by Joshua Guess
“No,” I said. “I just…look, it’s complicated. People have just never been super into listening to what I have to say. Let’s leave it at that. So, can we get to my place? It’s out of the way, and is a lot safer than it looks. I’d much rather be home than here.”
Jem thought about it for a few seconds. “I don’t want to leave you here, that’s for sure. It’s obviously not safe. But I have an obligation to get out there and help people. I don’t know what this riot is all about, but every hand will help. If the crowd outside isn’t too bad, we can get to a car and play it by ear. I should be able to take you home and get back here pretty fast.”
“Okay,” I said. “Take Morris Street, though, and you can get a look at the hospital from a distance. Might give you some idea what’s going on.”
We spent the next few minutes getting ready for whatever shitstorm we were about to walk into as best we could with what was at hand. Jem had a backup pistol strapped to his ankle he refused to let me use, but the absent captain had hobbies that helped even the score: one of those enormous athletic bags, tucked into a corner. Next to the bag rested a heavy wooden baseball bat, which I picked up and held like it was Excalibur.
I searched through the bag and found the long shin guards catchers wear, the ones that sneak up and cover the knees as well. They were huge on me, but I managed to get them on in the end. This was helped by the massive roll of athletic tape I pilfered from a side pocket, which I also used to quickly wrap my hands and wrists.
Jem watched this with obvious interest, but I ignored him. I had explained my job to him, and I told the truth. Just not all of it. Along with the more academic elements of what I did, I also performed a variety of real-world tests and experiments to create more accurate and realistic reports for my clients. That I knew how to wrap my fists was a byproduct of that.
I put both hands on the bat, feeling out its weight and balance. A crime novelist two summers earlier hired me to assemble a spreadsheet of the damage various pieces of common sports equipment and other items could do to a human body. Two weeks and three badly broken pig carcasses later, I had developed a solid respect for improvised weapons. Baseball bats were high on the list.
“Do you really think that’s necessary?” Jem asked. “We’ll be in the car.”
I shrugged. “This morning I didn’t think it would be necessary to sit in an interrogation room at the police station, and you saw how my day went. Being prepared and looking stupid is always better than looking cool and being dead.”
I kept the bat ready, but lowered it to my shoulder. “I’m ready when you are.”
Turns out no one was ready. No one in the whole goddamn world.
4
No one was in the hall, so we went through the door and out to the motor pool. Wallace being a small town, the space wasn’t large. There was enough room for a dozen patrol cars, though only a few remained. There were two unmarked cars, and the parking space marked with a sign for the ‘Tactical Response Unit’ was empty.
Also there was a guy hunched over another guy, eating him.
“Back away!” Jem shouted. I wanted to punch him in the back of the head, because we could have easily made it to one of the unmarked cars had he not announced our presence.
The dead man on the ground had his throat ripped out, blood sprayed out around him in grisly angel wings. Big pieces of his face and chest were missing, presumably swallowed by the raving nutbar digging his fingers into the poor slob’s guts.
The nutbar in question glanced up at us for the briefest of moments, but decided his meal was more important. Jem did not take this well, though I suspect he didn’t quite absorb the facts as I did.
Half the attacker’s face was badly damaged as if by a shotgun graze. The jaw had the flesh ripped away, along with the cheek and eye on the same side. That didn’t stop our boy from gobbling down another scoop of people meat. Jem stood in front of me, hesitating. I understood the problem immediately; the victim was clearly dead, nothing to be done. His killer wasn’t posing an active threat to us, putting Jem in an ethical pickle. What was the right thing to do? Did Jem shoot the man, with only strong circumstantial evidence he had killed the man beneath him? Could he afford not to, knowing the killer would almost certainly repeat his actions?
It was the sort of dilemma I could appreciate intellectually but didn’t actually suffer from myself. I darted around Jem in a wide arc and homed in on the cannibal squatting on the blacktop. Jem yelled at me but I paid no mind to it as I stepped into the swing and popped the killer a good one right to the cabeza. His head made a weird, hollow thump when the bat connected.
