Dead City - 01 (16 page)

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 gonna 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.”

“Okay.”

I glanced at Sandy in the rearview mirror. She wasn’t sobbing anymore, but she had a fixed, road-worn look in her eyes.

“You going to be okay for a minute?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“Okay,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

Marcus went up to a blue Volvo, opened the door, and shot the zombie behind the wheel as casually as if he were ordering a beer at a bar. I jumped when I heard the shot. Marcus reached in, grabbed the body, and pulled it out onto the pavement. It made a dull thud as it hit the ground.

He pointed at a green Kia, meaning for me to drive it.

I nodded. There were no zombies in mine. I got in, and Marcus got in his Volvo. We backed the cars into position, then gave them some gas, and rammed the light pole out of the way.

It made a fierce grinding noise, but eventually we got it moving, and after moving a few more cars, we had one lane open.

“That ought to work,” Marcus said.

“Yeah, I can get through here no problem.”

We were congratulating each other on a job well done, heading back for the car, when we heard Sandy screaming.

We ran for her at a dead sprint, but when we rounded a row of cars between us and her, we saw a thick knot of zombies beating on our police car, trying to get at the meat inside.

A few of the zombies were on top of the trunk, pulling at Sandy through the busted-out rear window.

Others had opened the driver’s side rear door and were already inside the car. I thought I saw Sandy, her back against the opposite rear door, kicking at the hands and teeth clutching for her, but it was dark and I couldn’t really see her that well to be sure.

I jumped onto the hood of the car, ran over the roof, and kicked a zombie that had yet to get inside square in the jaw. He flew backwards and landed on his head behind the car.

Next I grabbed a pair of legs belonging to a zombie who was headfirst in the backseat and pulled as hard as I could, extracting him from the backseat. I heard Sandy howling in pain, and I could barely see her, thrashing at the hands and faces pressing down on top of her.

Her screams filled up the night. I fired into the backseat, hitting at least two of the zombies in the head, maybe three.

Meanwhile, Marcus had gone around the passenger side of the car and got Sandy’s door open. He managed to grab her beneath the shoulders and pulled her from the car. As he moved her I heard a nasty sound, like a large piece of fabric being ripped in half, only it was the sound of her flesh ripping.

Several zombies tumbled out of the car after her.

Through a gap in the mass of bodies I caught a glimpse of Sandy, and nearly gagged. She was covered in blood, and her left leg was missing below the hip. Most of her stomach was shredded.

She started to gasp, gulping for air like a fish out of water.

“Get them!” Marcus shouted.

I jumped down next to him and started firing at the faces inside and on top of the car. I did it quickly. In thirty seconds they were all dead.

When I turned around, so was Sandy. She had bled out.

Marcus pushed her body off him and then the two of us pulled the other bodies out of the backseat. It was grim work, and we did it without talking.

When it was done, we got back in the car and drove away.

After we got rolling again, Marcus happened to glance in the backseat and made a disgusted noise.

“What?” I asked.

“We left her leg back there.”

“I’ll pull over so we can get rid of it,” I said.

“No,” he said, and sat back down. “Don’t worry about it. We’re not going to have this car very much longer. Downtown’s only two exits away.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”

“I’m sure,” he said. “A pity, though. She really did have great legs.”