by Damon Novak
Sonya stared, but she could see nobody inside the booth. The car that she had struck was now sitting in the middle of Highway 41, its left blinker flashing. It was behind her car, the momentum carrying her cruiser forward another thirty feet or so.
She staggered away, hearing a growling coming from behind her. When she whirled around, she saw what was once a middle-aged a man wearing bloodied golf pants and an equally stained polo-style shirt, extracting himself from her pushed-in windshield.
His eyes were wide and unseeing. The late afternoon sun still beat down hard on her back, causing her to perspire even more than the thing that had freed itself, now sliding down her hood in its own blood. It landed on the ground in front of the car, out of her view.
It. The man. The thing.
Looking behind her to make sure she wouldn’t be surprised by anything else, she caught movement inside the security booth. Sonya returned her attention to the car, walking forward until she could see in front of it. As it came into view, the man-thing stood up.
In a manner of speaking.
One leg was snapped at the ankle, the once-white golf shoe now squarely on its side as the creature hobbled toward her, one leg now a good ten inches longer than the other. Something – most likely a splintered bone – pushed against the inside of the pant leg, and the thought of it made Sonya sad and frightened at the same time.
The thing didn’t seem to notice or care, and if it felt pain, it was not evident by way of a wince or other facial expression.
Its dead face stared, milky eyes not wavering from her as it toppled to the ground again, unable to stay upright on its damaged appendages. As it lay there, clawing at the ground in an attempt to get back up, it snarled at her, its mouth open.
Sonya held her gun out before her, hands shaking terribly. She fired, and the monster went limp, the hole in its head leaking a dark, putrid liquid that smelled every bit of the nasty black rain.
Sonya turned and ran toward the booth, leaving her car in the middle of the street, her door open. If someone was trapped in there, or if they needed to be told to go get somewhere safe, it was her job to see it through.
From her vantage point by the car, the sun had provided a backlight through the small building’s windows, allowing her to see the movement from within. Now that she was closer to it, the tinted windows only offered a reflection of herself. Sonya slowed as she moved in, her gun raised. Instinctively, she side-stepped around the booth to make sure nobody or nothing hid behind it.
It was clear. Stepping around the corner of the booth, she stood still for a moment, listening for sounds, either coming from inside the structure or from the area around her.
You’re a good cop, she told herself. You’re staying calm in the face of insanity.
Her own thoughts providing more confidence, Sonya moved in closer, sliding her gun back into its holster. She cupped her hands against the glass to look through, when it exploded in her face.
It was as though blackness enveloped her as she fell backward, eyes closed, an unknown weight pushing her and adding to her backward momentum.
Even as she toppled to the ground, she managed to keep her arms out, preventing what had just burst through the glass from reaching her face and neck.
It seemed to take forever to hit the ground, and Sonya had time to scream at herself. Open your eyes! Open your eyes and assess the situation!
She did. Sonya opened her eyes to see a creature unlike any she had ever seen. Perhaps it was because she’d never been inches away from one of them, but it was … monstrous.
Her arms still thrust forward like pistons, her hands gripping the thing’s shoulders, she could see its cavernous mouth, dark blood running down its chin from an unseen wound, probably from biting off its own tongue. The thick, putrid fluid ran down in rivulets onto her face as she struggled to free herself from beneath its weight.
The man had been older before his conversion into a monster, and Sonya took advantage, bucking her midsection upward and throwing its slight frame momentarily to the ground beside her.
She instinctively rolled away from it, her hand reaching for her sidearm as she twisted onto her left side.
The holster was empty. Her eyes darted around the immediate area. The gun was nowhere in sight. Seeing the man-thing was pushing itself from the ground, Sonya scrambled to her feet and charged the struggling creature, raising her foot to plant a heel in its face. The direct impact set it back to the asphalt, its head smacking the driveway hard.