He didn’t take it well. The cannibal crumpled, barely catching himself by throwing his hands forward into the mess of viscera. He seemed stunned but not badly injured, so I womped him again. This time he went flat on his face, eyes losing all focus. I took advantage of the momentary stunning I’d given him by whipping the handcuffs Jem had taken off me out of a pocket and slapping them on the killer.
“Are you insane?” Jem said as he stalked over. “I could have shot you! And you can’t just go around hitting people with that thing.”
“The other option was for you to shoot him, and it didn’t look like you were going to. At least this way he can’t hurt anyone else. Now, where’s the key rack you mentioned…”
Jem sighed loudly but didn’t say anything as he pointed to the tiny shack nestled in the corner where the wall of the station met the chain-link fence surrounding the motor pool. I jogged over and searched the peg board inside for keys, which was an easy job considering how bare the lot was. I grabbed one of the two sets labeled ‘unmarked’ and tossed them to Jem when I got close.
“No more hitting people unless they’re attacking you,” he said.
“Totally,” I agreed. “Absolutely. I promise.”
“I’m not getting a sincere vibe from you,” Jem noted.
My mouth dropped open in shock. Utter shock. “That hurts, Kurtz. You’ve only known me half a day. Your judgmental attitude is unbecoming of a public servant.” I grinned at him.
“Whatever,” Jem said. “Just get in the car. The faster I get you home the faster I can help get this nightmare under control.”
I didn’t argue with him, choosing instead to stay mum on the amount of denial in that statement. Did he really think it was remotely possible he could help? If so, was it a product of an inflexible mind, an impossible level of machismo, or just plain shock? We had just been attacked inside a police station. Twice. Jem seemed to have pushed to the back of his mind the fact that so far we hadn’t seen a single person. No secretaries, no other cops, none of the staff you would expect to run into in the middle of the day.
Instead I just let him drive.
It became clear almost at once that something terrible had happened in Wallace. Thick columns of smoke could be seen dotting the sky not far away, thinner tendrils reaching for the heavens in the distance. The station we left behind was situated at the end of a cul-de-sac with a heavy stretch of woods behind it, the road leading away winding for a quarter mile before it hit civilization. The government buildings lining the sinuous road were devoid of people, but once we reached the larger surface streets, that changed.
Half a dozen bodies lay in various states of death. One had clearly been shot, obvious even from a distance. Others were like the guy back at the motor pool, with pieces missing in ragged chunks. Bitten, most likely. Several cars had been abandoned in the road, doors left wide open. A wreck—car versus tree, with the tree winning—sat off to one side, emergency lights blinking.
“How did this happen?” Jem asked. “How did everything get so crazy so damned fast?”
I wondered the same thing myself, but not in any kind of existential way. The tumblers in my head all clicked as the gears spun, and I spoke the first thing that came to mind without realizing I’d opened my mouth.
“Biological attack,” I said.
Jem’s head whipped to face
me. “What? No. No way. I’ve had to do counter-terrorism training. If this were biological, don’t you think everyone would be affected?”
“Not if the hospital was the target,” I said. “Maybe whatever agent did this was released there and lost its effectiveness. Yeah, you’re right, that sounds more like a chemical weapon. Whatever it is, it’s obvious not everyone has been hit by it.”
We meandered through downtown Wallace over the next few minutes, going slowly because of the bodies and debris everywhere. A sort of logic began to emerge from the chaos, giving me an idea of what we were looking at.
None of the affected were attacking each other. More than once I saw groups of them wandering together, changing direction like a school of fish. They ignored animals. I saw a squirrel run in front of a distant trio and none of them seemed to care.
The victims of whatever weapon had been used were easy to distinguish from normal people. Their body language was all wrong, as if they were moving with every muscle tensed as hard as they could manage. It gave them a distinctive gait.
