Dead City - 01

by Joe McKinney

  “You’re killing me, Marcus. What did you forget to tell me?”

  He looked at the fat woman on the pavement and then back at the zombies near the corner.

  “Remember how I told you I hit an oak tree about four blocks back?”

  “Just tell me, Marcus.”

  “We’re about to have company,” he said. “A lot of it, actually.”

  “Great,” I said. “Now will you get in the car?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

  I started the car and Marcus climbed in. The four zombies stepped onto the pavement. Beyond them, I could see more zombies coming our way.

  I backed the car up and took off in the opposite direction. At the exit from the parking lot we hit a dip and the front end crunched against the pavement. We ended up driving over the bumper.

  “Ouch,” Marcus said. “Next car we get, I’m driving.”

  Chapter 18

  As we drove away, Marcus reloaded his pistol and his two extra magazines. He was fast with it, too. Shooting came naturally for him.

  While we drove, he told me about his first encounters with the zombies. “I shot the couple that used to live downstairs from me,” he said. “Remember them? The woman had that nasty thing on her nose?”

  “I remember.”

  “Yeah, well, I heard her screaming. I was sitting there, watching all that crazy shit on the news, and I hear her screaming bloody murder. So I go down there, and there’s the husband, eating her. I shot him. I shot her too, just in case. After that I dragged them out to the dumpster. And you’re not going to believe this. I was headed back to my truck after dumping the bodies and I hear all this screaming coming from the pool. It was like everybody in the whole damn complex didn’t know what else to do besides scream. I went down there and saw this old woman standing next to the pool and a zombie floating facedown in the water with a cloud of blood all around him. She wanted me to jump him and pull him out, and I was like, ‘Lady, after what I’ve just seen, there’s no way in hell I’m gonna give that guy mouth-to-mouth. He’d probably try to bite my tongue off.’”

  “I don’t think you’re supposed to use your tongue when you do mouth-to-mouth,” I said.

  “Then you ain’t doing it right, brother. But, seriously, somebody ought to burn up all those bodies. Just you watch. In two days, this whole city’s gonna smell like I don’t know what. It’ll be bad, though.”

  I hadn’t thought of that—but then, I had other things on my mind last time I was home.

  “You know, you and April were probably one of the last people to have a cell phone conversation tonight. Right before I turned off the TV, I heard the news saying they’d lost all communication with their people in the field. No cell phone, no radios, no nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what I heard.” He suddenly got very excited and waved his hand at some zombies walking across a nearby yard. “Hey. Slow up. Over there. That’s the asshole who complained on me last month. Slow up and let me see if I can pop him.”

  “Have you lost your mind, Marcus?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, aping my seriousness. “Come on, pull over. It’ll only take me a second. I’ll fucking teach that guy about complaining on me.”

  I kept on driving.

  “Hey, wait a minute.” Marcus watched the guy fall behind, his damaged legs unable to keep up with the car. “Damn it, Eddie. When will I ever get a chance like this again. Come on, he’s getting away.”

  “No.”

  “Goddamn it, Eddie. Doesn’t April let you take your sense of humor to work any more?”

  I didn’t answer him. That was the second time he had mentioned April so casually, like there was absolutely nothing wrong, and it was pissing me off.

  He noticed he’d upset me. “Hey, I’m sorry, Eddie. I know you’re worried sick about her. We’re gonna find her.”

  “I hope so.”

  I pretended like I was having trouble reading the street signs, but he knew it was just an act.

  “She’s a smart girl,” he said. “She’ll know what to do when she has to.”

  “How do you know that, Marcus? Do you know what to do? I sure as hell don’t. I haven’t got a fucking clue. This whole night’s been one messed up cluster fuck.”

  Marcus folded the lid back over the case of bullets and set it on the floorboard next to his feet. Then he turned and watched the houses go by. It was his way of telling me he understood, and I appreciated it.

  “These traffic cars are pretty nice,” he said after we had driven a few minutes in silence. He played with the trash bag that was draped from the passenger door and laughed to himself. “Where did you say you found it?”

  “On Fletcher.”

  “Fletcher? Isn’t that in the 23 side?”

  “Right on the boundary line between the Downtown and West Divisions.”

  “What do you suppose a traffic guy was doing there? I thought they usually stuck to the freeways.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, he’s got a video camera.”

  Marcus looked over the little index card–size monitor mounted between the sun visors and played with the controls. He was like that with electronic stuff. Any gadget at all, if it was in front of him he couldn’t leave it alone until he had it figured out.

  “Did you watch this already?”

  I saw the picture come up. “No,” I said. And then, after a pause, “I didn’t have time. As soon as I found the car I went straight to Carlos Williams’s house.”

  He gave me a look out of the corner of his eye and I told him how Carlos had died, and what he had said about his son right before he shot himself.

  “You didn’t?”

  I nodded.

  “You went to see his family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Eddie,” he said, shaking his head slowly, sadly, “why do you do that to yourself? I swear, sometimes you can be a real idiot, you know that?”

