Apocalypse Of The Dead (4 page)

And then he knew what he was looking at.

“Hey, boss,” he said.

Carnot rolled his eyes up at Billy. What the fuck do you want?

Billy pointed at the approaching zombie with a nod of his chin.

Carnot looked over his shoulder, then did a double take. “Holy shit,” he said. He stood up and backed away from his lawn chair, still holding the cell phone to his ear.

The zombie stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass. It raised its arms, its hands outstretched and clutching for them in a gesture of supplication that Billy found strangely funny.

But he stopped laughing when the zombie started to moan. When you do nothing but sit around the common room of a jail pod all day, you watch a lot of TV. He had heard that moan before, on the news. Once, he’d seen a news spot where hundreds of the things had been moving down a San Antonio street. The things had been packed in tightly. And even with the volume turned down and the other guys talking and laughing and making asses of themselves all around him, he could still feel the gooseflesh popping up on his arms. But seeing it on TV was nothing like hearing it in person. The real thing took his breath away.

“Shoot it,” he said to Carnot.

But Carnot just stood there, the phone still stuck to the side of his face.

“Hang up the fucking phone and shoot,” Billy said.

Carnot groaned. Then he seemed to find himself. He looked at the phone like he was surprised it was still there. Then he said, “Babe, I gotta go.”

He flipped the phone closed and slid it into his gun belt.

Then he pulled his gun.

“Sir, you need to stop.”

“He’s not gonna stop,” Billy said.

“Shut up,” Carnot snapped.

He raised his gun and pointed it at the zombie’s chest.

“Stop, police!” Carnot shouted.

The man lumbered forward.

“Jesus, Carnot, he’s not gonna stop. Fucking shoot him already.”

“Stop,” Carnot said. But his voice was barely a whisper. He lowered his gun, raised it again.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Billy said. He stepped around Carnot with his trash spike raised like a javelin and jammed it into the zombie’s temple.

The zombie didn’t go down. It stayed on its feet and even turned a little toward Billy, its hands coming up to clutch at him. Grunting with the effort, Billy held on to the spike and worked it around inside the wound until the zombie’s arms dropped down to its sides and it sagged to the ground. Billy guided it down onto its back and then yanked his spike free.

“Holy shit,” Carnot said. “What the hell did you do?”

Your job, you idiot.

But he didn’t say that. His gaze went right past Carnot to the parking lot. Three more zombies were limping toward them. They looked different than the one Billy had just put down. They were shabbier. Their clothes were gray, filthy rags. Their faces were gaunt, smeared with blood. They looked like the zombies he had seen on the news, the ones inside the quarantine zone.

He heard moaning to his right and looked that way.

“What the hell?” he said.

There were two zombies there, a man and a young boy, their wrists tied together.

“Hey, boss,” he said. “We’re gonna need that pistol.”

“Yeah,” Carnot said.

But the deputy was shaking so badly he could barely point his gun at the approaching zombies, all of whom had started to moan loudly. The sound carried with disturbing clarity across the park. It seemed to be coming from everywhere at once.

“We have to get to high ground,” Billy said.

Carnot nodded, but didn’t move.

“Come on,” Billy said.

He grabbed the deputy by the shoulder and pulled him toward the bus. There was enough of a gap between the zombies that Billy thought they’d be able to make it at a brisk walk, but they hadn’t gone more than a few steps when one of the prisoners tumbled out of the bus doors and landed on his back in the parking lot. It looked like his throat had been torn out. One of the guards climbed down after him, his face and the front of his uniform soaked through with a reddish-brown stain.

“Get on your radio,” Billy said to Carnot. “Call for help.”

Carnot reached down to his belt and felt for where the radio should have been, but wasn’t. He looked back at the watercooler. Billy followed his gaze and saw the radio in the grass next to the lawn chair.

“For Christ’s sake,” Billy said.

One of the other prisoners was coming across the grass toward them. Most of his face was gone. Billy stared at the man. He’d heard the infected could ignore pain that would put an uninfected person over into unconsciousness. There were recorded instances of the infected walking around with their intestines hanging out of their bellies. But Billy hadn’t really believed those things until now. That man, his face had literally been chewed off. And he was still coming.

