Authors: Joe McKinney
Chapter 13
I thought maybe the house would blow up behind me as I drove away, something dramatic like that. The truth is I didn’t even know if that kind of thing worked in real life.
I’ve handled plenty of house fires, but I’ve never seen a house blow up like they do in the movies. All I could do was hope the fire did take hold, and that mother and child were burned up in it.
If there is such a thing as small mercies, then that is what happened. But I don’t know for sure. I took off down the street and never looked back.
As I drove away, I tried to make myself believe there was a sense of closure in their deaths. They wouldn’t have to live without Carlos, and Carlos wouldn’t have to live without them.
But even as I tried to convince myself that there was something good in what I’d seen, I knew I was being foolish. There was nothing good at all about it, and any attempt I could make to somehow put a good spin on it was just more moral cowardice.
I focused on the street lamps. They weren’t working, but counting them was a mind-numbing diversion. I glided past them without having to think about problems that made my head hurt.
I drove on until I got to Crane Street. Crane was another major cross street for the highway, and it was jammed up in the same horrible way Appleton had been.
The only difference was that from Crane Street I could look down on the highway, and it gave me a good view of the intersection, and the highway beyond it.
All the traffic was clogged up in the outgoing lanes, but the incoming lanes were empty. From the looks of it, all those people had tried to get out of town at the same time.
The traffic jam was predictable. As soon as someone’s car broke down, or there was an accident, the flow shut down behind it like a clogged drain. Every single person stuck in the break down had been forced to foot it, and they were probably all dead, or worse. Not one person in that whole doomed parade had been able to think outside of their mental box and simply drive the wrong way up the highway.
As I drove up the exit ramp, passing all the red signs that said WRONG WAY DO NOT ENTER, I remembered what my driving instructor at the Police Academy used to tell us. “The road is not a mandate,” he had said, standing on a picnic table in the middle of the Academy’s driving track. “It’s merely a suggestion.”
It felt strange to drive the wrong way on the highway, even though mine seemed to be the only car moving. I kept expecting a huge truck to come barreling over the next hill and smear me across the pavement, but I went for miles without seeing any movement at all.
I wasn’t far from my house when I saw the police car lights still flickering on the other side of the retaining wall.
When I got close enough to see that it was one of ours, I pulled alongside it and put a light on it.
I recognized the driver. His name was Martin Jackson, and he was unquestionably dead. No chance he was getting up again. His black skin and the brass captain’s bars on his collar were covered in blood from a long, jagged piece of metal that was stuck through his right eye and out the back of his skull.
I didn’t know him very well, but rumor around the department was that he would make chief one day. Just forty years old and already a captain with a PhD in Criminal Justice, he had the world at his feet. The department had spent millions on his training in anticipation of the great things he would do one day, and now all that potential was bleeding out across the fender of his patrol car.
I stepped over the wall and poked around his corpse with my flashlight. There were empty shell casings all around him, and it was obvious he had gone down fighting. I was glad for that. It was somehow fitting for someone with his reputation for being bigger than life.
The magazine in his gun still had four rounds in it. I thumbed off the live rounds and put them into my own gun, but he didn’t have anything else I could use.
I hesitated near the body, feeling like there was something else that needed to be done, but in the end I just got back into the traffic car and drove off.
My own family was waiting.
Chapter 14
I drove up the freeway, passing miles of cars massed into gridlock, and it felt like driving through my worst nightmare. From a distance, things looked normal. But close up, with the veneer pulled down, reality seemed to blur and bend.
The freeway was flanked on both sides by strip malls and apartment buildings and gas stations and all the areas people gravitate toward in their daily routines.
I figured most of the people injured on the highway would have wandered down into those areas, looking for help, which meant everything down there was absolutely unsafe.
When I turned onto Mariner Boulevard, I saw a huge crowd of zombies milling around between the cars. There had to be hundreds of them.
The intersection was completely choked up with wrecked cars, and I ended up driving through some bushes and across a gas station’s landscaping just to get around it.
Most of the zombies could only watch as I drove up the sidewalk on the other side of the street.
I almost made it through the intersection without incident, but the sidewalk I was driving on ran out in front of the Fish Shack, where a group of about ten zombies had gathered. I was stuck between them and wall-to-wall traffic. There was no way to go around them, and backing up would have put me right back where I started from.
I used the takedown lights to flood the entire area ahead of me with light. The zombie out in front never even flinched. He didn’t respond at all to the lights. I’ve never seen anyone look into the takedown lights and not have to turn their eyes away, but that zombie wasn’t fazed.
He didn’t look away, but I did. His face was torn up, the whole lower half of his jaw gone. From his nose to his throat, his face was one gaping hole with clumps of dirt and shredded pieces of skin hanging on like pennants from the wound. His shirt was black with dried blood.
Behind him the other zombies were a knot of arms and faces. They were coming into the narrow gap between a low concrete wall and the traffic.
