Authors: Joe McKinney
“Marcus, please. Get back in the car and let’s go.”
The zombies were moving in from every side now, but Marcus just stood there waiting for me to crack. He was actually smiling. The crazy bastard was actually smiling.
“Behind you,” he said.
I turned and fired at a woman in a blue dress. My first shot hit her in the cheek, but I was more careful with my second shot and put her down for good.
“Nice,” Marcus said.
“Shut up.”
“I’m waiting on you,” he said. “You tell me why you’re acting so fucking pissed about everything and I’ll get in the car and we can go. I’ll even let you drive.”
I pointed behind him and he turned and dropped a zombie with a one-handed shot. He made it look so easy.
“Well?”
“Don’t try to turn this around on me, Marcus. You’re the one who thinks he’s some kind of fucking cowboy out here. I just want to get home to my family.”
“Cowboy? You think I’m some kind of cowboy? What does that mean, exactly?”
“Behind you,” I said.
“You, too.”
“Left or right?”
“Your left.”
We both put our zombies down. Marcus was having the time of his life, which pissed me off more than anything else. To him, this was some kind of carnival shooting gallery and he was just plunking away like there were no consequences to any of it.
And he had no idea why what he did bothered me so much.
I looked around and realized there was no way we could keep up a safe position where we were. There were just too many of them, and more were gathering at the edges of the parking lot.
“Marcus, I am scared shitless. Okay? Are you happy? You made me say it. Call me names if you want to, but I am scared out of my mind. I’m scared for what’s going to happen to me and I’m scared for what’s going to happen to my family. I have no idea what to do and I’m stuck in the middle of a bunch of zombies and it’s all just a fucking game to you. That’s why I’m acting this way.”
“I do not think this is a game,” he said.
“Whatever. Behind you.”
He turned and fired a couple of times. Then he said, “You’re going to make it, Eddie. Don’t worry.”
“Yeah, well, I am worried, Marcus. I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to be. I want to know that my wife and my son are safe, and I want to be with them. Just because you don’t have anybody waiting at home doesn’t mean the rest of us aren’t scared to death for our families.”
The amusement went out of his face when I said that last part, and I realized that I had hurt him. Marcus had been married twice before and both times it ended hard. He took to women like a house on fire. It was fun to watch, but the damage was usually spectacular.
He pursed his lips together into a scowl. After a long pause he said, “Behind you.”
I shot two zombies, reloaded, and shot a third before I faced Marcus again. He wouldn’t look at me.
“I’m sorry, Marcus. That was stupid of me.”
“No, it’s the truth. You said it. I ain’t got nothing to go home to. Hell, I’m actually kind of glad my ex-wives got turned into zombies. Serves the bitches right. And no more alimony for me.”
“Marcus, I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Behind you,” I said.
He shot the zombie and watched the body after it fell. I thought maybe he was going to take off on me again, but he stood his ground.
A badly messed-up woman in a white shirt and no pants shambled up to him, and he waited so long to shoot her I almost did it for him.
When she hit the ground, he turned around and faced me again.
“Is there anything else you wanted to say to me?”
“Marcus, please. Let’s just go.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is my family is waiting out there somewhere. I know they are, and I have to get home to them. I want to be with them. Please, Marcus, can’t you see that? Help me get home. I need you to help me.”
He nodded. The sadness faded from his face, and in its place the old shit-eating grin returned. “Hey, Eddie, you know I’m always there for you.”
I nodded and waited for him to move, but he just stood there.
“Car,” I said. “Now.”
“Anything you say.”
We climbed into the car and tore out of the parking lot, neither one of us saying anything until we cleared the zombie crowd.
I was quiet because I was still pissed at him and embarrassed for the cruel things I’d said. We had been friends for so long, and relied on each other to know instinctively what the other was thinking and going to do in just about every situation, that it completely floored me when he did the opposite of what I expected.
I got the feeling Marcus was quiet because he was waiting for me to come out of my stupor and see all this as some sort of cosmic joke.
For him, there were no further implications to all these zombies than the end of alimony payments, and while I guess he understood my urgency on some level, he could never share it.
His laughter caught me off guard. When he saw me shaking my head at him, he said, “What? You don’t honestly expect me to sit here and mope with you until all this just goes away, do you?”
“You realize there’s a dead body in the backseat, don’t you?”
“Who? Him? Well, it’s not like he wasn’t a zombie already. And besides, I’m not the one who put him there, remember?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, will you stop it? I can’t ride in the same car with you if you’re just gonna cry about how bad all this is.”
He paused for me to say something, but when I didn’t, he said, “Look, if it’ll make you feel any better, we can pull over and get him out of here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Let’s do that.”
“Okay.” He looked back at the body and whistled. “Damn! He’s a big boy. What do you think he weighs? About 260, 280?”
“Probably.”
“Yeah, well, you’re gonna have to help me with him. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to lift him out of here by myself.”
