I no longer have anything to live for, he thought.
His wife, Trudy, whom he suspected of having an affair, wouldn’t care. What did she need with someone who found achieving and maintaining an erection problematic and on the few occasions he could get it up, ended things quickly by ejaculating prematurely? He realized that his kids would be forced to live with the shame of their dad being the drunken train traffic controller responsible for a few dozen deaths. No one would visit him in prison and Byron would turn his back on him, too.
Archibald heard the beep from the platform below, which indicated a train would be arriving within the minute. As he plodded down the stairs, the Station Manager announced as much. Archibald stood back on the platform and took notice of a snuggling couple eyeballing him. After he shot them a dirty look the two turned away.
I bet they know…maybe they heard about it via cell phone…now it’s just a matter of time before I’m caught…
Archibald saw the lights from the train as they bent the corner. The light spawned his epiphany, as if the beam struck a dark corner of his mind where all the answers lie. As the train entered the station, he lowered his head and ran as fast as he could for it. As the train’s brakes screeched Archibald threw himself headlong off the side of the platform. The last sound he experienced was a woman’s scream seconds before his neck snapped and his skull exploded against the windshield of the engineer’s booth.
E I G H T
6:49 p.m.
Cash, Roy and Jenny sat in the dark apartment and cringed at the sound of sporadic gunfire and screams. The door of an apartment across from them splintered, followed by the sounds of a fierce struggle taking place. The crash of furniture and animal-like grunts were punctuated by a loud plea for someone to help.
“Maybe these cops have lost their mind and are going door-to-door handing out ass-whippings,” Roy opined.
“If the cops have snapped like that, you know the reason why.” Cash rolled his eyes toward Jenny.
“It ain’t like we can boot her out,” Roy said. “But if the cops grab her, we won’t be far behind.”
“I think I’d rather stay here with you’s guys,” Jenny said, trembling.
“I guess I gotta give you props,” Cash told her. “You were down with us.”
His words drew a smile from Jenny, not a playful grin, but one borne from the release of tension. Cash wanted to keep an eye on her and surmised if she left she would do something risky, which would jeopardize his and Roy’s freedom. He regretted not only going through with the heist, but agreeing for her to be part of it. Roy had come up with the idea of fronting her off as a hostage in the event they became trapped by their pursuers.
The rain continued to play a drum roll on the building’s tin roof. Another gun shot broke the monotony, as if in the middle of the drumming someone sounded a tympani. Cash crept to the window and peered underneath a piece of plywood that partially covered the front window. Under the parking canopy he could see what looked like a body. The light from a nearby streetlamp reflected off something on the hand, a ring perhaps.
“I think there’s a dead body out there,” Cash said.
Roy came over and peeked out the window. After a half minute he seconded, “Yeah, that’s a body.”
Jenny spoke in a voice heavy with tremors. “What, the cops are shooting people?”
“I don’t see any cops,” Roy said. “I don’t see any flashing lights, hear any radios, shouting, helicopters, nothing.”
“I heard the choppas fly by a couple-a times,” Jenny said. “It sounded like they headed toward the water.”
Roy suggested, “Maybe they think we headed for the marina.”
“I doubt it. They know we ran here and there’s no way we’d have made it to the water.” Cash peered through the crack in the board as he spoke. “There’s definitely something strange going on. Even the crackheads are…” Cash’s eyes widened. “Look at this shit!”
Roy peered through the narrow band of wet glass and caught sight of a crackhead, Tanisha’s mother, Carmen, running through the parking lot. Something was in pursuit, dragging one of its legs, which was bent outward at the knee at a forty-five degree angle. It didn’t look human…
In seconds the thing caught up to its skinny victim. Cash and Roy became wide-eyed as the thing grabbed the woman’s coat collar and snatched with such force her legs flew out from under her. Carmen landed flat on her back as the man, or whatever ran her down, leaned over her face as if trying to steal a kiss. Only as this being pressed its mouth to Carmen’s, he made a growling sound and when he snatched his head back, a portion of her face hung from between his teeth.
