He’d read Eddie Hudson’s book about the first night of the outbreak in San Antonio, and like a lot of others had, he found it hard to believe that so many of the infected could pour into a street that was completely empty only moments before. But after seeing it for himself, he knew it was true.
Michael Barnes clearly knew it, too. Like all members of the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority, Barnes was a graduate of the Shreveport Survival School. Richardson had interviewed some of its instructors and had even been through an abbreviated version of the program before being allowed to go inside the quarantine zone with GRQA agents. He had a sense of what Barnes was trying to do by guiding them against the side wall of the grocery store. Richardson was ready for the slow but steady pace of their advance, stay quiet, stop, listen, scan, and move out again. While at the Shreveport School, he had felt like a kid playing cops and robbers. But this was the real deal.
Ahead of him, Barnes stopped and looked around. He motioned for Richardson to come forward.
“When we go around this corner, we’re not gonna stop, okay? You’ll see a strip center just ahead of you. We’re gonna stay to the right of that. You got me?”
“Yeah,” Richardson said.
“That weapon you’ve got there can fire through a magazine in a hurry, so don’t lose your cool and empty the whole thing into the first zombie you see. Every shot counts, or you don’t take it.”
Richardson nodded.
“Okay, let’s go.”
Barnes stepped around the corner and Richardson tucked in right behind him. Ahead of them was a long stretch of water, the strip mall Barnes had told him about on the opposite side. In between, a few cars were sunken up to their windshields. Here and there they saw a tree.
Richardson counted sixteen zombies, all of them within fifty yards of their position and closing fast.
“Let’s go,” Barnes said.
He was already moving out, going quickly, but without splashing. It was harder for Richardson. He was terrified of moving through water, especially when he couldn’t see his feet. He had a terrible feeling that the infected were just below the surface, waiting to grab him, even though he knew that to be impossible. The infected weren’t truly dead, after all. They needed to breathe to go on hunting.
As they were moving forward, he tripped over the curb of a traffic island and went face-first into the water. When he came up, spluttering and blinking the water from his eyes, he saw that Barnes was already a good ten yards ahead of him.
He ran forward, making a terrific splash.
But Barnes didn’t try to quiet him. One of the zombies had closed the distance between them, and Barnes leveled his AR-15 and dropped him with one shot.
Two others were close by and he dropped them as well. The pools of blood spreading out around the dead zombies turned green as they sank.
Barnes turned back to Richardson and said, “Heads up. Behind you.”
Richardson twisted around.
A male zombie, the face a blotchy pattern of scabs and abscessed wounds, was less than ten feet from him. He hadn’t heard it moving behind him, he realized. And then another thought occurred to him. This was one of the later-stage zombies. It didn’t move with the same clumsy gait. The milky film had cleared from its eyes. The dead, vacant stare was gone. In its place was a feral intensity, the deliberateness of a hunter.
“Shoot it,” Barnes ordered.
Richardson muttered an acknowledgment and raised his rifle and fired.
His first shot hit the zombie in the neck and sent it spiraling backward into the water.
Richardson got it in the head with his second shot.
He heard firing behind him. Barnes had zombies on three sides, but he was still calm. His firing was controlled, his pattern deliberate. One after another, the zombies went down until only a few remained, and those farther off, not yet a threat.
The battle had lasted perhaps twenty seconds, but Barnes had managed to drop a dozen or more of the infected. Richardson was in awe.
“Be careful,” Barnes said. “Don’t get too close to them. They may look dead, but it’s always possible for one of them to pop up suddenly.”
Richardson nodded.
“Come on. Let’s go.”
Barnes led him to a five-story building a couple hundred yards away. All the windows and doors had been blasted inward during the storms and the first floor was choked with debris, lath visible through the walls. Water came up to the bottom of the few pictures still on the walls and lapped at the top of the receptionist’s counter toward the back.
“Come on,” Barnes said. “We’re headed for the roof.”
They found the stairs and started up, water pouring out of their flight suits as they moved up to the second floor.