I looked at what I could see of the body in the rearview mirror. It was covered in blood.
“Okay. There should be some gloves in the trunk.”
“Good. Pull over someplace where we can dump him.”
But we had to go all the way up Dickinson Avenue before I could find a safe place to pull over. There were no businesses down Dickinson, and no zombies.
“This looks okay,” Marcus said. “Stop here and we’ll toss him out.”
I got the gloves from the trunk and Marcus opened the back door.
“Oh man,” he said, turning his face away from the sight. “You really fucked this guy up.”
“Me? What the hell are you talking about? Those are your bullet holes in him.”
“Relax, relax. Just come here and help me with him.”
I handed Marcus a pair of gloves. The man was on his back, one of his heavy slab-o-meat arms bent under his bulk and his head down in the foot well behind the driver’s seat. From where I stood, I could see his mouth was hanging open.
“What foot do you want?” I asked him as I pulled on my gloves.
“It’s always the same with you, isn’t it, Eddie? Can’t we ever get together without having to pull somebody’s stinking dead body out of the back of a police car?”
He was only half kidding. “That junkie on Queene’s Court wasn’t my fault,” I said. “How was I supposed to know he swallowed all that dope?”
“Whatever. Just grab a foot, would you?”
He grabbed the right and I grabbed the left. It was a tight fit because the door wouldn’t open far enough to let us stand side by side. We pulled on the guy until something gave way and he started to slide along the seat. On the way out, the back of his head smacked the metal part of the frame next to the seat and made a loud crack.
“Ouch,” I said. It sounded very loud along that quiet stretch of Dickinson Avenue.
“He didn’t feel a thing,” Marcus said. “Come on and help me get him over here.”
I went to move the door out of the way, but as soon as I moved, the guy suddenly sat up.
“What the—”
The zombie was on Marcus so fast that neither of us had time to react. They both went over backward. Marcus landed underneath him and the zombie’s bulk pinned him to the ground.
I tried to push him off but I couldn’t get the leverage. I was stuck between the two of them wrestling on the ground and the open door of the police car, and all I could do to help Marcus was to pound on the back of the zombie’s head with my fist.
He moved, but he wouldn’t break his hold on Marcus. I hit him some more and finally pushed him far enough from my legs for me to move. It took two hard kicks to his gut before he turned away from Marcus and focused on me.
Marcus moved fast.
As soon as the zombie got off him, Marcus was on his feet, his pistol in his hand.
I pushed the zombie back toward the car with another hard kick. He straightened up just in time to take a bullet in the forehead from Marcus’s gun.
His head exploded all over the car. The impact knocked him backward and then he fell forward, right on top of Marcus. I dragged the mostly headless corpse off of Marcus and reached out a hand to help him up.
“Thanks,” Marcus said, wiping the gore from his face.
I went to the trunk, got the blood-borne pathogen kit, and helped him get cleaned up a little.
“I’m surprised you couldn’t lift that guy,” I said. “Guess you need to work on your dead lift, huh?”
He looked at me with a stare almost as blank as that of the zombie he had just put down. “You have never told a good joke in your life, you know that? I mean it. You are tragically not funny. It’s pathetic.”
“What? That was a good one.”
He shook his head like he pitied me. “Just get in the car and drive.”
Chapter 20
Less than half a mile down the road from where we dumped the body, we saw a Channel 9 news van stopped at the corner of Dickinson and Stewart. Just around the corner, in front of the Lexington Baptist Church, was the news crew that belonged to it—two cameramen and a pretty, dark-haired reporter I didn’t recognize.
It looked like they were interviewing somebody—an older white guy in a blue shirt, yellow tie, and expensive-looking charcoal-gray slacks.
“Don’t slow down,” Marcus said. Then he groaned. They had already seen us, and they were flagging us down.
The cameramen turned their cameras on us.
“Too late now,” Marcus said. “Might as well go check it out.”
“They might know something,” I said hopefully.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “Those clowns from Channel 9. They know how to crucify us, that’s about it.”
I pulled the car into the church’s gravel parking lot and coasted over to the news crew. The cameramen followed us with their cameras, one of them taking extra care to record the damage to our car. He got a close up of the blood on the fender.
The reporter was stunningly beautiful. She looked about 25. Tight brown jacket. Shear white blouse. Super short brown skirt. Fantastic legs.
“Maybe it won’t be so bad,” I said.
Marcus snorted.
But before we could get out of the car, the reporter and one of her cameramen crowded up to my window. Behind her I could see a small group of wide-eyed, nervous-looking people coming out of the church to see what was going on.
“Sandy Navarro, Channel 9 News,” the reporter said. She turned slightly for the camera, making sure the cameraman got her legs in the shot. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway. “Have you come to get these people out of here?”
She stuck the microphone in my face.
The cameraman turned the camera on me, the glare from its spotlight blinding me.
“Who, me?” I asked.