Carmen’s body convulsed as the thing swung its head in the direction of the apartment where the three bank robbers were.
“That shit ain’t human!” Roy gasped.
Before ducking down, Cash feared he and the beast made eye contact. He drew his gun and put his free hand on the door knob. Roy needed no cue, holding onto his gun with one hand and Jenny’s arm with the other. Her fingers twitched as she and Roy crouched behind Cash.
“We’re gonna have to shoot our way to your sisters,” Cash said.
“I better hit her on the celly first,” Roy said, fishing his small hand-held device from his inside jacket pocket.
“We ain’t got time!”
Cash snatched the door open and they ran along the building overhang toward a metal parking canopy.
***
7:01 p.m.
Rosalind and Alexandra shined their flashlights toward the soil at the crash site and proceeded along the rocky levee, made slick not only by the falling rain, but by moss and blood that coated the large stones. Alexandra led the way, and when Rosalind stepped over a log she flinched when something slapped against her leg. What she expected to be a stick was in fact a severed human head.
“Fucking ‘ay!” She pushed the head away with her foot.
Alexandra froze and listened to the movement in the water. It sounded as if someone was coming to shore, but with the smoke and rain it was hard to see anything. She pointed to something in the distance.
“Looks like a cadaver that’s intact,” she announced.
They high-stepped over the jagged contour and walked upon a body with one arm broken backward at the elbow, but with both legs intact with long gashes on them. Rosalind knelt for a closer look and snapped off a series of photos from various angles. When she leaned over, the hand of the corpse reached up and became entangled in her hair.
Rosalind screamed and her cell phone dropped into one of the crevices. Seconds later she was on her feet panting.
“What the…?”
Alexandra chuckled. “Post mortem reflexes sometimes occur because the spinal cord continues to function after the death of the brain stem,” Alexandra said. “But why am I telling you this?”
“That wasn’t normal. That hand wrapped around my hair like it was trying to…”
“Reflexes,” Alexandra said with a cool finality. “Get your phone.”
Rosalind’s movements were tentative as she knelt and snatched the phone from the dark recess of the rocks. Again she stood erect and stared down at the bloated, gray-hued corpse.
Alexandra bent down for a closer look. “Most of these people died from blunt force trauma. Others were killed as the centrifugal forces threw them through the rail cars and either greenstick fractured or severed their limbs. This glass in this woman’s hair and face tells me that she was thrown through a window and landed face down among these rocks. I’m willing to bet she died after striking her head, since that is where the blood is coagulating. Hers is the lone intact body I see, so I assume the others were thrown into the wa—”
The same hand that grabbed Rosalind’s hair grabbed hold of Alexandra’s throat. The widening of her eyes told Rosalind that Alexandra now believed her earlier claim. The hand tightened around her throat and caused her to gag as she fought to loose herself. Even with both hands wrapped around the wr
ist of the moving cadaver, Alexandra was no match for it strength-wise.
The once-dead woman raised with her eyes open and a bloody grimace plastered on her face. Blood spew from Alexandra’s mouth and then her throat as the being ripped flesh from her neck. Rosalind, too stunned to run, never saw the man who’d risen from the water, with gray-colored skin and a bloody head wound. The wet man threw an arm over Rosalind’s shoulder and squeezed. Her bones crackled like breaking spaghetti.
Two shots rang out behind the women, and the corpses fell, but as the potential rescuer ran to the ladies, two other corpses rose, and before the military man could get off another shot, his protective suit was torn by the undead beings. He let loose a scream as a woman with mud caked on her face gnawed at his shin. The gun fell from his hand as the woman snatched him down to the rocks and with her fingernails dragged the skin from the hysterical soldier’s face.
