by Joe McKinney
As I walked through one of the front yards, I came across a huge Spanish oak with a canopy almost as large as the house it stood in front of. It had never been cut back, and its outer branches sagged to the ground, making it look like a gigantic dome tent.
A sharp, gusty wind blew through the top branches, tossing them back and forth. The huge oak creaked and groaned under the sudden urgency of the wind. It was strange and beautiful music.
I walked around its canopy and saw an opening where one of its larger branches curved down to the ground from the central bole.
There was enough room for a man to walk under it and the space seemed to form a quiet sanctuary, a cave with walls of leaves. I swung open the curtain of leaves and entered it, thinking that if nothing else I could catch my breath there.
But I saw immediately that it was no sanctuary. A man was already there, on his knees, eating large pieces of viscera from a gaping hole in a dead woman’s abdomen. A long, lumpy rope of intestine dangled from his fingers.
He wore a blue button-down shirt and his face was soaked in blood. His pants looked brown and very dirty. He wasn’t wearing shoes. His mouth hung open, forming a mean, vacant hole.
But the most awful part of his expression lingered around the eyes. They were milky white and opaque, a perfect image of death.
Blindly, I felt for the curtain of leaves behind me and grabbed them, steadying myself for support. I kept my eyes on the man’s eyes, not wanting to look away, and backpeddled into the yard.
But as I moved, so did he.
A piece of dark meat fell from his teeth. He stood up slowly, gangly and rickety on his damaged legs, and came after me.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked, but didn’t expect an answer.
What I was looking at was simply impossible. It was wrong in every way. I wanted to yell out at the man that he was an abomination, but when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out.
I felt like I was headed for a meltdown. My heart was beating so fast and so hard it hurt. I could hear the blood roaring in my head. I wasn’t breathing.
“No,” I said. “You need to get back.”
I let the branches fall from my hand and I stumbled backwards into the yard, still staring at the oak tree that no longer seemed beautiful, but mangled and unnatural.
The man appeared from the veil of leaves and came after me.
The battle I had just escaped didn’t seem real. The crowds of people walking into a wall of armed policemen, fighting with their bare hands and teeth, hadn’t seemed real. But that man, that gore-stained monstrosity, he was real. Looking at him, I no longer had any doubts I was looking at a zombie.
I reached for my gun.
As I backed up, I pulled it from the holster and worked it into my grip.
I saw the green glow of the night sights and centered the front dot on the man’s forehead.
He never even acknowledged the weapon. The void in his eyes never changed to recognition of the danger. He walked straight at me, and his face remained blank right up to the end.
I squeezed the trigger, and he fell. The only witness to one of the worst moments of my life was the rustling murmur of the wind through the trees.
Chapter 4
After I shot that man, I stood there looking at him, fighting off the urge to touch him. I could almost feel the cold, wet sponginess of his skin against my fingertips, and the thought turned my stomach.
I still couldn’t believe what was happening. When I left for work that afternoon, the world had seemed normal. Now, everything was upside down.
Were those people really zombies? I fought against the idea, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I had seen horror movies. I watched them and I laughed at how stupid they seemed, because the zombies in the Hollywood movies never looked real. Once you’ve seen death in all its splendid horror, a movie version just doesn’t cut it. The walking disasters I had seen certainly looked worse than anything I had ever seen on film.
As I stood there thinking about it, my doubts continued to grow. The way I understood it, zombies were dead people that went around eating living people. The man I shot under the tree had been doing that. God, he had been doing that. But was he dead? That part I didn’t believe. It went against everything that made up my reality. Besides, he’d bled when I shot him. Dead bodies don’t bleed.
And that made the horror of what I’d seen even worse. It wasn’t enough that the world was crashing down around my ears. Worse than that, I had actually shot somebody. I’d shot several people. How was I supposed to live with that? They’d been trying to kill me, sure, but that didn’t make it any easier. Killing somebody ain’t easy, not under any circumstances.
My head was swamped by the enormity of it. I’d seen a lot of good men and women die in the fight at the top of the hill, and I had just stumbled blindly through the worst of it. I was lucky to be alive, and I knew it.
I turned and headed west, where I hoped to find my car again.
But I didn’t have far to walk before I saw just how badly my shift had been gutted.
As I got closer to the spot where Chris and I ran into trouble, I started to see wrecked cars and broken glass and every kind of debris spread out over the lawns and into the street. There were hundreds of bodies strewn across the battlefield, and many of them had faces I recognized.
An echo of the fight still covered the street like smoke.
Not far from where I was, a man with useless legs pulled himself along through the grass, trying to reach me. There was gravel in the noise that came from his throat.
I had to look away, but it took an act of sheer will to do it. He was a human train wreck.
My police car had been demolished. All four windows were smashed in, and the front windshield was a spiderweb of cracks. It looked like the front fender on the driver’s side had been hit with a shotgun blast. There was a jagged, gaping hole in the metal, and the tire below it was flat.