We skirted Main Street, the backbone of downtown Wallace, for the simple fact that it was so choked with vehicles and bodies that we couldn’t have driven down it if we wanted to. The obvious correlation between population density of a given area and just how fucked that area was could not be ignored.
Jem almost stopped when we caught sight of a normal person, but by the time we understood what was happening it was too late. The man, who was middle-aged but in decent shape, was sprinting at top speed down a side street not far from the hospital. He was moving at a diagonal to us, and tripped even as we watched. The spill was a bad one; he had enough inertia to make him slide and tumble a good ten feet after he fell.
A small crowd of attackers appeared moments later and fell on him like locusts. Beside me, Jem radiated frustration, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“Nothing we can do for him now,” I said as gently as I could. “Let’s go by the hospital.”
Jem blew an angry breath through his nostrils and sped up. Part of me almost hoped he’d decided to slew sideways into the huddled mass of cannibals and broadside them to death, but the majority of my mind was happy he let reason win out. The car was too important to risk for the moment.
I expected Jem to take us along the access road a few hundred yards from the hospital, but he surprised me by veering much farther away. Wallace is composed mostly of hills with narrow, flat-bottomed valleys in between, but the Louis County Medical Pavilion was situated on a more choice cut of real estate. The sprawl of low offices connected by covered walkways radiated like spokes from a central tower eight stories high, and all of it sat on a flat tract of land.
Half a mile away, the hills rose again. The nearest of them carried County Road 11, which everyone just called 11, from which we could observe the entire scene.
The hospital was an abattoir. The vast slab of concrete the entire thing was built on was more red than not, the great smears of blood punctuated by the still forms of bodies. The missing police cruisers were easy to pick out, as each of them sat unattended with their flashers running. Even the hospital proper, the towering stack sitting in the middle of the carnage, showed signs of horrible violence. Bodies hung halfway out of windows, blood dried in long gushes down the side of the building. The top floor was actively burning, great billowing clouds of pitch-black smoke belching out.
“Oh my god,” I whispered.
“Jesus,” Jem said.
“I can’t believe those…what should we call them?” I said.
Jem blinked. “What?”
I frowned at him. “You say that a lot. You’re obviously smarter than this, so I’m going to chalk it up to shock.”
He had the grace to look slightly embarrassed. “Yeah, sorry. My mind was elsewhere.” On the horror show below, he meant. “You mean what should we call the people who have been attacking everyone. Do you think ‘infected’ sounds right?”
“We can call them crumple-horned snorkacks for all I care, we just need to have a name.” Jem stared at me with eyebrows knit together so hard I thought they’d make a sweater if he wasn’t careful. “No? Haven’t read Harry Potter? Fine, let’s call them zombies.”
“Zombies,” Jem said flatly. “Like, George Romero zombies.”
I shrugged. “They eat people and go down when you shoot them in the head. As shorthand goes, it isn’t terrible. I don’t know if they’re actually the walking dead or not, but for all intents and purposes…”
Jem waved his hand. “Fine, whatever. Zombies. What were you going to say?”
I pointed to the carnage below. “That I couldn’t believe those zombies managed this so quickly. I don’t see anyone alive, and only a few of them hobbling around. Then I thought, hey, it might be a good idea to go down there and grab some medical supplies.”
Jem shook his head. “Ignoring the fact we’d have to avoid or kill some, er, zombies, to manage that, you might want to remember the place is on fire at the moment.”
I nodded. “Exactly. It doesn’t look like anyone is coming to put it out, either. Regional has a lot of oxygen in storage, including some pretty huge liquid tanks that will eventually fail when the fire reaches them. Oxygen isn’t flammable itself, but it will make the fire ten times worse once the tanks go. It’ll leave this place the next best thing to a crater.”
