To the east, in front of us, there were another eight or so zombies. More gowns, more military, more civilians. My stomach rolled and flopped. I thought I might vomit and probably would.
I wanted a cigarette. A beer. A burger. I felt famished.
“Chase.” Dave waved me on. He was ready. Time to go. Time to leave Palmeri and Saylor to their fate. She struggled to keep Saylor on his feet. His weight had to be wearing her out. He definitely rested it all on her shoulder.
A horrible fate.
I sucked in a deep breath and sprang into action.
Not toward Dave. I just couldn’t. I ducked under Saylor’s other arm.
“Get out of here,” he said. “You guys have a better chance. Take Palmeri and get out of here. Fight a way through them.”
“We’re all getting out of here,” I said. It couldn’t be true and didn’t even sound realistic when I said it out loud. Fairytale or not, I committed. “Now fucking help us, help us!”
Saylor’s jaw tensed. He set his foot down, placed weight on his injured leg and winced. He manned up and hobbled with some speed.
Dave grunted, turned, and slashed his blade as if it was a Samurai sword with only an eight-inch reach. I didn’t stop him. He ran into the converging mass. With a swipe, he sliced open a throat, drove the blade into an ear, and stuck it into a third zombie’s Adam’s apple.
“Chase, behind you,” Dave said. He fought, killed, and was still able to warn me.
“Hold him,” I said, not waiting for Palmeri to acknowledge.
I spun around. The burnt zombie closest to me had her arms out, and what was left of her mouth was open. The blackened skin peeled, flaking off her face. A black tongue darted out of her mouth, licking at air the way an iguana or snake might, as if blind, and it used that muscle to sense prey in the area.
With a slash, I chopped the tongue out of its mouth, and heard it plop into a puddle of mud. The thing stepped on its own tongue without losing a sluggish step toward me.
Grabbing it by the hair, I pulled the head forward and drove my foot into its gut. With it doubled over, I slammed my blade to the hilt into the back of its neck, and twisted.
Looking up, I saw more zombies coming. We were definitely surrounded. My breathing was quick and shallow. Sweat dripped from my armpits. I felt claustrophobic. My eyes darted left and right, but I did not see a way out of this. No easy way.
I pulled out my knife. The zombie woman collapsed in a heap of dead carcass at my feet. I stepped around it to the side and used my elbow like a battering ram smashing it into the head of a hospital-gowned creature. Through a solid punch into the jaw of another, and used the blade to disconnect most of its head from the rest of its body.
I heard the others behind me, all engaged in a fight for survival.
One of those fast zombies charged from around a corner, knocking the slower shuffling dead from its path. I saw it, but could not react. My knife was buried deep into the flesh of a beast and I could not remove it. I let go of the handle and threw my hands up, which was the only way to defend myself from the attack.
A gunshot rang out.
In mid-flight, the fast zombie dropped, as if a bird shot out of the sky.
At the next set of apartments was someone with a rifle.
There was no time to yell out a thank you. I reached down, yanked my blade free and punched it between the eyes of the next gowned zombie. Holding the thing by an ear, I pulled my blade free, and the ear off of its head.
More shots came from whoever it was on the opposite side of the zombies. With deadly aim, he dropped creature after creature. He walked towards us as he fired. He used his rifle completely different from the way I had. I pressed the trigger like a person with an incurable twitch. He took single shots, hit a target, and then went on to the next.
I knew who it was, who it had to be. Not sure why, but I felt relieved.
As Spade got closer, the zombies around us got more dead.
I ran my shoulder into a zombie’s back. It had turned from me and had been walking toward Spade. My knee crunched into its spine as we hit the ground. I ran the blade across the back of its neck, raised it high, and holding it in both hands brought it home. My hand shook as the sharp teeth on the steel chewed through its spinal cord.Spade held out a hand and pulled me up. “We’re out of ammo,” I said.
“I’m just about out, too.”
