Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  “What?”

  “Part of his stomach was gone!” She said, and tried to choke the tears back. She tried to tell me again, but couldn’t. All she could do was bend down and kiss Andrew on his forehead and let the tears fall on his face.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  It took her a moment, but she stood up straight, composed herself, and said, “I shot him.”

  Our eyes met, and I loved her more at that moment than ever before. She was strong. She was brave. She was beautiful in her contradictions, so gentle and loving with our child, so fiercely unrepentant in protecting him.

  “Where did you guys go?”

  “We went to Franklin Street after that. You know those new apartments they’re building? We parked back there, up along the tree line. I listened to the radio until the stations went off the air. And then, after you called the second time, I kept trying to call you back. It must have taken two hours to get through.”

  I nodded. “Is he ready to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Let me go see if it’s safe. I don’t have any more bullets, so we’ll have to be quick.”

  She looked confused. “You’re not going to take the shotgun?”

  “You have it?” I asked.

  “It’s right there.” She pointed to the couch. The shotgun was right there, between the pillows.

  “Outstanding,” I said.

  I grabbed it, broke open the breach and checked the shells, and then we were off, rolling away from the curb before any of the zombies that had seen us drive up were close enough to be a threat.

  “Where do you want to go?” she asked.

  “Out of the city,” I said. “Somewhere where it can be just us.”

  She knew the perfect place. She didn’t tell me where, but she didn’t have to. I could tell as we entered the Hill Country we were headed for the Roundtop Bed-and-Breakfast, where the two of us had spent our first night as husband and wife.

  The place was empty.

  It was a small, German-style frontier two-story with a view of miles and miles of cedar and oak trees. We found a room with a southern exposure, changed Andrew’s diaper again, and put him down to sleep.

  We watched him drift off to sleep and kept watching him for a long time after that.

  Later, we stood arm in arm, staring out the windows that were painted by distant, wind-whipped fires, and watched the city burn. When morning came, a shimmering blood-red cloud loomed over the skyline like a brooding eye.

  “Don’t go back out there,” she said, looking up at me with eyes as deep as the sea. “Please.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, and squeezed her close.

  Chapter 34

  Six weeks later, I was back in a police car, looking down on a winding ribbon of road leading up the hillside to where I was working an overtime job. Road crews had been working around the clock to clean up debris from that night, and the ones I had been hired to protect were clearing abandoned cars off the roadway, using bulldozers to push them onto transports that hauled them away to someplace.

  The bulldozers were silent now, and the road crews were enjoying a late-morning break.

  I got out of the car and sat on the hood so I could see everything going on below me. A giant buzzard found a roost on top of a light pole not far away.

  It was one of those glorious winter mornings, where everything seems touched by perfection. The sky was a vaulted ceiling of absolute blue. There were no clouds. From one horizon to the other, there was nothing to disturb the velvet of its touch. The Earth was bathed in a blue so startlingly cold and rich and immaculately clean that when I removed my sunglasses and felt the dry breeze of morning on my skin, I realized I was whole, for the first time in a very long while. There had been a housekeeping in my soul, and I felt like I was living the first well day after a very long sickness. I could breathe again.

  I watched the buzzard spread his massive black wings and hold them open so the sun could warm his body.

  “Me too,” I whispered.

  The weeks following the outbreak were the hardest I’ve ever known. None of the days compared to the frantic rush and desperate searching of that first night, but they were hard nonetheless. It was the endless readiness, the constant tension and expectation that something bad was about to happen. It didn’t take long for exhaustion to set in, and when you passed people in the street, or sat next to them at roll call briefings, you could see that beaten-down look in their eyes.

  April begged me not to go back to work. She said we could go up into the mountains and disappear. The military had succeeded in containing the outbreak to the Gulf Coast states, she said. No one would ever need to see us again if we went to the mountains of Montana. She said the city was no place to trust with a child.

  I think the thing that finally convinced her I should go back to work was that there were no reports of rioting. It was an environment ripe for explosion, and yet not one person put a match to the fuse. The outbreak had left a weird sort of calm in its wake. April saw that calm, and a glimmer of hope returned to her mind.