“No,” Jem said. “Sorry, but I don’t plan on running in there. Fire I could maybe deal with, people trying to eat my face, but not both at once. We’re going to your place. After that you can come back here if you want, but I’m going to get you home.”
I was about to say something sarcastic, but stopped myself. It took a few seconds for Jem’s words and tone to percolate through my brain. He was holding on to one thing in a desperate attempt to keep himself on an even keel. He saw the impossibility of helping his community with every yard we drove, so he had clamped down hard on the idea that he could at least help me. Getting me home safely was literally all he could do.
“Sure thing,” I said, not looking away from the broken place of healing below us. “Let’s get to my place.”
5
We kept to the back roads, which was pretty easy since my trailer was squarely in the county’s back forty, so there wasn’t much in the way of destruction along the way. In those peaceful few minutes I had to fight the urge to let my perception slip backward. It was a defense mechanism I had worked through before; as soon as the horror is no longer in front of you, your brain wants to pretend everything is okay.
Gravel crunched under the tires of the unmarked car as we pulled in front of the double-wide. My old Jeep, a Cherokee rebuilt from the ground up, sat on its oversize tires right where I left it but with some brilliant silver lines jaggedly etched through its dark green paint.
Jem glanced at me curiously. “Think Jeff did that?”
I shrugged. “Probably. He could have parked his car on the road and walked back here without me noticing. After Nik scared him off I decided to listen to some Protest the Hero at full blast.” I took a calming breath before speaking again, because I might be comfortable cracking skulls but social convention was never not a minefield of anxiety. “You want to come in? Or, shit, you probably want to check on your family.”
“No family around here,” Jem said. “No girlfriend or anything. Got a few friends, but I…” He closed his mouth like he was trying to swallow something awful. “The rush is wearing off, you know? I just don’t think I can drive back into that right now.”
“Sure,” I said, hearing the unspoken fear with crystal clarity. He was torn because yes, he wanted to check on his friends but was terrified of what he might find. “Come on in. I’ve got plenty of food if you’re hungry, and booze if you fancy a drink.”
“Yeah, both of those things sound amazing right now,” Jem said gratefully.
Our footsteps on the deck elicited loud chuffs of excitement from inside the house, which was a good thing. I stopped before
opening the door, keys in hand, and craned my neck to look at Jem.
“Nikola needs to be introduced to you before he’ll let you in,” I said. “He’s extremely well trained, so if I give you the okay it won’t be a problem.”
Jem smiled. It was thin and weak, but genuine. “What happens if you don’t?”
“I’ll have a lot of blood to clean up,” I replied evenly. Jem’s smile died a quiet little death.
Nikola sat on his haunches just inside the swing radius of the door. His tongue lolled out in a doggy grin, his tail swishing across the carpet. When Jem came into view my dog came to his feet, alert but not aggressive.
“Nik, come,” I said. He moved to the doorway, nose uplifted. I said a command in German, and Nik’s head swung toward Jem.
“Put your hand forward, palm up,” I said. “Put it about six inches from his face and keep it there.”
Some people have an instinctive, almost unreasoning fear of large dogs. It’s probably some evolutionary holdover from when people had to compete with wolves for prey or something. Jem, as it turned out, didn’t suffer from such backward thinking.
Nik sniffed the proffered hand, then licked Jem’s fingers before losing interest in my guest entirely.
“Wow, nice place,” Jem said when we entered the house.
“Thanks, I like it.”
The compliment sounded genuine, though the few people allowed in my home invariably remarked how much it resembled a cave. The heavy coverings on the windows and dark wall panels made the place cozy for me, but Jeff’s assessment of me as an odd bird wasn’t wrong.
I walked over to the fridge. “I don’t know about you, but I could eat a horse right now. Been one of those days. You want something quick, or something to snack on while I make real food?”
Jem flopped down on my couch, which was an insanely comfortable and giant piece I’d picked up from an estate sale. “Whatever works for you. Your house, after all. I’m not picky.”
