by Joe McKinney
Richardson was still too stunned to take in the fact that he had just lived through a helicopter crash. It was all he could do to stand on his own two feet.
Barnes, meanwhile, was digging through the cockpit for the emergency kit and his AR-15. He came up with an orange backpack and two rifles. He came over to Richardson and stuck one of the rifles into his hands.
“You know how to use that?”
Richardson took hold of the rifle, gripping it like they’d taught him in the army twenty years earlier.
He nodded.
“Good,” Barnes said. “Because we’re about to have company.”
Only then did Richardson get a sense of their surroundings. They had landed in what looked like a grocery store parking lot. He could see the tops of cars and trucks just rising above the water. Off to their right was a subdivision, the houses sagging in on themselves, empty black holes where the windows and doors had been.
There was movement all around them.
The noise of the crash, he thought. It’ll be like a beacon for the infected.
Ragged shapes that hardly looked like people anymore stumbled into the water from the subdivision, filling the air with the sounds of their splashing and their moaning.
He looked down at the gun in his hands, then at Barnes.
“Let’s move out,” Barnes said. “We’re on the clock now.”
CHAPTER 5
Art Waller was eighty-four years old and suffering from the classic one-two punch of gastrointestinal nuisances that nature so generously doles out to the elderly: a fixed hiatus hernia and a peptic ulcer.
Add to that two bad knees, a back that screamed at him every time he had to reach below his thighs, and a palsied shake that he was pretty sure was the advance calling card of Parkinson’s, and his life was basically an object lesson in misery.
Still, for all that, right now, he had no intention of giving it up.
He turned slightly. Just enough to see that the thing behind him was still gaining.
Art needed a walker to get around. The tennis balls on its legs softened the noise, but the contraption still clanked each time he put his weight on it.
Clank clank. Clank clank.
He was creeping along, but it was as fast as he could go.
He chanced another look at his pursuer. There, on the sidewalk, less than ten feet behind him now, was one of the infected. It shouldn’t be here. They were supposed to be quarantined. He had seen them on TV, and they had said they were all locked up behind the wall. It shouldn’t be here.
But it was. And it was about to catch him.
The zombie used to be a nurse here at the Springfield Adult Living Village, but she was nothing but a mess now, no legs. They’d been torn off below her thigh. Now, she was pulling herself along on her belly with raw, bloody, mostly fingerless stubs that had once been her hands, leaving a thick blackish-red snail trail behind her.
And she was getting closer.
He gasped. The sound came up inside him like the rattle of dried beans in a coffee can. He was ashamed at the weakness he heard there, angry at himself. Damn it, he’d fought in Korea. Now, this miserable body of his was moving like the hour hand on a clock.
And that zombie behind him, she was the minute hand.
It was a slow-motion pursuit, but she was going to catch him. It was just a matter of time.
Clank clank. Clank clank.
He tried a few doors, but it was the Fourth of July weekend, and there was almost nobody left here at the Village. Just a skeleton crew of staff and a few residents.
He tried another door.
“Help me,” he cried. “Please.”
Behind him, the thing crawling on the sidewalk began to moan.
The sound of it unhinged something inside him. Union troops, he remembered, waiting on one knee in some cornfield someplace, their rifles ready at their cheeks, told stories of hearing the Confederates coming toward them, the rebel yell echoing off the surrounding hillsides. It did something to you deep in your bowels, they said, rattled you.
This was infinitely worse.
He tried to go faster.
Clank clank. Clank clank.
Just ahead, there was a hallway. He could hear voices. A man’s deep voice. A woman’s laughter.
The man’s voice again.
Ed Moore, he thought. The retired U.S. Deputy Marshal.
“Help me,” he said. “Ed?”
He put everything he had into it.
Clank clank. Clank clank.
Ed Moore had moved to Florida back in February because he liked the weather. For eleven years after his retirement from the U.S. Marshals Service, he’d lived in Amarillo, the Texas panhandle, where the winters were an endless parade of icy sleet and gray skies and wind that never stopped howling. Compared to that, Florida, with its comfy little villas nestled among the bougainvillea and palm trees and the live-in staff who wandered the place in their golf carts, was an absolute paradise.
The woman, Julie Carnes, was new to the Springfield community. She’d moved in at the end of June. She’d caught his attention right off, slender, a pretty face. Not handsome, but pretty. Still wore her hair long. He liked that. He leaned against the doorway to her private cottage and tipped his cowboy hat to her through the screen door. Ed said he thought it was time he introduced himself.
She was knitting something. She folded the needles together and rested them on the lap of her white dress.
He was wearing loose, faded blue jeans, black boots, a clean white shirt open at the neck. He doffed his cowboy hat to her as he entered, exposing a thick, uncombed tangle of white hair before sliding the hat back onto his head. There was a weatherworn look about him, like he should be trailing a cloud of dust.
She said, “You the resident cowboy?”
He smiled. He didn’t mind smiling. He still had all his own teeth. “You’re just like I figured,” he said.
“Oh? And what did you figure?”
“Well, I figured I’d found somebody I could talk to.”
“How do you know you can talk to me?”
