Zombie-dem

by James J. Stubbs

  Chapter 4

  Jason Seven

  'Hey Liz. Gruesome murder case just came in on the radio. Looks like cannibalism. Want to take it?' He shouted over the convoluted and messy police office. The place was filled with officers due to the outbreak of the flu that had swept the nation, and later the world. Everyone left standing was on duty. The place was a hub of activity and a far too overly-stimulating environment. She would have taken a purse snatching case just to get out. This, in her mind, was an issue for the health services and hospitals, not the police. All they could do was administer to keep some kind of order. It was maybe one step up from babysitting.

  'Yes!' She pleaded to him and shrugged over her cold cup of coffee. She stood bolt upright and started tucking her unwashed uniform into her trousers and straightening out her tie and belt. Jace smiled back and jogged across the room to her desk. He darted between two ailing officers who had arrested some muggers and grabbed her by the hand. He pulled her away from her desk, leaving her only a second to grab her gun and safely holster it.

  For the sake of waiting for the elevator, they darted down the stairs and into the frosty cold of New York City. The snow had only just started to lie. That was going to add more chaos to the streets. New York was in the process of being strangled by a severe winter. Perhaps the worst in living memory.

  'Where are we going?' She asked and straightened out her pointed hat as she lowered herself into the police cruiser. 'And no show off driving this time!' The car was by no means any warmer than the street outside. The leather on the seats made it colder in fact. She reached behind to check on the shotgun she had left mounted to the seat by her side. It was something she did every time she got in. Kind of a ritual, kind of a support mechanism.

  'Some penthouse spot on the park.' He was obviously excited by the prospect of getting out of the cramped office of the precinct too. He revved the engine into life, in his usual mechanically unsympathetic way. At least it got the thing warm nice and quick. She always liked the way he steered the low riding black and white cruiser with his palm rather than with both hands. In turn he always criticized her for the 10 o'clock and 2 o'clock position.

  He wasn't built big, not like the usual guys she found attractive, but he was lean and slim all the same. Jet black hair and an infectious smile and love of life. He loved his job, he loved his life and was comfortable in his own skin. Even though other people thought he was silly, or even arrogant, just because he could be cocky sometimes. But let the haters hate.

  'Why are they asking us to go? That's miles away!' Not that Jace cared. He drove like a crystal meth addict and he was damn proud of it. Traffic on the streets of New York, though still congested, had been reduced to a fraction of what it used to be. That meant he could treat it like a personal race day. He slid the car in the thinly lying snow from left and to right in boisterous moves that made the tires howl in protest. Of course there was no point in doing any of it without the sirens blaring. 'Your driving makes me ill. How did you ever pass basic?' She smiled and tightened her seatbelt.

  'Please. I nailed that test.'

  'I hit the mark more than you in the firearms.' She announced proudly for what must have been the seven hundredth time.

  'And in answer to your first question... go figure. There's no one else left.' The flu really had taken its toll on New York City. Most of its population was bed bound and there was talk that this epidemic could kill more than the First World War and the Spanish flu that followed it. Everyone was scared, Cops too. No one seemed to have a hold on it. After years of threats from bird flu, or swine flu, something finally came out of nowhere to bite us in the ass. Hard.

  With his maniacal driving, they reached the side of Central Park in next to no time. This was a homicide after all. It needed expert attention but at the same time, there was no one they could save. Crime had already been done.

  A horribly dense, almost character-ful mist, was descending over the park as they exited the Cop Cruiser and reached firmly for their hand guns. There hadn't been any looting yet. But social problems like this always resulted in crime and opportunism. Why after all were they investigating a murder? One as grisly as this to add to it.

  They were met immediately by a terrified door attendant. He wore a long black coat made of waterproof but fake leather. He was covered in blood. Lizzie instinctively raised her hands into the internationally recognizable "calm down" gesture. He was shaking visibly. His dark skin had faded a few shades and his eyes were bloodshot red. He was brandishing his arm at the elbow. His coat was ripped and blood was gushing from what looked like a flesh wound. He panted in a few deep breaths and lowered his torso so he could rest his hands on his knees.

  'Ass hole bit me!' He said through almost shaking teeth. He instinctively clutched his arm tight but regretted it after the shock of pain and let go. Jace was already on the radio calling for help. It might be a while in coming. If it came at all. The wound looked bad. The flesh had born torn right to the bone. The blood covered some of the worse details but on a glance, Jace could see all the way to the bone.

