by Joe McKinney
I don’t know what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t what happened next, for Barnes began to scream at the man’s head.
He threw it against the men’s room door.
He ran forward and kicked it like it was a soccer ball.
He said, “How do you like that, you fuckin’ piece of shit? You think you’re bad. You think you’re fuckin’ bad? Motherfucker, I’m your god!”
Then Barnes stepped forward and started smashing the head under his heel. Pounding on it. Grinding it under his foot.
“You hear me?” he screamed. “You ain’t shit next to me.”
Then he kicked the head some more.
That went on for a long time.
I got sick watching it. I was wiping the vomit from my mouth when he turned away from the battered head and the gore-stained gas station wall.
He wasn’t surprised to see me there.
He walked right by me and said, “Time to move out.”
I turned and watched him walk back to our group, where Sandra and her people were taking care of the young man and the women our sudden appearance had probably saved.
I am worried about Officer Michael Barnes.
They entered Conroe, Texas, on foot.
Nobody spoke. Nobody said a thing. Their group, which had grown to about thirty as they made their way up I-45, stayed in a cluster in the middle of the road, Officer Michael Barnes walking point about twenty feet ahead of them. They had been walking for hours. Most of the night, in fact. And now that morning had broken, they stared numbly at the pine trees and the well-kept yards and the simple, uninspired architecture of yet another small Texas town, and they were afraid of the emptiness that surrounded them.
They were on a quiet, two-lane residential street. Cars were parked along the side of the street and in driveways. Everything seemed well cared for: the houses, the lawns. Here and there, American and Texas flags still flew from poles in people’s front yards, stirring occasionally in the light breeze. And yet there wasn’t a soul in sight. The only sound was the constant padded thud of their shoes on the pavement.
Richardson, one of the few members of the group who was armed, walked behind the others, the tail to Barnes’s point.
He felt uneasy.
Something was wrong.
They were following the trail of refugees from the Houston quarantine zone and the zombies that had come with them. More of the infected were undoubtedly on the road behind them, pushing outward into new territory. So what was going on here, then? Were they in some sort of eye, the eerily calm center of the storm?
Probably so, he thought. And that ain’t good.
There was a sudden commotion up front. All at once the quiet that had been eating at Richardson’s mind was gone. People were talking excitedly, not yelling, not yet, and pointing off to the left at a fairly large brown brick building that looked like some kind of civic center, maybe a church, though there was no signage that he could see.
And then he saw the girl. She was twelve years old, maybe a year or two younger. The whole left side of her body was the color of iodine.
Dried blood, Richardson thought.
The girl was running toward them. Even at a distance, Richardson recognized the milky white eyes of the infected. She was emitting a noise somewhere between a stuttering moan and an oddly feral barking. Richardson had never heard anything like it.
The group was starting to move backward, toward Richardson’s position, and for a moment the crowd thinned enough for him to make out Officer Michael Barnes, standing perfectly still in the point position.
Barnes didn’t look around. He raised his AR-15 to his shoulder and squeezed off a round.
The girl’s lower jaw exploded in a spray of dark, wet bits and teeth.
Hit in the jaw, Richardson thought. Sweet Jesus.
The first shot spun her around and knocked her facedown on the ground. But she got back to her feet and she stumbled forward, trying to run, but managing only a careening sideways roll that made her look like a drunken sailor trying to stay on his feet after getting tossed into the street from some seedy Malaysian bar.
Barnes’s next shot put her down for good.
A few people gasped.
At first, Richardson thought they were gasping at what Barnes had just done, and maybe a few of them were, but then he saw the real problem.
From the building, a sickening moan erupted. A few of the infected appeared at one corner of the building. More followed. Richardson’s stomach turned at the sight of so many children.
Barnes wasted no time. He raised his rifle once again and, with an easy calm, fired into the approaching crowd.
Richardson turned away. Everyone around him looked stricken.
Richardson heard a woman sobbing. He glanced to his right and was surprised to see Sandra Tellez standing there. Her cheeks were shiny with tears. She looked like she was trying to make herself swallow the lump in her throat but couldn’t quite manage it.
Clint Siefer, silent as ever, put a hand on her shirt and gave it a gentle tug.
Sandra put her arms around Clint and squeezed. Then she looked toward Richardson and seemed as surprised to see him as he had been to see her.
They stared at each other, neither one speaking.
The shots kept coming, one at a time, slow and steady, like a hammer pounding on an anvil, and with each report, Sandra would flinch a little.
Richardson didn’t know what to say. He gave her a helpless shrug. There weren’t words to describe all that was wrong with the world. It was so terrible, so mean, so pointless.
He shook his head and looked away.
The shooting stopped, eventually.
Richardson looked up as the echo of the last shot died away and a silence once again descended on the world.
The group was zippering apart to let Barnes pass through. He was coming in Richardson’s direction, his weapon slung casually over one shoulder, his expression tight but revealing nothing.
Nobody spoke to him. Nobody, it seemed, could even bring themselves to look directly at him.
