Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. A fast-moving zombie broke his window and tried to pull him out of the car by his collar.

  The zombie clawed at him, but Marcus was faster, and his movements, once he got over the initial shock, were deliberate.

  He pushed the zombie’s arm back into his face and grabbed him by the neck.

  Once he had his grip, he didn’t let go. He yanked the zombie’s head down into the door again and again until the thing grew slack in his grip and collapsed to the ground.

  “They’re behind us,” I said, looking back at a small group of them coming our way.

  “Go!” he said. “Mow them down.”

  I put the car in reverse and punched it. We were twenty, maybe thirty miles an hour when we hit the closest zombie.

  The car lurched up and then it seemed like the back of the car just exploded. There was a rush of color and broken glass as the zombie came through the back windshield and crashed face-first into the Plexiglas prisoner cage separating the front and back seats. Everything inside the car rolled forward with the impact.

  In the rush, I lost control and scraped up against the concrete wall, killing our momentum.

  By the time I regained control and rolled the car to a stop, the zombie in the backseat was moving, fumbling at the Plexiglas.

  With exaggerated calm, Marcus turned to me and said, “Eddie, get us out of here, please.”

  The zombie in the backseat was a huge man, and he completely filled up the backseat. He slapped his broken hands against the Plexiglas and pressed his red face against it, biting at it and gouging it with his teeth. If he could have eaten his way through, I know he would have.

  He was so big that I couldn’t see around him. I was trying to back us out of the alley and then out to the parking lot, but there was so much going on that there was no way for me to do it without hitting just about everything.

  By the time we made it out to the parking lot, Marcus had had enough. He turned around in his seat, his back against the dashboard, and pointed his pistol at the zombie.

  “No,” I said, and shielded my face with my hand.

  “What?” he said.

  “Not in the car, you dumbass. What are you, fucking nuts?”

  “You keep asking me that,” he said. “Pretty soon I’m going to think you mean it.”

  I hit one of those concrete pillars they mount light poles on and it knocked Marcus off the dashboard.

  “That’s it,” he said, as he righted himself. He opened the car door and got out.

  “What are you doing?”

  He stepped to the passenger-side back window and pointed his gun at the zombie in our backseat.

  “No,” I said, trying to get my door open. But I was still in the car when he started firing. The window blew apart, and as I tumbled out onto the pavement, I saw the body in the backseat convulsing with the impacts.

  “Goddamn it, Marcus.”

  “What?”

  “What in the hell is wrong with you?”

  “What?”

  We were starting to draw a crowd, and two of them were fast-movers. I could see them pushing the other zombies out of the way.

  “Behind you,” I said.

  He turned, aimed, and shot two fast-movers like it was target practice. They hit the ground and were still twitching when he turned back to me.

  “What did I do?”

  The crowd around us was starting to get thicker and I didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Just get in the car, Marcus.”

  “No way. First you tell me why you’re being such an old woman about this. What the hell did I do?”

  “Are you nuts?”

  He pointed over my shoulder with his gun. “There’s a couple behind you,” he said. “Over there.”

  I turned around and saw two zombies in medical scrubs stepping off the grass about ten yards away. They were slow ones though, and one had been horribly mauled. He was missing an eye, and where it had once been there were only streaks of blackened blood. I took aim and shot each one in the forehead.

  “Time to go,” I said.

  “No. You wanted to talk, so let’s talk. I want you to tell me what it is that I’m doing that’s pissing you off so much.”

  “Marcus, please.”

  “Not yet. Tell me.”

  “We’re surrounded.”

  “I can see that. Come on, talk to me. I want to hear what’s on your mind.”

  “Marcus, please. Get back in the car and let’s go.”

  The zombies were moving in from every side now, but Marcus just stood there waiting for me to crack. He was actually smiling. The crazy bastard was actually smiling.

  “Behind you,” he said.

  I turned and fired at a woman in a blue dress. My first shot hit her in the cheek, but I was more careful with my second shot and put her down for good.

  “Nice,” Marcus said.

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m waiting on you,” he said. “You tell me why you’re acting so fucking pissed about everything and I’ll get in the car and we can go. I’ll even let you drive.”

  I pointed behind him and he turned and dropped a zombie with a one-handed shot. He made it look so easy.

  “Well?”

  “Don’t try to turn this around on me, Marcus. You’re the one who thinks he’s some kind of fucking cowboy out here. I just want to get home to my family.”

  “Cowboy? You think I’m some kind of cowboy? What does that mean, exactly?”

  “Behind you,” I said.

  “You, too.”

  “Left or right?”

  “Your left.”

  We both put our zombies down. Marcus was having the time of his life, which pissed me off more than anything else. To him, this was some kind of carnival shooting gallery and he was just plunking away like there were no consequences to any of it.

  And he had no idea why what he did bothered me so much.

  I looked around and realized there was no way we could keep up a safe position where we were. There were just too many of them, and more were gathering at the edges of the parking lot.

