by sniffing at the air and shuffling along following his scent blowing to them on the breeze.
The time for discretion in his approach had now passed, keeping at a full sprint he tucked the rifle tight into his shoulder and started squeezing off rounds in the general direction of the group that had turned towards Shellie in his cruiser. With that batch of zombies running together in a close pack it was hard for him to miss, but his hits were all body and limb shots, trying to accurately get off a head shot at this distance while running, was just a little beyond his ability. The hits he was making were at least causing them to lose a little of their forward momentum as the shock of the round impacting their bodies turned them briefly to one side or the other, but overall they were still making good progress towards the cruiser and it was going to be a close race. The rifle clicked on an empty magazine surprising him that he had burned through a full thirty rounds in such a short period, he needed to remember that he only had a few spare magazines and blowing through rounds at such a rate was going to leave him dry really quick without having caused any meaningful damage to his targets. He scrambled for another magazine, slammed it into the receiver and released the bolt all in record time, bringing the barrel back into position he slowed his rate of fire and concentrated on the legs of the front three zombies hoping to at least trip one of them to form a brief obstacle for the ones coming up behind it. Forty feet short of the cruiser he almost jumped out his skin as the thunderous blast of a shotgun boomed off to his right side and one of the zombies in the front of the pack suddenly lost its head from the base of its neck up in a spray of liquefied brain, bone and hair that showered those behind him. Kyle reflectively adjusted the aim of his rifle towards the source of the blast and found himself staring down his sights at Shellie as she steadied herself across the hood of his cruiser with his patrol's shotgun tucked comfortable into the crook of her shoulder as she lined up her next shot. The scared little secretary apparently had a few surprises up her sleeve as she coolly fired off a second shot with similar results although this one had the added benefit of taking out two heads for the price of one since her target had been lined perfectly with another zombie right behind him. Her efforts were paying off as she lined up her third shot and knocked took off another head, this time the body fell in the path of the zombies coming along at its heels and send several of them tumbling to the ground. Kyle also saw that the group of zombies who had been following his scent had now spotted him running down the street were coming on at a fast sprint from three angles it would be a close race for him to reach the car several strides before them.
"GET IN!" He yelled with a strangled gasp as he felt his lungs tightening to get more oxygen. The bullet proof vest he wore under his uniform was heavy and also form fitting, meaning that when his chest started heaving in exertion such as while running, it could only expand so far before it met resistance from the vest. Shellie glanced over at him, judging his distance from the car and then racked another round into the chamber of the shotgun. Steadying her aim she blasted another zombie head into glazed jelly all over the creature’s comrades running at its heels. Satisfied with her work she threw the gun into the car ahead of her and dove in after it, scrambling across to the driver’s door and throwing it open just seconds before Kyle reached it and slid quickly into place behind the wheel. He was thankful at that point that he had left the engine running for Shellie so that all he had left to do was drop it into gear and slam his own door shut before hitting the gas and plowing ahead. The cruiser had a metal push guard welded onto the front bumper that had been designed for pushing automobiles, in this case that metal guard served like a plow as he slammed into four zombies at once. Extending two feet from the front of the bumper the push guard allowed him to strike the zombies and knock them down while keeping their falling bodies from grabbing hold of the hood. As it was, they were knocked down to the street and either off to the side or under the cruiser as he discovered once the tires rose up and over first one then three of them at the same time, it caused car to rock back and forth and f
orced him to ease off the gas before he lost control and swerved into the ditch. Grabbing the wheel tight with both hands he held on and carefully kept them as centered on the road as possible until they had cleared the last of that first wave of zombies. Dodging and weaving like a drunk driver and throwing Shellie all over the inside of the car in the process he worked on keeping only the very front outside edges of the steel reinforced bumper involved in striking down zombies that he was unable to avoid to push them off to the sides instead of under the accelerating cruiser. It took almost half the block before there finally reached a point where the street was clear enough of zombies that Kyle could resume normal driving, by then both of them were battered and bruised from tossing about inside the car and hitting doors and the center computer console. Looking back in the rear view mirror Kyle saw that many of the zombies had turned after them and were pounding hard down the street in pursuit, he knew they would be able to easily outdistance them but their willingness to continue the chase was something to remember, if they came upon a blocked road or other obstruction causing them to turn around, they could be in trouble. For now he decided to just keep navigating the smaller back roads through the outer lying commercial and residential districts while he thought of just where they would go next.