Dead City

by Joe McKinney

  Twitchy and Paunchy were still arguing about taking my gun. Without looking at them, I said, “Behind you.”

  “Shut up,” Twitchy said.

  “Right there,” I said, nodding at the woman getting out of the cot. “Shoot her.”

  That was the wrong thing to say in front of Twitchy. I had meant to say something diplomatic, something calm, but even as I was thinking what to say, the words “Shoot her” just came out.

  Twitchy exploded in anger. He took a couple of steps forward and shook his fist at me.

  I saw a well-worn band of gold around the third finger of his left hand.

  “You leave her alone,” he yelled. “God help me, I’ll kill you if you touch her.

  Tears were streaming down his face, fat and round.

  “That’s fine,” I said. The zombie that had been his wife was now lumbering at him. Paunchy had seen her in time and was backing away. “That’s fine,” I said again. “Take my handcuffs. Secure her to the cot if you need to. She can stay there till someone can help her.”

  The zombie was five feet from him. Three feet. Too close.

  “Malin,” Paunchy said. He was pleading with the man.

  The zombie grabbed Twitchy by the shoulder and dug into the bare flesh of his arm with her teeth.

  He let out a girlish squeal and yanked his arm away. The next minute he was pushing the zombie away, trying to speak to it like it was still his wife, trying to coax it back to the cot.

  The zombie fought for another bite, and when Twitchy finally realized he couldn’t talk her back to the cot, he called for Paunchy to help him.

  Paunchy dropped his gun and ran to help. Together they dragged the zombie back to the cot and forced her onto her back.

  I took out my cuffs and walked toward them.

  “Here,” I said, holding them out to them. “Take these.”

  Twitchy wheeled on me, gun in the air. He fired a shot that whistled somewhere over my shoulder and hit the wall behind me.

  “Stay away from her, you son of a bitch. Get back!”

  I was frozen for a second, the shot still ringing in my ears. The cuffs fell to the floor.

  Everybody in the room was looking at us. The two men with rifles off to my left were fidgeting nervously, still uncertain what to do. Both nurses were standing in the middle of the room, their feet rooted to the floor. A few pairs of miserable, blood-red eyes peered up from nearby cots.

  Only Paunchy seemed to be focused on something other than the two of us. He was still struggling to keep Twitchy’s wife from getting off the cot.

  Two more zombies sat up in their cots. A moment later, another one.

  They lumbered to their feet, their bloody blankets falling down to the floor. One of them was closing in on the nurses. I yelled for them to move, but not in time. A zombie fell on one of the nurses, grabbed her by the hair, and pulled her to the floor.

  She went down screaming.

  Instinctively, I made a move to help her, and that set Twitchy into hysterics.

  He fired at me.

  The first shot missed me, went past me, and grazed one of the men on my left, striking him in the arm. The second shot thudded into the wall.

  Twitchy didn’t stop firing. Each time he pulled the trigger, he stabbed the rifle at me like there was a bayonet attached to it, which was lucky for me. It kept him from aiming. All he was doing was spraying and praying, which sounds like a good way to manage a gunfight, but isn’t.

  I ran to my left, clamoring over the injured in their cots, knocking them to the floor while I hit my belly and crawled behind a pillar for cover.

  Twitchy was yelling and shooting wildly. I peered around the edge of the pillar and Twitchy fired again, forcing me back behind cover.

  All I could see of the direction I’d come from were the three cots I’d knocked over, and the people who were now on the floor, holding their stomachs and vomiting a black, tarry goo onto the wooden floor.

  The man closest to me was staring me right in the face when he slipped under and became a zombie. It occurred to me then that he must have been using all his strength to stave off the change, and I had pushed him over the edge, or distracted him, which amounted to the same thing. Either way, by upsetting his cot, I had broken his concentration, and now a zombie was staring me in the face.

