by Joe McKinney
We made it maybe fifty or sixty feet when we heard the floorboards creaking in front of us. Marcus stopped and knelt down, listening, trying to figure their direction from the sound.
“We’re surrounded,” I said.
“Start trying doors,” Marcus suggested, his voice a barely audible whisper in the darkness.
When I found a door I told Marcus to stop so I could check it. I found the knob, cold and gritty with dust, and tried it.
It was frail, but the lock held.
“See if you can force it,” Marcus whispered.
I tried putting pressure on it, and the door felt loose on its hinges, but it wouldn’t open.
“It’ll make too much noise,” I whispered back.
“Okay,” he said. “Keep moving. Maybe one of these doors will—”
I couldn’t see what made him stop talking, but I felt him move violently away from the wall, and I heard him struggling with one of those things.
“Get that door open,” he said, and even as he said it he ran at me and pushed me forward against the door.
I lost my balance. Marcus didn’t wait for me, though. He hit the door with his shoulder, knocking it down.
Both of us went sprawling through the doorway and landed on a pile of broken wooden slats.
There was just enough light to see the shape of the room. The whole left side wall had been knocked out, and gave us a view of the first floor. The smallest hint of moonlight made it through the windows along the west wall of the warehouse, but it was enough for us to see that the first floor was a seething mass of zombies.
Straight ahead of us, the wall only went part of the way up to the ceiling. The top half was broken away, exposing a wide, flat crawlspace that stretched all the way across to the other side of the building.
“Through there,” Marcus said, pointing at the crawlspace.
The crawlspace had just enough room for us to go through on our hands and knees, and it looked pretty unstable. But even as I stood there thinking about it, Marcus was shooting at zombies in the hallway.
“Go,” he said. “Hurry it up.”
He fired again and that got me moving. I climbed into the crawlspace and started moving across the boards.
The floor was uneven, and it felt weak. I could feel it give a little as I put all my weight on it. Raised wooden slats crisscrossed the floor and made going forward difficult. Each time I came to one, I had to steady myself on it and swing my legs over one at a time so that I could put my weight down slowly on the other side.
“Here they come,” Marcus said, and when I turned to look back at him I saw zombies climbing into the crawlspace.
“Be careful,” I said. “The floor feels weak here.”
I was just over halfway across when I heard Marcus fire a shot. The hollow space made it sound like an explosion. I turned back and saw him on his back, firing his gun through his knees.
“Marcus.”
He rolled his head over so he could face me. “What?”
“Cut it out. Just get across.”
“There are only three of them. We get them and we don’t have to rush.”
“Don’t be an idiot. Just come on.”
I couldn’t see his face clearly, but I know what kind of look he was giving me. He rolled over onto his stomach and propped himself up—and then we both heard the floor crack.
“Marcus,” I said, but before I could say anything else there was a loud popping noise, like an ice skin cracking. I felt the floor move.
I saw him look down at the floor beneath him, and then the whole thing gave way. He disappeared through the floor in a rush of snapping wood and flailing arms.
“Marcus,” I said, and rushed towards the spot where he had just been.
There was a gaping hole in the floor, and I crawled right up to the edge and looked down. Marcus had landed on his back on top of a huge mound of rotten wood, and all around him was a narrowing ring of zombies, moving in to claim him.
“Marcus.” Even as I yelled it I was firing down onto the heads of the zombies nearest him.
“Get up,” I said. “Move, damn it. Move!”
And I fired and fired and fired until the slide locked back, but Marcus never moved. I saw him roll his head to one side and try to sit up, but in a moment they were on him. He kicked at them and tried to push them away, but they weighed down on top of him and tore into his body with their hands and teeth.
“Get out of here,” he said to me, his voice breaking with the pain. “Go. Get out of here. Don’t waste your bullets.”
I screamed for him to move, but it was wasted breath. All I could do was watch as he died in that gurgling, violent mass of bodies. A little stream of white dust sifted down from my fingertips onto the scene like the barest hint of snow.
I closed my eyes.
The floor creaked again, and my eyes shot open. The zombies Marcus had shot at were still crawling towards me. I pointed my gun at them and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. The slide was still locked back and the chamber was empty. The trigger wouldn’t fall.
I screamed at them to stop, but of course they wouldn’t.
And then I heard the floor pop again. There was another pop, and another, and the floor shifted under me. It took my breath away.
“Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.”
I looked up at the zombies in pure, unadulterated panic, like I expected to see some sort of echo of my own fear in theirs. But they were oblivious. They kept coming.
“No,” I said, pleading with them. “Stop. Stop.”
But there was no use saying anything at all. It was like talking to a wall. They crawled on and nothing would have turned them back. They didn’t notice the floor beneath them. I was the only thing they saw.
I inched my way backward on my elbows, crawling away on my belly at first, and then on my hands and knees as I got farther away from the hole. Every time the floor popped and cracked I felt another wave of panic wash over me.
