Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  It made me wonder how anyone could live through losing a child. My Adam’s apple pumped up and down in my throat like a piston, and I tried to push down the grief. I had no idea where April and Andrew were, and the stress of not knowing was breaking me.

  They were still alive, waiting for me somewhere out there in the night. I believed that sincerely. But the thought of them ending up like Carlos’s wife and son kept nagging at me until I was ready to take one bullet out of my gun and put in my pocket to keep for myself, because there wasn’t going to be anymore me if there wasn’t going to be anymore them.

  I closed my eyes and thought of my wife and son while the sound of “London Bridge Is Falling Down” faded to silence in the hallway behind me.

  Chapter 15

  I stood in Andrew’s room for a long time.

  There were still zombies in the front yard, and I still had to get the extra ammunition from my closet to the car out in the street, but moving took so much effort, and I was so tired.

  Finally, I don’t know how much later, I straightened my uniform and went to the living room window so I could look out into the front yard.

  The three zombies I had seen earlier were still there. They stayed close to the car, attracted to the light, I guess. Luckily, none of them were fast-movers.

  I went outside and put the three of them down in quick order. Then I moved all the ammunition from the closet to the car.

  It wasn’t until I was out on the road, looking for empty lanes to work through, that I realized I had no idea where I wanted to go or what I was supposed to do.

  When I worked dogwatch in the Northwest Division I used to go to the Exxon at the corner of Cereno and Budd. They gave cops free sodas there, and they had an office in the back where I sometimes went to catch up on my reports.

  Miles and miles of roadway disappeared beneath my wheels, and I drifted aimlessly, like a cloud of dust in a desert wind storm, until somehow I found myself in the parking lot of that Exxon. When I put the car in park, I realized that I had driven fifteen miles, at least, and yet had absolutely no memory of it. Where the memory should have been was a hole, swirling with grief and uncertainty.

  I stopped so that I was facing the building and stared at it for a second before I realized there was something wrong with it. The power was on. The lights inside the store were still on. And there were people inside. Three of them.

  I got out of the car and ran to the front door, but as I got closer I saw that they were zombies. They had that recognizable half-dead walk.

  The door was locked.

  When I tried to pull it open, one of the zombies came up to it, and slapped on the other side of the glass.

  Behind him on the floor was a puddle of blood, and beyond that, coming toward the door, was an older man with red, sunken cheeks and no hair, dressed in a clerk’s uniform. The third zombie was near the beer and ice cream freezers.

  I walked down to the far side of the window for a better look at the rest of the store. When I did finally make entry, I didn’t want to be surprised by an unseen zombie.

  The two at the door followed me. I watched them approach, and then moved down to the other side of the store once they blocked my view.

  I stared at the man near the beer. There was a transparent reflection of my face in the glass, and just beyond that were the grotesque, vacuous remains of a man so thoroughly numbed by what his life had been like that he couldn’t take his eyes off of the beer, even as a zombie.

  Wondering what Ken Stoler would have thought of that man’s consciousness, I tapped on the glass, but he didn’t respond. I banged my fist against the glass, and that did it.

  He turned, and in an instant I saw that almost all of his face was missing. The skin had been completely torn away, and though he was wearing a flannel shirt, there was so much blood that it was difficult to tell where his body ended and the cloth began.

  I looked away, suppressing a gag. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him approach the glass, but it was obvious that he couldn’t see me.

  He walked in my direction, but not quite at me. He didn’t stop walking until he ran into the glass about two feet to the right of me.

  By the time the other two zombies had made it to my end of the store I had a plan. I picked up the trash can near the front door and threw it into the window on the opposite side of the store. The glass window exploded all over the store’s floor and I was able to waltz right in.

  I was completely inside, gun drawn, and waiting for them by the time the zombies were halfway across the salesfloor.

  I shot the first two and then walked over to the zombie without a face. He was reaching for me, or at least where his addled senses told him I was, but he was really nowhere close.

  I put a bullet in his head and left him on the floor next to the candy aisle.

  Then I walked over to the soda section and grabbed a Diet Coke. I went to the windows and leaned against the glass, watching my reflection and thinking about everything that had happened. Off in the distance I could see an orange haze hugging the horizon and grayish-black smoke clouds piling up to the sky. The city was really burning.

  Beside me was the overstock bin where they kept the cartons of cigarettes. I glanced at it and then did a fast double take.

  Usually, they lock the cigarettes up so people can’t steal them, but the doors weren’t padlocked like normal. They were wide open. Anyone could just reach in and—

  It had been over a year since my last smoke. I had been cigarette-free ever since that morning when I came home from a late call and saw April sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of water in front of her and the most thoroughly puzzled expression I have ever seen on her face. That very minute I knew something special was happening to our lives and, when she told me she was pregnant, I went out to my car and crumpled up my pack of cigarettes. That was the last pack I thought I would ever smoke.

  But now, as I looked at carton upon carton of Marlboro Lights, I figured there was no better time than the end of the world to start smoking again. I opened the bin, took out a pack, and walked over to the registers for a lighter. My hands were shaking when I lit it up.