There was no time, but I still wondered where Chatterton and Vitale were. Feared the worst. Got to a point where hoping for the best just didn’t seem to make sense anymore.
Dave and Palmeri held their own. Spade and I joined their end of the fight. We ran past Saylor, who held his knife close to his chest. He must be out of ammunition as well. He appeared ready to battle anything that got close, and I’ll bet thankful nothing had yet.
It resembled a barroom brawl. Punches thrown, kicks delivered. Dave head-butted a zombie, then crashed his elbow into the face of one behind him. Palmeri could scrap. She grabbed at arms, and broke bones with her knees. Thought I saw some martial arts training in her moves. Nothing Jackie Chan worthy, but by the speed and fluidity, it was evident.
The quicker we clear the dead the faster I could get back to my kids. With that in mind, that solitary inspiration, I kicked down at the top of a zombie’s knee. The crunch of bone and cartilage was loud. The thing didn’t cry out, but it crumbled. I stepped on its back. Pulled on its hair; ran the blade across its throat fast, hard, and again, before shoving the blade to the hilt through the temple. An eyeball popped from the socket, perhaps making room for the passing by of the blade’s serrated edge.
Saylor screamed.
I looked up. He was down with two zombies on him. He stabbed at one of them repeatedly. The blade punctured the thing’s side. Intestines spilled out. The zombie kept at him with mouth open and teeth bared.
The way Saylor’s arm was almost pinned, there wasn’t much more he could do. Without bullets to destroy the brains, simply slitting a throat or stabbing them repeatedly was as useless as blowing a hole in their chest with a shotgun. Had to stop the head, the brains, because all other efforts were pointless.
My feet fought for traction. The cold muddy ground was like ice. As I made my way toward him, I watched the second zombie, bite the lobe from Saylor’s ear. It tore at the flabby flesh and tugged at it. The chewing is what disgusted me most. It gnashed teeth on Saylor’s lobe, tongue licking at its lips to swipe at spilling blood.
Saylor screamed and screamed. Partly from the pain of the bite, I assumed, but mostly from anger. Angry he’d been bitten, and angry he couldn’t do shit to get the zombies off him.
I dropped to a knee in front of it. The thing looked up at me, let out a guttural roar and hiss. I saw a small flab of lobe on its tongue, sloshing around inside its mouth. I stuck my blade into its mouth until the tip poked out of the back of its head.
The milky white eyes stared at me. No way had they seen me. Not anymore. I’d stabbed the fucking life out of it for good, for real, this time.
Saylor managed to kill the one he’d been struggling against, the one that had distracted him while the other ate his ear.
“It bit me, man. It bit me,” he said. He was on one knee, the injured leg extended.
“You’ll be all right,” I said. No idea why. We both knew he was fucked.
He didn’t even humor me; wasn’t interested in being passive. He was military. He took action. What I never expected was the action taken.
He started to growl.
I thought, ah fuck, he’s changing into one of them already? Was it that fast? How fucked was I being this close to him. I need to get up, get away, and keep moving.
I had been wrong. He wasn’t changing. He was working up courage or strength, or both. All at once, he grabbed the top of his bitten ear with one hand and then with the knife in his other, severed the ear off. It wasn’t a clean cut. It bled profusely. Blood just seemed to leak from the side of his head.
Saylor
held his ear in front of his face. His jaw set, mouth open. Muscles bulged on his neck. His arms shot to his side. He looked up into the fiery night sky.
“I’m not going to turn into one of those things, McKinney. I fucking ain’t, I just fucking ain’t.”
Spade came over and looked at the ear Saylor held in his hand. “It fuckin’ bit you and you chopped your ear off?”
“Fuck yeah, I did.” He was charged with energy with muscles tense all over his body.
“Fuck yeah!” Spade matched tempo. Had to be a military thing. Reminded me of a football team encircling each other on the sideline before the game, jumping up and down. Psyching each other up and out. Comrades. Buddies. Brothers.