The effect was only momentary. It immediately began to scramble back to its feet. Whirling around, she spotted the Glock 22, lying against the curb. She stumbled toward it, nearly face-planting on the asphalt herself.
She reached the gun and saw the magazine had ejected from it somehow; likely the magazine release striking the curb when it fell. Searching around it, she spotted it, four feet away.
She scooped up the Glock and ran toward the mag, just as a weight slammed into her back, sending her face-first into the street, her chin striking it hard.
Dazed, and feeling a few small fragments of her broken teeth inside her mouth, she spat and threw her left elbow out, striking the creature somewhere on its head. It again fell away, allowing her seconds to reach the magazine and try to get it into the gun.
Rolling onto her back, she saw the thing was back on its feet again. Her hands shaking, blood pouring down her chin and soaking into her uniform, Sonya struggled to jam the magazine back into the gun.
Then it was on her again, landing with its head on her abdomen. It tried to burrow in, its jaws snapping, and she abandoned trying to get the magazine in the gun as she bent her knees up just enough to keep the creature from biting into her flesh.
It scrambled and pushed with its feet, crawling forward to reach the tender skin of her face and neck. Its mouth gnashed like a piranha ready to feed.
Sonya turned her shoulder and felt the magazine slide into the gun. When she heard the glorious sound of the cartridge seating, she gave one last hard shove with her knees, racked the slide and pointed the barrel down at the top of its head, firing simultaneously.
The monster went limp.
She fell back, her breaths thin and useless, her heart rocketing inside her chest. Turning her eyes to the cruiser, she pushed from beneath her dead attacker and got on her feet, spitting out blood and broken pieces of her teeth as she charged toward the car, fighting dizziness from the brief, but intense exertion.
Seconds later, she was inside the Charger, the door closed.
Sonya let her head fall back onto the headrest and tried to calm herself. She began to second-guess her decision to go to the police station. It suddenly struck her there were no sirens; what did that mean? With all the carnage that had to encompass every damned corner of the city, how could she not hear sirens?
Her thoughts went to Sam, Laurie, Tommy and Claire. They’d just come in for their shifts when the black rain started. Either they changed into those creatures, or they needed help.
Dozens and dozens of her other fellow officers came to mind, and she reached down and turned the key. The Dodge’s engine started, and she pulled the transmission into reverse to avoid running over the man she’d killed.
The man I shot, she corrected herself. I’m pretty sure he was already dead.
Indecision gripped her like a vise as she stopped and put the cruiser back in park. She looked out at the street, noticed the waning daylight, and checked her watch. It was now 6:15. She was wasting time and putting herself at more risk. The only smart thing to do was to head back to Baxter’s and wait until morning.
She pulled the transmission into drive and pulled back onto US 41, heading north, toward the police station.
Ω
The front end was badly dented from the car that she’d hit, and the hood was smeared with blood. In that respect, it was good there were not many other cars on the road.
But it gave Sonya a strange feeling of what she could only call aloneness. It had cleared
out even more than when she’d just left Baxter’s. There had been several cars then. Now, just about an hour later, it felt like a ghost town.
She turned down SW 29th Terrace and immediately heard the warble of a siren, but something wasn’t right with it; it was muffled and irregular. As she rounded the next corner, another of the ghouls staggered into the street before her. Half the woman’s blouse was torn away, and her right arm flopped uselessly, as though she’d been given a nerve block shot.
She floored the accelerator, cranking the steering wheel left so as not to plow into her with the already-damaged part of her front end.
As the front bumper slammed into her knees they snapped, whipping the woman forward. Her head slammed hard into the black hood, putting a cantaloupe-sized dent just in the center of the passenger side.
As the car maintained forward momentum, the dead-faced blonde woman was jerked beneath the car. In Sonya’s mind, she practically witnessed the woman’s destroyed body twisting beneath the Dodge, burned by the friction of the spinning driveshaft, and spitting out behind her.
