Dead City - 01 (20 page)

I couldn’t move. All I could do was turn my head part of the way around, just enough to see two of the zombies crawling towards me. I yelled at them to stop, but of course they didn’t. They kept coming, and all I could do was shout.

The floor lurched backwards. I felt it move, and caught myself with a start. I heard the floor pop behind me, and when I turned my head, I saw one of the zombies fall through the floor. I couldn’t see the others. I turned my head the other way, and didn’t see them there, either.

“Come on,” I said, “pull up. Pull up.”

Very slowly, and very painfully, I managed to haul myself over the edge of the hole. When at last I landed on the moldy floorboards of the crawlspace, I collapsed, shaking. My friend was dead, and I had almost died.

The realization hit me hard.

Thinking of Marcus, I started the process of pulling myself along the boards again. I was so caught up in my grief I didn’t even realize I’d reached the other side. I rolled over the edge and landed on the floor of another office, never so relieved to feel solid ground beneath me.

I took in the darkness. There was a door on the opposite wall, and I figured there was another hallway beyond that. There would be more of those things waiting for me, too.

I checked the door. It was locked, but from my side. I turned the thumb catch and was about to turn the knob when I heard noises on the other side.

I put my head against the door and listened.

I could hear the muffled shuffle of feet on plank wood beyond the door.

Chapter 26

The first thing most cops do after they graduate from the Police Academy is go out and buy a fancy cop wallet so they can show off their badge.

My department makes us carry our badge and police ID on us at all times, and the local cop stores sell special wallets to hold it all. The one I bought has a cutout on the front part for the badge, and two see-through panels on the inside for both halves of the ID.

When Andrew was born, the hospital staff took a picture of him. In the picture, April has him across her chest and he’s holding the smallest pair of red hands up against the light. His eyes are shut tight.

April hates the way she looks in it, but she had a special copy of it made for my birthday because she saw how much it meant to me.

As I sat there in that decayed hole of an office, my back against the wall, I took the picture out of my wallet and stared at Andrew’s red, exhausted face. His mother was so flushed with relief and love for the baby in her arms that I could see the emotion shining through her skin. Seeing the two of them together like that made me smile in spite of everything else I was feeling.

Outside in the hallway I could hear more of those things shuffling around, and I wondered how many of them there were, and if they could sense me somehow. It still bothered me how they always seemed to find me. I told myself that if I ever saw Ken Stoler again I would ask him that very question. That is, right after I kicked his ass for stealing that truck.

One look around the room was enough to tell me that if they could sense me—and managed to get through the door—I’d be screwed. I only had six rounds left, and nowhere to hide.

I know it sounds strange, but even with the very real threat of ending up a shredded, bleeding piece of meat on the floor of some abandoned warehouse hanging over my head, the only thing I could wrap my mind around at that moment was Andrew’s picture. And of all the memories I had accumulated from the six short months that he had been a part of my life, the one that came to mind was me feeding him a bottle at two in the morning, rocking him back and forth in an old glider chair until he cried himself back to sleep.

I thought about all the times he’d fallen asleep on my shoulder, and I wanted more than anything else in the world to be back there, holding him, patting his back to make him burp, and feeling the warm, soft wind of his breath against my neck.

In the darkness of that office, I was able to imagine myself back in that glider chair. I turned my head just slightly. I could almost see the bedroom where April and I slept. The image was part memory, part self-induced hallucination, and the moment I recognized it for what it was, it was gone. The spell was broken.

I knew right then that to stay in that room would get me killed, and there was no way in hell I was going to let that happen. More than anything, I wanted to live.

I stood up and leaned my head against the door, putting my mind in order for what I was about to do.

I turned the doorknob slowly until it clicked over. I took a deep breath and got ready to move.

And that’s when the cell phone on my belt started ringing.

Chapter 27

I nearly jumped out of my boots. Fumbling at my belt, I grabbed the phone and flipped it open. So many things had happened in the last two hours, so many horrible things, that I had completely forgotten about it.