There was a wooden slat on either side of me, and I held on to them, using them to pull myself along. Putting one hand over the next kept me focused on movement, and helped me think about not falling through the floor.
And then I did fall through.
The wood beneath me didn’t even pop. It was there and then it wasn’t. The next thing I knew my feet were dangling in the air, swinging back and forth, kicking for a foothold that wasn’t there. I grabbed the beams on either side of me and squeezed my fingernails deep into the rotten wood. My grip was so tight that a sharp pain shot through my knuckles and into my wrists and arms. But I would not let go. I held on with all I had, willing myself to pull up. I heaved myself up, but couldn’t get over the beams.
I couldn’t move. All I could do was turn my head part of the way around, just enough to see two of the zombies crawling towards me. I yelled at them to stop, but of course they didn’t. They kept coming, and all I could do was shout.
The floor lurched backwards. I felt it move, and caught myself with a start. I heard the floor pop behind me, and when I turned my head, I saw one of the zombies fall through the floor. I couldn’t see the others. I turned my head the other way, and didn’t see them there, either.
“Come on,” I said, “pull up. Pull up.”
Very slowly, and very painfully, I managed to haul myself over the edge of the hole. When at last I landed on the moldy floorboards of the crawlspace, I collapsed, shaking. My friend was dead, and I had almost died.
The realization hit me hard.
Thinking of Marcus, I started the process of pulling myself along the boards again. I was so caught up in my grief I didn’t even realize I’d reached the other side. I rolled over the edge and landed on the floor of another office, never so relieved to feel solid ground beneath me.
I took in the darkness. There was a door on the opposite wall, and I figured there was another hallway beyond that. There would be more of those things waiting for me, too.
I checked the door. It was loc
ked, but from my side. I turned the thumb catch and was about to turn the knob when I heard noises on the other side.
I put my head against the door and listened.
I could hear the muffled shuffle of feet on plank wood beyond the door.
Chapter 26
The first thing most cops do after they graduate from the Police Academy is go out and buy a fancy cop wallet so they can show off their badge.
My department makes us carry our badge and police ID on us at all times, and the local cop stores sell special wallets to hold it all. The one I bought has a cutout on the front part for the badge, and two see-through panels on the inside for both halves of the ID.
When Andrew was born, the hospital staff took a picture of him. In the picture, April has him across her chest and he’s holding the smallest pair of red hands up against the light. His eyes are shut tight.
April hates the way she looks in it, but she had a special copy of it made for my birthday because she saw how much it meant to me.
As I sat there in that decayed hole of an office, my back against the wall, I took the picture out of my wallet and stared at Andrew’s red, exhausted face. His mother was so flushed with relief and love for the baby in her arms that I could see the emotion shining through her skin. Seeing the two of them together like that made me smile in spite of everything else I was feeling.
Outside in the hallway I could hear more of those things shuffling around, and I wondered how many of them there were, and if they could sense me somehow. It still bothered me how they always seemed to find me. I told myself that if I ever saw Ken Stoler again I would ask him that very question. That is, right after I kicked his ass for stealing that truck.
One look around the room was enough to tell me that if they could sense me—and managed to get through the door—I’d be screwed. I only had six rounds left, and nowhere to hide.
I know it sounds strange, but even with the very real threat of ending up a shredded, bleeding piece of meat on the floor of some abandoned warehouse hanging over my head, the only thing I could wrap my mind around at that moment was Andrew’s picture. And of all the memories I had accumulated from the six short months that he had been a part of my life, the one that came to mind was me feeding him a bottle at two in the morning, rocking him back and forth in an old glider chair until he cried himself back to sleep.
I thought about all the times he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, and I wanted more than anything else in the world to be back there, holding him, patting his back to make him burp, and feeling the warm, soft wind of his breath against my neck.
In the darkness of that office, I was able to imagine myself back in that glider chair. I turned my head just slightly. I could almost see the bedroom where April and I slept. The image was part memory, part self-induced hallucination, and the moment I recognized it for what it was, it was gone. The spell was broken.
I knew right then that to stay in that room would get me killed, and there was no way in hell I was going to let that happen. More than anything, I wanted to live.
I stood up and leaned my head against the door, putting my mind in order for what I was about to do.
I turned the doorknob slowly until it clicked over. I took a deep breath and got ready to move.
And that’s when the cell phone on my belt started ringing.
Chapter 27
I nearly jumped out of my boots. Fumbling at my belt, I grabbed the phone and flipped it open. So many things had happened in the last two hours, so many horrible things, that I had completely forgotten about it.
The caller ID screen showed April’s cell phone number, and I realized that those two rings I heard at headquarters must have gotten through to her after all.
“Hello,” I said. “April?”
“Eddie. Oh, my God. Eddie?”
“I’m here, April. Where are you?”
