by Turner, Ivan
Breathing a sigh of relief, Spinelli dropped the order to the other entrances. All but Entrance 3 acknowledged. Entrance 3 was on the north side of the building facing an outside common area. It was flanked by two dead end streets, well secluded.
"There's trouble at three," Spinelli shouted into his radio, sprinting away from Entrance 2 and around the corner. He almost ran headlong into a wandering zombie. At the last minute, he put on the brakes and tripped over his feet getting out of its path. Scrambling to keep his balance, he dropped both his rifle and his radio. The firing squad had been overrun. Two of them were down, fighting with their gloved hands while a mass of undead tried to get through their gear. The other two were still up, firing pistols at close range. Why hadn't anyone radioed in the trouble?
The zombie went for him, but he scrambled out of the way and pulled out his pistol. Two shots later, the thing lay sprawled. Another two were approaching and he cleared them quickly. Grabbing up his radio, he called for a status report. Despite the attempt at blocking up the doors, the zombies had broken through two other entrances. All at once, he saw the flaw in his plan. Hindsight truly is 20/20. He ordered his people to fall back and call for reinforcements. The situation had gone from bad to worse in the blink of an eye. In a moment it would go from worse to catastrophic. He wasn't sure he could prevent that.
This is how these things happen, he thought to himself. This is how the world ends. It’s not the zombies that take over the world. It's our dumb mistakes that hand it to them.
He took two steps away from the scene, then changed his mind. He could either attempt to save his four shooters and probably die or he could run and face his errors. Spinelli was a fairly well respected police officer. That he was out of his league on this operation was not entirely his fault. But the idea of having to face all of the people who were going to suffer for his screw up was way more frightening than the amount of undead now pushing each other unobstructed through Entrance 3. So he grabbed up his rifle, took a deep breath of clean air, and waded into the fight.
***
Many hours and countless resources had been spent overnight on working out the best approach for Smith and his squads. They had poured over city plans, trying to determine how the zombies had been smuggled into the building without the residents' knowledge. He was sure that some must have known. There would be a smell coming up through the vents and the landlord would have had to have been paid off not to investigate. There was also the superintendent and those closest to the area of concentration. In the end, they found a sewage pipe that had burst several years before and been capped off rather than repaired. Nothing flowed through it at this point, although God knew what lived inside. Getting an army of zombies through it would have probably been pretty easy. The only access was a subbasement. Most of the tenants probably didn't even know it existed. All they would have had to do was punch a hole through the floor and move the zombies up. Easy, right? He wondered what kind of a person it would take to accept that kind of job. He wondered how many of those people had given their lives away in transporting those dangerous creatures. Assuming they'd been conscientious enough to seal up the hole in the floor, Smith and his people could go in through the main entrance, cordon off the stairs, and head down two men at a time. They might be able to clean out the basement without evacuating the building. They might also screw it up and throw away a lot of lives.
Smith ordered the evacuation.
They would call it a bomb threat. First he sent into his task force the cover the basement stairs and take up positions in the lobby. At this time of the morning, those areas were deserted. When all of his men radioed that they were in position, he sent regular police in to go door to door.
A swarm of officers in standard uniform went into the building and into the stairwells. There were eight floors in the housing project. As the group reached the second floor, six officers peeled away and the rest continued on up. Six more officers were heading out of the stairwell and onto the third floor when the screams began.
"What the hell was that?" Smith cried into his radio.
But no one was answering. All at once, the entire place erupted in gunfire. The front door burst open and task force officers began an organized retreat. Smith rushed forward, abandoning his command post, and grabbed the first man he saw.
"What's going on," he cried at the man's visor.
"The whole building's infected," he said. "They're all over."
Smith let him go, staring forward. The last of his task force men came out of the building, these men laying down covering fire as they exited. He waited and waited but not one regularly uniformed officer had come through. They had all been cut off in the stairwells, all forced to move up instead of out. Inside the building, he could still hear shouts and pistol fire.
How did this happen? he thought to himself. When did this happen?
First he put four shooters fifteen feet from the entrance. They had orders to shoot anything coming out. Then he ordered his officers into a line where they could be inspected for wounds. Finally, he got the city on the phone to confirm that the building was still occupied. It was. Or, at least, it had been.
"Smith," called one of the radio operators. "I've got an Officer White on the radio."
Smith rushed over and grabbed it. "Officer White, can you give me your status."