  'Sir just take a seat in the car. Try to calm down.' Lizzie was keeping a respectfully safe distance from him. She was half scared and some part confused with some anger and rage built in there too. "Damn it you get one here now". She just about heard Jace shout down the radio and slam it back into its housing on top of the car's dash board.

  The man nodded and clutched his arm again. Lizzie unclipped her belt at the front and unthreaded it gently from around her curvy waist. She tucked her guns into a side pocket instead. Not quite protocol but certain circumstances called for leniency in such things.

  'Here' She passed it to the injured man. He was a heavy built guy. Tall, broad shoulders too. His gut sagged a little but that might have just been excess muscle. There was no way to tell by the shape of his coat and the way it fell over his shoulders. But he didn't strike her as a man who lacked in confidence, or any ability to stand up to anyone.

  'Who bit you... is the perp still in there?' She shouted at him in what must have looked like a fit of unkindness but she needed to start thinking hard about this most obscure of situations. He nodded frantically, held back some sick in the upper part of his throat and began coughing hard. She told him to wrap the belt around his wound to trap the blood in, but made sure he knew to release it at intervals to stop the blood pressure from building up too much.

  She placed a brave hand on his shoulder and lowered him into the cop car. It must have looked as though she was arresting him to any onlookers. She checked for their reactions.

  But there weren't any. New York had really changed. This city was never supposed to sleep. That's how it had been up until only a few short weeks ago. Now it was reduced to a ghost town. Like Chernobyl almost. Before her thoughts could drift any further, she was certain she heard a distant scream coming from the park opposite, but Jace grabbed her attention before anything else could.

  'Let's go.' He placed a firm but kind and caring hand on her lower back. It was no wonder they both got teased at the precinct. Nothing was going on. But they both probably hoped something might. He cast a sympathetic and genuinely concerned look at the tall black man sat panting in the back of the police car. He nodded back and mimed the words "Go get the son of a gun". Jace smiled at him and opened the door so they could talk.

  'You take it easy. As soon as an ambulance pulls up then flag it down.' He grabbed both shotguns from behind the seat and passed Lizzie her favorite. They both had different feels to them, almost unnoticeable to anyone else, but the weight balance on them was different and just the way they recoiled after a burst shot was different. He pulled back the slide on the ancient looking pump action shotgun to check there was a shell in each of the dual barreled assemblies. Happy that it was ready to fire, he held it tightly in both hands and squared up to the door ahead.

  Jace held his gun over one shoulder. Always did fancy himself as a cowboy. But he used the free hand
to radio for help. No one was coming. He knew that before he took the time to bother asking. But it was worth a try.

  'Any Intel then?' He waited for a reply through the crackling radio and stepped through the swiveling glass doors and into the polished, marble stoned, lobby of the swanky apartment block. All he could make out over the commotion on the other end of the radio was "top floor". So it had to be the penthouse then.

  He dashed over to the old elevators at the back of the grand lobby but they were predictably not responding to his jabs against the buttons. Power had been really unreliable since the flu hit. Most of the power plant operators and any countless numbers of support staff were probably bed bound just like the rest of the cities populace. The elevators stood motionless behind an old and heavily polished metal grate. This building must have been built five lifetimes ago.

  'Stairs?' She asked already seeing his face start to twist.

  'This is where you tell me I need to do more cardio isn't it?' She smiled but he was very serious. That was a bit odd in a way but he often slipped into two very different modes. One ultra serious but still maintained the smokescreen of light humor, and one ultra silly. She never did decide which one she liked the most.

  She scanned the foyer as quick as she could to find the stairs. The walls were painted in a brilliant shade of white and were home to many oil paintings of many famous and not so famous characters. A lot of people must live here. That was going to make things hard in the long run.

  Panic could set in quickly when something like this happened and the official advice from the government was to rest as much as possible if you were unfortunate enough to come down with the flu. Even those who showed no symptoms were told to stay inside and lock the doors. So a building full of sleeping rich people, waking up to two cops storming through on the hunt for a cannibal, was probably going to cause a stir. She finally spotted a nook in the corner with a fire escape symbol atop the corner. That must be the entrance to the stairs.

  'We can't get to the penthouse by these steps.' He announced confidently as he strode up the steps two by two. He was going to burn out if he kept racing up them like that, but the situation did call for a lot of urgency.

  'How do you know?' Lizzie tossed away her hat and unfastened her raven hair to get some air to her forehead. Her tie was quickly jettisoned too.

