by Joe McKinney
“Hold on,” he told me as we started down two flights of steps.
I saw the ground ahead of us drop away into empty space, and then all of a sudden we were pointed straight down and the ground was rushing up to meet us.
We hit so hard I could actually hear the car’s frame bending. Marcus struggled with the wheel, caught the car before it could drift all the way sideways, and then landed it in the middle of Mount Olive Street.
He let the car drift to a stop and waited for me to say something.
“What?”
“Well?” he asked.
“Well what?”
“Go on, say the words. That was some of the best driving you’ve ever seen, wasn’t it?”
“Are you kidding me?” There were pieces of broken windshield glass in my hair and my door wouldn’t close anymore. “Marcus, that was the most fucked-up thing I have seen you do all night. I never did anything like that when I was driving.”
“Oh, come on.”
I was still brushing glass out of my hair. I held one up so he could see it. “What did I do that was worse than this?”
“You’re kidding, right? Eddie, look in the backseat. Do you see a dead fat guy back there? No, you don’t. And you know why there’s not a dead fat guy back there? Because what I just did was some incredible fucking driving. Tell me it wasn’t. Go on, tell me and then call yourself a liar.”
“No.”
“Admit it.”
I laughed at him. “No. No way.”
“Fine.”
He put the car in gear and started off down Mount Olive, pouting the whole way. He amazed me like that. It cracked me up that someone capable of kicking as much ass as he did could still be capable of pouting like a four year old when he didn’t get his way. But there it was.
The car was so messed up the best he could get out of it was about thirty miles per hour, but he still threw in a parting shot before he gave up the argument.
“I don’t care what you say. That was some incredible driving, and you know it.”
Mount Olive curved around the east side of the Convention Center, then went north until it turned into the on-ramp for the highway.
We weren’t able to make it that far, though. There was a massive amount of traffic congestion before the ramp, and it was completely impassable. We didn’t even have room to drive up the grass embankment because there were so many cars wedged into the gaps between the guardrails.
We had to back up and cross over at Dove Street into the East Division service area.
Neither one of us had ever worked the east side, so everything east of Mount Olive was uncharted territory for us.
I had heard the neighborhoods east of the Convention Center were tough, but I was shocked to see how different they were from the perfectly manicured gardens and clean streets of the Convention Center’s grounds. We were just one block over, separated from the center by a long line of enormous live oaks, yet it seemed like we had stepped into another world. Even the pavement was different. Where the Convention Center’s streets were smooth and accented with russet-and ochre-colored bricks, we were on raw asphalt that had buckled from the railroad tracks that crisscrossed all the streets in the area. The lingering, filthy stench of backed-up sewage and rotting garbage hung in the air.
After turning onto Dove, we were lost. Streets that seemed like they should have gone north-south seemed to fade away into vacant lots or curve back on themselves, and we suddenly found ourselves in the warehouse district with absolutely no idea how we got there or how we would get out.
The buildings we passed were dying. Graffiti covered the faces of the buildings in unbelievable profusion. In places the long, unintelligible scrawls were covered up by weeds growing at the base of the foundation.
It didn’t really make sense to call what we were looking at the warehouse district, because there was really nothing more to it than one decaying hulk after another stretching on into the darkness. What I was looking at was the dead city, the cancerous growth in the bowels of a dying culture.
I was thinking that way, about the death of things, and staring out the window at the gaping black holes in the sides of the buildings we passed when Marcus slapped me on the arm.
“What’s that?” he asked, pointing a good ways down the road at what looked to me to be smoke.
But it wasn’t smoke. Even from a distance I knew it wasn’t smoke. It was moving faster than smoke, but thicker and blacker.
“It looks like a flock of birds.”
“You may be right,” he said. “Probably grackles.”
They were grackles. It was the biggest flock of birds I’ve ever seen. As we pulled up on another dead end we saw hundreds of thousands of fat black birds sitting on every available perch. They lined the edge of the roof of the building straight ahead of us, and they were all over the power lines and the parking lot and the gutted carcass of a Country Fields Bread Company eighteen wheeler. Red-and-white plastic bread bags fluttered into the air all around us. The grackles were tearing the loaves of bread apart, feeding like sharks in an ocean of blood.
The noise they made was tremendous.
We saw movement again. From off to our left, a small section of the flock fluttered into the air, flew a short distance, and then settled down to the ground again.
“Look at that,” Marcus said. His voice had a strange, exhausted breathiness to it that I hadn’t heard before.
Then I saw why the birds were taking off. There were zombies moving through the parking lot. At first I saw just a few, but as I watched, more zombies streamed out from between the buildings. Soon we were facing a crowd of maybe sixty or more.
A few of the grackles started screaming, and soon the whole flock was agitated and squawking like they were being murdered, though the birds didn’t have any trouble avoiding the infected. Small sections of the flock took to the wing in violent fits and then settled down again a short distance away.
“We should go.”