A fusillade of bullets from his cohorts followed. No sooner had they laid down the gunfire when more heads popped out of the water, and the zombies climbed ashore with relative ease, as if all that happened was they’d been banged up. It took a solid minute of uninterrupted gunfire to drop them and even when shots did just that, the bodies would lay prone for forty-five seconds or so before they rose again. In the shadows of the fog other beings could be heard but not seen.
Unlike movie zombies, these creatures were not weak, docile nor pie-eyed. Other than the blood and the ghastly hue of their skin, they were normal people, albeit, some were badly deformed and moved stiffly. Still, they possessed strength greater than that of a normal person.
Admiral Pederson ordered his men to let loose a second wave and then had a half-dozen soldiers armed with axes taken from nearby fire trucks to follow them into the fray. The second group began to behead the quivering creatures. The remaining soldiers gathered together the sworn police officers on the scene and Pederson instructed them to keep quiet about what they saw. As he spoke one of the police officers panicked and drew his sidearm.
“Naw!” He shouted, holding his gun at his side. “The public has a right to know!”
Seconds later a shot rang out and the defiant officer’s blood sprayed his cohorts, as he dropped to the ground, dead.
“You are no longer an Antioch police officer, but a sworn deputy of the United States government,” Pederson said. “Anyone disobeying my command will be treated as a treasonous soldier and executed for threatening the national security of the United States. Is that understood?”
The half-dozen remaining officers nodded their heads in synch.
“Good, now cordon off this area and guard it with your lives, and I mean that literally. Nothing goes in or out.”
Unbeknownst to them, two miles away government soldiers were being overwhelmed by a dozen or more persons raised from the water; some with missing, twisted, or deformed limbs. Pederson received images of the battle on his cell phone and ordered one of his men to get him out of the area.
The soldier commandeered a police vehicle, allowed Pederson inside and the two sped away. On his way out, Pederson was reminded of the story of Frankenstein’s monster, and how an experiment with the dead had resulted in the destruction of its inventor.
***
7:23 p.m.
When Valerie Poseidon heard the sound of breaking glass, she panicked and expected a crackhead or one of the local thugs to come through the window and rob her. She got on the phone and speed-dialed Bob, whose apartment lay cattycorner to hers.
“Mister Goodman, please…I need you to come over now! Someone just broke my window!”
Bob also sounded panicked. “Hell naw! I just blew some teenager’s brains out!”
She stole a peek from behind her curtains and saw the ones at the Goodman residence being pulled to one side. She saw Bob look in her direction.
“Mister Goodman, ar you telling me you shot someone?”
Before Bob could answer he dropped the phone and scrambled to reload his weapon. Valerie ran to her kitchen and grabbed two tapered knives, then stood next to her front door in case she was forced to literally cut and run. She heard something outside her window that sounded like a dog growling at an approaching stranger. Valerie’s fingers tightened around both knives. If someone entered her abode she planned to strike at its crotch and face simultaneously.
Valerie took one more look through the slit in her curtains. A silhouette shaped not like a dog, but a youthful human being, neighbor Betty Fry’s boy to be precise, leapt through Bob’s window, oblivious to the shards of glass and wood.
Bob backpedaled, and as he tried to get his gun into firing position, his weapon fell from his hands. His scream caused Valerie to shiver as Bob, the toughest man she knew, went down without so much as another grunt.
Valerie snatched open the front door and fled her apartment. Grace Owens stood in her doorway with a butcher’s hatchet in hand and shouted, “Valerie! In here! Hurry!”
As Valerie veered for the door, the kid—thing, beast, whatever the hell it was—tore through Mr. Goodman’s door with blood dripping from his mouth and hands. The crippled thing sprinted after her with the form and speed of an athlete. Though it had stopped raining the ground was still slick, and as Valerie turned up the walk to Grace’s house, her feet went from under her and she fell onto her side with a loud grunt.