  'Don't they all have personal access elevators and things?' He was guessing, probably basing it on a movie he had been watching. But come to think of it, he was probably right.

  'We can just get as high up as we can.' Lizzie made the best of it. They raced as fast as they could but did so in silence. The exertion of sprinting up stairs was enough to take their breath away. Jace threw away his jacket and let it plummet down the middle of the stairwell and unbuttoned his short a few holes too. Lizzie did the same.

  'Here!' He finally panted and approached the final door at the top of the stairwell. 'I hope the personal elevator has a power supply of its own.' He grumbled and formed up at the grey and windowless door. He took to the right and she to the left. 'Is it my turn, or is it your turn?' He cocked a single eyebrow and stared right into her crisp eyes.

  'I don't know...' They actually did keep track. Police partners always had their quirks. It kept them sane and helped them through. 'I guess you can owe me one.' She nudged him gently in the middle of his chest and opened the door, shotgun ready.

  Nothing. 'Clear.' She almost forgot to announce as per her rigid training. But her eyes had focused on something down the corridor. The decor was very much the same as the foyer below. Marble floors, polished heavily, white walls and ornate doors to either side. Two doors to the left of them and two doors to the right. These apartments were huge, one per corner of the building it would seem. The corridor formed a cross shape with an opening of sorts in the middle. They would need to check that and remain hopeful of finding an elevator with an independent power supply.

  'What is it.' He had crept behind her, not to scare her, but to see over her shoulder. She jumped a little but elbowed him for the trouble. She nodded to the other side of the building, to the only of the carved wooden doors that was open.

  'Yeah... what is that?' Jace cocked back his shotgun and started to run. 'My turn.' He whispered back to her. She gave chase as the object finally came into view. A foot was hanging out of the door but appeared motionless.

  'Get the fuck up!' Jace never swore.

  There was no response to his shouts though. Lizzie caught up to him after carefully checking around the cross shaped corridor for anything else out of place. She would have to trust her gut for what qualified as "out of place" these days. Jace was just about ready to move around the corner, shotgun ready, he stared down the barrels to the sight at the end.

  'Last chance. Get the fuck up!' He was really upset. With no answer he burst around the corner to be met with a gruesome sight. The man was dead. Was it a man? There wasn't really any way to tell.

  'What the hell...' He trailed off into his thoughts and almost forgot about his partner. He could forget sometimes that he had been doing this a fair bit longer than she. He was a native New Yorker, she wasn't. Gruesome sights were a part of the job, in some ways they were part of New York. He only realized he hadn't warned her when she gasped for breath and immediately turned away with both hands over her face, her shotgun dropping to the floor with the shock of the sight.

  'Damn... I'm sorry Liz.' He left the victim's side, threw his shotgun back over one shoulder and held her tightly with his free arm. She let him at first but soon pushed away and picked up her own weapon. Embarrassed. 'Try not to drop it again. Could be your lifeline someday.' He did his best not to sound condescending. She hated him for it but he was right. She wiped away a single tear and nodded a half baked nod.

  The victim was barely recognizable as human. The face had been clawed away, leaving nothing but blood spilled eye holes and patches of flesh. It wore a dressing gown and pink slippers. Its chest had been ripped open and its organs fully removed. Lizzie kept things together and swallowed another ball of stomach contents that was determined to force its way back to the surface.

  'I heard the virus is different in other parts of the world.' Jace pushed the victims foot back inside of the apartment and closed the door. He lay one gentle hand on her shoulder. He could have stared at that corpse with morbid curiosity for hours. But there was nothing he could do.

  'I didn't hear anything like that.' She sobbed.

  'It has rabies like qualities in other parts of the world. Apparently its an aggressive flu strain baked inside an incurable rabies variant.'

  'Oh fuck...' Her face dropped at the prospect and her grip unintentionally loosened on her shotgun. 'Do you think that's what this is?' She wore her concern with her voice. It was trembling like her hands.

  'Maybe.' He must have been scared. He must have been. But like the hero he was, once you peeled back his insensitivities and flaws, he didn't show it. He took hold of her hand and led her back to the center of the hallway.

  There was, true to his predictions, an elevator there. By the sights out of the window there was a storm front moving in. One so much more intense than anything either of them had seen or could imagine. The mist that had been lowering around Central Park had drawn in thicker and faster than they thought it might, and snow had begun to fall in volumes alongside it.

  But he could also guess by the height that they were getting close to the top of the building. The elevator they were stood beside would probably take them all of the way to the top.

