Apocalypse Of The Dead (8 page)

“Ed? Where’d they come from? I thought…the quarantine. Aren’t they…How could this happen?”

He stepped out of the closet with his gun belt in his hand. He slipped it around his waist and buckled it, then put his gun case on the coffee table and took out a pair of Smith & Wesson .357s. He dropped one into the holster and tucked the other into the small of his back.

The boy was looking at him, his eyes wide.

“I don’t know, Margaret. I really don’t. It’s spreading, though. I saw three of them attacking Linda Beard.”

Margaret looked sick.

“Do me a favor,” he said. “Check the window. Tell me how many you see.”

“Where did you get those guns?” the boy asked.

Margaret was peering through the blinds. She let them fall back into place and said, “Mr. Moore is a retired U.S. Marshal.”

“No way! You’re a marshal?”

“Used to be,” Ed said. He smiled at the boy. “What’s your name, son?”

“Randy Hargensen.”

“Well, hello, Randy Hargensen. And how about you, little lady?”

“This is Britney,” Randy said. “She’s ten.”

Ed tipped his hat to her. “Pleased to know you, Britney.”

The girl didn’t speak. She was trembling all over.

Randy said, “I like your hat. It’s cool.”

“Randy’s into Westerns,” Margaret said.

“Great. I like a good Western myself. You ever read Elmer Kelton, Randy?”

The boy cocked his head to one side. “I’m seven.”

“Oh. Good point. Tell me, Randy, you ever seen a real marshal’s badge?”

“No, sir.”

Ed took out his wallet. Inside was a gold badge. He slid it out, removed it from its backer, and then handed it to Randy.

“You put that on, okay? You and your sister are gonna be my deputies.”

The boy’s smile was huge. The girl was still trembling, though. It was going to take more than trinkets to reach her.

“Margaret,” he said. “What’s the count?”

“Eight of them,” she said.

“Okay, that’s no problem.”

He loaded each of his revolvers in turn from the speed loaders in his gun case. Then he stepped up to the door, a revolver in each hand.

“Margaret, come over here and do the door for me. When I tell you to, you throw it open, you hear?”

“Where are we going, Ed?”

“I left Barbie Denkins in her apartment. We’re gonna go get her. Then we’re gonna make our way over to Julie Carnes’s place. She should still be with Art Waller. From there, I don’t know. You ready?”

She nodded.

He turned and winked at the kids. Then he said, “Okay, throw her open.”

Margaret opened the door and Ed rushed outside. There was a zombie right in front of the door, and Ed put a bullet in its forehead.

He stepped over the body and went for the others. He didn’t waste time letting them come to him. The sound of gunfire would bring more of the infected, and they had to be gone before that happened.

Careful to make every shot count, he dropped five of them in short order.

“Ed!”

He turned at the sound of Margaret’s voice.

Two of the infected had gone for the open door instead of for him. They were on the sidewalk now, one on either side of the door.

Ed stepped between them, raised his revolvers, and dropped both zombies simultaneously.

When he turned his attention to Margaret and the kids, the boy was looking at him strangely. His eyes were wide, and he wasn’t crying. He was smiling.

“Whoa,” the boy said. “Mister, that was cool!”

Ben Richardson was looking over the side of the roof at a small group of zombies clustered around the doorway of the building opposite them. There was another group doing the same thing around the door to their building. What exactly they were doing he couldn’t tell, but something was going on. It almost looked like they were communicating, discussing something.

He and Barnes had spent most of the morning on the roof of the Clear Lake Title Company, waiting for the infected to get bored and wander off. But they hadn’t. If anything, there were even more of them down there than before. The sound of their moaning chilled some deep interior part of him, something vital. It hadn’t been like this in San Antonio.

“Hey, Officer Barnes.”

No answer.

Richardson looked back. Barnes was sleeping with his back against the stairwell door, a white hand towel draped over his head. Richardson had heard stories of U-boat captains who sometimes took their boats deep to avoid a depth charging and fell asleep, even as the boat creaked and groaned and shuddered all around them. It was one way to show their men there was nothing to fear so as to keep up their morale. For a moment, he wondered if Barnes was trying to do something similar now, but just as quickly he chased the thought away. He didn’t get that sense from Barnes. The man had a stoniness to him that didn’t seem to allow room for compassion for another man’s fear.

