by Joe McKinney
It stank.
But finally, it stopped, and he stood up again.
Before I could say anything he looked up at me and said, “Don’t you dare ask if I’m okay.”
I shrugged.
“It feels like I’ve got the flu,” he said. “My back is fucking killing me.”
“When we get inside maybe we ought to head to the nurse’s office first. Maybe there’s something there we can—”
I stopped myself midsentence. Carlos looked up at me.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I thought I heard something.”
“What?”
“Shhh.”
It sounded like keys rattling. I turned my flashlight on the playground and swept it with the beam. It didn’t look like there was anything there, but it was hard to be sure because the beam didn’t penetrate very far into the dark.
I heard the noise again.
“What is that?”
And then I saw one of our SWAT officers named Anthony Moraga walking between the monkey bars and the seesaws. He wore a black tactical uniform, different from the French-blue patrol uniforms Carlos and I were wearing. He had his Glock in his hand and an AR-15 slung over his shoulder. It looked like he was walking with a bad limp.
“Tony,” I said to him, and then just as quickly wished I hadn’t.
He slowly turned to face us, and even before I could see the vacancy in his eyes I knew he was one of those things. A zombie.
“Why did you do that?” Carlos said.
“I don’t know. Come on.” I tried to pull Carlos along with me, but he wouldn’t move.
“Just shoot him,” he said.
I raised my gun to fire at Moraga. Every part of me rebelled against the act of shooting a fellow cop—even one who had been so horribly changed. It was almost impossible to pull the trigger.
I hesitated.
Waited too long.
Moraga raised his hands as he started to walk toward us, and with the hands came the gun. I watched in stunned silence as he swept the air with the muzzle, firing several rapid-order shots as his arm described a sloppy arc through the air.
He wasn’t aiming. I don’t think he was even capable of that. I don’t even think he was trying to fire.
It looked more like sympathetic trigger-pull to me. The fingers of his hand clutched for us, and because they were wrapped around the trigger, the gun went off.
But none of that went through my mind at the time—at least, not in any organized way.
When I threw my arms over my head and ducked down next to Carlos, I was operating out of pure fear. I pushed and carried him in the opposite direction, yelling for him to move as we ran.
Behind us, Moraga fired again, and this time the shots were closer, kicking up little umbrellas of dirt at our feet.
He kept firing until the magazine was empty and the slide locked back in the empty position.
And then he quickened his pace.
I stared back at him in disbelief. His right leg was bent slightly outwards at an awful angle, obviously broken, giving his gait an up-and-down rolling motion.
It slowed him down, but not by much. Between carrying Carlos and my own exhaustion it was hard to keep ahead of him.
He chased us past the playground equipment and out into the parking lot and never fell more than twenty steps behind us.
“Fucking SWAT,” I panted. “The bastard’s a zombie and he’s still in better shape than me.”
“Get to those doors,” Carlos said.
He meant a pair of green metal gym doors at the other side of the parking lot. I didn’t see any other way to get away so I did what he said.
As we reached the doors I could hear Moraga coming up behind us. The dragging slide of his footsteps mingled with the rattling of his keys and when I reached for the handle I could have sworn he was right on top of us.
I grabbed the door and pulled. It wouldn’t give. I tried the other door. It wouldn’t give, either.
“Locked.”
“Hurry up.”
“It’s locked.”
“Here he comes.”
I turned just in time to see Moraga drag himself up the curb and step into the grass.
“Shoot him.”
I pointed my gun at him and I wanted to pull the trigger. I wanted to, but couldn’t.
Moraga never flinched. He just kept hobbling toward us and I stood there, frozen by a mental block that wouldn’t let me shoot a cop.
Then I heard the sudden explosion of a pistol shot next to my ear.
I flinched out of the way and fell to one knee. The ringing in my ear was fierce.
Moraga stopped just in front of me and teetered backwards on his heels. He fell, landing in a pile on the grass, his legs tucked under his body like a child sleeping in the grass.
I looked back at Carlos and saw him panting heavily, his Glock still pointed at the space where Moraga had been standing.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” he said.
“I couldn’t.”
“Why the hell not?”
“He’s a cop.”
“Not any more. Jesus. You need to stop being so fucking sentimental and start worrying about saving your own ass.”
After that, he broke down into a violent coughing fit, worn out by the effort it took to yell at me.
In between his coughs he vomited hard, and when he looked up at me his crimson eyes were a watery snapshot of hell. His face was pale and wet with sweat and tears. In that moment I knew he was dying. He was fighting it bravely, but he had already admitted as much to himself. Death was coming for him, and he was looking it in the eye.
“We need to keep going,” I said.
“Get bent.”
“Let’s get inside, Carlos. Please.”
“I said leave me the fuck alone. I don’t want your—”
The pained look melted from his face and changed to that of a professional policeman once again. I saw it happen almost instantly.
