Dead City - 01

by Joe McKinney

  A group of them closed in on him.

  He picked his gun up and tried to fire, but nothing happened when he pulled the trigger.

  He stared at it stupidly for a moment before his training kicked in. Arguello came up with a magazine, slapped it into place, and pulled back on the slide, ready to shoot.

  The first shot wasn’t even close. It hit high up on the corner of the house. The next shot hit one of the zombies in the shoulder.

  After that he started firing wildly into the crowd, wasting all his ammunition.

  The zombies took him down, and ripped him apart, but through it all he never made a sound.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  But I had problems of my own. I was completely surrounded. There were dozens of zombies slapping their hands against the sides of the shed, reaching for me.

  I pushed myself up to the highest part of the roof, looking everywhere for a way out.

  They couldn’t reach me—at least not yet. But there were enough of them that the weight of their bodies pressing up against the shed could topple it over. They had already torn down a section of the wooden fence and were moving back and forth between the two yards.

  The yard where Arguello had just died was crowded with zombies. There were just as many around me. I couldn’t go into either yard and expect to last very long. I turned around and around on the roof of that little shed, looking for a way out, but I kept seeing the same things and same shredded faces over and over again.

  As I turned I slipped, and my knee hit the shingles.

  Off balance, I started to slide.

  I panicked, shot a hand out, and caught a corner of the roof. The suddenness of it caused my head to jerk up, and I managed to get a quick glimpse of the yard to the left of the one I was in.

  It wasn’t more than six or seven feet away, but I was so panicked I hadn’t even seen it until just then.

  I counted eight zombies. They were banging against the fence to get to me, but there weren’t enough of them to break through.

  It was a way out. I thought if I could jump into that yard I could hit the ground running and keep going.

  The only problem would be fighting off the zombies when I landed.

  But then I remembered I didn’t have to fight them. All I had to do was shoot them. I had a pistol. There were almost thirty rounds in the gun. I could just pop them from where I was and jump into an empty yard.

  Piece of cake.

  But I hadn’t figured on aiming while the zombies below me were rocking the shed.

  The distance to the target was no problem. My shooting wasn’t the greatest, but three yards was pretty easy, even for me. At least I thought it would be easy.

  It was like trying to shoot from a surfboard on choppy seas. Getting a clean head shot was hard, and I knew from past experience that it took too many body shots with a pistol to put even one zombie down. I put a lot of rounds into their faces and glanced a few off the sides of their heads, but I only got a kill shot every six or seven shots I made.

  By the time I ran out of ammo, there were still two of them left on their feet.

  And the zombies below me were rocking the shed. It was getting harder and harder to keep my balance, and I knew that if I was going to make a break for it, it would have to be right then. It was the last, best chance.

  I crouched down like a sprinter at the gates and tried to focus on the jump. The yard below me was a seething carpet of faces and hands. I took a breath, forcing down the nausea and the fear, and jumped.

  One of the zombies grabbed me as I landed. We both tumbled to the ground and I rolled off him. Once I was on my feet I took off running and didn’t stop until I was out in the street, all the zombies behind me.

  I stood there huffing, looking around in utter disbelief. I had heard people talk about mental exhaustion, about getting to that point when the mind refuses to go any further, but I had always thought it was just hyper-bole. I didn’t realize it was actually possible to get to that point.

  But even as I stood there, listening to the hordes behind me as they crashed through the fences like an approaching tidal wave, a little voice inside me pleaded for a little more. You’ve got to move.

  Ken Stoler’s act of treachery had left me without a ride, and I felt like a doomed man, waiting for the gallows door to drop.

  The zombies were wandering back through the houses, and as I looked behind me, I saw more and more of them filtering into the street.

  You’ve got to move.

  Chapter 11

  I ran for it.

  I passed dark, beat-up clapboard houses that leaned in on themselves at unsafe-looking angles and sagged under the weight of years of neglect. Few were painted. Most were worn gray from the weather and their porches looked like there was no way they could hold a man’s weight. The yards were small, the grass thin and scraggly. They were strewn with old machine parts and junked cars.

  I ran down the center of the street because I didn’t want to get boxed in again. With no ammunition, I had to avoid a fight. There was no way I would be able to fend off a whole crowd of zombies with just my baton. Even a small group of twenty or so would be able to overpower me.

  The zombies I had just escaped were blocking the street to the west, so I headed east.

  When I got to Appleton Street, I got my first good look at the highways. Appleton ran north-south across the near west side, then curved east and went straight up to the highway. Whenever I made arrests, Appleton was the street I used to get on the freeway for the drive downtown. From there it was a quick five-minute car ride to the jail.

  I was used to running into traffic on Appleton because it was a major road, but I wasn’t prepared at all for the mess waiting for me. The street was a bumper-to-bumper junkyard of abandoned cars.

  I looked up and down Appleton and saw cars crashed out all over the road. Off to the south, I could see most of them still had their headlights on, and they looked like cats’ eyes.