  The other two behind him changed in the same way. It was like watching a row of lightbulbs flicker out. One minute they were human, suffering. The who of what they were, or had been, was gone, leaving only an angry blank slate.

  The three zombies stood up, and then the whole room erupted in screams and the clanging of beds being overturned and bodies colliding.

  Over the din of it all, I could still hear Twitchy yelling at me. Despite everything going on around us, he seemed to have focused on me, treating me like the root of all his troubles.

  He fired two more shots. One of them hit the floor next to my left hand and kicked up little pieces of wood that peppered my arm, burning like wasp bites.

  I ran for the next pillar, not giving him the chance to close in on me. As I landed on the ground behind the next pillar, I turned, raised my gun, and almost fired.

  I didn’t pull the trigger, though, because just then Marcus broke into the room right behind Twitchy. Dozens of people ran into the room behind him, Sandy and Stiles and the two cameramen among them.

  Sandy gasped. Stiles’s face was lit with rage. There was a mad rush of people as Stiles and a few others tried to take the cameras away and pull Sandy from the room. At the same time, people continued to rush into the room, running to the cots in the room to check on their injured friends and family.

  Twitchy wheeled around and pointed his rifle at Marcus.

  Wrong thing to do.

  Marcus grabbed the barrel in his left hand and pushed it away. He dug the heel of his right hand under Twitchy’s chin and forced his face to the ceiling. Then he kicked him in the balls so hard that Twitchy’s feet actually left the floor.

  Twitchy collapsed, gurgling in pain.

  Marcus turned on Stiles and snarled something at him. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I gathered it was something similar to what I had said to myself when I first saw the room.

  People were screaming, fighting, dying. We were packed in so close together that it was hard to tell the healthy from the sick.

  I couldn’t shoot my way out. The room was too crowded for that. Instead, I kicked and punched my way to the front door. I thought if I could only make it out the doors, and put some distance between myself and this crowd, I’d stand a chance of making it back to the car.

  I fought my way to the doors and pushed on them, but they were locked. When I turned back to the room, I could see people getting knocked down and devoured. Arms were waving, faces bent into horrible masks of rage and pain, and in the middle of it all was Marcus, swinging the butt of the rifle around like a club, tearing a path through the crowd.

  From off to my left I saw Sandy Navarro. She had been pushed into a corner by two zombies.

  I fired a single shot and dropped one of them.

  Sandy turned toward the shot, saw me, screamed for me to help her. The other zombie put his hands on her, and she pushed it away. I couldn’t fire at that one, though. He was too close to her for me to risk it.

  I ran that way, fighting my way through the crowd, and came up behind the zombie she was wrestling with.

  The zombie was a skinny man in a white shirt and brown slacks. His shirt was stained with rust-colored gore under one arm. I kicked him in the back of the knees, knocked him off balance, and threw him to one side.

  He landed faceup, and I didn’t give him a chance to regain his feet. I fired once, catching him in the left eye.

  “Are you hurt?” I asked Sandy.

  She was staring at the zombie I’d just killed, very near to throwing up.

  “Are you hurt?” I said again.

  She shook her head no.

  “Good. Stay close. I’m g
onna get you out of here.”

  I grabbed her hand and pulled her towards the hallway at the far end of the room, but she was scared, and she resisted.

  “Come on,” I said, snarling it at her. “Come on.”

  “Eddie!”

  It was Marcus, directly above me. I looked up and saw him leaning over the balcony, looking down at me.

  “Marcus—”

  Under different circumstances I would have asked him how the hell he’d gotten up there, but as it was I grabbed Sandy by the arm and pulled her out so he could see her.

  “Grab her,” I told him, and hoisted Sandy up. It took some doing, but I managed to get her into position so she could stand on my shoulders.

  Marcus reached down, caught her by the hand, and pulled her over the railing.

  When she disappeared behind him, he was staring down at me, an inexplicable grin on his face.

