Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  He reached for the door and pulled on it. Still locked.

  “How many?” I asked, looking over the railing at the zombies that were gathering below us on the first floor. Some of them were taking their first steps up the stairs.

  “A whole crap load,” he said. “I don’t know. I went down the south stairwell. They’re all over the place.”

  “Great.” The zombies from the third floor were turning the corner above us. “Any ideas?”

  He shook his head. “How many bullets do you have left?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe ten.”

  “Me too.”

  The first few zombies were coming into sight above us. The ones from the first floor were having more trouble coming up than the others were coming down, but it was just a matter of time. They would make it up eventually.

  “I guess we make them count,” I said.

  “Yep. But save your last round for me, okay?”

  “With pleasure.”

  A couple of zombies rounded the corner above me and I shot them. Every shot sounded like an explosion in the tight confines of the stairwell.

  “There’s too many of them,” I said.

  “Keep shooting.”

  I turned my attention back to the zombies coming down the stairs. Marcus was pulling on the second-floor door with everything he had. He put one foot on the doorjamb and grabbed the handle with both hands. He yanked on it with his whole body weight, and the door flew open.

  Marcus fell backwards and landed on his butt. Two older male zombies in very expensive suits came through the door, and in the split second before Marcus put holes in their heads, I recognized one of them as Captain Ibsen from the Media Relations office.

  Marcus stepped in front of the door and kept it from closing with his foot. “Come on,” he said. “It’s now or never.”

  But he didn’t have to tell me twice. I was out the door and onto the second-floor reception area before he finished his sentence.

  The second floor was the home of the department’s Interagency and Media Relations offices, and the ten or so zombies I saw there were all dressed in the finest style.

  At least they had been.

  Now all those expensive clothes were soaked through with blood and bile.

  Marcus did the shooting for both of us, clearing a path through the zombies and across to the west side of the building.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Can’t take the south stairwell again. There’s too many of them that way.”

  “But where are we—”

  “Over here,” he said, and pushed open a gray metal door on the back wall. “This way.”

  I followed him through the door and into the night air. The sign on the door said OBSERVATION DECK, but that was a little optimistic for the scrap of cement and metal railing that we were standing on. It was maybe four feet wide and fifteen feet long, with a canopy overhead that didn’t even cover the whole deck. There were a few ratty chairs next to the door and about a million cigarette butts on the cement, and the only view the observation deck provided was of the fenced-in portion of the employee parking lot and the back side of a long-since-vacated bakery.

  “Where to now?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m making this up as I go.”

  “That’s cute. Seriously, Marcus, where to?”

  “I am serious. I don’t know. You got any ideas?”

  He tilted back one of the chairs so that it kept the door from opening, and then looked over the railing to the parking lot below. “I guess we jump for it.”

  I looked over the railing and then back at him. “Are you insane? We’re like thirty feet up.”

  “Gosh, princess, I’m sorry. Did you want to go back inside and fight zombies?”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Where else do you suggest we go?”

  He was right, of course. There wasn’t any other way out of the building. I looked over the edge again and whistled. “After you,” I said.

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  Marcus climbed over the side and lowered himself down until he was hanging from the ledge by his fingertips.

  Then he let go.

  I heard him land, and a second later he called up to me to jump down. “It’s all right,” he said. “It only looks like a long ways.”

  “Asshole,” I said, and then climbed over the railing just like I had seen him do. I held on for a second, then let go.

  I knew even before I landed that I was going to mess myself up, and sure enough, when I hit, I felt a stabbing pain go through my right ankle, up my leg, and into my back.

  I folded, and stayed that way.

  “You okay?” he asked me.

  I looked up at him and thought of Carlos Williams. “It’s my ankle,” I said.

  “Shit.” He looked around, searching the parking lot for movement. “Do you think it’s broken?”

  “No,” I said hopefully. “I don’t think so.”

  “Try to move it. Turn it in little circles.”

  I tried moving it, and it hurt like hell. Marcus helped me stand up and I put some weight on it a little at a time.

  “How does it feel?”

  “It hurts.”

  “Do you think you can walk it off?”

  “Yeah,” I said, taking a few tentative steps. “I think so.”

  “Good.”

  We turned toward the building just in time to see the back door bust open and a crowd of zombies come pouring out. We both stood there slack jawed at the sudden commotion. Another moment later and they were through the back door and flooding out into the parking lot, coming right for us.

  Chapter 23

  We stood there in the parking lot and watched as the crowd of zombies got bigger.

  “There are so many of them,” I said. “Why are there so many of them? The first floor was empty when we came in.”

  Marcus checked his magazine and then slapped it back into his gun. “I’ve only got four rounds left.”

  “We need to get out of here.”

  “I know. How’s your ankle?”

  “I can make it.”