The caller ID screen showed April’s cell phone number, and I realized that those two rings I heard at headquarters must have gotten through to her after all.

“Hello,” I said. “April?”

“Eddie. Oh, my God. Eddie?”

“I’m here, April. Where are you?”

Static filled my ears. Through the white noise I could hear her voice, scared, yet still rational and in control. She said something about an apartment building and then I heard her say Andrew’s name.

“April,” I said. “April, I’m losing you.”

More static. It roared in my ears.

I heard her voice again, and then all hell broke loose. A zombie slammed into the door from the other side, and the whole wall shook.

There was a pause, long enough for me to mouth the words, “Oh shit,” and then the door burst open.

A burly, thick-armed zombie lumbered through the door, his mouth greasy with blood and caked with little pieces of cloth.

I backed up towards the crawlspace as I wrestled my gun out of the holster. He was almost on top of me before I got a shot off.

There were four more in the hallway moving towards me. A soft orange light was coming into the building through three windows along the left-hand wall, and in the muted light they looked like gray ghosts. They shambled toward me and I ran at them, twisting one way and then the other, dodging around each one in turn, and kept running all the way to the corner.

There were more hidden in the shadows, blocking me from a very narrow staircase. The one closest to me was looking the other way, and I grabbed his already-shredded shirt and used him as a shield as I pushed my way through the others.

I hit the top of the stairs and had to stop. There was a zombie about two thirds of the way up the stairs and it was too narrow to go around him.

I fired once and sent him sliding down the steps on his back.

It wasn’t a clean head shot, but it was enough to buy me some time to jump over him and make it to the foot of the stairs. I landed hard and turned the corner, right into the open arms of a huge zombie.

He was a wall of meat.

He grabbed me with one arm and pushed me against the wall. I tried to squeeze by him but he bit down hard on my shoulder.

Luckily, all he got was a mouthful of the shoulder strap of my bulletproof vest.

We wrestled in a clumsy dance. I managed to get a hand under his chin and forced his head back. I brought my gun up with my other hand and shot him just above the ear. Gore went all over the wall behind him.

The zombie I had knocked down the stairs was getting up and there were others about to come down the stairs behind him.

I took off running through an open doorway, through another small and very narrow room with a time clock on the wall, and then through a door that led outside.

Breathing in the night air, I took stock of where I was. From what I could tell, I was on the opposite side of the building from the loading docks where Marcus and I had seen that huge crowd.

But the side I was on didn’t look much better. There was a large crowd at both corners of the building.

I turned to my right and tried to flank most of them with the best sprint I could muster.

They grabbed at me, and tried to latch on. I could feel their hands on me, but I pushed and dodged and just plowed through until I broke out of the alleyway and onto a dark and broken street.

There was no street sign, no way to tell where I was. Downtown was burning off to my left, and I knew that was west of my position, but that wasn’t much of a help. Even if the streets had been marked I wouldn’t have known one from the other. They all looked the same to me.

I was completely lost.

I knew I had to find a car. Without that, I didn’t stand a snowball’s chance of making it home.

Halfway down the street I could see two zombies coming out of the shattered front doors of a convenience store. As I watched them cross the parking lot my breath formed thick clouds in front of me. I had been so wrapped up in the stress of escaping the warehouse and trying not to think about Marcus that I had forgotten how cold it was outside.

The two zombies were walking toward me, but they were still too far away for me to tell if they had seen me or not.

Another group of about seven or so was milling around in front of a small, two-story white-brick building about fifty yards away.

South of me there were several large Section 8 apartment buildings, and while I couldn’t see any movement around them, I knew there would be more zombies there. North, south, and west were all closed to me.

Once again I was forced to go east, so I gathered myself up and started off at a trot.

There were zombies moving through the darkness on the other side of the empty lot not far from where I was. I saw a man against the white doors of a half-burned refrigerator, and then I saw more zombies coming out of the rubble near him.