“There’s a Kroger up ahead on the right,” Barnes said.
At first, the words made no sense to Richardson.
“A grocery store?” he said, confused. What did a grocery store have to do with anything?
“I want you to take these people up there,” Barnes said. “But before you let everybody in, you secure the building. Send two people around the back. Have them check for more infected. If there are vehicles back there, check them to see if we can use them. Once you’ve got the place locked down, I’ll go inside and clear it.”
He ejected the magazine from his rifle, checked it, then slid in a fresh one.
“Go on,” he said. “Get moving.”
“But—”
“What is it?” Barnes said. He wasn’t looking at Richardson. He was scanning the surrounding buildings, his eyes reduced to two thin, hard slits in a nest of wrinkles. There was a two-day growth of whiskers on his face.
“I don’t understand,” Richardson said. “You want me to take them? Where will you be?”
“There are more of those things around here,” he said, and indicated the piles of bodies he had just made. “I’m gonna make sure we have a way out of here. I’ll see if I can find us some vehicles.”
“Okay,” Richardson said. That much made sense at least.
“Go on,” Barnes told him. “Get moving. We need to make this fast. I’ll catch up with you in a second.”
They stood in the nearly empty parking lot of a grocery store.
Presently, they heard a noise, a truck lumbering down the street. It was the first vehicle most of them had heard since leaving their homes and joining the trail of refugees and it created a stir among them.
The truck, a white Isuzu two-axle van, lumbered into the parking lot. Barnes was behind the wheel. He got the truck turned around and backed it up near the front doors of the grocery store. Then he got out and approach
ed the crowd.
To Richardson he said, “What’s it look like?”
“They’ve got power in there,” Richardson said. “I looked through the windows and didn’t see anybody moving.”
“Doesn’t mean it’s clear,” Barnes said. “I’ll go in and check first. What about the back?”
“Nothing.”
“No vehicles?”
Richardson shook his head.
“Okay. Well, I think I’ve got that taken care of.”
Most of the little towns they’d passed through had been cleaned out by other refugees. They had seen nothing but empty shelves and garbage and dead bodies and wrecked cars in the streets. But Conroe seemed different. Hostile as its emptiness was, it was nonetheless relatively intact. Inside the store, at least from what Richardson could see, was an embarrassment of riches. Certainly enough food and supplies for all of them.
Richardson told him as much.
Barnes considered that, then looked at the faces of the others standing behind Richardson, waiting with wide, hollow-looking eyes.
Barnes had left his rifle in the truck. Shortly after killing the masked bandits in Bammel, he and Richardson had gone into a store and found a change of clothes. Now Barnes was dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt under a thin black windbreaker. He reached inside his windbreaker and removed his .45 semiautomatic pistol.
He ejected the magazine, checked it, then slapped it back into the receiver.
To Richardson he said, “I want you to keep an eye out for any more of the infected. I saw a few a couple of streets over.”
Richardson nodded.
To the crowd, Barnes said, “Listen up, everybody. Is there anybody here who knows how to drive a bus?”
A few people raised their hands.
“That’s good. I found some transportation for us. I’m gonna go inside here and check to make sure everything is clear. While I’m gone, I want you people who raised your hands to work out who’s gonna drive first. We have two buses, so we’ll be able to divide ourselves up into two groups. Try to figure out who’s going in which bus while I’m in here.”
And with that he turned on his heel and disappeared inside the store.
A few minutes later, they heard two shots.
Richardson and Barnes walked side by side up the bread aisle, past packaged tortillas and boxes of crispy taco shells and loaf after endless loaf of bread. Richardson’s initial impression of the place was correct. It was largely untouched by the other refugees. But ahead of them, at the end of the aisle, was a thick smear of clotting blood on the floor.
As they got closer, Richardson could see that the trail of blood led through a pair of swinging doors that opened into the store’s backroom.
“You put them back there?” he said.
Barnes nodded. He reached out and grabbed a loaf of Jewish rye off the shelf, tore it open, and handed Richardson a slice.
“Thanks.”
They ate their bread as they turned in to the refrigerated section of the store, an island of coolers displaying an array of steaks and pork and chicken.
“I want to be organized about this,” Barnes said. “I know some of these people have been trapped inside Houston for a long time. They’re probably gonna want to get some huge forty-ounce rib eye or something. I can’t blame them for that, but we’re not gonna have anywhere to cook it either. We need to stick to stuff that can keep while we’re on the road.”
“That makes sense,” Richardson said. But he was surprised. He had worked up an opinion of Barnes as unbalanced, uncompromising, brutal beyond words. He had a genuine fear of him. The others did, too. They sensed something awful about him. And yet here Barnes was, calmly discussing logistics, even showing some empathy for the other refugees.
“Oh,” Barnes said, “and find out if anybody in the group is a doctor or a nurse or a pharmacist. Something like that. If so, have ‘em go through the pharmacy. I know we’re gonna need antibiotics, maybe some painkillers, things like that.”
“Okay,” Richardson said.
“I’m gonna go grab some of the others and get them to help me with loading supplies onto the truck.”