  He nodded and looked out over the parking lot. I could see his wheels turning. The lot was maybe a third full and surrounded on three sides by a fifteen-foot-high green wrought-iron fence. There was a guard shack and a gate on the south end of the lot, but it wouldn’t open without a key card.

  “Looks like we’re gonna have to climb over,” he said.

  Of course that was easier said than done. Every April, during the Fiesta celebrations, some drunken idiot gets stuck at the top of the fence while trying to climb over so he can piss on a cop car, and some cop has to risk his fat ass going up there to get him down. The fence did really well keeping people out, but now it was doing just as well keeping us in.

  I looked around for something we could climb up on to help us get over, but there was nothing close to the fence.

  “Looks like that’s going to be kind of hard to do, Marcus.”

  “Again,” he said, “would you rather we go back inside and fight zombies? I don’t think the zombies would mind much.”

  “One of these days I just might take you up on that.”

  “Just follow me,” he said.

  We started toward the west side of the parking lot. If we could get over the fence there, it was only about twenty yards to our car.

  But we hadn’t made it more than half way to the fence when we heard a woman screaming to the south of us. She sounded really close.

  We both stopped, and listened.

  She screamed again. She was close. Marcus took off running across the lot and I hobbled after him as fast as I could go.

  The zombies coming out of headquarters were spreading out, and as I looked behind me I saw a line of them backlit by the building’s emergency lights. It was hypnotic in a way, watching them. They moved so slowly, so painfully, and yet with such a relentle
ss need to put their hands on us that I found it hard to look away.

  The girl’s screaming brought my attention away from the zombies. I watched Marcus disappear at the edge of the lot, and I was still maybe thirty yards away from him when I heard him fire the first shot.

  I got to him as fast as I could. He was standing at the fence, facing a young girl of about sixteen who was on the other side. She was screaming for help and reaching between the bars to grab hold of Marcus’s clothes.

  Behind her was the body of the man Marcus had just shot.

  More zombies were lumbering toward us from the bakery behind the girl.

  “Open the gate,” she said. “Please. Let me in. Please!”

  Her face was wet with tears and sweat. When I looked into her eyes I immediately recognized that look—that look that said there was nothing anybody could do to reach her. She was only seeing fear.

  Marcus fired again, but even in the low light of the alley way I could tell there were more of them than we had bullets. They were thick in the darkness behind her, and there were more entering the alley farther off.

  She turned her hunted gaze on me. “Open the gate. Please. You’ve got to let me in.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, but all that came out was a pantomime of the words, “I can’t.”

  “Run,” Marcus said to her. “Run. We can’t open the gates.”

  But she was so scared she couldn’t take that in. The words weren’t breaking through her wall. She pounded the wrought-iron bars so hard they rocked inside their concrete mounts. She cried to be saved.

  Marcus fired again, and out of the corner of my eye I saw his slide lock back.

  “I’m empty,” he said.

  “I got it,” I said, and came up next to him, firing what I had left. I fired three times, and each time I put one of them on the ground, but all I did was make room for other hands to reach for her. We had nothing left to protect her with.

  “Help me. Jesus, why won’t you help me?”

  “Run,” Marcus said to her. “Come on. Run.”

  “Please.” She said it over and over again until she just gave up and slid down the bars to the ground. She wasn’t listening to anything anymore.

  “Run.”

  The girl turned her huge doe eyes up at Marcus. He knelt down next to her and showed her his gun.

  “Do you see that? Do you? When it does that it means I’m out of bullets. We can’t open the gate. We don’t have the key. If you want to live you have to stand up and run. Run. That way.”

  Marcus tried to grab the sides of her face through the bars.

  “You have to run,” he said, lowering his voice and speaking as calmly as he could. “Run.”

  He tried to pull her up, but she slipped out of his hands and collapsed to the ground.

  “Run, you stupid bitch. Get your ass up and run. Right now.”

  But the zombies closed in around her. We were less than a yard away from her, and we were powerless to do anything to help her. As I watched, the color bled out of her face and she stopped struggling. Her screams were muffled into silence.

  When the zombies had finished with her, some of them stood up and clutched at me through the fence with their bloody hands.

  “Fuck this,” I heard Marcus say from behind me. But I didn’t turn to look at him until I heard the roar of an engine.

  It was Marcus, behind the wheel of one of the Gang Unit cars. I saw the headlights come up, and then the back tires began to spin as Marcus backed it up.

  “What the hell are you doing, Marcus?”

  He skidded the car to a stop halfway across the lot, paused there for just a moment, and then the car lurched forward. He was barreling down on the spot where I was standing.

  “Marcus,” I said, “you are one insane son of a bitch.”

  I jumped to one side just before he reached me. He never hit the brakes or slowed down at all. The car blasted through the gate in a splash of sparks and broken metal.

  Some of the zombies at the gate were thrown clear by the impact; others were mowed down under the car.

  The Crown Victoria went all the way across the alley and smashed to a stop in a crumpled mess against the wall of the bakery.