  He sighed and pressed the button on the control panel in hope that it would work. It was surprising for them both when the yellow backlight on the touch pad sparked into life. He lifted up his arm to her chest and pushed her back. The book really was out of the window now, sending protocol with it.

  Lizzie could feel herself falling down a long rabbit hole. He braced his shotgun against his shoulder and nodded at her to do the same. He could hear the elevator sl
owly drawing closer from the top of the building. It pinged a few times and there were a few clangs of metal on the way too. He held up two fingers to give Lizzie the signal for a deep breath. It would steady both their heartbeats and their aim.

  The elevator slowly eased open. The blood started flowing as soon as it did. There was no one inside but the blood pooled on the floor of the elevator was easily an inch deep. It seeped out of the gaps in the panels, and spilled out onto the floor in front of them. Not enough to wash around but enough to splash under their boots as they steadily stepped inside.

  'None of this can be good...' Jace pressed his finger against the symbol for the top floor. It usually must have had a lock mechanism on it. There was even a brass key in the base of the instrument panel. That could only mean one thing... the original victim had let the person who later murdered them into the elevator themselves. It must have been someone they knew.

  He cast Lizzie a concerned look from the corner of his eye. She leaned past him and jammed her finger into the button herself.

  'Nut up or shut up.' She said and straightened out her face with a deep breath and a slap from the back of her hand. She gripped the shotgun as hard as she could but held it at her waist.

  'Infectious, isn't it?' Jace smiled and held his shotgun like it was an elongated hand gun in one hand, and drew his pistol in the other.

  The door eased open to reveal an open plan living room. Their choice of furnishing was mostly traditional. There was even an antique globe at the back of the room. But there was no time to admire any of the collected wares. Or even the liquor cabinet behind the golden plated bar to the left hand side of the room.

  'Do not move!' Jason shouted and darted over the distance between themselves and the standing perp. Blood dripped from their hands which were hanging to either side of their body. It hung its head loosely over its chest. It wore black, was thin from undernourishment and flu, so no way to see if it was male from behind. Jace had been ready to tackle them to the ground had he needed to. He wasn't expecting it to stand still.

  'Jace, move back.' Lizzie barked at him, a lot more desperate than usual. He would normally have ignored her, but listened just this one time. As well he did. The person swiveled on the spot and started growling. It had the features of an elderly woman, but with milky white eyes and blood dripping from both corners of her mouth and hands. She began to howl. The sound was terror inducing, high pitched, and bone splintering. It lurched once for Jace, who moved swiftly out of the way.

  'Get down on the ground!' He yelled at the ageing woman but she didn't seem in the mood to listen. She didn't know why she noticed, but the woman was grinding her teeth. Was it some kind of anticipation? Because chances were, that it was this woman that had eaten the poor person a few floors below!

  Lizzie took the shot. Without even thinking. The creature dropped to the leopard skin carpet and bled out in moments. The shotgun had torn open a sizeable chunk of her chest cavity and splattered organ parts a good distance across the room.

  'What have I done?' She started shaking for just a moment but Jace was on her like a shot. He took the gun out of her hands and placed it on the coach to their right hand side. He held her gently but she struggled free to grasp for air.

  'Just relax... this was going to happen eventually.' He tried his best to comfort her. She had never killed anyone before. He had seen cops quit over it before.

  'All units check in.' The voice came in over the radio. It sounded calm at the precinct. You could usually hear some chattering or something over the radio whenever they called. But this time was different.

  'Detective Seven here.' He waited while a few other units called in.

  'Do you have phone signal?' The operator asked in a very "matter of fact" way.

  'Copy.' He checked the bars on his android phone and tapped it out of sleep mode.

  'Do you have it too?' The operator asked but Jace didn't reply. There was a video pre-loaded on his phone and the play icon flashed incessantly red.

  'Err.. yeah, copy. I think.'

  'Watch it.' He put his radio down a moment and pressed the play button. He made Lizzie watch it too. Even though she seemed in no mood to. Anything to take her mind off would be momentary relief from the guilt that must have been overpowering her.

  The video showed an aged man shooting at milky eyed creatures while barking orders at a scientist that was nowhere on the screen. He was riding a push bike by the looks of it through some virtually abandoned street in an unnamed northern city in England. He could only tell because the video contained a map in the corner. Was someone trying to get some kind of message out? Or a warning? They looked the same. The old woman Lizzie had just blown away with her shotgun and the people on the video. The aged man on the video was trying to convince the scientist of something judging by the heated conversation. Trying to convince him that the dead were walking.