  A zombie put a hand on my arm. I pulled away and shot it twice, once in the chest, once in the ear.

  Marcus was still smiling. “Did you get a peek?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Up her skirt?”

  “Marcus!” The zombie I had just shot got pushed back on me by the frantic crowd, and I was forced to kick it away.

  “Marcus!”

  He rolled his eyes at me, but lowered the barrel of the rifle down for me to grab.

  I caught it, and he pulled me up. Once I was even with the balcony I was able to swing myself over.

  I landed next to him. Sandy was huddled up in a ball on the floor next to the wall, sobbing.

  We picked her up and carried her out to the car, the sounds of the battle dying away behind us.

  Chapter 21

  Sandy was a mess. We had to prop her against the trunk while we cleaned up the broken glass and spilled blood from the backseat, but by the time we had it clean enough for her to sit down, she was a little more in control.

  Not much, but a little.

  “What about my cameramen?” she asked, looking up at Marcus with large, uncertain eyes. She had wiped her face with a baby wipe from the vehicle’s blood-borne pathogen kit, but there were still little black rivulets of mascara on her cheeks that made her face look like a desert of dried-up creek beds.

  Marcus put an arm around her shoulder and guided her to the backseat.

  “Sandy, we have to worry about you, okay?” he said, and I was shocked at the delicacy in his voice, the naked humanity. “I’m sorry about your friends, but we have to go.”

  She looked into his eyes and brushed the hair away from her face. Another change. This time, the gesture made her look vulnerable, and yet very sensual at the same time.

  Nothing is as protean as a woman.

  “Okay, Marcus,” she said, and climbed in.

  I turned the car onto the upper level of the freeway. The bottom level was only two lanes wide, with no shoulder, and there was no way we were going to make it through there. The upper was a little more open.

  Once we got on the freeway, we were in darkness. All the overhead street lamps were out. None of the Trans-Guide traffic displays were working. The freeway was a black ribbon against the night skyline, and off in the distance we saw towering pillars of black smoke and the orange glow of structure fires.

  Looking around at all the destruction, I realized how lucky I had been the last time I was on the freeway. Had I run into this mess earlier, without Marcus, I would probably still be looking for a way home.

  Or worse, not looking for anything at all.

  I turned on the takedown lights and the car’s high beams, flooding the road ahead with as much light as the car could put out.

  Wrecked cars were everywhere. Clouds of dust floated sluggishly on the breeze, and the cold night air seemed to glow with a greenish sheen. The car’s lights caught the dust, and as I snaked us through the gaps in the snarled traffic, I had the feeling we were drifting through an underwater landscape of sunken ships and warplanes, the graveyard of some long-ago and distant naval battle.

  In places the freeway was so thick with wrecks that we had to use the push bumpers to ram our way through. Whenever possible, Marcus would get out and drive the wrecks out of the way, but we still ended up beating the crap out of the car. It started making a mechanical whining noise, a sickening groan, every time I hit the gas. I could feel it straining, slipping out of gear.

  We saw a car that had run up onto the bed of an older model Ford pickup. Inside the car I saw a woman slapping her bloody hands against the passenger window in a slow, pointless gesture, and when we got up close enough to see her face, there was no doubt that she had been changed. Death spoke through her eyes.

  Sandy gasped in the backseat.

  “You okay?” Marcus asked her. He had to raise his voice to be heard through the shattered Plexiglas divider. There was still blood on it, despite our best efforts to clean it up for her.

  She nodded, wiped a tear from her face. I actually pitied her then, despite the attitude she had given me back at the church. Seeing her like that, softened, made me realize that she was genuinely hurting. It also made her seem even more beautiful than she had been before the situation at the church got so out of hand.

  “What’s that smell?” Marcus asked.

  He was right. Something smelled bad. I wrinkled my nose at it as I looked around.

  It wasn’t death. I know what death smells like. This was something else, something just as earthy and foul, but not as ominous. Like manure.