  It helped too that Andrew made a full recovery. Nothing remained of that night for him but a faint little scar. Our worries that he might be infected never amounted to more than sleepless nights.

  In the end, she let me go back.

  On my way to work that morning I stopped and bought the local paper. It was the first issue since the outbreak, and I had been eager to dive into it. I was hungry for information—real information, not the stuff we had been living on from the word-of-mouth grapevine—and I skimmed the paper ravenously.

  Most of what it said was a repeat of what I had already heard in briefings and from other people, but there were still some statistics there that I hadn’t heard.

  San Antonio had been a city of 1,200,000 people before that night, and now the best estimates put the population somewhere around 300,000. More than three fourths of the city had died.

  And my department got hit hard. We went into the outbreak with just over 2,200 officers, and now there were less than 200 of us left.

  The highest-ranking officer to make it through the outbreak was a lieutenant from Fiscal Services, and the only reason he made it through was because he was out on a fishing boat in Canyon Lake with his two teenage sons.

  When he got back he found himself brevetted to chief.

  After the fires were put out, the long, unbelievably complex task of putting the world back on it rails began. There were official meetings held in city hall and unofficial street meetings held in churches and out in the front lawns of people’s homes. And slowly, the rubble started to clear.

  People were organized. A census was taken. Power was turned on. All the pieces of the puzzle were turned around and studied and gradually a new picture began to emerge.

  There was a massive, unspoken tide of emotion swelling up in everyone, a belief that this time around, we could do it right.

  But while everyone believed we could make it better than it had been, not everyone agreed on how that should be done. The most vocal voice of them all was Ken Stoler.

  Ken had lived through the night, and in the weeks following the outbreak, he had become a staunch advocate for the infected. He had an article in the paper, laying out his plan for containing the zombies, studying the necrosis virus, and finding a cure. His driving belief was that we, the uninfected, were obliged to save the infected from themselves. He even founded an organization to further that agenda. He called it People for the Ethical Treatment of Zombies, or PETZ.

  Early on, his organization scored a major victory and got a court order prohibiting the military and the police from shooting the infected unless it was in self-defense or defense of a third party. It was a major headache for me and my fellow officers, and I’d be lying if I said we obeyed the injunction completely. Things happen in the fog of war. Especially in strange wars.

  I didn’t need to read Ken’s article to know what it sai
d. I had heard it all firsthand while I was working security at one of the numerous public meetings following the outbreak. Ken delivered his speech to an angry crowd, and I had to escort him off the stage.

  When I got him to safety he turned to me and said, “Thanks, Eddie.” He held out his hand. “No hard feelings?”

  I punched him in the nose. “That’s for stealing my truck, you asshole,” I said, and left him sitting on his butt, staring up at me like a pouting child.

  I closed my eyes and then slowly opened them. The city skyline was visible off in the distance, and my thoughts wandered back to Tiresias. He was out there somewhere, alive no doubt, and still waiting for me to make the connections, to build the bridges he had first extended to me. I was a long way from that, still, but I could feel the changes brewing inside of me.

  I read on, going from one article to another, reading about adventures that weren’t much different from my own. But I didn’t get the enjoyment from the paper that I thought I was going to get.

  In the end, I gently folded it up and tossed it back into the car. I didn’t feel like reading anymore. There was no sense in stirring everything up again, I thought.

  And besides, it’s hard to read the paper when so many of your friends are dead.

  But then I saw them. April and Andrew were coming up the road toward the first security gate. I radioed down and told the policeman there to let her through. Suddenly all the hard feelings washed away, and as I watched them drive up the hill, I felt good again.

  April opened the car doors and got Andrew out. She pointed me out to him and tried to get him to wave to Daddy. I didn’t get a wave, but his eyes lit up.

  I walked toward them, and in that moment, my part of the world made sense. Andrew smiled at me, and I realized that the answer to everything, the one landmark on the featureless plain that was my private hell, was the smile on my baby’s face.

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  Copyright © 2006 Joe McKinney

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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  ISBN: 978-0-7860-2597-8