  “Marcus, I am scared shitless. Okay? Are you happy? You made me say it. Call me names if you want to, but I am scared out of my mind. I’m scared for what’s going to happen to me and I’m scared for what’s going to happen to my family. I have no idea what to do and I’m stuck in the middle of a bunch of zombies and it’s all just a fucking game to you. That’s why I’m acting this way.”

  “I do not think this is a game,” he said.

  “Whatever. Behind you.”

  He turned and fired a couple of times. Then he said, “You’re going to make it, Eddie. Don’t worry.”

  “Yeah, well, I am worried, Marcus. I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to be. I want to know that my wife and my son are safe, and I want to be with them. Just because you don’t have anybody waiting at home doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t scared to death for our families.”

  The amusement went out of his face when I said that last part, and I realized that I had hurt him. Marcus had been married twice before and both times it ended hard. He took to women like a house on fire. It was fun to watch, but the damage was usually spectacular.

  He pursed his lips together into a scowl. After a long pause he said, “Behind you.”

  I shot two zombies, reloaded, and shot a third before I faced Marcus again. He wouldn’t look at me.

  “I’m sorry, Marcus. That was stupid of me.”

  “No, it’s the truth. You said it. I ain’t got nothing to go home to. Hell, I’m actually kind of glad my ex-wives got turned into zombies. Serves the bitches right. And no more alimony for me.”

  “Marcus, I’m sorry.”

  “Stop saying that.”

  “Behind you,” I said.

  He shot the zombie and watched the body after it fell. I thought maybe he was going to take off on me again, but he stood his ground.

  A badly mes
sed-up woman in a white shirt and no pants shambled up to him, and he waited so long to shoot her I almost did it for him.

  When she hit the ground, he turned around and faced me again.

  “Is there anything else you wanted to say to me?”

  “Marcus, please. Let’s just go.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “The point is my family is waiting out there somewhere. I know they are, and I have to get home to them. I want to be with them. Please, Marcus, can’t you see that? Help me get home. I need you to help me.”

  He nodded. The sadness faded from his face, and in its place the old shit-eating grin returned. “Hey, Eddie, you know I’m always there for you.”

  I nodded and waited for him to move, but he just stood there.

  “Car,” I said. “Now.”

  “Anything you say.”

  We climbed into the car and tore out of the parking lot, neither one of us saying anything until we cleared the zombie crowd.

  I was quiet because I was still pissed at him and embarrassed for the cruel things I’d said. We had been friends for so long, and relied on each other to know instinctively what the other was thinking and going to do in just about every situation, that it completely floored me when he did the opposite of what I expected.

  I got the feeling Marcus was quiet because he was waiting for me to come out of my stupor and see all this as some sort of cosmic joke.

  For him, there were no further implications to all these zombies than the end of alimony payments, and while I guess he understood my urgency on some level, he could never share it.

  His laughter caught me off guard. When he saw me shaking my head at him, he said, “What? You don’t honestly expect me to sit here and mope with you until all this just goes away, do you?”

  “You realize there’s a dead body in the backseat, don’t you?”

  “Who? Him? Well, it’s not like he wasn’t a zombie already. And besides, I’m not the one who put him there, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you stop it? I can’t ride in the same car with you if you’re just gonna cry about how bad all this is.”

  He paused for me to say something, but when I didn’t, he said, “Look, if it’ll make you feel any better, we can pull over and get him out of here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”

  “Okay.” He looked back at the body and whistled. “Damn! He’s a big boy. What do you think he weighs? About 260, 280?”

  “Probably.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to help me with him. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to lift him out of here by myself.”

  I looked at what I could see of the body in the rearview mirror. It was covered in blood.

  “Okay. There should be some gloves in the trunk.”

  “Good. Pull over someplace where we can dump him.”

  But we had to go all the way up Dickinson Avenue before I could find a safe place to pull over. There were no businesses down Dickinson, and no zombies.

  “This looks okay,” Marcus said. “Stop here and we’ll toss him out.”

  I got the gloves from the trunk and Marcus opened the back door.

  “Oh man,” he said, turning his face away from the sight. “You really fucked this guy up.”

  “Me? What the hell are you talking about? Those are your bullet holes in him.”

  “Relax, relax. Just come here and help me with him.”

  I handed Marcus a pair of gloves. The man was on his back, one of his heavy slab-o-meat arms bent under his bulk and his head down in the foot well behind the driver’s seat. From where I stood, I could see his mouth was hanging open.

  “What foot do you want?” I asked him as I pulled on my gloves.

  “It’s always the same with you, isn’t it, Eddie? Can’t we ever get together without having to pull somebody’s stinking dead body out of the back of a police car?”

  He was only half kidding. “That junkie on Queene’s Court wasn’t my fault,” I said. “How was I supposed to know he swallowed all that dope?”

  “Whatever. Just grab a foot, would you?”

  He grabbed the right and I grabbed the left. It was a tight fit because the door wouldn’t open far enough to let us stand side by side. We pulled on the guy until something gave way and he started to slide along the seat. On the way out, the back of his head smacked the metal part of the frame next to the seat and made a loud crack.

  “Ouch,” I said. It sounded very loud along that quiet stretch of Dickinson Avenue.