With each passing moment their numbers grew, like ants coming up from a hive, until there were knots of them so thick in places they spanned the whole street.

I didn’t even bother to pull my gun. There were so many of them it would have been futile to waste the ammunition.

I looked for a way out, and found it around the corner of a wrecked apartment building on the other side of the empty lot.

There were gaping holes in the walls, and when a small group of zombies moved towards me, they made a gap so that I could see all the way through the building. Beyond them it looked clear. I ran for the opening and came out on a wet, unlined street.

There was a drainage ditch at the end of the block and I ran there.

I ended up in the bushes at the base of the slope, knee deep in filthy brown water, with ropy vines laced with thorns biting into my face and arms.

But I didn’t stop moving. I made the other side and scrambled up it on my hands and knees. I was covered in mud when I came over the other side, and as soon as I stopped moving, the cold returned with a bite.

A huge field of wet grass stretched out in front of me.

Off to my left I could see the firelight from downtown, and as it caught the water on the ground it made the grass sparkle like a sea of jewels.

The grass sloped gradually upward, and the crest of the hill was dominated by a line of dark elms. I walked up to the elms, hoping to stay under the cover of the trees while I went north, paralleling the drainage ditch; but what I saw instead was a road packed with a slowly shambling crowd of the infected.

I ran back into the elms and headed north.

A fast-mover came at me through the trees, moving just as fast as I was. I tried to change direction on him, but he was on me before I could get out of the way. He tried to tackle me, but I kept my feet and managed to push him down to his knees.

I lit him up with my pistol, but he was moving too fast for me to get a clean shot. My first shot hit him in the chin. My second and third shots grazed his cheek and ear. I used my last two bullets to put him down for good.

Then I ran through the trees until I hit pavement again. It was a small, unlined road, and on the other side of that was a small white church, dark at the windows and square as a country barn.

The zombies came out of the woods on both sides of it, and there were even more behind me. There weren’t any more fast-movers, but there were a lot of the slow ones.

I was completely surrounded.

I was freezing too, wet all the way up to my waist. I looked for a hole to run through, but there wasn’t one. I was trapped.

I holstered my weapon and pulled out my baton.

Slowly, deliberately, I searched the crowd for my first target.

“I love you, April,” I whispered, and said a little prayer that it wasn’t going to be my good-bye to her. “I love you, Andrew.”

A zombie in a black shirt and ball cap closed on me. His teeth were slick with blood, poking through flaps of shredded skin where his lips had once been.

I drew the baton back and I was timing the stroke when the shot rang out.

The zombie slumped to the ground without a sound. There was a bullet hole in the side of his head that looked like a black flower.

I turned, stunned, toward the shot. Four black men with rifles were standing on the front steps of the church. One of them waved at me to hurry up, while the others sent a volley of bullets buzzing in the air around me.

Chapter 28

I ran for the porch, bullets whistling past my head.

The men on the porch were knocking down zombies all around me, giving me a clear shot right up to the door. I hit the steps at a full sprint and the man who was waving at me caught me and pulled me over to the door.

“I got him, Simon,” he yelled to one of the other men. “Let’s go.”

A big guy in his early twenties was down on one knee at the leading edge of the porch, firing through the rails. He glanced back over his shoulder and gave me a hard look.

“There’s too many of them out here to leave around,” he said to the one who had grabbed me.

“I ain’t staying out here,” my guy said. “We got him, now let’s go.”

“Get going if you’re going,” the one named Simon said, and then he pointed at me with his chin. “Give the cop your gun if you’re going.”

The first man hesitated.

“Get going,” Simon barked at him. “Hey cop, you know how to shoot one of those things?”

“Yeah,” I said, and took the rifle from the first man. “I got it. How much ammo you got?”

“A whole damn church full,” Simon said.

The first man hesitated, but I pushed him back gently towards the door and told him it was okay. “Are there more of you inside?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Go inside.”

He slipped inside the church without a word. There was a green metal ammunition box on the porch behind where he had been standing, filled to the top with loaded magazines for the rifles.