Between the attack she’d just survived, the blood still trickling from her chin and the scene all around her, Sonya’s last nerve shattered, and she started blubbering. She knew what was happening, and she tried to stop it, but it was no use. She stopped the car right in the middle of the road. The messy cry had taken hold of her, and it wasn’t going to let go anytime soon.
She covered her face with her hands and allowed herself just a few moments to get a sense of herself; to evaluate whether she should give up or press on.
Noise outside the car forced her to reach her decision far before she was ready.
When she raised her eyes again, she saw that it wasn’t just the half-dressed woman she’d mowed down; there were at least a dozen more in the parking lot, backdropped by the brick face of the Everglades City Police Department building.
They staggered around aimlessly at first, but as she removed her foot from the brake and piloted the cruiser closer, they began to turn toward either the sound of her engine or the motion of the car itself. Sonya spun the steering wheel hard right, turning into the east driveway, farthest from where they shambled.
Come toward her they did, all of them, working their way toward the bright yellow parking stops dividing the parking lot into two sections.
The siren that warbled through the otherwise silent day emitted from a flipped-over cruiser, an officer that should have been very dead protruding half out from underneath it, his arms extended, his bloodied hands clawing at the macadam. The windows were shattered, and on the side of the car, upside-down, were the words K-9 UNIT.
Despite the damage to his horrific face, Sonya recognized the officer. It was Rick Bly, a good man nearing his retirement, with six children and at last count, eight grandkids.
The sight tore Sonya up inside, the thought of his family, either wondering where he was, or transformed into mindless monsters themselves. She wondered if his dog was in the car, too, dead like all the others they’d seen.
Several of the infected people began following, three of them tripping on the concrete tire barriers and falling down, only to scramble back up, their eyes never leaving her car.
If I stop, they’ll surround me, Sonya thought. She looked out ahead of the car, making sure she didn’t get cornered with no way out. She wasn’t sure she’d be able to plow through that many without damaging the already-compromised Dodge, and based on the number of mindless humans she was seeing outside, going into the building would be suicide.
She abandoned the idea. She had to get back to Cole and Lilly’s place. While they didn’t have a plan, at least she knew they were resourceful. And they had a doctor with them, just in case.
Sonya made her decision. Now to get back there without dying.
One of the creatures had made it between the tire stops without tripping, and now appeared to lean forward, stumbling toward her car faster than she expected. He was as thin and gangly as a long-time heroin addict, and wore torn jeans and ratty tennis shoes, his tank top and pants smeared with unidentifiable chunks of bloody gore.
Wiping her eyes on her sleeves to clear her vision somewhat, she slammed on the brakes and threw the car in reverse, turning to look over her shoulder as she backed toward the driveway.
The thing managed to reach her door before she could get away, snarling and snapping its jaws like the one that had attacked her at Tarpon Lakes. As it slammed into the door beside her, her side mirror caught his left ribcage, snapping the mirror from the car and sending the crazed man spinning away and to the ground.
Sonya turned the wheel hard, the rear end making a fluid arc as the car’s front end followed. When the front again pointed toward the driveway, Sonya threw it back into drive and floored it, tires burning rubber as she rocketed out of the parking lot and back onto the street.
Her heart pounding, she didn’t slow until she saw an open, empty parking lot for the justice center. She turned into the driveway and drove as fast as she could to the end, then cranked the wheel again until the car faced the street. She quickly threw it in park and cut the engine.
Sonya grabbed for the radio Lilly had given her.
“Lilly! Lilly, CB, are you there?”
Nothing.
She raised the radio to try again when she heard, “Sonya, where are you? Are you okay?”
It was Lilly Baxter.
Sonya mashed the button. “I’m fine. Good. But I couldn’t … I gave up on the station. Too many of them out here.”
“Okay,” Lilly said, but Sonya ceased hearing her words.