"They came into the stairway and cut us off," she replied. She sounded tired and frightened. "I saw six people grabbed and mauled while the rest of us, the lucky ones, scrambled into the hallways. Some others headed up the stairs."
There were still gunshots coming from the building but they were thinning out.
"Where are you now?"
"I managed to get into one of the open apartments and take out the zombies in here. I've barricaded the door but they're out there and they're trying to get through."
"Are you alone?"
"Yes."
"Are you wounded?"
There was a hesitation. Smith didn't bother to repeat his question.
"There's one other thing," she said. "I don't know what you're planning but there are people in here. These walls are thin and I can hear them. I can hear them crying."
Smith walked away from the radio and inspected his available troops. He didn't know what had happened, how the building had become a plague zone, but he wasn't willing to sacrifice even one life that could be saved.
He faced the assembled officers. "There are survivors in there so we're going to go back inside and clean it out the hard way." He looked at the assembled men and women. Many of them had removed their helmets and he could see what the encounter had done to their morale. He looked at the medic and she gave him the thumbs up. No one was wounded. No one would be turning. Yet.
As inspiration, he went over to the van and pulled out some gear. In front of all of them, he began to suit up.
"Relay the situation to Naughton," he said to the radio man.
When he was geared up and ready to go, he faced his officers again. "Okay," he said. "Who wants to go first?"
***
In the end, Heron chose the Museum of Natural History. It had been years since he'd been there and Mellie was just the right age to appreciate it. They were having a butterfly exhibit that she would just flip for. So the Heron family caught a train uptown. He would have liked to take a horse drawn cab ride across Central Park, but the weather precluded it. Mellie wouldn't take kindly to the cold. So they crossed town on the train at 42nd street and transferred, riding back uptown to the museum. It was a long trip, but it was worth it. Mellie loved the trains and didn't get to ride them nearly as often as she liked. They reached to museum shortly before noon, grabbed some lunch nearby, and headed inside.
It was a brilliant afternoon. Even the grey snowy skies outside couldn't do anything to dampen the Heron family spirit. Anthony himself felt better than he had in a long time. Even his work as a homicide detective had forced him to shackle his emotions. Now he was free. He laughed and
made silly jokes. He took Alicia in his arms and kissed her deeply in front of a room full of people. Whenever Mellie asked him what could be deemed a scientific question about butterflies, he made up the most ridiculous answer he could think of and passed it off as fact. Alicia scowled at him but was having too much of a good time be genuinely angry.
As they moved though the butterfly exhibit, Heron marveled at the artistic symmetry of the creatures. He had never been interested in nature. He'd never been interested in anything really. For all of his life he had kept himself so firmly grounded in reality that those things hovering just outside the range of his peripheral vision may as well not have even existed. He looked at Mellie and, for a moment, tried to see things the way she did. He tried to remember being a child and seeing things just that way. Had he never been like that? Never?
And today? Today was a façade, an anomaly. Heron was performing based on his emotions. But it made his family so happy. What he truly wanted was to be the man he appeared to be just then. He wanted the façade to crumble away and reveal that very same man beneath. Alicia wanted him to retire. He could do so. He had his twenty years. But men like Heron didn't put in twenty years and then retire. It wasn't dedication. It was obsession. And it wasn't the police work that obsessed him. If he'd been anything else, he was sure that he would have discovered that same obsession. Still, maybe it was time to turn that obsession toward being a husband and father. Maybe it was time to retire and work retail security twenty hours a week while collecting his pension. He wondered how many zombies a mall cop saw on a daily basis.
"You okay," she asked, breaking his reverie.
He nodded and smiled. "I feel good," he told her. "I feel really good."
***
It had been too much to ask for. Six simultaneous operations going smoothly and without casualties? Naughton may as well have asked Santa for a new bicycle. He was already on the phone, trying to divert people to Spinelli's location when he got the call from Smith. For the life of him, he wasn't sure which situation was worse. Spinelli was missing and there were zombies pouring into the street. But Smith's housing project was infested and there were people trapped in their apartments.
And then there was Henry. There was no word from Henry.