  “He didn’t feel a thing,” Marcus said. “Come on and help me get him over here.”

  I went to move the door out of the way, but as soon as I moved, the guy suddenly sat up.

  “What the—”

  The zombie was on Marcus so fast that neither of us had time to react. They both went over backward. Marcus landed underneath him and the zombie’s bulk pinned him to the ground.

  I tried to push him off but I couldn’t get the leverage. I was stuck between the two of them wrestling on the ground and the open door of the police car, and all I could do to help Marcus was to pound on the back of the zombie’s head with my fist.

  He moved, but he wouldn’t break his hold on Marcus. I hit him some more and finally pushed him far enough from my legs for me to move. It took two hard kicks to his gut before he turned away from Marcus and focused on me.

  Marcus moved fast.

  As soon as the zombie got off him, Marcus was on his feet, his pistol in his hand.

  I pushed the zombie back toward the car with another hard kick. He straightened up just in time to take a bullet in the forehead from Marcus’s gun.

  His head exploded all over the car. The impact knocked him backward and then he fell forward, right on top of Marcus. I dragged the mostly headless corpse off of Marcus and reached out a hand to help him up.

  “Thanks,” Marcus said, wiping the gore from his face.

  I went to the trunk, got the blood-borne pathogen kit, and helped him get cleaned up a little.

  “I’m surprised you couldn’t lift that guy,” I said. “Guess you need to work on your dead lift, huh?”

  He looked at me with a stare almost as blank as that of the zombie he had just put down. “You have never told a good joke in your life, you know that? I mean it. You are tragically not funny. It’s pathetic.”

  “What? That was a good one.”

  He shook his head like he pitied me. “Just get in the car and drive.”

  Chapter 20

  Less than half a mile down the road from where we dumped the body, we saw a Channel 9 news van stopped at the corner of Dickinson and Stewart. Just around the corner, in front of the Lexington Baptist Church, was the news crew that belonged to it—two cameramen and a pretty, dark-haired reporter I didn’t recognize.

  It looked like they were interviewing somebody—an older white guy in a blue shirt, yellow tie, and expensive-looking charcoal-gray slacks.

  “Don’t slow down,” Marcus said. Then he groaned. They had already seen us, and they were flagging us down.

  The cameramen turned their cameras on us.

  “Too late now,” Marcus said. “Might as well go check it out.”

  “They might know something,” I said hopefully.

  “Yeah, right,” he said. “Those clowns from Channel 9. They know how to crucify us, that’s about it.”

  I pulled the car into the church’s gravel parking lot and coasted over to the news crew. The cameramen followed us with their cameras, one of them taking extra care to record the damage to our car. He got a close up of the blood on the fender.

  The reporter was stunningly beautiful. She looked about 25. Tight brown jacket. Shear white blouse. Super short brown skirt. Fantastic legs.

  “Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said.

  Marcus snorted.

  But before we could get out of the car, the reporter and one of her cameramen crowded up to my win
dow. Behind her I could see a small group of wide-eyed, nervous-looking people coming out of the church to see what was going on.

  “Sandy Navarro, Channel 9 News,” the reporter said. She turned slightly for the camera, making sure the cameraman got her legs in the shot. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway. “Have you come to get these people out of here?”

  She stuck the microphone in my face.

  The cameraman turned the camera on me, the glare from its spotlight blinding me.

  “Who, me?” I asked.

  She tossed the hair out of her face with an easy shake of her head, a move that made her look like a model in a shampoo commercial, and said, “There are sixty-three people inside this church, officer. They’ve been without power for hours. Without food or water. Some of them have medical needs. What are you going to do to get them out of here?”

  Marcus chuckled. I glanced over to him, but he just held up his hands. “Don’t look at me, man. There’s a reason I always let you talk to these people.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem.”

  Sandy Navarro stuck the microphone in my face again. “Officer?”

  A light breeze carried the faint vanilla hint of her perfume into the car. “Do you mind backing up?” I said.

  “These people need an answer, officer.”

  “Well they’ll get one as soon as you back up.”

  She didn’t move.

  “Please,” I said. “I’d like to get out of the car.”

  She huffed indignantly, but finally backed up.

  I opened the car door and stepped out. So did Marcus. But I hardly had a chance to close the car door before Sandy Navarro moved in for the kill again.

  “What are you going to do for these people, officer?”

  She was grandstanding for the camera. Channel 9 News had a reputation for sticking it to the police any time the opportunity came around, and I knew to expect it, but I still felt like I’d been put on the spot.

  Maybe that’s why I let myself get angry.

  “What exactly is it that you expect me to do?” I asked.

  “You’re the police,” she said. “Isn’t it your job to serve and protect?”

  “I’m not the police,” I snapped. “I’m one cop. Just one. I don’t know what in the hell you expect me to do. My whole shift is dead. We haven’t seen another living policeman or a firefighter in hours. I don’t have radio contact with anybody. I don’t have backup. We don’t even have enough firepower to face down a small crowd of those things out there. So I ask you, what exactly do you expect me to do for these people?”