  Chapter 24

  Marcus was stuck in the car, jammed up beneath the steering wheel and the air bag. I held the air bag off him like a drape. He turned towards me. There was a little bit of blood on his face and a musty-smelling white cloud inside the car that made me feel like I was inhaling ash.

  “Hey, Marcus, can you hear me?”

  He let out a shallow, tired sigh and opened his eyes very slowly. “Oh, man,” he said, and a thin grin crossed his face, “that sucked.”

  I smiled too. I couldn’t help it. “You’re a fucking idiot, you know that?”

  “You’d think I’d have that figured out by now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Can you move?”

  “No.”

  “You can’t? What’s wrong?”

  “You’re in the way.”

  “You’re killing me, Marcus. You know that?”

  “Not yet,” he said, chuckling as he pushed his way out of the car. “But I’m working on it.”

  The smile didn’t last long, though. After I helped him out of the car he looked at the scene, at the bodies, at the girl whose torso had been ripped open and mostly eaten.

  “What was she thinking? Why didn’t she run like I told her to?”

  The force of the impact had thrown her body several yards to the right of us. She had been wearing a pair of blue jeans and a soft baby-blue camisole, but the camisole was shredded now and the jeans soaked with her blood. From the neck up she looked human. From the waist down, too. The part in between looked like the floor of a butcher’s shop. Even Marcus had a hard time looking at it.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just scared, I guess.”

  He shook his head. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen anybody do. Why would anybody just lie down and die like that? She just gave up.”

  “It’s a waste, that’s for sure.”

  Marcus and I hobbled away.

  Neither of us were able to make a very good pace. My ankle was still hurting, though not nearly as badly as it had been just before Marcus nearly ran me over, and Marcus was banged up something fierce. He said his whole right side felt like it had been hit by a wrecking ball.

  A lot of the zombies from the alley were still moving, but they couldn’t catch up with us. The ones from headquarters were still inside the parking lot, stuck behind the fence and not much of a threat. We dodged a small group that was outside the fence at the northwest corner, and then had a clear shot all the way to the car.

  Both of us went for the driver’s seat. “I’m driving,” he said.

  “Yeah, right, not after what you just did.”

  “I called it back at the gas station, remember?”

  “What does this look like? Third grade? Plus, I let you drive from the ready lot to here. It’s my turn now.”

  “I’m driving.”

  “No way. You’re hurt.”

  “So are you.”

  “We’re going to my house,” I said.

  “I know the way.”

  “Fine,” I said, and threw up my hands. “But we’re going to my house. Straight there. Nowhere else.”

  “I know. Get in.”

  Marcus pulled the car off the sidewalk and we turned north on Vespers. We were going to take Vespers northbound all the way through downtown, because it joined up with the access road for the freeway and we should have been able to take that all the way out to my house.

  Provided we drove outbound on the inbound lanes to avoid all the traffic, it was less than twenty minutes from headquarters to my house.

  But we didn’t even make it three blocks before we were stopped by massive traffic congestion at the emergency entrance to Children’s Hospital. Everything was shut down to the north and to the west of that by debris and abandoned cars.
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  Marcus turned the car onto the sidewalk again and drove us east.

  “Maybe we can cut through Washington Square and double back.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as I watched a group of zombies walking across the street from the hospital. “Let’s try that.”

  While he drove up the sidewalk I went to work on the remaining ammunition, splitting it up between his gun and mine.

  “Twenty for each of us,” I said, and handed him back his pistol and his extra magazine.

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Really? I thought we had a whole—” He slammed on the brakes, hard. “Holy shit!”

  “Oh my God.”

  My jaw went slack and I sat there gaping at a crowd so big I couldn’t see the end of it. To the north of us, and again to the west, the streets were filled with zombies. Cars in the middle of the street looked like rocks in the middle of a fast-moving stream.

  The bus station on the northeast corner was on fire, and the windows of the glass buildings above us were painted with fire. Large pieces of rubble filled the streets, and through the charred frame of an exploded bus we could see where the gas pumps had once been. The fire was still at a healthy rage, and in the orange and yellow glow I watched the infected coming for us.

  “Where are they all coming from? Look at that, Marcus. They’re everywhere.”

  Marcus spun the car around under full acceleration and left a pair of black looping streaks down the sidewalk as we headed south.

  He took us down two blocks, and then turned east again where we hit more abandoned cars and more crowds.

  It was maddening, like trying to find our way out of a maze, only the game was rigged so that every direction was a dead end. We couldn’t stay on any one road longer than a block or two before having to change direction and start all over again.

  By the time we cleared downtown we were on the near east side and caught between traffic and another crowd of zombies. I looked from one obstacle to the other, my mind racing for an idea of what to do next.

  Marcus chose a third option. He turned the car onto a pedestrian walkway that led over the freeway and came down in the park-and-ride terminal for the Convention Center.