  He was right, of course. But it didn’t feel like he was right.

  “You’re too damn sentimental. That’s your problem.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “There’s no probably about it. I know I’m right.”

  We drove on in silence for the next few blocks while he tried to figure out how to replay the tape. All the easy ways to get to the freeway were blocked up, and I was forced to use some of the smaller streets and alleyways.

  “What’s wrong with taking Maldon?” he asked, glancing at the street we had just passed. “That’s a straight shot.”

  “Too many businesses down Maldon,” I said. “I want to avoid any large crowds if we can help it.”

  “Oh.” He looked disappointed.

  He kept working on the video until he got it. “Oh yeah, here we go.”

  I couldn’t really watch it and drive at the same time, but with Marcus narrating the whole thing I didn’t really need to.

  “Okay,” he said, “there he is. Who is that? Do you recognize him? Looks like Wainscot to me.”

  I glanced over, but the monitor was so small I couldn’t see anything. The figures on the screen looked far away and dark.

  “There goes his gun. He sees something. Damn it. Can’t do much with the focus. What’s he looking at? There he goes. Wait. No. Now he’s off camera.”

  Marcus kept watching, pushing the fast-forward button and watching some more, but that appeared to be the end of it.

  “That didn’t tell us a damn thing,” he said.

  “He wasn’t anywhere around when I found the car.”

  “Yeah, he probably got eaten.”

  “Nice.”

  “What? Oh, I’m sorry, Miss Prissy. I’m sure it was all hugs and kisses when he met the zombies.”

  “Go to hell, Marcus.”

  “Find a parking spot, brother,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand at the world outside our car. “We’re already there.”

  Chapter 19

 
; Marcus was admiring the brand-new shotgun. Traffic really did get the best toys.

  On patrol, officers use the barrel of the shotgun as a trash can. You find everything from gum wrappers to chicken bones stuffed down inside them.

  And when quail season opens, you’re lucky if there’s a gun in your car at all.

  He worked the action and ejected one of the green beanbag shells from the gun. “Useless,” he said, and tossed the bean bag out the window.

  “Oh!” I said. “I’ve got real shells for that thing. Check that green box over there.”

  “Where?”

  “It’s over there. I don’t know. Under the seat, maybe.”

  “Got it,” he said, and started loading up the magazine tube. “Where did you get these from anyway?”

  “From home.”

  “Your house?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I didn’t know you had a shotgun.”

  “It’s just an old skeet gun. Nothing special. A Ruger Red Label Over-and-Under. I haven’t shot it since before April and I got married.”

  “That’s too bad. Ruger makes a good gun.” He racked the shotgun’s action and a huge smile lit up his face. “God, I just love the way that sounds. Don’t you?”

  “You can use it if you want.”

  “You don’t mind?”

  “No. Of course not. You’re the one riding shotgun.”

  “Cool. Thanks.” He looked up from the shotgun and I could tell he was checking his mental map of the area. “You’re not going to go through the Medical Center, are you?”

  “No. I figured it’d be best if we went around.”

  “Probably so. The news was saying that the hospitals are all totally overrun. They got it early, from what it sounded like.”

  We kept to the edge of the Medical Center, but even from there, it was obvious the destruction was total.

  Most of the major roads were so overrun with traffic that there was no hope of getting into the hospitals anymore. The entire area was choked off.

  As we hopped a curb and drove through the grass to get around a clogged section of Fielding Street, I looked to my left and let my eyes follow the direction all those cars were facing.

  Fielding was flanked on both sides by massive earthen embankments that stretched up from the street level to the businesses at the top of the ridge. People had actually tried to drive up those embankments, and it looked like a lot of them had rolled their vehicles before they got anywhere. The street reminded me of a wild African river after a flood, the kind they show on nature documentaries, with the carcasses of thousands of animals floating on the surface and crowding the banks.

  I put us back on the road. Even though I was trying to avoid the more commercial areas, it was impossible to stay completely away and still get to where we were going.

  And we couldn’t avoid the zombies, either. They were all over the street, and as we drove past groups of them that turned and stumbled after us, I began to understand just how far and fast the outbreak had spread.

  We drove past so much destruction that I stopped trying to add it all up. Marcus didn’t seem to care, though. He hummed to himself happily, like he did this everyday.

  “I think you’re going to have a hard time getting through at Middleton,” Marcus said.

  “Why at Middleton?”

  “They put up a lot of stuff through there since you left. A lot of businesses. See?” He pointed ahead of us where the traffic suddenly became too thick to pass. “That’s what I was talking about.”

  I stopped the car and looked out over a sea of frozen traffic. Zombies staggered between the cars. There didn’t seem to be a gap large enough to drive through, and there were hundreds of zombies entering the street on both sides of us.

  In the time it took to figure out where they were coming from we were surrounded.

  “Looks like we’ll have to back up and try to go around,” I said.

  “Not yet,” Marcus said. Then all of a sudden he pushed the door open and jumped out, leaving me staring after him with my mouth gaping open.