“Well,” he said, “I ain’t never seen you in purple. I hate purple on a woman. All the women around here, they wear purple like it’s some kind of uniform.”
“You mean an old-lady uniform? I’m seventy-five years old, Mr. Moore. I don’t need a uniform for people to know I’m an old crone.”
“You ain’t a crone,” he said. “You wanna know the truth? I think you’re about the best-looking woman in this place. I mean that. I’m talking about the staff, too. And by the way, you can call me Ed.”
She nodded. There was a lull.
“So, you’re here by yourself?” she said.
“For the last six years.”
“You’ve been here six years?”
“I’ve been here since February. I’ve been on my own six years.”
“Ah,” she said. “Two years for me.”
“You get lonely?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes. A girl can knit only so many scarves. Why, you asking me out?”
“Jerry Jeff Walker’s gonna be in Tampa next Friday.”
She laughed. “I knew it. A cowboy. The hat isn’t just for show, is it?”
“Been wearing it all my life. Don’t see any reason to give it up now.”
“You mean now that you’re not a marshal anymore?”
“How’d you know about that?”
She looked down at her knitting needles, fidgeted with them. “I asked around about you,” she said. He thought he saw a blush, but that might have been the light.
Encouraged, he said, “They’d don’t have cowboys where you come from?”
“I’m from Monroeville, Pennsylvania. They got George Romero, and that’s about it.”
“Ah.”
“You like living here?” she asked.
“It’s okay. Actually, to tell you the truth, not as much as I thought I would. I don’t play golf, and I don’t read like I planned on doing. Most of th
ese other guys here, they sit around all day and watch the news and talk about how much better things were when Ronald Reagan was in office. It makes me wanna pull my hair out.”
“So what do you do?” she asked. “Sit around with them and wait for something to happen?”
“Well, I had kinda thought that something just did happen.”
She blushed that time. He was sure of it.
He was about to ask her if she wanted to come back to his place for a drink when they heard panting outside the door.
“Help me,” came a man’s voice. “Ed?”
Julie looked at Ed. He frowned. He went to the screen door and poked his head out, a silhouette standing there in the sunshine.
“Art? What’s wrong there, buddy?”
“The nurse,” he panted. “Out there. She’s infected. Oh, Jesus, after me. Ed…please help me.”
“Hold on there, Art. I’ll help you.” He turned to Julie. “You mind if I bring him in here?”
“Of course not,” she said, and rose from her chair and started clearing skeins of yarn and magazines from a couch in the living room.
They sat Art down on the couch, the two of them lowering him onto his seat even as he went on frantically babbling about something going on outside in the hallway.
“What happened to him?” Julie asked.
Ed shook his head.
“Out there,” Art said. He was gasping. “She’s out there.”
“Who’s out there?”
“The nurse. She doesn’t have any legs.”
“What?”
“Ed,” Julie said. She looked frightened.
“I’ll go check it out. You stay here with him.”
He slid out the door and stood there for a moment, looking around, then headed off in the direction from which Art Waller had come.
The hallway was empty, quiet, checkerboarded with patches of sunlight and shadow, but Ed could still feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Something felt wrong.
Back in 1992, he’d gone into a house in Hugo, Oklahoma, with an arrest warrant for a militant white supremacy nut accused of a church bombing that killed two black women. The house had looked empty, but Ed wasn’t so sure. All his internal alarms were blaring. He’d stepped into a back bedroom, and something told him to stop. Looking down, he saw a tripwire under his foot that led up the doorjamb to a shotgun mounted in the ceiling. Another inch, and they’d have been cleaning him up off the floor with a sponge and some hot, soapy water.
He had that same feeling now. Moving slowly, he stepped up to the corner of the hallway and looked around. He saw a long, dark smear of blood on the sidewalk. The trail turned in to a room a few doors up the walk. He glanced behind him and saw Julie standing in the doorway, watching him. He motioned her back inside. Then he set off toward the blood trail.
The door was propped open, and inside he saw two paramedics and Art Waller’s legless nurse feeding on the body of a supine woman, her torso ripped open like a canoe. The body shook and twitched as the zombies tore into her.
Ed nearly vomited.
Three blood-smeared faces looked up at him.
Ed backed away.
One of the zombies, a tall, slender kid in his twenties whose only injury seemed to be a small but festering wound on his shoulder, got to his feet.
The next moment he was running at Ed.
Fast mover, Ed thought. But before he could react, the thing had closed the distance between them. The zombie raised its hands for Ed and Ed sidestepped him, coming up behind him and pushing him headlong as he swept his feet out from under him.
The zombie crashed headfirst into a bougainvillea bush and got wrapped up inside its dense inner branches.
When Ed turned back to the cottage, the second paramedic was already on his feet and limping more slowly than the first toward him. The legless nurse was dragging herself toward him on her belly.
He stepped out of the doorway and almost ran down the hallway to Julie’s cottage, but he stopped when he realized the zombies would follow him.
He couldn’t lead them straight to Julie and Art.
He looked around for a way out.
The first zombie, the fast mover, was pulling himself out of the tangled bougainvillea. The second one stepped out of the doorway. And now he could hear their moans. The sound carried through the courtyard and it made his blood run cold.