The driver’s-side door was open, and the inside was even worse than the outside. The shotgun was missing. My briefcase was in pieces and spread all over the floorboard. A bullet had pierced the steering column and the ignition wires were hanging from the hole. Somebody had knocked the computer out of its mounting bracket. My cell phone was nowhere to be found.
“Fucking perfect,” I said out loud, and slammed the door closed. What little glass was left in the window frame collapsed and came tinkling down on the pavement. “That’s just great.”
I stood in the street beside my car with my fingers in my hair, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do.
There were no other police cars at the scene.
I could see long skid marks leading back up the hill. I guessed the officers who came down this far did the same thing Chris and I had done and got the hell back up the hill as soon as they realized their little .40-caliber cap guns weren’t doing the trick.
But they had left their dead behind. I saw six dead policemen and one firefighter amid thirty or forty dead civilians. It looked like it had been an expensive battle for everyone.
Chris’s flashlight was in the grass on the other side of the car. The bodies of two men in their late twenties and an older woman were less than ten feet away, and when I reached down to pick up the flashlight, I was careful to keep my eyes on them.
A voice from somewhere in the shadows said, “Don’t worry, they’re dead.”
I fumbled for my gun as I turned on the voice. “Who’s there?”
“It’s me, Eddie.”
It was Carlos Williams, one of the field-training officers from my shift. He was stretched out with his back against a tree over by the corner of the house, his gun still in his hand.
“Carlos?” I said. He looked bad. “Where are you hurt?”
“They bit me,” he said, and shrugged his shoulder so I could see where. He was wearing his short sleeves, like me, and his left arm was torn up pretty bad. There was a nasty wound on the side of his bicep so jagged and deep blac
k with blood it had to be a bite mark.
I went over to him. “Can you stand?”
“I think so. Help me up.”
I got my arm under his and heaved him up. “I nearly shot you,” I said. “Don’t scare me like that.”
“Yeah, you looked pretty jumpy.” He laughed to cover up the pain. “I wasn’t worried. I’ve seen you shoot.”
“You’re funny. Come on. Let’s clean that off.”
I guided him around the side of the house and turned the water hose on his arm.
“Hold still,” I said. “I know it hurts.”
I turned the flashlight on the wound. It was still bleeding freely, but I got most of the dirt and grass and shredded bits of his shirt out of the wound.
“It looks deep,” I said.
“I’ll be all right.”
“Come on. I think there’s one of those blood-borne pathogen kits in the trunk.”
There were dead bodies all over the yard, and it seemed like everywhere we stepped there were brass casings sticking up through the grass.
“You guys really shot the place up.”
“It takes so many shots to kill them,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They just kept coming.”
I nodded without listening.
His wound was starting to scare me. The blood was still pouring down his arm, and he looked pale. I remembered how bad Chris got and how fast he started to go downhill, and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to Carlos if I could help it.
He was bigger than me by about eighty pounds and holding him up was difficult. I sat him down in the backseat of the patrol car and had him turn his arm so I could see it.
I got a look at his face in the pale white bulb of the car’s dome light. His eyes had turned piss yellow, with deep red pools at the edges. His chin and the front of his uniform were stained with a foul-smelling black liquid that I guessed was vomit. I forced myself not to gag, focusing on the wound.
“Keep that in the light,” I said to him. “Let’s see if we can stop the bleeding.”
“Look at those guys over there,” he said, pointing with his chin.
“Where?” I turned quickly, half expecting to see more of those zombies coming after us. “What guys? I don’t—”
“I shot them. I shot them all. Look at them. Each one’s got a hole in the middle of his forehead. They kept coming, but I shot them all.”
It sounded like he was trying to convince himself it had really happened.
I got the blood-borne pathogen kit out of the trunk and tore it open. Fancy name, but there’s not much to it. It comes with a couple of rolls of bandages, some latex gloves, a paper filter mask, a plastic squirt bottle, some hand sanitizer, and that’s about it.
I put on the gloves, poured the whole bottle of hand sanitizer directly into the wound, and then unwrapped the bandages.
“This is gonna hurt, okay? Try not to move.”
I worked the bandages around his arm, trying to make it snug without hurting him too badly. He growled under his breath, but he let me fix him up. The blood was already soaking through by the time I had it secured.
“Fuck,” he said, pushing my hands away. His voice sounded like a growl. “That’s good enough.”
“We’ll have to change the bandages again in a bit. They’re already soaked.”
“Yeah, okay. Here, get out of the way. It’s too damn cramped in here.”
I backed off and let him climb out. When he finally got himself out of the backseat I realized just how big a guy he really was. He wasn’t over-muscled, but he wasn’t fat, either. There was just a lot of him. A big square block.
He was a few years older than me, maybe 37 or 38. His hair was thin, light brown, and he wore it short and trimmed.
Even if he hadn’t been in uniform, and I didn’t know him from Adam, I think I would have recognized him for a cop. He just had that look about him.