  But, oh, that old familiar taste. I breathed it in slowly, letting the flavors fill up my lungs slowly so I wouldn’t choke. It was like heaven to feel that nicotine rush again. I felt light-headed and giddy, and kind of dizzy all at the same time. I blew out the smoke above my head and watched it grow into wreaths.

  Then, from behind me, I heard an amused voice say, “I thought you gave that junk up.”

  Chapter 16

  “Marcus!”

  I knew that voice the moment I heard it. It was Marcus Acosta, my old district partner before I transferred to West.

  “Eddie,” he said. God, he was so calm about it.

  He wasn’t in uniform. He was wearing blue jeans and a heavy black jacket, his pistol tucked into an off-duty holster and his police radio in his back pocket. He stood there with his arms crossed, a twisted, devilish smile on his face.

  It had been three months at least since I’d seen him last. Police work is like that. The shifts are so screwed up that if you don’t work with someone every day, you never see them. And yet there he was, standing in the middle of all that broken glass and smiling like he had just done something naughty, and I couldn’t help but smile myself.

  One look at him was enough to wipe out an awful lot of pain.

  He kicked some of the glass around with his toe as he looked at the bodies on the floor and said, “So, zombies.”

  “Yep,” I said.

  “I have to confess, I didn’t see that one coming.” Then he smiled again. “It looks like you’ve had a rough night.”

  “Yep. You?”

  He shrugged. “Are you in that traffic car?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looks like you wrecked it.”

  “Yeah.” I looked out to the parking lot and didn’t see any other cars besides mine. “You have a car around here?�
��

  “It’s about four blocks west of here.”

  “Your pickup?”

  “No, that’s back at the station. I was in a marked unit.”

  “What happened?”

  “I wrecked it.”

  He walked around the store, looking at the bodies, making sure they were all down for good.

  When he came to the old bald guy in the clerk’s uniform he said, “Hey, you shot Gummers.”

  “Who?”

  “Gummers.” He kicked the dead man’s foot.

  “Friend of yours?”

  “No. He was the new guy here. Started about two months ago. Man, that guy talked and talked and talked. Drove me nuts.”

  “Gummers?”

  “Ain’t got a tooth in his head.” And he curled his lips over his teeth and smacked his lips together. “You know, Gummers.”

  “Got it,” I said. “Say, how come you’re not in uniform?”

  “Uniform’s back in the truck. I heard about all this on the TV when I woke up, so I came in early. By the time I got to the station everything had already gone to hell. And by the way, I don’t recommend going to the Northwest Division station.”

  “That bad?”

  “Most of B-shift is dead.”

  I nodded.

  “How about out west?”

  “About the same. What did the news have to say?”

  “Nothing, really. At first it was riots and looting, that kind of thing. Nobody on TV said anything about zombies, though. First time I heard zombies was when I got to work.”

  “What else did they say?”

  “Sounds like it’s happening all along the Gulf Coast. They’re saying it’s because of that stuff down in Houston. The news didn’t really say anything else. Besides, all the local channels were off the air by the time I got to the station.”

  “How does that happen? How does everything crap out like that so fast?”

  He shook his head at Gummer’s corpse and said, “I’m surprised you’re not at home.”

  “Already been there.”

  “And?”

  “They weren’t there. The car’s gone. I don’t know where they went to. I don’t even know if they’re okay.”

  “You haven’t talked to her at all?”

  “Just for a second or two. Earlier. I don’t know how long ago. A lot’s happened.”

  “But you did talk to her?”

  “She sounded scared.”

  “Well, that makes two of us.” He watched me closely for a moment. “Eddie,” he said, “she’s a smart girl.”

  I nodded. “I hope she’ll know what to do. I’m scared for her. And for Andrew.”

  “They’ll be okay, Eddie.”

  “I hope so,” I said, and a long, uncomfortably empty silence followed. I changed the subject. “We ought to find a new car, Marcus. That one out there has about had it.”

  “Where did you get that one?”

  “Found it.”

  “You haven’t been downtown yet?”

  “No. I heard all the emergency tones going off on the Downtown channel though. Sounds like they got it bad.”

  “I think everybody has it bad,” he said. “Still, we probably ought to head that way.”

  “What on earth for?”

  “Headquarters. If there’s some sort of plan in the works, they’ll know about it.”

  “What makes you think headquarters is still operational? All the radios went down.”

  “Yeah, but they may have only lost the mainframe. The Emergency Operations Command Center is probably still secure. They’re supposed to have dedicated lines to Homeland Security and FEMA.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But I don’t plan on cruising halfway around the city just to find out. If there’s any chance at all that I can find April, that’s what I’m gonna do.”

  “But do you have any idea where to start looking? You said yourself that you don’t know where they went. They could be anywhere.”

  “Yeah, and wherever they are, that’s where I want to be too.”

  “Fair enough,” he said. “We’ll look for them together. What about your car?”