“Yeah,” said Marcus. “I think so, too.”
He put the car in reverse and turned his head to look behind us. He frowned, and then dropped his head and cursed under his breath.
“What is it?” I looked back in my rearview mirror and saw what he was looking at. There was a huge crowd of zombies behind us. “Crap! Where do they keep coming from?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “They’re everywhere.”
He put the car in drive again and peeled off to the left. He cut between two long white buildings and sped down a broken, puddle-filled alley. We broke out of the alley at Shiloh and he stopped the car.
Shiloh was blocked off to the west of us by a gutted fire truck. All of its hoses were laid out next to the smoldering black corner of a vacant warehouse. Either something had exploded or a section of the building had come crashing down because there was debris all over the road and there was no way we could get around it. More crowds were gathering to the right of us. Big crowds stretched out deep into the darkness.
Marcus turned the car into the crowd and punched it. I leaned back in my seat, bracing myself against the dashboard, but before I could yell at him not to do it, we were diving headfirst into the crowd.
We hit the first bodies while we were still accelerating, and then everything started happening too fast. There was a hideous rush of wet thuds as bodies hit metal and glass and rolled off the hood. I saw faces, but no features. Everything was a blur, and roaring above it all was the straining engine of the Crown Victoria, fighting a losing battle as it pushed through the crowd.
We started to drift to my side of the street. The car was rolling sideways by the combined weight of all the human bodies it was striking, like a boat caught in a strong crosscurrent. I could feel the car start to lose acceleration, almost as if it had been knocked out of gear. Marcus had it floored, but we were slowing down, and we were still caught up in the thick of the crowd.
We were an island in a sea of bodies when the car gave out altogether.
“Run for it,” Marcus said as he opened his door and took off toward a three-story gray and white building to his left.
But I couldn’t get out.
Already there were dozens of zombies pushing up against my side of the car, and it was all I could do to hold the door closed. If there hadn’t been so many of them pressing against the ones closest to me, they would have been able to rip the door out of my hands.
Frantically, I climbed over the computer between the two bucket seats and squeezed out of the driver’s side door. Even as I was climbing out of the car, more bodies were pressing down on me. I felt a hand clutching at my shoulder and my neck, and then they were all over me.
I started swinging my fists at everything. As they swarmed around me I felt their weight pushing me back into the car. I put one arm across the top of the door and the other on the broken windshield. Before they could come down on top of me I jumped straight up and got on top of the car.
From the roof I could see Marcus fighting his own way toward the building. I also saw a way to get to him. I pulled my gun and shot at four zombies standing in front of the car, and then jumped to the ground and ran after Marcus, dodging zombies as I ate up the distance between us.
He was fighting them back from the doorway, yelling at me to hurry it up. I saw him break a man’s neck and then throw himself into a thick wooden door, ramming it with his shoulder. I came up right behind him and never slowed down.
We hit the door at the same time, and sent it flying off its hinges. We both crashed to the ground on the other side in a wave of dust and shattered wood.
I popped up and turned my gun back on the doorway. Zombies were already coming through. Marcus was running toward a large staircase off to the right. I fired at the first zombie through the door and was about to fire again when I heard Marcus shout, “Come on. Up here.”
I ran after him. He went up the staircase and around a corner at the top of the stairs with me on his heels the whole way. There we slipped in to a deserted office and I slammed the door behind us.
“Help me move this,” he said, pushing a cabinet in front of the door.
Together we pushed it flush to the door and then listened. We could hear heavy, plodding steps making their way up the stairs.
Chapter 25
I turned away from the door and the sound of the infected beyond it, breathing hard and shivering against the cold.
The building we had taken shelter in had started to rot after years of neglect. There were holes in the wall and most of the windows were broken out. A harsh, cold breeze bit through its dark cavities. It was like being in a cave.
I instinctively reached down to my gun belt for my flashlight, but it was long gone. We were stuck in the viewless dark.
Gradually my eyes became accustomed to it, and bulking shapes around us turned into the less obscure outlines of very old and very musty office furniture. The ravages of neglect were everywhere, and the place stank of wet, rotten wood. A wet, gritty sort of sawdust covered everything.
Marcus wiped some of it from his hands and asked, “Where’s the shotgun?”
Oh crap.
“I think it’s still in the car,” I said
“Why is it in the car?” His sense of humor never failed him.
“I don’t know. I guess we forgot it.”
“We? You were supposed to get it.”
“Me? Why me?”
“You were riding shotgun. That’s what that phrase means. You ride shotgun, you’re the one who’s supposed to hold on to the shotgun.”
“You don’t really want to argue about this, do you? Because you know, I’m not the one who just took off running and left his partner’s ass hanging out in the wind. I’m real sorry if I forgot it, but I was kind of busy—you know, with those zombies trying to eat me and all.”
“You don’t do sarcasm very well at all.”
