Dead City - 01 (2 page)

He moved more quickly than the others, but still with that clumsy, falling gait of someone who seemed to have forgotten how to walk. He didn’t register the gun pointed at his face, and he didn’t blink or look away or avert his eyes, even though I had my flashlight shining right in his face.

It looked like he didn’t even see it.

“Get down on the ground!” I yelled at him, keeping the beam on his face. “Do it now!”

If he heard me at all, he gave no sign of it. I was yelling at a blank slate.

“Spray!” I yelled over my shoulder. That was for Chris’s benefit. When the pepper spray gets in the air, you can go down coughing even if you don’t get hit by it directly.

I holstered my Glock and came up with my canister of pepper spray.

“Get down on the ground!”

When he kept coming, I squeezed my finger over the trigger and waited for him to get in range. Pepper spray works best inside of three or four yards.

As he got closer he raised his hands to grab me. I pointed the canister at his face and pulled the trigger, giving him a tight, one-second burst and then backing away, just like in training.

Pepper spray takes a split second to do its damage. When people get hit with it, they usually stop, not hurt, but stunned, for just a moment, and then fall to the ground screaming, clawing at their eyes, and yelling like mad because that stuff fucking burns.

But the guy I sprayed didn’t even skip a beat. He kept coming, and for a second I wondered if I missed or if he blocked the spray with his hands somehow. I let him get close again and then pumped another short one-second burst at his face.

I got it in his eyes. I was sure I got him in the eyes. But nothing happened. He didn’t even blink. He opened his mouth and the skin around his neck tightened, but no sound came out.

There’s enough spray in one canister for six one-second bursts. When I hit him with it again, I got in close and emptied the rest of the pepper spray right into his face.

I threw the empty canister to the side as I stepped back and stared at the man in amazement. I was riding a wave of adrenaline, and I had to force myself not to charge him and take him down with my bare hands. The air was thick with spray and I didn’t want to get incapacitated by it.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered the pepper spray course they taught us at the Academy. They said three percent of the population is naturally immune to the effects of the spray, but I had never actually seen anybody from that three percent.

The only other people I ever heard of who could shake it off like my guy was doing were meth freaks, and he wasn’t moving like a meth freak.

As I backed up I heard Chris yell. I looked over at him and saw that the plump woman in the spandex had somehow managed to get right on top of him. I was surprised to see him go down. He wasn’t big or anything, but he was in good shape.

She was clawing at him. Her fingernails raked across his face, cutting him, and then suddenly she knocked the gun out of his hand.

He slapped at her with his flashlight, but couldn’t break away completely. Their arms were caught up in each other.

He landed a good jab with the butt of his flashlight and backed away. Then I heard the sharp metal on metal snap of his baton as he extended it and cocked it back over his shoulder.

He swung it down on her knee sharply, and then again, punctuating the second stroke with the sickening crunch of broken bones.

The woman’s whole body reeled from his blows, but she didn’t cry out and she didn’t go down.

He hit her again and again, moving around her, keeping her at arm’s length and striking her legs when she got too close, but no matter how hard he hit her, she wouldn’t go down.

“What the hell!” he yelled. They were moving around each other in a strange, clumsy type of dance, Chris keeping the beat with his baton on her legs. “Why won’t she go down?”

But I couldn’t help him. I had my own problems to worry about.

The man I just pepper-sprayed was still reaching for me. He put out a mangled hand and I dodged underneath it. Before he could turn around, I kicked the back of his knee and pushed him down.

He didn’t even try to break his fall. Didn’t put his hands out or anything.

In the distance I could hear sirens and the uneven rise and fall of the roaring engines, and I knew help was getting close. But there were more people gathering around us now, and as I turned slightly I thought I recognized the people from across the street we had seen as we came in.

That’s when Chris went down.

All his attention was focused on the woman, and he never saw the two men who grabbed him from his right side.

I saw one of them bite him and Chris screamed. He spun around frantically, knocking their hands and faces away as he landed on the ground.

They reached for him and he rolled away. He jumped to his feet with his gun in his hand and fired two quick shots at the man who bit him, nailing him squarely in the chest.

The sound broke the air, but I was the only one who flinched. No one else in the yard even registered the shots.

The man he hit staggered backwards, knocked straight up by the force of the impact, but he didn’t fall.

I watched him shift his weight from one foot to the other in a clumsy, teetering dance and then start to walk forward again.

Chris fell backwards, clutching his neck, the blood already jetting between his fingers. Even as he fell he kept his gun leveled at the man.

I ran over to him and pulled him back.

“He fucking bit me!” Chris shouted.

I put Chris behind me and yelled at the man he had just shot. “Stop! Don’t you fucking move!”

I had my gun barrel trained on his chest and still he kept coming.

I couldn’t help but look at his face. There was nothing behind it, like one of those zombies in the movies. His gaze fell on me, but I knew somehow he wasn’t looking
at
me. There was no cognition, no intelligence in his eyes. They were clouded over, a mystery.

Chris and I backed into the street, careful to keep our distance.

“Shotguns!” I yelled, and waved Chris toward our cars.

We both scrambled back to the patrol cars, avoiding the people who were coming after us from three sides now.

As we circled around to the trunk of my car I noticed that Chris was having trouble keeping up. He had gone pale, and his breath rattled in his throat, like he was choking on phlegm.

“You won’t be able to shoot,” I told him.

“I’ll cover you. Get the shotgun.”

I popped the trunk and pulled out my shotgun case. The Department gives us the Mossberg 500—a standard, tough-as-nails twelve-gauge pump, built to take a beating and fire just about any kind of shell made.

I dumped six green beanbag shells into the magazine tube and another into the breach. We’re not allowed to use slugs on patrol, only the less-than-lethal beanbag rounds.