  I used to enjoy watching the ebb and flow of traffic. It always fascinated me the way it pulsed, gathering up in knots at the stoplights and then spacing out again at the green, like the movement of blood through the body.

  San Antonio had once been a living entity, with vigor in its veins driven by the pulse of its streets, but now the streets that were the city’s arteries and blood vessels were frozen, the blood congealed in the veins.

  The city itself had become a zombie, dying on its feet.

  I kept my head low and started checking the cars that looked like they could be driven away.

  Most of them were hung up in traffic and couldn’t be moved, but I finally found an old beat-up Monte Carlo resting in the grass near the turnoff to a small side street. It looked like crap, but the keys were in it.

  The dashboard was covered in trash. I swept it off with my hand and a little clear plastic baggie of marijuana fell onto the passenger seat. It caught my eye immediately, and it made me laugh, not because it was especially funny but because of what it represented.

  Back when the world was normal, I’d search cars looking for stuff like that bag of weed. I used to find plenty of it, too. But as I looked around and saw how thoroughly the world had changed, that little bag of weed seemed a pathetic link to the way things used to be.

  I turned the key, but all I got was the lame whirling noise of a bad starter. I tried it again and got the same noise.

  “Come on, you piece of crap,” I said. “Come on.”

  I hit the steering wheel. Mashed down on the gas. Nothing. The engine wouldn’t turn.

  I saw a group of zombies moving through the back patio of a bar across the street, and they turned towards me when they heard the noise.

  There was one zombie out in front, moving faster than the others. I cranked the engine again and kept an eye on him.

  The Monte Carlo still wouldn’t start, and the fast-moving zombie entered the street. In the time it took me to crank the car again he was already across the str
eet and banging at the passenger window.

  When he started around the front of the car I stepped out and snapped my baton open. He came around the fender with his hands already reaching for me.

  I waited for him to get within striking distance and then I dropped him with a full baseball bat–style swing to the side of his head.

  He landed face down in the grass and didn’t get up again.

  But while I was fooling around with him, the others were getting closer. I got back in the car and kept cranking. There was nothing, nothing, and then all of a sudden the engine roared up. It was knocking and chugging, but it was running.

  One of the zombies grabbed at the windshield just as I dropped it into gear and took off. I caught his arm in the side-view mirror and spun him around violently.

  He landed in the grass next to the fast-moving zombie, and I was off before he could stand up again.

  I headed west for two blocks, and then south again. Driving that Monte Carlo was a pain in the ass. The seat was busted. It was stuck as far back from the steering wheel as it would go, leaning into the backseat, so that I had to sit up with no back support just to keep control of the car.

  I didn’t want to get it going too fast either, because every time I stepped on the brake it felt like I was stepping on a wet sponge.

  But I was lucky to have a car at all, I told myself. And I was lucky to have gotten away from Appleton Street with my life.

  I kept telling myself how lucky I was as I drove through wreckage that seemed to be getting worse.

  When I got to the intersection of Beaumont and Fletcher, I had to slow down to go around a wreck, and I just happened to look off to my right.

  There was a police car down there! I could tell right away that it was one of ours because it had the parking lights on. They train us to leave them on when we’re out of the car so we can see each other from a long way off in the dark.

  I turned the Monte Carlo toward the cruiser. When I pulled up I saw that it was a traffic car. It had a video camera mounted on the inside of the windshield and there were radar antennas all over the place.

  I walked around the police car. It was beautiful, not a scratch on it. Compared to the crap they give us on patrol, it was immaculate. There was even a brand-new shotgun in the trunk. Those bastards in traffic always get the best toys.

  I got in, cranked it up, and it purred like a kitten. Everything worked. It was strange to sit in a police car that didn’t smell like sweat and oil and cheap air fresheners and a drunk’s puke. There was even a little trash bag tied to the inside of the passenger door.

  I flipped on the PA speakers and said, “Can anyone hear this? If you can hear me, come out in the street.”

  I was risking another zombie encounter by doing that, but if the traffic officer who was assigned to this car was anywhere around, I didn’t want to leave him stranded.

  But no one came out. He was either dead or injured, and, in either case, I couldn’t help him. I took Carlos’s driver’s license from my belt and placed it over the gauges on the dashboard.

  The car handled like a dream. On patrol, we have to drive through fields and jump curbs and do all kinds of crazy things to our cars, but obviously traffic didn’t do that kind of stuff.

  In no time at all I had the windows down and I was cruising down Fletcher Street towards Carlos’s house.

  Chapter 12

  Carlos’s neighborhood was nicer than the neighborhoods I had just come from.

  As I turned into the main entrance, the streets seemed to open up. There were no cars on the curb, and no front yard fences to chop up the views.

  I saw open spaces, and trees, and yards with green healthy grass reaching all the way up to the front steps. They were old houses, but they were sturdy and well-maintained.

  “Well done, Carlos,” I said to myself as I passed a rather impressive red-brick house with a little fountain in the front yard. This neighborhood was a good catch on a policeman’s salary. Maybe his wife worked, too.