Richardson stayed behind Barnes, letting him make sure the way was clear before they proceeded upward again. Every floor was a repeat of the one below it, wrecked, the walls peeling, the carpet dark and moldy beneath their boots. The place smelled of seawater and sewage and rot.
When they reached the roof, Barnes moved immediately to the edge and looked down.
Richardson moved in beside him.
Below, a few zombies were moving toward the fallen corpses. Richardson knew that these later-stage zombies were cannibals, and wouldn’t hesitate at an easy meal.
He was watching one pack of zombies eating a floating corpse when all of a sudden the corpse was yanked under the water. One of the zombies refused to let go of his meal and was pulled down with it. He resurfaced about twenty feet away, but with one arm bitten off at the elbow.
“What the hell was that?” Richardson said.
Barnes watched the zombie get to its feet and just stand there with a vacant expression on its face.
A moment later, it was pulled under again.
“What’s down there?”
“Tiger shark, probably.”
“A tiger shark? You’re kidding.”
“They’ve been known to come in this far during high tide,” Barnes said. “And we did put a lot of blood in the water.”
He stood up then and took the radio from his tactical vest.
“Quarter Four-One to Dispatch,” he said.
“Go ahead, Quarter Four-One.”
“Quarter Four-One, we’ve set up on the roof of the Clear Lake Title Office. Our situation is stable at present, no injuries. Request evac A-sap.”
There was a long pause.
“Quarter Four-One?” Barnes said.
“We read you, Quarter Four-One. Negative on your request. Evac is not possible from your current location.”
Barnes looked at Richardson and frowned. “What the fuck?” he said. He keyed up his radio again. “Quarter Four-One, you did copy my transmission, didn’t you? Our situation is stable, but urgent. We are not injured. We need immediate evac.”
The radio was silent.
Barnes tried again, but got nothing.
“Fuck,” he said, and clipped his radio back onto his tactical vest.
“What does that mean?” Richardson said. “Why won’t they answer you?”
“What the fuck do you think it means?”
Barnes sat down against an air duct and took a Snickers bar from his vest. “Might as well get comfortable,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere for a while.”
Her grandkids said they wanted to go down to the estuary, and Margaret O’Brien figured, sure, that’d be okay. She had them for the weekend while Grace, her daughter, was on a business trip in Atlanta, and frankly, she thought she was doing pretty well. The kids fought and bickered with each other every chance they got, that was true, and Randy, who was seven, tattled constantly on his sister, Britney, who was ten, but the trick to kids was just to keep them occupied. They had something to do, they behaved. Grace acted like Margaret had forgotten everything about children. Ha! She’d raised three daughters, hadn’t she? And she’d done it as a young widow, too. She didn’t have a wealthy ex-husband paying her alimony. She hadn’t forgotten everything she’d learned about raising kids. She was sixty-eight, sure, but she wasn’t senile. Not yet, anyway.
“Look, Ma, I’m not saying you forgot anything,” Grace had said, once again holding out the book she’d been trying to unload on her for the last twenty minutes. “All I’m saying is—”
Margaret held up one of her small, chubby hands.
“Don’t,” she said. Margaret, short, thick about the middle with a generous bust and a full head of brown hair that was only now starting to turn gray, was born Margaret Stephanides, and sometimes, when she argued with her daughters, the Greek blood in her fanned hot. She took one look at the book, Siblings Without Rivalries it was called, and said, “This is the book you think is going to teach me about taking care of children? Bah. Grace, you’re going away for the three days. You don’t think I can handle myself for three days? What do you think, I’m going to let them steal a car or something?”
“No, Ma, I just—”
The palm again. “You keep your book, Grace. You leave me the kids. Have a good time in Atlanta, okay?”
And so there’d been a few fights, sure, and Randy, he looked mystified when Margaret told him to stop tattling instead of yelling at his sister for calling him a turd brain, but it was okay. She was doing fine.
Now they were on the way down to the estuary, where the pamphlet up at the nurse’s office said they had over sixty species of migrating birds during the summer months, the path lined by bougainvillea and palmetto swaying in the warm ocean breeze.