Barnes disappeared down another aisle, leaving Richardson standing there, shaking his head.
Somebody was laughing nearby. It was the reckless, drunken sound of pure joy, and with a half-formed smile on his face, Richardson followed the sound.
It was coming from Jerald Stevens. Earlier, Richardson and Barnes had found him in the candy aisle, sitting on the tiled floor, a five-pound bag of Gummi Bears turned up to his mouth. Now he was sitting on the counter of the deli, holding an enormous turkey breast with both hands and eating it like it was corn on the cob. He had already eaten a good deal of it. On the floor around him were the remains of a package of potato salad, two apple cores, three stones that might have come from some peaches or nectarines, even half of a raw zucchini.
“You eat all this?”
Jerald Stevens looked up at him with a huge grin on his face. There were tears in the man’s eyes.
He nodded at Richardson.
“Better slow down, partner. There’s plenty for everybody.”
Jerald choked down a piece of the turkey. He was breathing hard. “You know how long it’s been since I’ve seen food like this?”
“Too long,” Richardson said. He smiled. “Enjoy yourself.”
Jerald nodded. He had already taken another bite.
Still smiling, Richardson walked off to find somebody who knew something about prescription medicines.
CHAPTER 18
Nate Royal was sitting on a bench across the street from where he’d parked his van when Jessica Metcalfe pulled up in her shiny new Jag.
He smiled as she climbed out of the car. Somehow, he had a feeling he’d be seeing her today. His knee was throbbing, and in his mind, the girl and the surging pain in his knee always went together.
She was older, like about thirty-five, but the gulf between them was a lot wider than years could measure. She lived with her husband in one of the big white houses on Kansas Street. Martindale, Pennsylvania, was your typical post-industrial town, and it didn’t have much in the way of filthy rich, but the Metcalfes came about as close as anyone.
Nate, however, lived with his dad and his dad’s girlfriend, Mindy, in a rotting two-bedroom house with the railroad tracks on one side and a drainage ditch mounded with garbage on the other.
Actually, that wasn’t totally true. Actually he lived in a converted work shed behind his dad’s rotting two-bedroom house. But Jessica Metcalfe didn’t need to know that. As far as Nate was concerned, all she needed to do was shake that beautiful ass of hers all the way up the sidewalk, and she was taking care of that just fine.
Nate watched her disappear into the dark, tinted front doors of the Wells Fargo bank, and his mind tumbled back a few years, to the day her husband, the city attorney, had fired him from his job with the Sanitation Department and then turned right around and offered him a completely different job: two hundred dollars to touch up the paint on their pool house.
“Come by this Sunday,” he said. “Say, nine o’clock?”
Confused, Nate merely nodded.
Then he arrived at the huge white house on Kansas Street, and he saw the gleaming white marble trim around the pool and the dazzling blue water, and a fantasy was born.
Jessica Metcalfe, wearing an itty-bitty white tennis outfit, had showed him where he’d be working and then gone inside, and as he stood there waiting for her to come back out, he could almost picture her stepping out her back door in a red bikini, peeling it off like Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High as sun-dappled beads of water sprayed over her head.
But of course in real life, she hadn’t peeled off anything except a page of unlined paper covered with a loopy, girlish handwriting.
“Here are your instructions. You think you can handle that?”
It was real bitchy the way she said it. He had bristled at that, but h
e needed the money, so he squinted at the page and tried to make sense of what she had written. Even back in school, when the teachers were working with him in the special classes he took, he’d never been able to pull the sense out of anything more than four or five words long, and she’d written so much stuff down on that paper. He stared at it, feeling lost.
Two hours later, when she came out to check on his progress, she said, “Oh, holy hell! What have you done to my house?” He followed her gaze up to the gutters he had just painted eggshell white and couldn’t see what the problem was.
He didn’t catch what she said after that, just the part about how he was a stupid retard who couldn’t even read, but that was enough to start a trembling rage crawling up the back of his scalp.
He followed her inside the house.
She was sitting at an old-fashioned rolltop desk in the kitchen, doodling little flowers with a pink pen while she talked on the phone. She left him standing there for a full minute before putting a hand over the phone and saying, “Are you still here? You’ve done enough damage for one day, don’t you think?”
“Take it back,” he said.
Into the phone she said, “Linda, let me call you back. Uh-huh. No, everything’s fine.” Then she turned to Nate and said, “You’re getting mud on my floor.”
He looked at his feet, momentarily derailed.
“I ain’t no retard,” he said. He heard the high, squeaky register of his voice and puffed up his chest to compensate for it.
“Get out of my house,” she said. “You’re fired. Leave.”
His anger broke then and he took a step toward her, cocking his fist back as he came. What happened next happened all at once, so fast he couldn’t really piece it all together. It was like a series of photographs in his mind, arranged in no certain order.
Her eyes got huge.
His elbow bumped something and he felt whatever it was slide off the table next to him.
Some sort of fancy glass crystal vase hit the floor and popped with a hollow and expensive-sounding poof.