  But the destruction had come to Carlos’s neighborhood, too.

  Just off the main entrance I saw a burnt Tudor-style house at one corner. I probably would have missed it completely if I hadn’t seen one of the curtains billowing into the air like the swish of a girl’s skirt. It floated on the breeze, sticking out of a charred hole where the kitchen window used to be. It seemed so sad and silent.

  And there were zombies here, too. They filtered into the street behind me as I drove by. None of them were a threat, though. The front yards were so big that I was halfway down the block before they could make it to the curb.

  Carlos’s street wasn’t all that different from any other in the neighborhood, except that there was a car crashed into the fence on the corner. The wooden slats of the fence were scattered around the yard like exploded matchsticks and the back right tire was sticking up into the air.

  I turned my spotlight into the passenger area and saw a body slumped over the wheel. It wasn’t moving.

  I stopped in front of Carlos’s house. It was done up in gray brick and brown siding, with well-trimmed hedges lining the front of the house and a black, wrought-iron light pole in the garden. The light wasn’t working.

  There were three large windows on the front of the house, and I turned the spotlight into each one of them, trying to see inside. There was no movement. The house was dark and the spotlight didn’t penetrate very far.

  I was hoping Carlos’s wife would see the spotlight and come out on her own, but it didn’t happen. I waited there in the car, looking around for more zombies, and wondering again if this was really such a good idea. Every minute I was away from April and Andrew was an invitation for something bad to happen to them. After all, I didn’t even know Carlos’s wife’s name.

  But I had come this far already, hadn’t I? Wasn’t it worth the chance that maybe I could do something good for Carlos’s family, even if I hadn’t been able to do anything for him?

  The question seemed to me to answer itself, and so I threw the shotgun over my shoulder and started up the front walk.

  My flashlight beam wasn’t much use either. I lit up the windows next to the front door, but couldn’t see anything. The whole house seemed strangely quiet.

  Cops always talk about that feeling. What they mean is that sensation when the hairs stand up on the back of your neck and you just know a situation is about to get really fucked up.

  Imagine wading through the ocean and suddenly feeling something big brush against your leg.

  That’s what that feeling feels like.

  And that’s pretty much the feeling I had as I walked around the house.

  The back door was blasted open. It had been one of those sliding glass doors that I thought every cop knew better than to put on his house. Pieces of glass were everywhere, inside and out. The house was wide open, and I thought I saw blood on the carpet. It was hard to tell for sure because the carpet was a deep pile brownish-maroon.

  All I knew for sure was that it was wet and sticky.

  The inside was split into two parts, with the kitchen, master bedroom, and dining room off to the left of the living room, and the smaller bedrooms off to the right. I started my sweep with the kitchen and worked back from there.

  As I entered the hallways leading off to the smaller bedrooms I tightened up. There was blood on the carpet, and more blood on the wall.

  I turned the corner into the first room I came to and saw baby clothes and toys all over the floor. A crib and a bookshelf were off near the back and there was a changing station near the inside left corner, away from the door.

  Matthew was there and there was blood on the changing pad and blood on the wall behind him. There was so much blood.

  And then it became abominable.

  He moved. His head lolled over and he looked at me, eyes vacant and milky white, like candle wax.

  I turned away.

  My head was swimming, and I staggered backwards from the changing station. />
  The shotgun fell from my hands.

  My legs went weak and couldn’t hold me. I half fell, half slid down the wall into a pile in the corner.

  I couldn’t hang words on shock of that magnitude. As a parent, looking at that torn little body, I felt such a deep sense of violation that I was unable to pull myself back from it. Surely this was hell, because nothing else could ever debase the human condition as much as the sight of an infant made into such a horrible thing.

  A few moments passed.

  I finally looked up at the changing pad again and saw his arm hanging over the side, his hand grasping at the slick wooden paneling, unable to get a grip, and I wondered why it took something that horrible to convince me the world was dying. I would have preferred just about any death to this. Instead of a war or an asteroid or global warming, something that killed us from beyond ourselves, we were dying by implosion.

  I saw movement in the hallway. A woman’s body fell against the door to the nursery. She was wearing a T-shirt and panties. Her legs were sliced up in a hundred different randomly crossing angles. Blood was caked to her skin. Her hands and bottom jaw and the side of her head were torn open and black with infection.

  She stumbled into the room and stretched out her mangled hands to grab me.

  “What have you done?” I said, though I knew she couldn’t answer me. Besides, we were well beyond the point where answers mattered.

  When she was close enough to put her hands on me, I pushed her aside and stood up behind her. If there had been more range I could have used the beanbags, but we were very close together, and at less than five feet shooting someone with a beanbag is basically the same as shooting them with a really big bullet. The effect is the same, anyway.

  I didn’t want to risk splattering her blood all over me, not after what Ken had told me, so instead of shooting her I punched the back of her head with the butt of the shotgun. She went down, but not for good. I didn’t do enough damage. When she tried to get up I swung the butt of the shotgun down and put her away once and for all.