His eyes narrowed to a point just over my shoulder, and he said, “Behind you.”
I turned and looked across the parking lot.
At first I only saw five zombies shambling toward us. Then eight. Then more than I could count. There had to be a hundred of them or more in a narrowing half circle around us.
Carlos fell back against the doors of the gym and slid down to the ground. He sat there looking around us and coughed.
“You’ve got to help me,” I said, trying to pick him up. “Come on. We’ve got to go.”
“There’s nowhere to go. You go if you want to.”
I tried to lift him again, but he wouldn’t let me. “Please get up. Come on.”
He wouldn’t even look at me.
“You son of a bitch. I’m not gonna die here. Get up.”
I pulled him up from his shoulder, but couldn’t hold him. He slipped back down and fell over to one side.
“Get up.”
The zombies behind me were getting closer. I could hear their feet scraping along the pavement. They all moved at different speeds, some of them closing in faster than others depending on their injuries. The ones with their legs intact were the fastest.
One of them stepped over the curb to my left and I shot her.
After that I just started firing at any of them that got too close. By the time I fired through all three of my magazines there were piles of dead bodies all around us, but there were still a lot more of them closing in on us.
“I’m out,” I said over my shoulder. I holstered my gun and pulled out my baton.
I took a deep breath and waited, watching the crowd for the best place to strike. I knew the first move would be the most important. If I read the crowd wrong and let them get between Carlos and me, there’d be no way to double back and keep them off him.
It had to be right the first time.
But before I got a chance to move, I heard the crack of a rifle shot and the whistle of the bullet as it went by my head.
I moved left and spun around in a panic, and saw Carlos still seated against the door. But now he had Moraga’s AR-15. Somehow he found the energy to lift Moraga’s corpse and remove the rifle. He had his knees up in front of his chest, and the barrel of the AR-15 supported between them. His left arm hung uselessly by his side, but he still managed to fire with the right.
He cleared out the ten or so zombies closest to us, and then started shooting at the next wave. Even in his condition, he still managed to place kill shots at thirty yards.
When he fired his last round, he let the rifle slip from his hand.
I ran over to Moraga and searched him for more AR magazines, but all he had were two Glock magazines. I grabbed them both and went back to Carlos.
“You have to get up. Come on.”
He muttered something, but I couldn’t make it out.
“Come on,” I said, begging him. “Get up.”
He blinked at me, but after a moment he let me help him up.
We moved around the front side of the building, past long rows of neatly cut hedges, and up to the front door. It was an older school, built in the fifties, and the front steps were steep. I looked for a wheelchair ramp, but didn’t see one.
“We’re gonna have to climb up.”
He grunted.
I pulled him up the stairs to the front doors and propped him against the doorjamb. The doors were locked.
“Goddamn it. It’s locked.”
I thought I heard Carlos laugh. “School lets out at three,” he said.
“Come on. Maybe there’s a window or something.”
We went down to the lawn. I looked left and then right. More zombies were coming at us from the parking lot. Hedges blocked the windows to the left, so we went right.
The lawn sloped downward, away from the school. The first-floor windows were over our heads all the way to the end of the building, so we went around the corner of the building and followed the wall until we came to another staircase.
It was a narrow half-flight of stairs leading up to another green metal door.
I tried the door, and wasn’t at all surprised when it didn’t open.
“Where are we going, Eddie?”
“Through here,” I said, and leaned Carlos against the railing.
There was a little window halfway up the stairs that looked big enough for us to crawl through. I peered inside, couldn’t really see anything in the darkness, and decided we had to risk it.
I pulled my baton and punched out the window-pane. I swept the rest of the glass out of the frame and pulled Carlos over to me.
“We’re going through here,” I said. “Can you help me?”
He laughed, or muttered. I couldn’t tell which. It was beginning to get difficult to read his gestures.
I crawled through the window and then reached back to get Carlos. He tried to help, but he wasn’t thinking clearly, and his help slowed me down more than anything else. It was a clumsy, painful process, but I got him through eventually.
As he came through he landed heavily on his face, and stayed that way.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
He growled at me as he rolled over onto his back.
“Sorry,” I said.
I reached down to him and he took my hand. Once he was on his feet he slumped back against the window frame and started coughing again.
“We ought to find the nurse’s office,” I said. “If nothing else, maybe they have a phone. We could call somebody.”
“Who?” His voice sounded like it was coming through liquid.
“9-1-1, I guess. Maybe they can get an ambulance to us. Or tell us what to do for you.”
“Maybe,” he said, but it looked like he didn’t really care.
I guided him through the utility room and into the hallway.
It was dark, and it was obvious that whatever was happening to the outside world had also happened here. Trash was everywhere. A few classroom doors hung open haphazardly. Disorder reigned.
I looked down the banks of lockers to the end of the hallway, where it split into three directions.