As the beast was about to pounce, several shots rang out, and each pierced the boy’s body. Blood spurted from its chest and the boy hit the ground. Cash, Roy and Jenny charged and by the time Cash stopped to help Valerie to her feet, the creature was on its feet. Roy and Jenny nearly pancaked Grace as they leapt through the door of her apartment. Cash grabbed a still-dazed Valerie, fired off a shot that struck the thing in the knee and then pulled Valerie to safety with Grace and the others.
He slammed the door shut, but not before he and Grace witnessed the young man rising yet again. Cash dragged Grace’s easy chair and put it behind the door, then called to a terrified Tanisha, “Help Roy and Jenny move the bookshelf in front of the window!”
After moving the heavy bookshelf, Roy sprinted to the kitchen and barricaded the back door with a wooden chair from the table and dragged the refrigerator to cover part of that window. With Cash’s help they scooted the stackable washer and dryer to cover the other half of the window.
“That’ll still leave us room to shoot from if need be,” Roy said as they came back to the living room.
“What the hell?” Cash said, a bewildered look on his face. “Is this some kinda Zombie shit or what?”
“Has to be,” Valerie said between hard to gather breaths. “We can’t all….be having the….same nightmare.”
Tanisha came forward, trembling. “Can someone go to my house and get my mama?”
Cash shook his head. “I hate to tell you this, but your mother got caught out there by one of those things.”
Tanisha swooned and fell to her knees. Roy came over and helped her to the sofa. The young lady’s eyes were wide and her gaze distant. She shifted her eyes around the room and then slumped into the recesses of the sofa. Grace sat next to her and slipped her arm over the girl’s shoulder.
The sound of squealing tires broke the silence, followed by a loud bang and the sound of twisting steel and breaking glass. Cash’s breath caught in his throat as he saw a car plow through the apartment next door to Bob Goodman. Gypsum and steam filled the air and the driver leaned on the horn and delivered a mournful version of Taps that sounded written by the devil himself. From the backseat staggered a bleeding being, who looked to be suffering from a broken neck, but who was nonetheless able to walk at a normal rate of speed as it approached the home of Grace Owens.
N I N E
7:23 p.m.
An impatient Officer Hobbes radioed in the reports of gun fire and shouting. The Police Dispatcher ordered him to hold his position. Few transmissions had taken place via radio, which both he and McElroy found odd. McElroy went to his squad car, unlocked his rifle and grabbed his flashli
ght.
“What’s going on?” Hobbs asked.
“Wait here,” McElroy said as he walked past him.
“Whoa, whoa, you go into those apartments by yourself and you might get your ass shot off, or you’ll get written up for insubordination.”
“It sounds like there’s a riot’s going on and we’re letting two bank robbers, who also kidnapped a woman, get away!”
“The bank has video of the robbers. That shit’ll be all over then late night newscasts.”
“You wait here,” McElroy insisted. “I’m going to get those guys.”
“There are two of them, one of you. They’re both armed and there’s no telling how many of their homeboys will back them up on this.”
McElroy stopped walking. “If you’re worried about being left alone, come with me.”
“How do you know they’re even there?”
“They’re in there,” McElroy insisted. “If they’d have jumped the back fence, the guys on the other side would have nabbed them and notified HQ.”
“Let’s give it five more minutes,” Hobbs insisted. “If we don’t have a second unit backing us on this side in five minutes, I’ll go in with you.”
McElroy strode back toward his partner. “Okay, five minutes, not a second more.”
“Relax, Lou. Help is on the way.”
McElroy set the shotgun on the front seat of the car, leaned against the door and lit up a camel filter. He was angered by the idea that the media might get drift of a botched police chase that allowed cornered thieves and kidnappers to get away. Newscasters would play up the idea the suspects ran into a neighborhood the police appeared afraid to enter.
The helicopters flying toward the water and the number of police officers being assigned to that area would also be an issue. For now, no one was talking about it over the air, which he presumed came on the orders of the Chief of Police.
Zombie Factor Page 4
