Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  Zombies were everywhere. We were the only vehicle still moving, inching through traffic that was set in place like a river under a hard freeze. The outbreak had caught so many people while they were on their way home.

  It disturbed me to see the images of everyday life frozen in place and then corrupted like that.

  From the way cars were abandoned at the intersections, I could imagine how it must have happened.

  I pictured rows upon rows of cars sitting at the red lights, waiting, waiting. And then from one side or the other, the zombies would have descended on the people in their cars and attacked them, breaking their windows with the palms of their bloody hands and pulling innocent people from their cars like chunks of meat from a can.

  The people in their cars were probably so mentally blunted by years upon years of routine that they sat there shocked and let the attack happen rather than step on the gas and blow through the light.

  Perhaps some of them got out of their vehicles and tried to help the ones being attacked. There were quite a few car doors left standing open. If so, those helpful few were probably among the first to die.

  The man with the glasses poked his head over the driver’s side of the truck and asked me what my plan was.

  “I don’t have one,” I said.

  “There’s no place you guys are supposed to go in an emergency?”

  “Are you kidding?” I said, and steered the truck past a group of zombies eating something next to the driver’s side of a brand new Ford Mustang. “You really think the San Antonio Police Department has a procedure for something like this?”

  He frowned. “No. I guess not.”

  “We’re headed for a fire station,” I said, just to mollify him. “Sit back, okay?”

  He did, reluctantly.

  Our little group moved up the street through the center turn lane. I kept the truck at a reasonable speed—fast enough to avoid the zombies, but not so fast that I didn’t have time to react when obstacles came up in front of us.

  Doing that got us most of the way to the station.

  The sounds of the riot got louder the farther down Independence we went. We could hear the piercing tone of a police car’s siren ahead of us. Hearing it gave me a moment of hope.

  That moment faded pretty fast, though. The car making that tone was stationary, and no cop ever leaves his car’s siren running unless he has to abandon it in a hurry.

  We were less than a block from the station when I realized we weren’t going to make it all the way there. Just before we got to the intersection, I turned off Independence and drove up the curb to a grocery store parking lot across the street from the station.

  From where I parked, we could see the front and most of the west side of the station, and it was obvious that it had been the center of fighting as bad as any I had seen.

  Almost all of the windows on the bottom floor were broken inwards and all three truck-bay doors were ripped open. The police car making the piercing tone was parked in front of the station near a couple of others, the driver’s door open and the flickering strobes painting blue and red streaks across the red-brick façade of the station.

  Dozens of dead bodies were sprawled out in a half circle around the police cars. Some of my brother officers had fought their last stand there.

  A zombie in a water board uniform stumbled across the front lawn and disappeared around the corner. As he blended into the night, I knew the world was crumbling down around our ears. Our first line of defense had folded right before my eyes.

  “Officer,” the man in the glasses said. “What are we doing? We need to get somewhere safe.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Yet even as I watched the crowds stumbling into the street, I had to linger over my memories of that place.

  Independence Station used to be a sort of community center for the people of the near west side. Most of the families living close by were extremely poor, and the place loomed over their modest homes like a medieval cathedral.

  Mothers brought their children there to have EMS look them over when they were sick or hurt because the firefighters at the station would always help them, and even though they were supposed to report how they used their supplies so the city could send out a bill, the firefighters there rarely reported the stuff that didn’t really need to be reported.

  The César Chávez Parade kicked off from Independence Station every year.

  Community-action groups held rallies in the break room.

  For the past decade, the city used the station as a free clinic where they passed out flu shots.

  A good number of the people who died in front of the station were probably brought there by friends and family in much the same shape as Carlos. The thought of how horribly they must have died and how hopeless they must have felt brought me back to my own problems.

  I turned to Carlos and looked him over. It was uncomfortable for him to bend over at the stomach, and he had to stretch out across the seat so he didn’t put pressure on it. Cold night air blew in through the open windows, but he was still sweating profusely. His eyes had started to swell and, though he tried to close them, the eyelids weren’t quite able to make it over the swelling.

  “Carlos,” I whispered. “Carlos, we can’t stay here. Can you hear me? We have to go someplace else.”

  He turned his head away from me and coughed some black phlegm onto the door panel.

  “Hang on.”

  I wanted to tell him something else. I wanted to tell him we were going to get him some help. But I didn’t believe that and it seemed cruel and pointless to lie when he already knew the truth.

  The first gardener leaned in the driver’s side window and tapped me on the shoulder. He pointed to a few zombies that were coming our way and said, “Señor, los muertos.”

  “I know,” I said, and motioned for him to sit down.

  I put the truck in gear and we were off again.

  Chapter 8

  I had no idea where we were going when I pulled out of the parking lot and headed up Resolution.