“Look at her,” he said, pointing at an old woman laid out in the grass. “I shot her, too.”
“You had to do it,” I said. “She would have come after you like the others.”
“She’s the one who bit me. Her name’s Sylvia Perades.”
“You knew her?”
He nodded. “About twelve years ago I caught her son in the backseat of a stolen car. I brought him home instead of booking him and held him down while she slapped the fuck out of him. After that, she used to make me tamales to bring home to Kathy every Christmas. She made dinner for me and brought it to the hospital the day Matthew was born.”
“You needed to protect yourself,” I said.
“It didn’t look like she recognized me at all.”
“She probably didn’t.”
He stared at her for a long time, saying his goodbyes. He stared at her so long I thought he was fading out on me.
“I forgot you were a dad,” I said, not really knowing what else to say to him but feeling like I had to say something. I remembered that he took a lot of time off a while back when his kid was born, but until he said his son’s name I hadn’t even remembered whether it was a boy or a girl. “What is he, about a year old now?”
“Nine months,” he said, but I think he knew what was really on my mind. I’m sure my face showed it plain enough. “Have you called your wife yet?”
I shook my head. “I can’t find my cell phone.”
“Me either. It was here on my gun belt, but it looks like it’s gone now.” He felt around his belt without looking at it. “Looks like my baton’s gone, too.”
“We need a car. We should get you to a hospital.”
“A car, yes. Hospital, no.”
“You’re hurt.”
“And I’m sure bunches of other people are too. Imagine what the hospitals are going to be like. Everybody who’s injured is gonna head to a hospital. How long do you figure before the hospitals are all overrun with those zombie things?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“We need to get to a fire station. They have medics there. Besides, whenever the radio system goes down, we’re supposed to head to the nearest fire station. The rest of the shift is probably headed there now.”
While he was talking, I watched the street to the west of us. Through the flickering strobe lights I could see zombies moving down the hill. Coming our way.
“Carlos,” I said. “We need to leave.”
“We need a car.”
“Well, we’re not going that way.” I pointed up the hill where there were plenty of cars but absolutely no way of getting one.
He turned to see where I was pointing, and then hung his head. “Crap, Eddie. I don’t have many bullets left.”
“Save them. We’re not gonna shoot if we don’t have to.”
Chapter 5
The crowd coming down from the top of the hill grew steadily larger. To me, they looked like streams of dark water overflowing an embankment, coming downhill without direction, following the path of least resistance. They seemed driven only by a vague impulse to keep moving.
“Got any ideas?” Carlos asked.
“You’re the senior man. You tell me.”
“I’m not gonna be able to make it very far. It’s my head. I feel really dizzy. It hurts.”
I knew he was hurting. There was pain in his voice, even though he tried to force it down.
“There’s the elementary school. Can you make that?”
“Yeah,” he said, but he sounded doubtful. “We ought to avoid any kind of place where a crowd might gather.”
“School let out at three.”
He nodded, and together we started toward the school, his arm over my shoulder.
Feeling his dead weight on my shoulders, I was stunned by how bad he looked. His bite was serious, there was no doubting that, but even so, I thought, there was no way it should be tearing him up like it was doing. The piss yellow in his eyes was starting to deepen to a dark crimson, and he was coughing, hacking up huge wads of black phlegm that stank h
orribly. His whole body shook each time he coughed. He was slick to the touch too. From sweat. Every step was a labor, a painful, gut-wrenching labor, and it said something about the inner strength of the man that he was able to walk as fast as he did.
Together we made it past the bodies and the trash in the street and all the way to the end of the block, where the slope of the street flattened out and a wall of trees marked the back ring of the cul-de-sac.
The edge of the school’s property was protected by a seven-foot-high hurricane fence.
I climbed up first and then reached down for Carlos.
He pulled most of his own weight over, which was lucky. I doubt I could have carried him.
He did so well coming over that I let him come down the other side by himself. Bad idea. He lost his grip near the top of the fence and fell, landing on his side so hard it knocked the wind out of him.
“Are you okay?” I asked, kneeling down next to him. I offered him a hand up.
He pushed it away, but didn’t move to get up. He stayed there on his hands and knees, head bent down, trying to catch his breath.
“Why do people always say that?”
“What?”
“Why do people always say, ‘Are you okay?’ after someone falls and busts their ass? I mean, look at me. Do I fucking look okay?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Forget it,” he said. “Just help me up.”
I helped him to his feet and balanced him there. He was swaying badly. Off toward the school the flood-lights on the corners of the building lit up the playground and the parking lot beyond it.
I looked over the field separating us from the buildings and then at Carlos.
“We’ve still got some walking to do. Can you make it?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?”
The closest building to us was the gym, and we headed that way. Halfway across a field where years of kickball had worn dirt lanes into the grass, Carlos stopped walking and bent over. He vomited all over his boots, and kept on vomiting. Long after I was sure he couldn’t have anything left inside him, he was still vomiting.