The beanbags are still pretty fierce, though. One or two hits at less than ten yards can put almost anybody on the ground and leave them with a couple of broken ribs, no matter how tough they think they are.

I closed the trunk. “You ready?”

Chris nodded, but he looked very sick. “What’s wrong with them? I shot that guy. How come he’s still walking?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

They stumbled closer. Watching them come, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at a crowd of walking corpses. It was like they had stepped right off the screen of some Hollywood horror film.

We moved out, staying on the driver’s side of our cars and careful to keep the engine block between our positions and the crowd that was still advancing on us through the grass.

The whole time we were doing that I could hear our cover officers getting closer, and from the way the engines and the squealing tires were starting to drown out the sound of the sirens, I figured they were just outside the subdivision.

Help was less than two minutes away.

I pointed the shotgun at the three men who had just entered the circle of street-lamp light next to our cars.

Chris was still standing, but he was bleeding badly. It was running down the side of the car where he was leaning for support.

I focused the shotgun’s ghost ring on a man about ten feet away and yelled, “Get down on the ground!”

The man ignored my order and walked right into the fender of my patrol car. It was like he expected to just walk right through the car.

“Get down on the ground!” I yelled.

He turned and moved around to the front of the car, his hands out in front of him, ready to grab.

When he stepped into the street, I fired.

My first shot went wide of center mass, hitting him in the shoulder. The impact spun him around, and he went down to his knees, but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t even try to clutch at the spot where the beanbag hit him.

I racked the next shell into the shotgun and raised the barrel, ready for another target.

When the man I had just beanbagged stood up, turned, and faced me again, I felt my heart sink down into my stomach.

People just don’t do that.

I’ve beanbagged people before, and nobody has ever just stood right back up, even from a glancing blow.

I searched his face for some indication that I had hurt him, but there was nothing there. There was no emotion, no expression, no content of any kind. He was empty. The eyes seemed to look through me into nowhere.

“Stay down! I’ll hit you again. Stay down!”

I aimed my next shot more carefully. I took my time and centered the ghost ring right in the middle of his chest.

He was less than five feet away when I fired, and he took the full force of what a twelve gauge can do. The blow knocked him backwards, off his feet, and laid him out flat on his back.

At that distance I wouldn’t be surprised if I smashed his sternum into dozens of little pieces.

I racked the shotgun again. That noise usually clears every room that hears it, but none of those people seemed to care.

They didn’t run, or blink, or look to each other for support. They never paused at all. Their pace never varied, even when they reached out to grab at us. Every move was slow and plodding, like an old woman trying to climb a flight of stairs.

More of them were coming around the front of the car now and I fired two more beanbags as quickly as I could at the first two in line.

The one closest to me went down.

The one behind him staggered back, but didn’t fall.

“Stay back!” I yelled. The air around us was filling with gun smoke, and there were so many of them coming at us that, even with the shotgun, I couldn’t keep them back.

The first guy I bean-bagged walked into my car again. I jammed the barrel into his chest and fired. I fired again as he fell to the ground.

Chris and I backed up.

We were out of shells and the shotgun was useless without them.

I went for my Glock.

“What are they, Eddie?”

“Move! Move!” I said, and pushed Chris along the side of the car. I almost had to carry him to get him to go because he was having trouble supporting his own weight. He couldn’t run at all.

As we reached the back of my car, I froze.

From between my car and Chris’s car another man stumbled into our path.

He turned and faced us and in that one moment I lost all composure. His face and his arms were a mess. There was blood everywhere, and his face was so badly shredded that I could barely recognize his features.

What looked back at me wasn’t a face at all. There was a massive gash starting just below the left eye. It was blood red and protruding from the socket like a squashed grape. The gash opened downward in a jagged triangle that spread around the jawbone, ending at a flap of skin that was caked over with dirt and hanging uselessly from his neck. Gleaming white pearls of teeth showed through the sinews of what remained of his cheek.

His right arm was just a bloody stump, but he reached for me with it like there was still a hand attached.

I lowered my weapon in confusion and disgust, then snapped it back up. “Stop! Don’t move!”

But he kept on moving.

I fired a single shot square into his chest, and he rocked back on his heels, teetering for a moment before regaining his balance.

His gory arm came up again, and he reached for me.

I aimed with both hands.

My gun barked three times, and all three shots slammed into his chest. Again he rocked back, but I couldn’t make him fall.

My training told me that it was body armor—nobody can take that kind of pounding unless they’re wearing body armor.

When he came at me that last time, I aimed for his face and fired a single shot. The bullet struck him in the cheek, and a gory bloom of blood spray and bits of flesh and bone and teeth spread out across the white hood of the police car behind him.

The man flew backwards, landing on the car’s push bumpers. I watched him struggle to regain his feet and more than anything else in the world I wanted to run as fast and as far away as I could. The shock of what I had just seen and the juice pumping through my system made me want to throw up.

I grabbed Chris by the shoulder and pushed our way to his car. I tossed him in the backseat and forced my way back to the driver’s seat.

So many people had gathered around us. They were everywhere, hands tugging at my uniform, pulling me away from the car.

I climbed in and slammed it into reverse.

There were people banging on the doors and windows and the trunk, but I didn’t bother to avoid them.

I stepped on the gas and peeled out, knocking people to the ground as I shot away from the curb. Swerving like a drunk, I kept the pedal on the floor all the way back up Chatterton.

At the top of the hill I was doing maybe fifty miles per hour and was completely out of control. I glanced off two parked cars and careened across the lanes just as two police cars came up on me.

When I saw their strobes I cut the wheel sharply and went into somebody’s front yard. I couldn’t keep the car in a straight line and the front end got away from me. The car spun suddenly to the right, and when the wheels caught, the car shot back toward the street.