They both howled. Except this time when Saylor looked to the sky like a wolf, Spade punched the heel of his hand into Saylor’s face; drove the nose bone into the brain. Saylor fell over, flat onto his back. Mud splashed out around him.
“Can’t risk it,” Spade said. Not sure he was talking to me.
I stood up. Looked around. The carnage was everywhere. The dead finally dead and we’d lost one, which was too much. The guy had cut off his own ear to live. “Now what?”
“We get back to the ship; we get the fuck out of here.”
“Lieutenant Marfione’s holed up in one of these,” I said. I used the radio on my sleeve. The bud dangled, resting on my chest. I lifted it and stuffed it back into my ear.
“Anything?”
“Nothing. But after the explosion we couldn’t hear anyone earlier, just him, Just Marf.” I tried reaching the L.T. again.
“The radios are crap. It’s that simple. Government issue. The moisture, the distance – short as it is – could be a million reasons why it doesn’t work. Ours, mine anyway, cut out right away.”
Had Allison or my kids tried reaching me or tried to find out what was going on? Where or how we were doing?
We needed to find Marf, yes, but we needed to get back to the ship. I hadn’t forgotten the shooting I’d heard earlier coming from their direction.
While I still wanted to know what happened to Vitale and Chatterton, I figured now was not the time. Guess I didn’t need an explanation. It was kind of self-explanatory. Zombies were everywhere. Explosions. There was no need to ask. My imagination worked fine. They were dead. With Spade, I had no doubt, if they’d been bitten, they would not return as a zombie, either.
I yelled into my sleeve in one last attempt. “Marf!”
“I think it was the apartment back here,” Dave said. “That one.”
The one he pointed at could very well have been the apartment Marf was in. Had it of been, he would have seen us out the window. If he saw us from the window, why didn’t he join the fight?
“Let’s check,” Spade said. He went forward and as he passed Palmeri, he hesitated long enough to touch her shoulder. Maybe there had been something between Palemeri and Saylor. More than I’d picked up on. I hadn’t seen it but Spade’s gesture revealed much, much more.
She didn’t meet my eyes as I followed Spade. Silently, she fell in behind me. I heard the sloshing sound of her boots in the mud. I wished I could think of comforting words to share. Something I could say to ease her pain.
It was a new world. A different one. I got it. Gone were the days of comforting one another, if we ever really did that before. Pain was in surplus. Kind of like you didn’t mind saying God Bless You when someone sneezed, but when the person lets out three or four in a row, you’re like, fuck man, I’ll just wait until he’s all done.
That’s where we were. In the midst of it. No point saying, “Sorry for your loss.” Not now. Not yet. Not until it we were all done.
Chapter Twenty
0554 hours
“It was this one, had to be this one.” Dave pointed at an apartment.
There were no zombies there, like last time, if it was the right one. Perhaps we’d just killed them all. Very likely. “Why didn’t he come out and fight with us?” I said.
Spade stared at the apartment. “We’ll go in and check it out. If he’s not there, the search is over. We’re done. We’re going back to the boat and leaving this shit stain harbor. Understood?”
No one argued.
Palmeri stayed behind me, I stood behind Dave, and Spade took point. He waved us on to follow.
Staying low, we crossed between apartments. We reached Marf’s and put our backs to the building. Spade held up a fist to tell us we were to wait.
My breath spewed out in visible vapor. My nose was cold, dirty and the tip was numb. I closed my eyes for a moment and sucked in a deep breath. I exhaled and looked to my left.
Crouched, Spade slid along the side of the apartment toward the door. He had his pistol in one hand, hunter’s knife in the other. He signaled with his head, so we advanced.
“Open the door on three,” he said.
Dave nodded. Hand on the knob.
It was a silent head-bob count. On the third one, Dave pulled open the door.
Spade didn’t move. Didn’t charge in, nothing.