  “It’ll run, but the right front tire’s about to shred away to nothing. It’s rubbing bad.”

  “Then the first thing we do is find another car.”

  “What about yours?”

  “Eddie, I put it halfway up an oak tree.”

  “Oh.”

  “And there weren’t any left at Northwest, either.”

  “That figures,” I said. “You think we’ll have a better chance downtown?”

  “Yeah, I was thinking we could go to Fleet and get one of the cars out of the ready lot. They’ve got hundreds of Crown Vics out there just waiting to get the decals put on them.”

  That made sense, I admitted.

  “And while we’re down there, we ought to go over to headquarters. It’s only a couple of blocks away. It couldn’t hurt. From there we can go wherever you want us to go.”

  “You really want to check out headquarters?”

  “I think we need to. Look, if they do have a plan, it’s bound to include a safe area for civilians. Let’s say you find April and Andrew. What then? You need a place to put them where you know they’ll be safe. You can’t do that if you don’t have a plan.”

  “That’s true.” It did sound like a good idea. It was better than the plan I had, anyway, which was no plan at all. “Can we get to the freeway from here?”

  He smiled. “This is still my district, remember?”

  “Okay,” I said, and stepped aside. “After you.”

  “Thank you.”

  Chapter 17

  We stepped through the shattered store windows and into the parking lot. It was starting to get really cold. I shivered against it, wishing I had a thick jacket like the one Marcus was wearing.

  The front of my car looked like the face of a boxer who has just lost a fight. The passenger-side headlight was busted out, and the remaining one looked like a swollen, open eye. Part of the plastic bumper was rubbing against the ground on the passenger’s side, and the hood was smashed in. A little more driving time and the whole car would be history.

  “Oh, man,” Marcus said, laughing.

  “I know,” I said, still trying to figure out if we could pull the front bumper off so that it wouldn’t fall off while we drove. “I really smacked it up.”

  “Not that, stupid,” he said. He slapped my arm and pointed across the parking lot. “I’m talking about her.”

  He was pointing at a really fat, dark-haired girl at the other end of the lot. Zombie. I could tell by the way she walked.

  At first I thought she was completely naked, but when she moved I could see a flash of white underwear appearing and then disappearing into the folds of her thighs.

  She pivoted around on one foot and then the other in an uncertain, tottering kind of way, so that we saw her in profile with every step. There was a large, nasty gash across the top of her leg that went from the top of her knee all the way up to her hip that looked like rotten, blackened flesh.

  “Is she wearing a thong?” Marcus said, still laughing. “God, that is the most obscene thing I have seen all night.”

  “Shut up, Marcus.”

  The woman kept walking toward us at the same laborious pace, but she was still far enough away that we could have just climbed into the car and left.

  “God, she’s really fat.”

  “Forget about her, Marcus. Let’s get going.”

  “Hold on, would you? I mean, look at that. I didn’t know they made thongs that big. That thing must be holding on for dear life. ‘Help. Help me. I’m breaking!’”

  “For God’s sake, Marcus. Drop it, would you?”

  Marcus was a clown. That was just his way. He could turn a trip to Internal Affairs into a stand-up routine and still write a report good enough to get us out of just about any kind of trouble. But this time I wasn’t amused. I found it more annoying than
anything else.

  “Let’s just go, Marcus.”

  “You’re seeing this, right? Look at that. It’s like trying to cover up a watermelon with a rubber band. You mean to tell me you don’t think that’s funny?”

  “She’s a zombie, Marcus. Zombies aren’t funny.”

  “You have to get your humor wherever you find it, Eddie.”

  “I’d like to go now, please.”

  “Hey, what do you suppose she’s at right now? About twenty yards?”

  I gauged the distance. “Yeah, about that.”

  “I’ll bet you a pack of smokes you can’t land a head shot in less than three shots. What do you say? Come on. I’ll make it a whole carton. I know you want some. I’d do it myself, but I’m out of ammo.”

  “There’s a whole case in the car,” I said, and walked over to the driver’s-side door. “You can have all you want if you shut up and get in.”

  “Just a second. Come on, give it just one shot.”

  “No.”

  “About fifteen yards now, I bet. Piece of cake. Even you could hit her from here. Come on, you’re not scared, are you?”

  “No.”

  I know he thought he was being funny, but he sounded cruel to me. Marcus could fight like a son of a bitch, and I’d seen him rip up plenty of bad guys, but I had never known him to be unnecessarily cruel, and that’s the way he sounded to me just then. It disturbed me.

  He snorted. “I bet you couldn’t have hit her any—”

  I glanced over at him. “What is it?”

  “Eddie,” he said, “there’s something I forgot to tell you.”

  “What?” I followed his gaze.

  Four zombies were coming around the corner of the store. He watched them as they came around the dumpster and then looked back at me.

  “You said you’ve got some bullets in the car, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fat chick,” he said, pointing over my shoulder with his chin.

  I turned. The fat woman was way too close to ignore anymore. I fired one shot into her forehead and then turned back to Marcus.