Static filled my ears. Through the white noise I could hear her voice, scared, yet still rational and in control. She said something about an apartment building and then I heard her say Andrew’s name.
“April,” I said. “April, I’m losing you.”
More static. It roared in my ears.
I heard her voice again, and then all hell broke loose. A zombie slammed into the door from the other side, and the whole wall shook.
There was a pause, long enough for me to mouth the words, “Oh shit,” and then the door burst open.
A burly, thick-armed zombie lumbered through the door, his mouth greasy with blood and caked with little pieces of cloth.
I backed up towards the crawlspace as I wrestled my gun out of the holster. He was almost on top of me before I got a shot off.
There were four more in the hallway moving towards me. A soft orange light was coming into the building through three windows along the left-hand wall, and in the muted light they looked like gray ghosts. They shambled toward me and I ran at them, twisting one way and then the other, dodging around each one in turn, and kept running all the way to the corner.
There were more hidden in the shadows, blocking me from a very narrow staircase. The one closest to me was looking the other way, and I grabbed his already-shredded shirt and used him as a shield as I pushed my way through the others.
I hit the top of the stairs and had to stop. There was a zombie about two thirds of the way up the stairs and it was too narrow to go around him.
I fired once and sent him sliding down the steps on his back.
It wasn’t a clean head shot, but it was enough to buy me some time to jump over him and make it to the foot of the stairs. I landed hard and turned the corner, right into the open arms of a huge zombie.
He was a wall of meat.
He grabbed me with one arm and pushed me against the wall. I tried to squeeze by him but he bit down hard on my shoulder.
Luckily, all he got was a mouthful of the shoulder strap of my bulletproof vest.
We wrestled in a clumsy dance. I managed to get a hand under his chin and forced his head back. I brought my gun up with my other hand and shot him just above the ear. Gore went all over the wall behind him.
The zombie I had knocked down the stairs was getting up and there were others about to come down the stairs behind him.
I took off running through an open doorway, through another small and very narrow room with a time clock on the wall, and then through a door that led outside.
Breathing in the night air, I took stock of where I was. From what I could tell, I was on the opposite side of the building from the loading docks where Marcus and I had seen that huge crowd.
But the side I was on didn’t look much better. There was a large crowd at both corners of the building.
I turned to my right and tried to flank most of them with the best sprint I could muster.
They grabbed at me, and tried to latch on. I could feel their hands on me, but I pushed and dodged and just plowed through until I broke out of the alleyway and onto a dark and broken street.
There was no street sign, no way to tell where I was. Downtown was burning off to my left, and I knew that was west of my position, but that wasn’t much of a help. Even if the streets had been marked I wouldn’t have known one from the other. They all looked the same to me.
I was completely lost.
I knew I had to find a car. Without that, I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of making it home.
Halfway down the street I could see two zombies coming out of the shattered front doors of a convenience store. As I watched them cross the parking lot my breath formed thick clouds in front of me. I had been so wrapped up in the stress of escaping the warehouse and trying not to think about Marcus that I had forgotten how cold it was outside.
The two zombies were walking toward me, but they were still too far away for me to tell if they had seen me or not.
Another group of about seven or so was milling around in front of a small, two-story white-brick building about fifty yards away.
South of me ther
e were several large Section 8 apartment buildings, and while I couldn’t see any movement around them, I knew there would be more zombies there. North, south, and west were all closed to me.
Once again I was forced to go east, so I gathered myself up and started off at a trot.
There were zombies moving through the darkness on the other side of the empty lot not far from where I was. I saw a man against the white doors of a half-burned refrigerator, and then I saw more zombies coming out of the rubble near him.
With each passing moment their numbers grew, like ants coming up from a hive, until there were knots of them so thick in places they spanned the whole street.
I didn’t even bother to pull my gun. There were so many of them it would have been futile to waste the ammunition.
I looked for a way out, and found it around the corner of a wrecked apartment building on the other side of the empty lot.
There were gaping holes in the walls, and when a small group of zombies moved towards me, they made a gap so that I could see all the way through the building. Beyond them it looked clear. I ran for the opening and came out on a wet, unlined street.
There was a drainage ditch at the end of the block and I ran there.
I ended up in the bushes at the base of the slope, knee deep in filthy brown water, with ropy vines laced with thorns biting into my face and arms.
But I didn’t stop moving. I made the other side and scrambled up it on my hands and knees. I was covered in mud when I came over the other side, and as soon as I stopped moving, the cold returned with a bite.
A huge field of wet grass stretched out in front of me.
Off to my left I could see the firelight from downtown, and as it caught the water on the ground it made the grass sparkle like a sea of jewels.
The grass sloped gradually upward, and the crest of the hill was dominated by a line of dark elms. I walked up to the elms, hoping to stay under the cover of the trees while I went north, paralleling the drainage ditch; but what I saw instead was a road packed with a slowly shambling crowd of the infected.
I ran back into the elms and headed north.