Billy looked around for a place to take cover. The news had said to seek the high ground, if possible. There was a gap between the approaching zombies and through it he saw a car parked off by itself.

“There,” he said to Carnot. “That car over there. Come on.”

They ran for it, Billy pulling Carnot along behind him. The car was a fairly new Buick in decent shape. It was empty, and Billy was glad for that. He jumped onto the roof, turned, and pulled Carnot up next to him. Then they got on the roof and stood side by side, watching the zombies getting closer.

“You’re gonna have to shoot,” Billy said.

Carnot raised his weapon. Billy watched him take aim at a man in running shorts and the remnants of a bloodstained white T-shirt.

“Shoot him,” Billy said.

Carnot fired. The bullet smacked into the man’s shoulder and spun him around, but it didn’t drop him. He turned back toward them and came on again.

“Head shots, damn it,” Billy said.

“I’m trying,” Carnot said. His voice was trembling.

He fired three more times and managed only one hit.

Within moments they were surrounded. Mangled hands clutched at their feet. The moaning was deafening. Carnot was shaking badly now. He was firing wildly, completely missing zombies that were less than three feet from the tip of his gun. Billy, meanwhile, was kicking at hands and spearing at faces, making his movements count.

He got one of the zombies in the forehead, and the man slumped forward onto his knees, his face pressed against the back driver’s-side window by the bodies pushing in from behind him. One of the zombies in the back managed to ramp up over the fallen zombie’s back and came up onto the roof.

Billy sidestepped around the zombie’s outstretched arms and pushed him down onto the trunk.

He heard a click.

Carnot was standing there, pointing his empty Glock at the zombies below him. The slide was locked back in the empty position.

“Goddamn it. Reload!”

Carnot pointed the empty pistol at another zombie and tried to pull the trigger.

“Reload your fucking—”

But Billy didn’t get a chance to finish. Carnot vanished. It was like Wile E. Coyote in those old Road Runner cartoons. One second he was there; the next he was gone, his feet pulled out from underneath him. The back of Carnot’s head smacked against the edge of the roof with a sickening crunch and then they pulled him down to the ground.

As Billy watched, they swarmed Carnot, tearing at him with their teeth and their fingers.

His screams lasted only a moment.

Billy didn’t waste time watching Carnot twitching in his death throes. Instead, he jumped to the ground and ran for it. A few of the zombies tried to follow, but they were slow. Billy was able to weave through them easily. Once he created some distance, he stopped, caught his breath, and looked for an escape route.

There were, he guessed, maybe sixty or seventy of the zombies walking across the park. Most were close by, already in the parking lot. A few were crossing the street into the hotels and green belts opposite the park. In the distance, he could hear police sirens getting closer.

“Never thought I’d be happy to hear that,” he muttered.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, a splash of orange coming around a line of shrubs.

It was Tommy Patmore. His arms and his stomach and his thighs were soaked with blood, but he didn’t look infected. He looked shell-shocked, confused. The shank was still in his hand.

From behind Tommy, one of the other prisoners was coming up fast. He was limping, a bad bite wound just below his knee, but he was still moving with frightening speed.

A fast mover, Billy thought. The articles he’d read had mentioned how some of the zombies, the ones who were in really good physical condition before they became infected, sometimes managed to maintain a measure of their former physical prowess when they turned. But the same article had also said that it took longer for those people to turn. They’d only been out about two hours. How had this happened so fast?

He shouted, “Tommy, look out!” and ran for his friend.

He got there just as the fast mover was closing on Tommy, and he jammed his trash spike into the zombie’s ear. The zombie fought like a big fish on a hook, but it eventually went down.

Billy pulled his spike out of the zombie’s head and turned to Tommy.

“Are you okay? Did you get bit?”

Tommy’s mouth was working like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t making words.

“Tommy, answer me.”

“I…I killed him. I did it.”