I punched it. I hit the zombie with the shredded face and heard the plastic bumper crunch under his weight. He slammed face down into the hood and tumbled across it, straight toward me. His forehead hit the base of the windshield and cracked it, and as he rolled off to my left he pulled one of the windshield wipers out of the cradle.
I hit the others at a run, and I learned the hard way that it isn’t easy to run over a crowd of people.
One went under the car and, as I drove over the others, the front tires lost traction.
The car seemed to hover in the air for just a moment before it rolled to the right, like it was gradually going over on its side.
I went off the curb and hit the side of a minivan.
The car bounced back onto the sidewalk and I kept on the gas, pushing it through the bodies as fast as it would go.
I could hear the car groaning with the impact.
“Sorry, traffic,” I said. “I fucked up your pretty toy.”
The back tires hit the ground with a thud as I rolled over their bodies, and the next thing I knew I was looking at an empty sidewalk.
I didn’t let off the gas until I was past all the fast food places and into the residential part of Mariner.
Once the road opened up, my mind cleared and the only thing I could think of was holding April and Andrew again. It never even crossed my mind that what had happened to Carlos’s wife and son could happen to my family.
I was in denial, I guess.
I entered my subdivision at the Alfoxden gate, and then went north on Swinburne to my street.
But as I turned onto Lighthouse, all my confidence dissolved. The air in my street was heavy with smoke, and somebody’s trash had been scattered all over the pavement. Little pieces of paper were blowing down the street and across the yards like empty promises. There was a car smashed up on a brick mailbox about six doors down and a fat man in a white T-shirt and khaki pants was lying motionless, face down in the street.
I drove around the body and stopped near my house. My front door was wide open, and I jumped out of the car in a panic. I didn’t even bother to grab the shotgun.
I drew my gun and hit the front door running.
My neighbor was standing in the doorway to my kitchen. Most of his right arm was missing and the side of his head had been torn away by somebody else’s teeth.
He never even got a chance to turn around. I put my pistol up to the side of his head and fired.
A man and a woman I didn’t recognize were on opposite ends of the couch in the living room and I shot them both.
“April. April!”
I shouted it over and over again as I ran from one room to the next, getting more and more desperate with every empty room I searched.
They were gone. I stood in our bedroom, my chest heaving and my mind uncertain, unable to focus on anything. I must have retraced the same paths through the house five or six times before it began to sink in that they weren’t there.
There were clothes on the floor and Andrew’s toys were all over the place. I looked at the mess, and for some reason thought,
Garage!
I hadn’t checked the garage.
I ran through the kitchen, over the body of my dead neighbor, and into the garage.
It was empty.
April’s car was gone. I had bought her a brand-new black Nissan Xterra about three months after she got pregnant because I didn’t want her driving around in that crappy Ford Taurus she drove all through college. But it was gone.
I stood in the doorway, and felt totally lost.
I would have still been standing there, looking at my empty garage, if I hadn’t heard the crunch of broken glass behind me.
When I turned around, I saw three zombies walking toward me through the kitchen. The girl in front was wearing jeans and a torn blue bra and no shoes. Smeared tracks of blood spread across the floor from her feet.
Behind her were two older men, and behind them I saw dim shapes moving into the house through the front door.
I fired at the girl and she went face down into the stove. The slide of my Glock locked back in the empty position and I was forced to toss it aside. The others kept coming.
I backed up into the garage. The two older men were just entering the laundry room between the kitchen and the garage when suddenly a third zombie broke in between them, moving fast.
I recognized him from around the neighborhood, though I didn’t know his name. He was just somebody I saw jogging all the time.
When he entered into the garage he was practically at a run. He came up on me so fast that I didn’t even have time to throw a punch.
He grabbed me, and his momentum knocked us both to the ground.
I kicked at him. I slapped and punched him. I rolled one way and then the other, but he was incredibly strong and he pinned me down so that I couldn’t break his hold.
He tried to bite me, but I forced the palm of my hand into his neck, pushing as hard as I could to keep his face away from me. His breath smelled like blood and the skin around his neck felt wet.
I tried flipping him, but no matter how hard I tried to move him, he wouldn’t go over.
We stayed locked up like that until some more zombies grabbed at my shoulder. The strong one on top of me shifted a little under the weight of the others and that gave me the leverage that I needed to knock him off balance.
After that, he went over easily, and when I threw him off me he landed hard near the garage door.
Before the others could grab me I jumped up to my feet and ran for the rack of shovels on the far wall.
I grabbed one and swung it at the zombie closest to me.
It knocked him back, but he didn’t go down. The shovel was too long and I couldn’t swing it with enough force to make it an effective weapon. Instead of swinging it again, I used it to jab at them, hooking them with the blade and pulling them away from the door.
The fast-mover came at me again just as I pushed the last one away from the door, but he couldn’t force his way through the ambling crowd in time to reach me.