  We saw the source of it just ahead. An eighteen wheeler had flipped over on its side and was blocking two of the three lanes. There were a few cars in the remaining third lane that looked like they had run into the retaining wall when the big rig flipped over.

  Marcus drove one out of the way, and I rammed two more with the car to get us clear.

  Once we cleared the gap and got around the truck, we saw that the rig was a cattle hauler, and the smell that we thought was manure really was manure.

  The scene was gut-wrenching, easily the worst display of blood and bone and brown, puddled viscera I had seen all night.

  The side panels of the truck had been ripped away when it rolled over, but there were parts of the paneling that looked like they had been pulled apart by human hands. Zombies had gone after some of the cattle and torn them to pieces. Dripping, shredded cattle carcasses, a shoulder here, a leg or rump section there, were festooned from broken wooden slats, and there were large, steaming piles of cow shit and wet hay melting together in pools of blood on the ground.

  Some of the cattle must have stampeded in fright during the attack because there were crushed human bodies on the ground next to the cattle carcasses.

  About fifty feet away I saw a cow with its stomach ripped open. The wound looked like some kind of grotesque jungle orchid in bloom. Its head was resting on the retaining wall, where it had crawled away to die.

  “What do you know,” I said, pointing the cow out to Marcus. “There’s no cross-species contamination.”

  “No what?”

  “No zombie cows.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Cross-species contamination,” I said again. “There are no zombie cows. Haven’t you wondered if anything else besides people gets turned into zombies? Apparently, it’s a big question in zombie studies.”

  “Zombie studies?” He put his back to the passenger door and crossed his arms over his chest. His way of pronouncing something as bullshit when he heard it. “I took women’s studies back when I was working on my Associate’s degree. Is zombie studies anything like that?”

  “This is a little different, I think.”

  “So what are zombie studies?”

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just something this guy told me about earlier tonight. I think it amounts to a bunch of freaks in a chat room, talking about what they think zombies would be like if they actually existed.”

  “If they actually existed?”

  “Well,” I said, �
��I think they’re gonna have a lot to talk about after tonight.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t know you were into that kind of thing.”

  “I’m not. It was just a random thought going through my brain. No big deal.”

  “Oh.”

  We continued on in silence for a little while longer, and things were quiet enough that I could hear Sandy’s sniffles in the backseat. Poor girl, I thought. She’s trying hard to be tough.

  “You really took women’s studies in school?” I asked Marcus.

  He glanced out the window at the fires burning up the west side of San Antonio’s skyline. “It wasn’t quite what I thought it was going to be,” he said.

  The wreckage blocking the roadway never seemed to end, and I began to wonder if we would have been better off taking the surface streets. The car was really starting to groan.

  A short distance later we came to another wreck that was blocking the whole road. The main culprit on this one was an overturned maroon Isuzu Trooper. Evidently, it had hit two other cars, gotten airborne after hitting the retaining wall, and knocked down a light pole.

  The pole was lying across two lanes and the left shoulder, and there were at least ten cars turned the wrong way. Some were crumpled together in a metal embrace.

  I stopped the car and studied the wreckage.

  “This is going to take some doing,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Marcus said. “Think you can push that Isuzu out of the way? Looks clear past him on that side.”

  “I think so.”

  There wasn’t really much to push against. Because it was upside down, the bumper was too high for me to catch it with the push bumper, and I had to ease up to the aluminum case for the spare tire and part of the rear window.

  I made contact gently, then dipped into the throttle and started to push. The car strained, and then the aluminum spare-tire case buckled. The next moment I heard creaking metal and the pop and shatter of glass breaking. I knew we weren’t going to get it moved that way.

  I backed up, carrying part of the spare-tire case with me. “What do you want to do now?”

  Marcus squinted at the wrecked cars. “Let’s see if some of these other cars are drivable. Maybe we can use them to ram that light pole out of the way.”