Without a plan, he took off running across the courtyard, away from Julie’s cottage.
They were still behind him, but he had a pretty good lead. A few quick turns, and he lost them somewhere near the path that led down to Tamiami Road and Centennial Park.
And that’s when he heard voices.
One voice, actually. A woman’s. “It was such a lovely wedding,” he heard her say. “Your Daddy was so proud. I remember watching the two of you come down that aisle, you holding on to his arm, just smiling ear to ear. I think it was the only time I ever saw him cry.”
Ed followed the woman’s voice. It belonged to Barbie Denkins, whose husband had died thirty years earlier and left her obscenely rich. The woman was in her late eighties now and thoroughly senile, Alzheimer’s. Her cottage door was standing open. There was blood on the door frame. Inside, her quarters were packed with unopened boxes of sporting goods and picture frames and vegetable juicers and miracle cleaning products, all of it sold to her by unscrupulous telemarketers she was too starved for attention to hang up on.
Off in a far corner of the room, a zombie was bumping into boxes, trying to fight its way to where Barbie Denkins sat, chattering happily away.
“You didn’t want those red flowers on your cake,” Barbie said. “But I went ahead and did it just the same, and it was a better cake for it. You tell me it wasn’t.”
The zombie saw Ed and turned his way.
Beside Ed, next to the door, was an umbrella and a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat.
He picked up the bat.
The zombie stepped around a row of boxes, its head leaning to one side at an unnatural-looking angle. One of its cheeks had been torn open so that the mouth was elongated, the bloodstained rows of its teeth visible all the way back to the molars.
It moaned as it raised its hands at him.
Ed took a step forward and swung for the fence, planting the sweet spot of the bat on the side of the zombie’s head.
The thing went tumbling backward against the wall, then landed in a heap on the floor.
It didn’t move.
There was a pain in Ed’s left shoulder, and he worked it around in the socket. The joints were protesting the sudden exertion.
“Stay here,” he said to Barbie.
Outside her door, the first of the two paramedics was coming around the corner about fifty feet away.
The second one wouldn’t be far behind.
He flexed his shoulder once again and raised the bat for another blow. He’d take care of these two, then go back inside and get Barbie.
Piece of cake.
CHAPTER 6
“What are we gonna do?” Richardson asked.
He was following Michael Barnes as best he could, wading through water that looked like melted caramel, holding his AR-15 up above his shoulders to keep it from getting wet.
“Be quiet,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m gonna get us to a secure position. A roof, if possible. From there, we’re gonna call for extraction.”
“They’ll extract us? You’re sure?”
Barnes put a finger to his lips. Then, using hand gestures, he indicated that they were going to go around the back of the grocery store and into the buildings behind it.
They couldn’t use the roof of the grocery store. Richardson knew that. Scared as he was, he’d been able to tell from the air that the building’s roof had collapsed in on itself. It wouldn’t be safe.
He turned and looked back at the wreckage of their helicopter. The thing looked like the jumbled exoskeleton of some enormous insect. A thick column of smoke rose in
to the air. Beyond the wreckage, he could see the infected already coming into the area. They were attracted to noise. All their senses worked, but their sense of hearing was the strongest. And the moaning of those already in the area would only make things worse.
He’d read Eddie Hudson’s book about the first night of the outbreak in San Antonio, and like a lot of others had, he found it hard to believe that so many of the infected could pour into a street that was completely empty only moments before. But after seeing it for himself, he knew it was true.
Michael Barnes clearly knew it, too. Like all members of the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority, Barnes was a graduate of the Shreveport Survival School. Richardson had interviewed some of its instructors and had even been through an abbreviated version of the program before being allowed to go inside the quarantine zone with GRQA agents. He had a sense of what Barnes was trying to do by guiding them against the side wall of the grocery store. Richardson was ready for the slow but steady pace of their advance, stay quiet, stop, listen, scan, and move out again. While at the Shreveport School, he had felt like a kid playing cops and robbers. But this was the real deal.
Ahead of him, Barnes stopped and looked around. He motioned for Richardson to come forward.
“When we go around this corner, we’re not gonna stop, okay? You’ll see a strip center just ahead of you. We’re gonna stay to the right of that. You got me?”
“Yeah,” Richardson said.
“That weapon you’ve got there can fire through a magazine in a hurry, so don’t lose your cool and empty the whole thing into the first zombie you see. Every shot counts, or you don’t take it.”
Richardson nodded.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Barnes stepped around the corner and Richardson tucked in right behind him. Ahead of them was a long stretch of water, the strip mall Barnes had told him about on the opposite side. In between, a few cars were sunken up to their windshields. Here and there they saw a tree.
Richardson counted sixteen zombies, all of them within fifty yards of their position and closing fast.
“Let’s go,” Barnes said.
He was already moving out, going quickly, but without splashing. It was harder for Richardson. He was terrified of moving through water, especially when he couldn’t see his feet. He had a terrible feeling that the infected were just below the surface, waiting to grab him, even though he knew that to be impossible. The infected weren’t truly dead, after all. They needed to breathe to go on hunting.