I jumped through the doorway and pulled it closed behind me, then steadied myself on the washing machine while the zombies banged at the door behind me.
From where I stood in the laundry room I could see through the kitchen to the dining room and through the front windows to the street where the car was parked. I had left the headlights on, and I could see at least three zombies walking through the glare. They were cutting through the grass toward the house.
The front door, I thought. Oh crap, it’s open.
I ran through the kitchen and into the entry way just in time to push one of the zombies back onto the front steps and shut the door in his face.
Through the window I saw a small crowd gathering in the front yard. They formed around the headlights like moths.
I could hear the ones in the garage banging on the door and I stood there, breathing hard, feeling trapped. The front door was solid, but the door leading out to the garage was paper thin. I doubted it would hold very long.
I looked down on the floor and saw the night sights of my Glock glowing against the white tile of the kitchen floor and I prayed that April and Andrew had managed to get out of here before things got out of control.
Wait a second, I told myself. Eddie, you’re an idiot. There’s a whole case of bullets in the closet. Shotgun shells, too. Not those stupid beanbag rounds either. Real ones.
I picked up my gun and ran to the closet in the master bedroom. It was a mess. All my gun stuff that I usually keep on the top shelf was on the floor, and the blue box that I kept my .45 in was missing.
I pushed some stuff out of the way, looking for it, but it wasn’t there. That was good, I told myself. That meant April had it. At least she had heard enough of our conversation to get the gun, and that meant she had some protection with her.
I had three magazines with me, and I topped each one off with fifteen rounds apiece. I looked for my shotgun, but couldn’t find it. Maybe April had that too, I thought.
I did find my extra flashlight, though.
With my Glock reloaded, I went back to the kitchen so I could clear the zombies out of the garage. I wasn’t going to chance April and Andrew coming home to a house full of zombies if I could help it.
I paused just outside the garage door to catch my breath. There wasn’t any room to screw up on this, and I had to make every shot count. They weren’t banging on the door anymore, but I knew all I had to do was open it and they would come pouring out.
The fast-moving zombie was my biggest concern. He was stronger than the others, and I had already seen how he could force his way through the others. If he was anywhere near the door he would have to be the first to get it.
I kicked the door open, stepped back, and leveled my gun.
There was a man on the other side of the door in blue jeans and a dark blue mock turtleneck. I shot him in the forehead and then turned my light past him, looking for the fast-mover. He was towards the back. He had been facing the wrong way when I opened the door, but when he saw the light he turned around and headed towards me at full speed.
I shot three more zombies before he got all the way to the door, and I had another one in my sights when he broke through. He forced the one I was going to shoot to one side just as I pulled the trigger and my shot ended up hitting a different zombie in the shoulder.
He knocked the others out of the way in his rush to get me, and he was inside and had me backing up before I could fire off another shot.
I had to back-pedal to keep my distance, and it was impossible to do that and fire with any accuracy.
My first shot hit him just below the nose. That shot would have stopped anybody else, but not him. It snapped his head back, but the rest of him kept coming forward.
I fired at him again and hit at the corner of his left eye. That put him down on the ground, but it didn’t put him out completely. He was still twitching, jerking his shoulders like he was in a seizure and trying to get back on his feet.
I fired three more shots at point-blank range, turning his head into a puddle of soup.
By that time the others had filtered into the kitchen. It was exactly the situation I had hoped to avoid, because now they were spread out, coming around both sides of the island, with plenty of room to move. I had to keep moving and shooting at the same time, keeping my eyes on targets coming from two directions.
By the time I put the last one down I had a trail of bodies spread out across three rooms and brass casings all over the place.
The magazine in my gun was empty. It had taken me sixteen rounds to put down ten zombies, which was a pretty bad ratio. Shaking my head, I swapped out magazines and went back to the closet to load up on more ammunition.
I took one last look around the bedroom and then walked into the hall. As I was walking by Andrew’s room, I accidentally kicked one of his toys, a phone shaped like a puppy that bobbed its head up and down as you dragged it by its leash. It started singing “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and the song grabbed me by the heart.
It’s funny how the smallest things can cause such massive storms in the mind. Andrew hardly ever played with that damn toy, but the sound of it was enough to awake half-a-year’s worth of memories in me.
I found myself turning the corner into his room, looking at the diaper bin and the sock puppets and the little blue turkey baster-looking thing that we used to clean out his nose and I really started to hurt.
It made me wonder how anyone could live through losing a child. My Adam’s apple pumped up and down in my throat like a piston, and I tried to push down the grief. I had no idea where April and Andrew were, and the stress of not knowing was breaking me.
They were still alive, waiting for me somewhere out there in the night. I believed that sincerely. But the thought of them ending up like Carlos’s wife and son kept nagging at me until I was ready to take one bullet out of my gun and put in my pocket to keep for myself, because there wasn’t going to be anymore me if there wasn’t going to be anymore them.