At the time, the other three operations were under way. Baches and his team were still setting charges while Parrish and Horton had yet to complete their sweeps. Since the latter two were at locations that were allegedly unoccupied, Naughton ordered every last expendable person to Spinelli's location in New Jersey. Smith's situation was at least contained so regular cops could handle the outside while he brought a team in to sweep for survivors. With the commissioner's permission, Naughton diverted forty cops to that location. He soon got word that Horton and Parrish had dispatched their extras. Henry had checked in. He was in trouble. Of course. Like Smith, Henry had a contained situation. Naughton told him to evaluate the possibility of a rescue. If he wanted to take a crack at pulling Rollins and his team out, then he could try. Otherwise, he wanted the entrance to the place sealed up tight. They could pop the cork and clean it out later.
After this debacle, he didn't know what was going to happen. If New York became a quarantine zone, that meant that they would receive no help in battling the zombies and the infection. As it stood, the commissioner was talking about asking for military aid. Without it, the problem might quickly escalate. Then what would happen? Would they bomb New York?
Naughton had to push those thoughts from his mind. This was the United States of America. It wasn’t some backwards country on the ass end of the world and it wasn’t some cheap dime store novel. Every last person would fight for every last person. Right?
***
“Is Naughton on his way?” Smith asked the radio operator.
The young man shook his head. “Sorry. He says that two of the other operations went south and he has to monitor from headquarters.”
Smith had no business running this operation from the inside. By all rights, he should be doing what Naughton was doing and controlling things from without. But he didn’t feel right sending men and women into a dangerous building while he himself was unwilling to go. He’d geared up and stepped into line first to motivate them.
“Okay, we’re going to do this floor by floor, cleaning each one out and evacuating the people inside. No risks and no heroics. We have to hold the stairway or else we’ll get trapped. Can I get a status on that basement?”
“The basement door was sealed and showed no activity,” someone said.
Smith nodded. “I’ll take point. Lefferts and Chopra put your guns on that basement door. Any questions?”
There were none. After all, how complicated was it?
Moving up to the front doors, Smith could see activity behind it. The glass was smudged but there were two or three zombies milling around behind it. The guards he’d left there were tense, their fingers on their triggers. But the zombies didn’t seem to notice. Unlike their normal portrayal in the movies, they weren’t banging on it, trying to get out. Somehow, Smith found it more unsettling that they just didn’t seem to care about the people outside.
He ordered one officer to each side of the door. When they pulled the doors aside, he and the guards fired inside and brought down the zombies. Then Smith moved in, checking the corners. The lobby was a small affair, with two elevators directly across from the entrance and the staircase just to the right. There was a heavy door that led from the lobby into the staircase with a small glass window at head height. Filling the frame was the ghoulish face of one of the undead. So much for bucking the stereotype. To the left was another door, this one with no window and a sign that had, at one time, read Staff Only. The words had been scratched out and replaced with Fuck Off. According to the plans, it was a storage room. It encompassed the rest of the ground floor as there were no apartments down there. Smith was inclined to leave it alone and prioritize the survivors above, but gave in to his better judgment. As they went up, he wanted to make sure that there were no zombies between him and the main entrance. Normally, he would have ordered everyone out the fire escape, but they were rusted and dangerous. This was one of those buildings you read about on the news after half the population dies in a fire.
He put a guard on the stairwell and made his cautious way into the storage room. Almost immediately, he heard something banging around in the dim area.
“This is the police,” he called out. “Identify yourself.”
Slowly, a head peaked out from behind a row of shelves toward the back of the room. Smith leveled his weapon. “Identify yourself,” he repeated.
“Um…Earl Wakefield. I’m Earl Wakefield!”
The man was wearing dirty blue overalls and a faded grey T-shirt underneath. He was an older black man with mostly grey hair and a sagging face. He put his hands in the air, obviously not knowing whether to be more afraid of the zombies or the cops.
“Mr. Wakefield, are you harmed?”
“Uh…no… I ran in here before it all went really bad…”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah, I am.”
Smith turned to Owens on his left. “Take him outside, get him checked out and get a statement.”
Owens nodded and escorted the man out. Smith did a cursory check of the storage room and then had the door closed. Entering the lobby, he noticed that the knob to the stairwell door was turning. Lefferts and Chopra were ready, waiting for the thing to finally figure it out. Smith marched forward and grabbed hold of the knob.
“Ready?” he said to the two officers.
They nodded.
He pulled open the door and turned his head away from the gunfire that followed. He closed his eyes, noting that the shooting lasted a bit longer than expected. There were four zombies in the stairwell. Lefferts and Chopra pulled pistols and made sure that the dead would stay dead. Smith ordered the bodies cleared and then checked the way up and the way down.