I looked at the rifle in my hands and read Remington on the barrel. There was no shoulder harness and no scope, and the action still had clumps of packing grease at the corners.

I ejected the magazine, checked it, then stuffed it back in.

The others started firing. “Come on, damn it,” Simon said to me. “Fucking help us out here.”

I looked across the yard at the zombies closing in on us. The parking lot went right up to the front walk and then continued on around to the right side of the building. A white rail fence separated the parking lot from the road, and about a hundred feet or so beyond that was the line of black elms I had just run through. The zombies were coming in from all sides now.

“How many of them are there?” Simon asked me, his voice just a notch or two away from an animal’s growl.

“A couple hundred at least,” I said, taking a post to his left. “A lot more than this.”

An older man standing off to Simon’s right threw some magazines at my feet and then went back to firing. The three of them were unorganized. They shot at whatever crossed their path without thinking about maximizing their coverage, and a few of the zombies got in too close.

I walked down the length of the porch railing, firing at the ones who got through. I put four down in short order, and then made my back to the center where the three of them were firing.

I grabbed one of the men and pointed him toward the parking lot. “Focus on those over there,” I said.

Then I grabbed the other guy and told him to get the ones coming from around back on the left side. Simon and I focused on the ones coming out of the elms.

Marcus once told me that I couldn’t shoot my way out of a wet paper bag. He meant with a pistol. With a rifle, I was a completely different kind of shooter. I learned to shoot a rifle when I was a kid, deer hunting with Dad up in Minnesota, and it always felt like a perfect fit in my hands. Once I had the stock seated against my shoulder, it was a massacre.

I went through magazines in a hurry. The infected were falling all over the parking lot, and soon it was thick with their corpses. I even started knocking them down on the other side of the fence, while they were still out in the street.

The acrid smell of gun smoke filled up the porch, but still I kept on firing. I was hitting targets on both sides of the porch and didn’t stop until the box of magazines was almost empty. I didn’t even notice the others had stopped shooting.

When I finally stopped shooting, the yard and the street and the parking lot were stacked deep with bodies. A few zombies were still on their feet and moving slowly toward us, but the crowd had thinned down considerably.

“Get her,” Simon said to the man at my left, pointing at a young girl of maybe thirteen who was dragging her useless left leg toward the porch.

Simon loaded up another magazine and shot the last four zombies still walking the yard.

“Anybody got movement?” he asked, scanning the yard over the sights of his rifle.

“They’s done on this side,” said the man watching the parking lot.

“Over here, too,” said the other man.

“Good.” He swept a pile of brass off the porch with his toe. “You shoot real good,” he said to me, but it wasn’t exactly a compliment the way he said it. More like an accusation.

I could sense his hostility. The way he stared at me was more than just posturing. There was real hatred there. Not the kind of hatred one man has for another, but the kind of hatred men feel for symbols, for forces that control their lives and keep them down.

I watched his eyes, very much aware of the guns we all held and the unspoken something filling up the air around us.

I knew what he was doing. It was a gangbanger’s game, to see if I would flinch. On the street, it’s a way of establishing dominance. Once somebody makes eye contact, they hold it, and won’t look away.

If you’re a cop and you look away first, you’re in trouble, because they know they own you.

I lowered my shoulders slightly and got ready for whatever was coming next. He stood square, trying to intimidate me. He was a good four inches taller than me, with a wide, flat nose and a couple of good-size gaps in his teeth. His flannel jacket made him look bulkier than he probably was, but I’d say he still had at least fifty pounds on me.

The other two men didn’t get it. I knew what the stare meant, the rules of the game, but even I didn’t know why we were doing it. Had he really bailed me out just to do this?

The moment dragged out uncomfortably, both of us waiting for the other to show some signs of weakness.

While we stood there, staring at each other, the church door opened, and I heard a very calm voice call out from the darkness, “It’s time to come inside. Both of you.”