  The streets I drove everyday and the businesses where I made calls and bought sodas and went to the bathroom were being gutted by the crowds. The destruction was spectacular.

  Off in the distance I could see patches of orange haze and wind-whipped smoke in the treetops. I knew that San Antonio, my home for nearly thirty years, was burning.

  Most of the shop windows facing the street were broken out and every few moments we’d see somebody running, trying to find someplace to hide.

  We stayed on Resolution for about fifteen blocks, but turned off at Herrick because the road was jammed up with traffic.

  I could actually feel the fog leaving my brain as we turned off the commercial streets and put the frenzy behind us.

  Down in the neighborhoods, I saw a family cramming clothes and a few other things into their car. The wife watched us drive by, her eyes alert and skittish like the eyes of a wild deer.

  I felt an overpowering need to talk to April, as I watched the woman load her two small children into the backseat. With any luck, she was already strapping Andrew into his car seat and heading someplace safe.

  It struck me at that moment that I had no idea how far and to what degree the outbreak had spread. Was there such a thing as a safe place? I didn’t know, and even if I had been able to talk to her I had absolutely no idea what to tell her.

  I stepped on the gas and got through the neighborhood as fast as I could. I remembered there was a fire station on Thorn Street, less than a mile away, and I steered us in that direction.

  Thorn Station was an old-style, single-truck barn on the edge of the municipal golf course that had been converted into an EMS supply station.

  My plan was to keep Carlos and the others there until somebody from the Fire Department came by to restock their EMS wagon and we could get a real medic to look him over.

  The station was quiet and dark when we pulled up. It hadn’t taken any damage like Inde
pendence Station had, and there were no signs of activity in the area. The one truck door was closed up, but I expected that.

  I got out of the truck and looked over the station. The others got out too and, out of the corner of my eye, I saw them looking around apprehensively.

  The man with the glasses came up to me. “Why here, officer?”

  I studied him for a second before I answered. He had a medium build, sturdy, but not muscular, with a narrow, delicate jaw and intelligent, questioning eyes. He seemed to be taking the situation pretty well.

  “This is the safest place I can think of,” I said. “It’s not close to any businesses or main streets, and with that golf course there, we can see those zombies coming from a long ways off.”

  His eyebrows went up when I used the word “zombies.”

  “Plus,” I said, “all fire stations have emergency generators, bathrooms, food in the kitchens, and this one is an EMS supply barn. Maybe I can find something inside to help Officer Williams.”

  He had been smiling as I rattled off the advantages, nodding in agreement with each one, but when I mentioned Carlos, his smile melted away.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Your friend,” he said, pushing his glasses back up his nose. “There’s nothing you can do for him. You know that, right?”

  I knew it. I knew it all too well.

  “Maybe,” I said, and glanced back at the truck. Carlos was still in the passenger seat, and I lowered my voice because I didn’t want him to hear. “Maybe. But I can at least make him comfortable. And I can keep those zombies from getting him.”

  He nodded.

  “By the way,” I said. “I never did thank you for helping us back there at the school. I’m Eddie Hudson.”

  I offered him my hand and he shook it. “Ken Stoler,” he said. “I used to teach science at the school.”

  “Used to,” I said back at him, noticing the past tense.

  “Used to.”

  “Come on, let’s get inside.”

  I asked the two gardeners to help me carry Carlos to the door. He was trying to stay alert, but he was just too far gone. His legs were useless.

  The front door was locked. There was a card-key reader next to the door, but I didn’t have a card. I looked around for a window and found one big enough for the first gardener, the smaller one, to climb through. It was locked, too, so I broke it out with my baton.

  “Go through and open the door,” I told him.

  He gave me a blank stare.

  I made a series of gestures explaining what I wanted him to do, and eventually he understood.

  He crawled through the window, and a moment later we were standing inside.

  I looked around for the lights and turned them on. The others chattered to themselves, smiling with obvious relief to be out of the darkness.

  “Every fire station’s got an emergency generator in case of blackouts,” I said. “I don’t think they had this in mind, though.”

  Again I got that blank look.

  “Never mind.”

  The first floor of the station was mostly business. There was a kitchen and a little dining room with a couch and a few cheap lawn chairs in a back corner. The rest of the first floor was dedicated to supplies and equipment.

  Octavio and I guided Carlos to a cot near the truck bay and tried to make him comfortable. He refused a cup of water that I brought him, and he wouldn’t let me look at the wound. He muttered something about me leaving him alone and turned his face to the wall.

  I let him go. There was a serious problem, and I knew I’d have to do something about it soon. He was going to turn into one of those things, but I didn’t want to confront that truth just then.

  I went back to the kitchen instead.

  The others had found a TV and were hunting for a picture. They flipped through all the channels, and eventually found a snowy news station. The broadcaster was talking hurriedly in Spanish.