“Officer Barnes.”

“What do you want?”

“Can you come here for a second, please?”

Barnes lifted the towel, annoyed at having his nap interrupted.

“Please?” Richardson said, and waved him over.

Barnes crawled over to him.

“What do you want?”

Richardson pointed at the zombies clustered around the doorway across the street. “Look at them over there,” he said. “Why are they doing that?”

The tide was starting to ebb again, and most of the zombies were only up to their knees in water. They were all at a fairly advanced stage in the infection. Their skin was gray and leprous, open sores on their arms and neck and face, but they moved with a confidence that the more freshly turned Stage One and Stage Two zombies couldn’t match.

Beside him, Barnes studied the crowd. He was frowning. He pulled himself up and peered over the side of the building at the group that was gathering around the door to their own building.

“How long have they been there?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Richardson said. “I just saw them.”

“Shit,” Barnes muttered.

“What is it?”

“They’re getting ready to make entry,” Barnes said. “We’re gonna have company pretty soon.”

“What do you mean? How can you tell?”

Barnes pointed at the zombies out in the street. “I thought you went through the Shreveport School.”

“Well, I—”

Barnes cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You see those zombies there? The ones walking there? If you watch them long enough, you’ll notice that they’re circling the building. The same ones have been doing it all morning, making that god-awful racket. These others have broken away from the main group, though. They’ve given up trying to flush us out. They’re coming in to get us. Those ones over there, they’ve probably trapped something inside that building. A dog, maybe. There’s still lots of dogs around here.”

Richardson was shocked.

“You’re serious? They’re capable of that kind of cognition? They can set up a diversion?”

“Of course,” Barnes said. “They’ll fuck you up if you’re not careful. Bubbas like these guys can do basic problem solving. They can open doors and crawl through windows and hunt in packs. I watched four of ’em trap a raccoon once. I don’t know if you ever tried to catch a raccoon, but it ain’t easy.”

“You call them Bubbas?”

“Stage Three zombies, like those guys. They’re not real bright, but they’re bright enough to get the job done.”

Richardson shook his head in amazement. He’d heard rumors that some of the Stage Three zombies had limited cognition. At Shreveport, they told him some of the more advanced zombies could respond to their names or cooperate on kills, that kind of thing. But he hadn’t believed those rumors. It seemed more like wishful thinking from the growing sector of the American public that wanted the government to go in and try to administer a cure for the necrosis filovirus, even if that meant risking the quarantine.

Richardson had seen it before with Dr. Sylvia Carnes’s expedition into San Antonio. She’d taken twenty-eight college kids, all of them members of the University of Texas at Austin’s Chapter of Ethical Treatment for the Infected, into the quarantine zone, and gotten most of them killed in the process. Richardson had been along as an embedded reporter on that disastrous trip, and was one of three to make it out of San Antonio alive. It was there he’d solidified his opinion that the infected were beyond help. But seeing the infected like this complicated things.

“So what are we going to do?” he said to Barnes.

“We’re gonna need to get out of here. You ready to move?”

There was a loud crash from somewhere downstairs.

“What was that?”

“Shit,” Barnes said. His rifle was leaning against the wall next to the stairwell door. He ran over and picked it up, ejected the magazine, checked it, slapped it back in. “How you doin’ for ammo?”

“I only fired twice.”

“Okay, good.”

Barnes leaned against the door, listening. Even from where he stood, Richardson could hear moans inside the building below them. Something was crashing around inside the stairwell, making its way up.

Barnes looked back to Richardson. “We’re about to get some company. Remember, make your shots count. Don’t rock back and start firing or you’ll burn through that magazine in a heartbeat.”

Richardson nodded.

There was a booming crash against the metal door. It rocked against its hinges.

Another crash.

“Next one and they’ll be through,” Barnes said.