We waited as seconds ticked by.
I counted them off with the speed of my heartbeat.
Four. Five. Six.
“Marf?” Spade said. It was the softest I’d heard him speak. “Marf?”
Nothing.
“Stay,” Spade said. He took a step up and into the apartment.
I looked right, left, right. It felt like we weren’t alone. We weren’t, just it seemed like things were all around us, closing in and encircling us. I didn’t like it.
Spade came back out and tucked the knife into the sheath on his hip. “He got out. No one is in there. Floorboards are torn up. He went out through there.”
I sighed. Good for Marfione. He’d made it out.
“So where is he?” Palmeri said. “Why didn’t he come to fight with us?”
“Might not have known,” Dave said.
That was shit. All the gunshots, Marf would have to be deaf to miss the battle that just finished. “That’s not it,” I said.
“We aren’t looking for him, we can’t,” Spade said.
I used my radio. “Marfione? Can you hear us, Marf? Over?”
“I said we’re not looking. We’ve been gone far too long as it is. We need to get back to the Coast Guard. Sun will be up soon. Very soon. We can figure out what to do next then,” Spade said.
If Marf had answered, I would have disagreed, and gone looking for the soldier, but the radio remained silent.
Spade walked away, back from where we’d just come. “We’re going to stay between rows and head straight. Gate can’t be more than sixty, seventy yards ahead. We go slowly. We stay packed together. Palmeri, you are the eyes in the back of our head. Understood? Palmeri, do you understand?”
“Roger.”
“Okay. We’re mobile.”
We walked slowly and stayed close. My mind wandered far and fast.
# # #
It had been winter. Calls that were coming into 9-1-1 were few and far between. The fire section had wheeled six of the three-drawer cabinets to the center of the circular pod. Five sat around the makeshift table with poker chips sitting in stacks and piles in front of those playing.
DeJesus shuffled cards.
Milzy, one of first platoon supervisors and the small blind, tossed a chip to the center. “It’s hold ‘em, right?”
DeJesus nodded. “Correct.”
LaForce attempted dancing a chip over knuckles. “They always make this look so easy.”
“They practice,” Milzy said. “Nothing easy about it. It’s why they do it. Frustrates everyone who can’t. Rich guys like that probably spend hours in the bathroom mirror doing it over and over and over.”
The foghorn-like alarm indicating a new job had been entered activated, came from my terminal. There was a long line on the CAD screen. I read the job text. “HOUSE ON FIRE -- UNKN IF ANYONE INSIDE”
I entered the line of equipment and the set of their firehouse alarm tones
. This way, lights and alarms would wake sleeping firemen. Then it would be followed it up with a long alert tone, called Boxing It Out. That way, firemen knew I wasn’t just sending them on an EMS run.
My headset was on and my foot depressed the pedal below my desk. I spoke slowly, and clearly. “Telephone alarm report of a house on fire, possible people still inside. Going to be the vacant house across from--” I said, giving the address, the cross streets and named off the three closest engines and two trucks, as well as the rescue and battalion chief to respond.
More information popped up on my monitor.
“It’s a backup call, Chase. Fill it out,” Milzy said, standing by my shoulder.
I toned out the department, stepped on the pedal, and said, “Backup call for the report of a house fire--possible people trapped.” I sent the protectives, fire investigation and deputy chief to the location before the first unit was even on scene.
“Engine Five on scene, two and half story wood frame with flames from the roof. Give me a working fire and restricted alarm,” the officer on the engine said over the air.
My job was to parrot reports in case their radio signal was weak. Everyone would hear me fine. “Engine Five on scene of a two and a half wood frame with flames from the roof. Declaring a working fire restricted alarm. Deputy Chief, do you copy?”
“Deputy copies. I’m on scene. I’ll take command. Battalion chief has operations.”
“Showing the deputy chief on scene. You have command. Battalion chief to have operations.” I typed while I spoke.
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