The police officer spotted an animal coming up the street in front of her. As it came closer, Sonya saw that it was a German Shepherd. Somehow, the dog’s coat was free of any residue from the black rain. It might have been one of the K-9 officers, but there was no way to be sure.
Only the dog’s paws were discolored, as if it had been able to tuck itself under something when the phenomenon struck. It staggered, its feet barely able to avoid one another.
“Sonya, are you there?”
Her eyes glued to the animal, she let more tears flow as it slowly came to a stop. It turned its head toward her as if pleading, then collapsed, falling onto its side.
It lay still.
“They’re dying,” she whispered into the radio.
“Who are dying?” asked Lilly, desperation in her voice.
“The … the dogs,” whispered Sonya. “The fucking dogs.”
“Get back here now, Sonya. Just turn the car around and come back here.”
Sonya raised the radio. “I am. I’m just gathering myself right now.” She had nothing to staunch the blood flowing from the huge gash in her chin, so she simply kept wiping it away with the back of her hand.
“It’s going to be dark soon, and you don’t need to be out there. How far away are you?”
“I’m at the Justice Center.”
“So about half an hour. Hurry, Sonya. You can make it. CB will wait by the gate for you.”
Sonya’s eyes couldn’t leave the dead German Shepherd. If it was one of the police K-9s, it was either the male, Takoda, which meant ‘friend to everyone’ in Sioux, or it was the female, Nokosi, which meant ‘bear’ in the Seminole language.
While Takoda was goofier and more loving to the officers with whom he was familiar, Nokosi was a more serious dog. She would protect her fellow officers with the force of a mama bear protecting her cubs, though, which is how she got her name.
Both dogs were around six years old, dedicated public servants who’d saved officers’ lives on numerous occasions.
“Sonya!” came Lilly’s desperate call.
The single word broke through her fog. She pressed the button. “I’m coming. Tell CB not to go out to the gate for at least twenty-five minutes. No reason for him to put himself in danger that long.”
“You know I can’t tell CB anything, but hurry!” said Lilly.
Sonya put the radio
down and fired the Charger’s engine, dropping it into drive immediately. She still had well over a half tank of fuel, so that wasn’t a problem.
Avoiding the dead or dying animal, she ran two tires off the curb as she left the parking lot and turned right. The street was clear to the corner, so she slowly rolled through the stop sign toward the 41.
She had just reached the stop sign when something slammed into her driver’s side window. She screamed and threw her body away from the window, then turned back to see the German Shepherd standing on its hind legs, its front paws pressed against the glass. Its face, while just that of a dog, seemed frantic and desperate.
Without thinking, Sonya pressed her foot to the brake and reached for the door handle, pushing it open. The dog was smart; it backed away, and as soon as the door was open, it jumped over her, landing on the passenger seat and turning around to face the windshield. It glanced at her as Sonya pulled the door closed again and locked it.
“Oh, my, who do we have here?” she asked, reaching over to inspect the dog’s collar. The name NOKOSI was there, in print.
Panting, Nokosi licked Sonya’s hand and the gash on her chin, and her tears fell anew. She said, “Hold on, Nokosi,” and hit the gas, turning onto Highway 41 southbound.
Bringing the Dodge up to speed, she felt the steering wheel bouncing under her grip, threatening to spin fully in one direction or another if she were stupid enough to release it. The first accident, combined with the woman she’d hit outside the police station, had thrown the car badly out of alignment, and it was a struggle just to overcompensate against it.
Ahead of her, spanning from one curb to the other, several vehicles were crashed, a mish-mash of twisted steel, plastic and glass. Remnants of smoke remained from the fire that had blackened half of the cars, and there was no way through. They’d overrun the curbs on both sides of the street, a couple overturned on the sidewalk, now sitting on their roofs.
Sonya turned the wheel right, and cut through the corner gas station parking lot, but she still couldn’t get around the mess. Unable to continue in her chosen direction, she turned right on Calusa Street. She drove two blocks unimpeded, until a signal light, still working, turned red.