Richardson swallowed the lump in his throat and tried to focus. His vision was tunneled around the door.

There was a final crash and the door exploded outward. A zombie stood there, three more behind him. The first one lumbered out onto the roof. He looked half-starved. His shirt was little more than a scrap of soiled cotton looped around his neck and his left shoulder. Richardson could count the man’s ribs down his right side. They protruded like ripples in a pond through his yellowish-gray, abscessed skin. But his eyes were clear, intent on aggression, full of feral intelligence behind a curtain of wet, dark hair.

Richardson’s finger twitched against the trigger, but he didn’t fire. Barnes did that for him. Four quick, well-aimed shots. The man looked like he was practicing on the range. He kept himself in a crouch, making every move count.

The exchange lasted maybe three seconds.

Barnes advanced into the doorway without saying a word.

Richardson went after him.

There was one more zombie in the stairwell but Barnes put it down with another well-aimed shot.

In the stairwell, the sound of the AR-15 was like two boards being slapped together. It echoed inside Richardson’s head.

A moment later, they stepped out onto the fifth floor. From there, they were going to have to take the exposed interior stairwell that led down through the center of the building and into the lobby. Debris had collected all over the floor, and Richardson had to scramble over it just to keep up with Barnes.

They were on the second-floor landing when they spotted their next zombie. It crashed out of an office to Richardson’s right, and Richardson gasped in surprise as the thing clapped a mangled hand on his shoulder.

He ducked away from the woman and spun around, bringing the muzzle of his rifle to bear on the woman’s head.

He fired, and the woman’s head exploded all over the wall behind her. The headless corpse fell backward against the wall and sagged to the ground.

Richardson lowered his rifle and looked at the damage he had caused.

“My God,” he whispered.

But when he turned around, Barnes was out of sight.

“Officer Barnes?”

He heard the sound of footsteps below him. He looked over the railing and saw Barnes moving in a crouch across the lobby.

Realizing that Barnes had no intention of waiting for him, Richardson ran down the stairs as fast as the debris in his way allowed. All sorts of trash had floated into the lobby with the ebb and flow of the tides, and scrambling across it was hard. Barnes made it look easy, never letting his weapon dip from the low ready position, but for Richardson, it was humiliatingly difficult to navigate the mess of chairs and tables and plastic boxes and piles upon piles of plywood that seemed to be everywhere.

He came up next to Barnes and looked out into the street. The noise of their firefight had attracted scores of the infected. They stumbled out of every doorway, from around every corner, advancing through the knee-deep water with varying degrees of skill. Some almost seemed to bound through the water. Others moved in fits and starts, like badly handled marionettes.

Richardson raised his rifle, but Barnes put a hand on the muzzle and forced it down.

“No,” he said. “Save your ammo.”

“What are we gonna do?”

“We’re gonna move fast. Come on.”

They ran up the narrow street, zigzagging through the wreckage, hugging the walls of buildings wherever possible. Richardson kept as close to Barnes as he could, but the man was fast. By the time they reached the corner of the building, Richardson was a good ten yards behind him, and losing ground.

But then Barnes stopped. He peered around the corner, then looked back at Richardson. His gaze didn’t stay on Richardson, though. It drifted to the area behind him, and his face took on an odd, puzzled expression.

Richardson stopped and turned to see what Barnes was looking at. None of the infected had followed them. They had run right through the crowd, but now the infected were all turning away and forming a tightening ring around a knot of people who had just emerged from the building across the street from the Clear Lake Title Company.

Even from a distance of two hundred feet or so, Richardson could tell they weren’t infected.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Officer Barnes, do you see—”

“Uncles,” Barnes said. “Come on.”

He made a move to duck around the corner.

“Hey, wait,” Richardson said. “We have to help them.”

“They’re uncles,” Barnes said. “They’re dead already.”

“You’re kidding. You’re just gonna leave them? You can’t.”

“Just fuckin’ watch me.”

Barnes turned away. Richardson stared at his back, amazed that the man could disengage from the scene so effortlessly. He only had a moment to make up his own mind: follow Barnes or do what his gut told him was the only humane thing to do.