“Was I being sarcastic? Because I didn’t mean to be. I’m being dead fucking serious. What the hell is wrong with you? You just left me out there.”
“You’re a big boy,” he said. “You didn’t need my help. You may not be able to shoot worth a damn, but you can fight when you need to. I’ve seen you do it, and I wouldn’t let you watch my back if I didn’t know you were up for doing it again. It would have been nice if you’d have remembered the shotgun, though.”
Something crashed against the door. Both of us jumped back, ready for those things to come busting into the room.
The door shook, but it held. That first loud crash gave way to a slow, steady beating against the door, and even in the faint light I could see little streams of white dust sparkling down from the seams of the door.
At first it sounded like there was just one or maybe two of them on the other side, but gradually the noise grew louder and less rhythmic.
Soon there were dozens of hands beating against the door, and the door was moving, creaking back and forth in the hinges.
“I guess we argue about it another time,” Marcus said.
“Where do they keep coming from?”
“I don’t know, but we should probably get going.”
“I mean it, Marcus. Where do they keep coming from? First the street’s deserted, and then the next thing you know, the whole damn place is covered in them. They don’t move that fast. How does this keep happening? What are we doing to attract them?”
“What do I look like?” he said. “Do I look like I have the first fucking idea about what is going on?”
“It’s weird.”
“No shit. Tell me it didn’t take you all night long to figure that out.”
“No,” I said.
“Okay then. We can’t stay here.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere but here.” He walked to the back of the room and disappeared around a corner. “Come on,” he said. “There’s a hallway back here. Let’s see where it goes.”
For Marcus, there was no stopping and questioning what he was doing or what he was about to step into. He was tough, and he knew it. It never occurred to him that he couldn’t stand toe to toe with anything or anyone he encountered.
But I wasn’t that way. For me, rushing headlong in to a fight was just plain stupid. I only fought when I had to, and even then I tried to have a plan about it. They say opposites attract, though. Maybe that was why Marcus and I worked so well together. We counteracted the worst in each other.
As I followed him into the hallway I was still troubled by the way so many zombies always seemed to descend on us so quickly everywhere we went. It seemed impossible that death could have overtaken so many, so quickly. I thought about the crowds we had encountered, and I wondered if it was just our stupid luck or if there was something more to it than that. I wondered what Ken would have said about it.
For Marcus, it wasn’t even an issue. He seemed to think it just happened, that it was completely random, and that we just happened to fall into the thick of it because we were unlucky.
“More of the fuckers to shoot,” was all he said about it.
Behind us, I heard the sound of the door giving way, and the filing cabinet being thrown to the ground. It was a sudden, hollow sound that reverberated through the building.
“Sounds like we’re going to have some company,” Marcus said.
“Yeah. Better keep going.”
The hallway we were in connected to a whole series of small offices. They were more or less interconnected, and the walls between them were little more than particle board partitions that didn’t completely separate one cubicle from another.
Once we were past the offices we stepped into another hallway that was much narrower. There were doorways on each side that were more substantial and I guessed that they had belonged to the people who ran this place.
But there must have been another way in besides the one we took because as soon as we stepped into the hallway, two zombies came out from around a corner to our left. I stepped over and pushed the one in front into the
arms of the other one, and they both fell to the ground. I took out my pistol, but before I could fire Marcus stopped me.
“Don’t waste your bullets,” he said. “Let’s keep moving.”
We took off at a trot, winding around a couple of corners before we slowed to a walk again. The floorboards creaked under our feet, which wasn’t good. We were bringing unwanted attention to ourselves with every step.
Suddenly Marcus stopped, held his hand up, and listened to the darkness ahead of us.
I stopped too, and listened.
Footsteps. They were coming closer, too. Marcus looked back at me and I nodded back.
“Can you tell how many?” I asked.
He shook his head. “More than one,” he said.
“Okay, I’m ready when you are.”
He rose from his crouch and moved out around the corner. Then he stopped and let out a frustrated sigh. I stepped around the corner to see what he was looking at, and when I saw it, I gasped.
The hallway opened up to a landing, and beyond that was a wide staircase that led out to a row of truck bays. One of the overhead doors had collapsed, and a huge crowd of zombies was pouring in through the hole. A narrow stripe of blue moonlight ran crossways through the room below, and a small group was crossing it and mounting the stairs.
They had already seen us. I could only see a short distance beyond the door where they were coming in, but the little bit of the alley that I could see was packed in tight with bodies. From the rate they were pouring into the building, I guessed that the first floor was already overrun.
“There are so many of them,” I said.
“This is getting old real quick,” Marcus answered. “We can’t stay here. Let’s double back and see if we can get around them.”
“Right behind you.”
We both backed away from the landing. I could hear more of them coming up the stairs, and while they didn’t seem to climb very well, it was only a matter of time before there’d be enough of them to cause us problems.
We ran into a dark hallway off to our right because it looked like it went all the way back to the far side of the building.