Britney, who was tall and skinny and beautiful like her mother, liked birds. Randy, he didn’t. He looked bored.
“Nana,” he said. “Where are all the birds? You said there’d be birds.”
That was a good point, Margaret thought. She didn’t see any.
“Nana, what’s that man doing?”
“What man, Randy?”
“That one.”
With her thumb, she pushed a pair of bifocals up the bridge of her nose and leaned forward, trying to see where Randy was pointing.
What followed was a moment of confusion. Her mind gave her a merciful sort of reprieve from the shock of too sudden a revelation. Like bad news, the full impact of what she was seeing took a moment to filter through the buffer of her disbelief. But gradually, the obvious could not be denied. That man, she realized, was a zombie.
“Nana?”
She grabbed them both by the shoulder and squeezed. “Come on, kids. Let’s go back.”
“Nana,” Britney said. She shook herself loose.
Together, they watched the man in orange as he stood up and slowly turned around. His face was covered with blood. Something long and limp, like wet, raw bacon, was hanging from his mouth. Even at this distance, Margaret could tell there was something wrong with the man’s eyes.
The man in orange climbed onto the bank, pond water leaking out from between his cracked teeth. None of them saw the others coming out of the trees farther down the path, not until Randy heard sirens from the main road and turned that way.
“Nana,” he said, pulling on Margaret’s shirt.
Margaret pulled him close to her. A man in a bloodstained T-shirt and khaki shorts was coming toward them through the grass. A big piece of meat was missing from the side of his face and dried blood covered his hands. The hands kept opening and closing, like he was begging for food. His mouth opened, revealing teeth black with blood, and he began to moan.
The sound was answered all around by the other zombies.
“Nana,” Britney shouted.
It was too much for Randy. He was pulling against Margaret’s grip, trying to run away. Randy was small for his age, but God he was strong, and he nearly pulled her down with his struggles. And then Ed Moore, wearing a cowboy hat and jeans and holding a baseball bat, stepped into the grass in front of them, and Margaret couldn’t believe how fast he moved. He planted the bat right up against the zombie’s head.
Laid him out with one swing.
The zombie didn’t get up. Ed stood over the body, looking down.
Blood dripped from the end of the bat.
Then he turned and smiled and tipped his cowboy hat to Margaret, winking at her. “How you doing, Margaret? You okay?”
Margaret whimpered.
Beside her, Randy, who was thoroughly awestruck, just nodded.
Ed Moore looked the three of them over. Margaret O’Brien was sixty-eight, frumpy, a little overweight, but still confident on her feet. The kids looked young, early elementary school aged. One look at Margaret and he knew she had already figured out what was going on. That was good. Having to explain it to her would take too long. The kids he wasn’t so sure about. That age, did they know about the infected? Did they have any idea what it meant to see them outside the quarantine zone?
“We have to get somewhere safe,” he said.
Margaret O’Brien nodded. The kids didn’t say anything, just latched onto Margaret and stared at the infected coming at them from all sides.
“My cottage is over there,” he said, pointing with the bat over their shoulders. “Can you guys make it?”
Margaret pulled the children close. Ed figured that was answer enough. He turned and gauged the distance to his cottage. There were three zombies between them and safety, two others that might be able to close the distance if he didn’t get the other three with the first hit.
“Let’s go,” he said.
And with that, he went for the zombie nearest to them and got behind it. He stroked it in the back of the knees and dropped it. While it was down, he hit it in the back of the head.
He gave a quick look behind him, saw that Margaret and her two grandkids were still with him, and went on to the next one.
“Where did they come from?” Margaret asked him.
They were in his cottage now. Margaret was standing in the middle of his living room. The children had backed themselves into the corner behind his TV. Neither one of them had said a word since he first met them, and that was okay with Ed. He liked children, always had, but the quieter the better. He figured scared and quiet kids beat scared and crying kids any day.
“Ed?”
He was in his closet, getting his guns down from the storage box on the top shelf. After retirement, he had shelved his beloved .357 revolvers and figured he might never wear them again. And up until today, he had even convinced himself that it was nice not having to carry the things around.