  We all gathered around it, glued to the images they were showing, even though Ken and I didn’t understand most of what was being said.

  Right away, I recognized pictures of downtown Houston, and I wondered why in the hell they were showing Houston when it was San Antonio that had been turned into zombie land.

  Everything they were showing looked like old news to me. More flooding, more blackened corpses floating in the rivers that had once been the streets of Houston.

  One of the women began to sob, and Octavio put an arm around her.

  “Why are they showing Houston?” I asked Ken, not really expecting an answer. “Why aren’t they talking about what’s going on here?”

  “I think they are,” he said. “The cause of it, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his thumb and said, “You’ve heard the same reports I have out of Houston, I’m sure. Rescuers being attacked and mutilated by the survivors.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He turned back to the screen. “I think what we’re seeing here is the same thing that’s been happening down in Houston for the last few days. I think it’s spreading.”

  “But how?” I asked. “You think the evacuees are doing this?”

  “Maybe a few came here that way, but that wouldn’t be enough to spread violence like we’ve seen so quickly. It has to be something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, still watching the TV. “A virus would be the most logical guess. Something that spreads quickly and causes massive necrosis.”

  “You mean decay?”

  “That’s right. I heard you and that other man talking. You used the word ‘zombie,’ and I heard him say ‘los muertos.’ I don’t think that’s completely accurate. Those people we’ve seen aren’t dead. They are decaying on their feet, just like a dead body would do, but they’re still alive.”

  I shook my head at that.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I’m not sure about that,” I said. “I thought I was sure, but the more I think about it, the more confused I am. I’ve seen those things take a whole magazine of bullets in the chest and still keep walking. Hell, I’ve shot them myself. If they were living, they wouldn’t be able to take that kind of damage.”

  “I know they’re alive,” he said.

  “But how?”

  He pushed his glasses back into place. The things seemed like they wanted to jump off his face. “Because I caught one back at the school. Back when this first started.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “Nope,” he said. “I tied her to a table. I studied her, and found a heartbeat. A pulse. They bleed, too.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve seen that.”

  A moment passed. We watched footage on the TV from other cities, and they looked a lot like what was happening in San Antonio. New Orleans. Dallas. Miami. Mobile. Matamoras, Mexico. The destruction was total.

  “I can’t believe they’re alive,” I said. “How can living people act that way?”

  “It’s hard to believe, I know. But I do think you were pretty close to right when you called them zombies. Whatever it is that’s causing them to decay is probably causing them to go mentally deaf and dumb, too. They probably don’t have any idea what they’re doing past satisfying an instinctive hunger.”

  “They would have to know what they’re doing,” I said. “At least on some level. Why else would they eat people? Why not just go to McDonald’s?”

  He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them again he said, “I don’t have all the answers. My guess is that they have some consciousness; but if so, it’s only a little. I never thought it would happen like this.”

  I turned and stared at him. “Like how? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I never thought the zombies would be living people. I thought they’d be dead people.”

  “What in the hell are you talking about?” I asked him.

  “I run a website
on zombies,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Livingdead.com. It’s a big deal on the web, and in philosophical circles, too. There’s a group of us that usually do the discussion groups and we talk about all kinds of zombies. I got into it because of the philosophical issues they raise. Zombies raise all kinds of issues about consciousness. The biggest one of course is about the existence of consciousness itself. Why do we have it? Do I have any way of knowing if other people have consciousness? That kind of thing.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, trying not to lose my temper. Finally, I said, “People are dying out there, Mr. Stoler. This isn’t a bunch of geeks on the web talking about consciousness or whatever you people do. This is people dying. My wife and child are out there, somewhere.”

  “Hey, wait,” he said, showing me the palms of his hands. “I’m not making light of this. I know it’s not a game out there. I’m just saying, that’s all. Just thinking out loud.”

  “Sure,” I said. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to check out the rest of this place.”

  I left him and made my rounds through the station. All the doors were secure, and none of the windows were large enough for the zombies to break through.

  From what I saw, they didn’t seem able to climb very well, and the window we had broken out was above eye level.

  The station had several phones, and I tried them all. None of them worked.

  One of the phones was in the station commander’s office. Evidently, even he had been forced out into the field in a hurry because his sport coat was still hanging on a peg on the wall. I brushed up against it on my way out of his office, and when I did I heard what sounded like his keys jangling in one of the pockets.

  Out of curiosity I went through it and found his personal keys. One of them said Chevy on it. I had seen a maroon Chevy stepside in the parking lot behind the station and I thought there was a pretty good chance the keys went to that truck.

  I put the keys in my pocket. When I searched the rest of his coat I found a cell phone in the breast pocket. It didn’t seem very likely, but I flipped it open and dialed April’s cell phone. I pressed SEND and put it up to my ear, not expecting anything.