He was crying, his body shaking all over.

“What? Who?”

“DeShawn James. They wanted me…They told me to…I stabbed him in the belly and then I stopped, you know, I…I had changed my mind. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t. But then he started fighting me.”

Tommy glanced down at the shank in his hand like he didn’t know what it was.

He said, “I didn’t want to. God, there was so much blood.”

“Yeah, well, you did. Now it’s time to cowboy the fuck up and deal with it. We’re in a world of shit here, Tommy. Are you bit anyplace?”

“Bit?”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tommy. Are you hurt?”

“No.”

“Good. We got to get to someplace safe.” He scanned the buildings across the street. The hotel would be no good. Zombies were already walking up to the covered carport at the main entrance. But farther south, he saw a place that looked promising, a few low structures behind a large pink stucco wall. “Over there,” he said. “Come on. Stay close.”

And together, they ran for it.

From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

Houston, Texas: July 5th, 3:15 A.M.

I saw my first zombie from the window of a registered charter bus on the Gibbs-Sprawl Road as we entered the quarantine zone around San Antonio.

That was eight months ago.

She was weirdly sexless, not anything like what I expected. I remember she was standing barefoot in the weeds that had grown up at the edge of the road since the city was abandoned, and her greasy, stringy hair hung down over her face like a wet curtain. Her body was thin and rickety looking. She was wearing a baglike, bloodstained hospital gown, and to me she looked like an emaciated crack whore. She never even looked up, not even as our bus rolled on by. She just stood there, hugging herself with her bone-skinny arms in the cloud of dust our bus had kicked up. I wasn’t disgusted like I thought I would be. I just felt sad.

But, like I said, that was eight months ago. I’ve seen a lot of zombies since then, a lot of death. I’ve studied them. I’ve gotten closer than I would have liked at times. Eventually—hopefully—all of these notebooks will get turned into some kind of cohesive whole, some narrative of the zombie outbreak that has brought our great nation from superpower status to the level of a ticking time bomb for the rest of the world, and in that narrative I’ll try to find a reason for it all.

If there is one.

Somehow I doubt there is.

I’m growing more and more convinced that there aren’t reasons to explain this world we live in. Not good ones anyway.

Maybe that’s what makes catastrophes so horrible—the lack of a reason. I mean in a teleological sense. Our brains are wired to see the world in terms of cause and effect. Even the atheists among us find some small measure of comfort knowing that there’s a reason things are so bad.

These days, I find myself more interested in the zombies themselves than I am with the traditional things with which a historian and commentator should be concerned. Xenophon, Plutarch, Sallust, Suetonius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Raphael Holinshed, Francesco Guicciardini, Edward Gibbon—those great chroniclers in the history of historians—they all sought to cast a wide net, giving equal attention to personal agenda and facts. I would like to cast a wide net, too. And I have plenty of opinions. The economic impact of the outbreak at home and abroad, the political flare-ups, the big, empty speeches on the floor of the U.N. and on the White House lawn—all those things have their place in a history with any claim to completeness. But I find it hard to give a rat’s ass about them. The politicians aren’t out here on the street dying with the rest of us. They’re all stashed away in some secure, undisclosed location, waiting it out. And their eloquent speeches don’t tell the part of the story that needs telling.

I read Eddie Hudson’s book and a dozen others just like it. I know what they described—all the shambling corpselike people flooding the streets, attacking every living thing they could find. Well, I’ve seen what happens after almost two years. The infected aren’t dead. And like all living things, they’ve changed, adapted. The ones who have survived since the first days of the outbreak—and granted, there aren’t many of them—have become something different. And yet, for all that, they are still dangerous; they are still unpredictable. They still attack. They’re like alcoholics who can’t help coming back to the bottle. Even if they don’t want to.

That’s the side of this thing I want to talk about.

July 5th, 5:40 A.M.

We’ve got about twenty minutes until takeoff and I wanted to jot down a few notes about the quarantine zone. Sometimes I find it hard to wrap my mind around how big it is. The logistical scope of the project is simply staggering.