“Here, come on. I think it’s this way.”
We took the hallway to the right even though I didn’t really remember how to get to the office. The front doors led directly into the cafeteria, I remembered that much, but I wasn’t sure where the office was from there.
In most elementary schools the office is right there in the front, but I remembered this one was different. I thought it was on the other side of the gym, so I worked that way.
The hallway in front of the office was littered with loose-leaf paper and large pieces of office furniture toppled over at odd angles.
One of the overhead light panels was dangling from the ceiling by a tattered rope of electrical wires. I watched it spin in a lazy circle like it was the center of the world, and I wondered how in the hell it had fallen down like that.
Carlos groaned something.
Off to the right, coming around into the hallway from another direction, was a man in brown corduroy pants and a collared shirt. He was dragging a bleeding stump that used to be his leg across the floor, smearing the tile behind him with gore. His neck was broken, his head bent over at a disgusting angle. A huge red knot had swelled up from the other side of his neck.
Behind him were five more zombies.
I let Carlos rest against the wall while I loaded a magazine and chambered a round.
With my flashlight up, I walked toward the lead zombie in the brown corduroys and shot him. Once he was down, I stood over his body and shot the other five, single-tapping each one to the forehead.
When the last one fell, I went over to the glass doors of the office and tried to pull them open. They were locked.
“Damn it. This place is killing me.”
I pointed my flashlight into the office and poked the light around. I was right about to turn around and get Carlos when I saw a flash of green pant leg and a brown boot below it.
Whoever it was had seated themselves behind a desk, but I couldn’t see anything besides the leg and the boot.
I kept the beam on the leg, waiting.
Suddenly, a Hispanic man with straight black hair and very brown skin peeked around the corner of the desk. He smiled at me, and in the bright white light of the flashlight beam I saw his teeth sparkling like veiled diamonds.
Chapter 6
“Hey Carlos, there are people inside here.”
He made a weak, strangled noise, and I turned the flashlight on him. He had pulled himself up against the wall and he was holding his side, muffling his coughs with his shoulder. It seemed like he was trying to hide from the light.
He was slipping, and it worried me.
I tapped on the glass doors of the office with the butt of my flashlight. The man in the green pants didn’t want to stand up. I guess he thought he was safe as long as he stayed in his little hiding spot.
He probably figured if he waited there long enough, I would just go away.
“Come on,” I said as patiently as I could. “Come over here and unlock the door.”
He shook his head.
“Open the door,” I said, like I meant it.
I brought the flashlight back and made like I was going to break the glass with it.
That made him sit up and take notice.
He raised his hands as if to say okay, okay and came over to the door. Looking back at his hiding spot, he turned the key.
When I heard the bolt click, I pushed the door open.
“Thank you,” I said, and moved around him into the main reception area.
The place was a mess. Office equipment was everywhere. There were books and papers and notebooks strewn across the floor.
The school’s mascot must have been the cougar, because there was a large fake bronze statue of one laying on its side beneath a plaque that said, THIS IS A BLUE RIBBON SCHOOL.
I nudged a picture frame out of the way with the toe of my boot. �
�Where’s the nurse’s office?”
He didn’t answer.
“Where’s the nurse’s office?”
The look on his face wasn’t exactly a helpless one. It was more neutral than that, like he just wanted me to leave.
“No English.”
“That figures,” I said.
There was a hallway on either side of the wall behind the cougar. Both hallways disappeared into blackness and I knew I didn’t have the time to go exploring.
“Médico,” I said. “¿Dónde médico?”
He gave me an uncertain shrug. I knew I wasn’t saying it right, and it frustrated me that he wouldn’t at least try to meet me halfway. He was going to make me fumble through it.
I pushed past him and went to the corner where I first saw his pant leg. Four more people sat there, tucked into a narrow aisle between the desks and the wall.
One of them was an older man, dressed in the same green landscaper’s uniform as the first man, and the other three were women dressed in gray housekeeping outfits.
I looked down at them and they looked back at me with completely neutral expressions on their faces.
I showed them the palms of my hands in a gesture I hoped they would take as friendly. I wanted to say something to put them at ease, but I didn’t know the words to say in Spanish. About the only thing I knew how to say was to ask for their license and insurance.
“Do any of you speak English?”
All I got was the same blank look.
There was no used dragging it out. I made my way down the hallway, glancing in all the offices until I found the one labeled NURSE.
Only a few of the cabinets had anything useful in them. There were some more latex gloves, some bandages, and some antibacterial soap, but very little else.
There was a phone on the wall and I tried that, but all I got was a strange electronic squelch that sounded like I had called a fax machine by mistake.
I tried the operator.
I dialed 9-1-1.
Hoping against hope, I even tried calling home, but I got the same weird noise each time and finally gave up on it.
I stuffed some of the latex gloves in my pocket and headed back up to the front.