  “What the—Hey, wait.”

  I watched him run straight into that crowd of zombies and I thought, “He has gone insane.”

  Even worse was that he expected me to follow him, just like it was another Friday night bar fight.

  “You idiot,” I said to him, and the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the car, gun in hand. I was looking at a sea of zombies in every direction. There had to be a thousand or more.

  But Marcus never hesitated. He fired all six rounds from the shotgun and then started swinging the shotgun around like a club, tearing a path right into the middle of the crowd and whooping it up like he was the whole damn rebel army rolled into one man.

  He actually taunted them as they closed up behind him.

  And then his rebel yell was drowned out by the bark of his pistol. I caught glimpses of muzzle fire as he moved through the crowd. He looked like a cowboy out of some old-time movie, strutting through the crowd with his gun blazing.

  But the zombies weren’t just closing in on him. They were all around me, too. Just before I jumped back inside the car I saw Marcus about fifty yards away. He jumped into the open bed of an abandoned pickup truck and started shooting.

  I put the car in gear and drove straight into the crowd, mowing down bodies as I went. I kept my eyes on him as I plowed through the sea of bodies, ignoring their faces as they rolled off the hood.

  I locked up the brakes and spun the car around so that the passenger door was as close to him as I could get it.

  The car slid sideways into the crowd, and a few of the zombies were thrown with such force that when they slammed into the side of the truck that Marcus was firing from, the impact nearly knocked him off his feet. He almost went over the side.

  I shot a zombie that was trying to climb through the passenger window and cleared the way for Marcus to jump back in the car.

  He was hollering the whole time, still firing out the passenger window as I put the car into reverse and mashed down on the accelerator.

  The back tires broke loose. Smoke was everywhere. It was like driving too fast through a bumpy field. Bodies were being thrown out of the way or pushed under and run over and there were so many of them that the car nearly high-centered on top of a still-moving pile of bodies before our momentum put us back on the asphalt.

  “Go! Go! Go!” he yelled, laughing like he had never seen anything so funny in his whole life. “That’s it. You’re tearing them up.”

  I kept on the gas until we cleared the last of the crowd and then a little farther after that. We ended up going over a curb and crashing into the drive-through order box at the Burger Barn before I got the car to stop.

  Marcus was laughing his head off. I wanted to punch his lights out, but before I got the chance he put his hands up and said, “No. No way, Eddie. You do not get to say a damn word. You know why? Because that was awesome. That was absolutely fucking awesome.”

  I looked at him and wondered who put this idiot in the car with me. The whole time, I was gripping the wheel so tight my fingers were turning white.

  “Well?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Come on, Eddie. Say something. You were amazing. And I know those zombies back there were impressed.”

  “Impressed?”

  “Yeah, well, they’re zombies, of course, so they can’t be that impressed. But damn, Eddie. You may not be able to shoot your way out of a wet paper bag, but brother, do you know how to drive. That was by far the coolest thing I have ever seen you do.”

  And then he started laughing again.

  I made a fist and got ready to use it.

  “No,” he said, still laughing.

  “What in the hell is—”

  “No,” he said.

  My frustration came out as one long, slow hiss. Instead of punching him, or choking him, I gripped the steering wheel.

  “Say it,” he said. “Come on,
say it.”

  “Screw you, Marcus.” But the moment to hit him passed, and my anger settled to a simmer.

  We were still stuck in the parking lot and we had to figure a way out that put us on the other side of all those zombies. The lot was edged all the way around by a two-foot-high cement wall, and the only way out was starting to fill up with zombies.

  “Just plow through them again,” Marcus offered.

  I punched it, heading for the center of the crowd. We hit the exit going way too fast and swung a hard right onto Nightingale.

  The car was swaying all over the place from all the damage I had done to the suspension, and when we made the turn the back end came around on me and whipped through the crowd.

  They didn’t slow us down though, and as I straightened out the back end, Marcus leaned out the window and started firing at them like he actually stood a prayer of landing a kill shot.

  “Awesome.” he said, ducking back into the car. “Absolutely awesome.”

  “You’re a moron.”

  “You know,” he said, and his voice had that annoying edge to it that told me he was about to tease me. “I refuse to let a bunch of zombies ruin the end of the world for me. And you either, for that matter.”

  Three blocks over we turned south again and tried to finish our course around the Medical Center. We got as far as Cotton Street before another traffic jam caused us to turn into a strip center parking lot.

  “Any ideas?” I asked, looking over the wreckage.

  “There’s a service drive around back for the loading docks. I bet we can cut through there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Honest,” he said. “I’ve been through there before.”

  “Okay,” I said, and turned the car toward the back of the building. The drive went around the side of the building, then turned to the left, and went straight along the back wall.

  We were only able to make it about halfway down the alley. There was a high concrete wall on the right, and a large brown truck parked along the left wall. Between the two of them was a space about half as wide as the car.

  “Looks like we go—”