She tossed the hair out of her face with an easy shake of her head, a move that made her look like a model in a shampoo commercial, and said, “There are sixty-three people inside this church, officer. They’ve been without power for hours. Without food or water. Some of them have medical needs. What are you going to do to get them out of here?”
Marcus chuckled. I glanced over to him, but he just held up his hands. “Don’t look at me, man. There’s a reason I always let you talk to these people.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No problem.”
Sandy Navarro stuck the microphone in my face again. “Officer?”
A light breeze carried the faint vanilla hint of her perfume into the car. “Do you mind backing up?” I said.
“These people need an answer, officer.”
“Well they’ll get one as soon as you back up.”
She didn’t move.
“Please,” I said. “I’d like to get out of the car.”
She huffed indignantly, but finally backed up.
I opened the car door and stepped out. So did Marcus. But I hardly had a chance to close the car door before Sandy Navarro moved in for the kill again.
“What are you going to do for these people, officer?”
She was grandstanding for the camera. Channel 9 News had a reputation for sticking it to the police any time the opportunity came around, and I knew to expect it, but I still felt like I’d been put on the spot.
Maybe that’s why I let myself get angry.
“What exactly is it that you expect me to do?” I asked.
“You’re the police,” she said. “Isn’t it your job to serve and protect?”
“I’m not the police,” I snapped. “I’m one cop. Just one. I don’t know what in the hell you expect me to do. My whole shift is dead. We haven’t seen another living policeman or a firefighter in hours. I don’t have radio contact with anybody. I don’t have backup. We don’t even have enough firepower to face down a small crowd of those things out there. So I ask you, what exactly do you expect me to do for these people?”
We stared at each other for a brief moment, and I think maybe she saw how bad things were in my eyes.
She blinked.
The microphone lowered a little.
When she spoke again, her hard edge had softened a little, and the words didn’t come as easily.
“About an hour ago, Chief Roles held a press conference in which he said the police department was moving to Stage III of the emergency mobilization plan. Can you tell me what that means?”
I glanced at Marcus in time to see the smile evaporate from his face.
“What does that mean, officer?”
“It means things are as bad as they can possibly get,” I said, which was basically understating the problem. In order for our brass to go to Stage III of the emergency mobilization plan, they would have had to admit the total defeat of the combined resources of the San Antonio Police Department, the Bexar County Sheriff’s Office, and all the little unincorporated police departments throughout south Texas.
I thought of April and Andrew, and they never seemed as far away as at that moment.
“You wanted to know if help was coming for these folks.” I said to Sandy. “You can tell them we’re waiting on the military. They’re about the only ones that can pull our irons out of the fire at this point.”
Marcus came around the front of the car. “What else did the chief say, Sandy?”
Sandy turned on him, and almost immediately I saw a spark in her eye. Marcus had that effect on women. They couldn’t spread their legs fast enough.
“He said that all personnel were being recalled to duty, regardless of their actual duty status. Are you a police officer, too?”
“Marcus Acosta,” he said, and held out his hand to shake hers. Marcus hated reporters, but he loved women, and he had an almost predatory look in his eyes as he took in her sumptuous curves.
Sandy, for her part, suddenly seemed a lot less aggressive than she had just a moment before, when she was the no-nonsense investigative journalist ready to stick it to the police. At that moment she reminded me more of a little lamb that didn’t have enough experience to realize that if she didn’t cut and run right that minute, the wolf in Marcus was going to devour her.
“Sandy Navarro,” she said, eyes turned down a little, blush spreading like a field of poppies in bloom across her cheeks.
They shook hands, and lingered that way a little longer than they should have for just a polite nice-to-meet-you handshake.
“I’ve seen your spots on the news,” he said. “You’re good.”
“Thank you,” she said, and the blush widened.
I groaned and turned away.
“Give me a second,” she said to him. “I want to finish interviewing Dr. Stiles and then maybe we can talk some more. I’d love to hear about the adventures you two have had tonight.”
“I’d like that, too,” he said. “I’ll be here.”
Sandy walked back to the older guy she’d been interviewing when we pulled up, and waited for the cameramen to get back into position.
Marcus smiled at her, then caught me sneering at him.
“What?”
“You know what,” I said. “What the hell was that?”
“Give me a break,” he whispered. “This may be the end of the world, but it’s not everyday a man gets to have something that good. You saw those legs. Do you have any idea how good they’d look wrapped around me?”
“You’re a man whore, Marcus.”
He smiled.
The two of us walked closer to the entrance and stood behind the cameramen so we could hear the interview.
Sandy straightened her skirt and jacket, brushed her hair back out of her face, and then turned on the charm for the camera.
“Good evening,” she said to the camera, her eyes twinkling. “I’m Sandy Navarro, Channel 9 News. I’m here at the Lexington Baptist Church in northwest San Antonio with Dr. William Stiles of the University Hospital District, who less than five hours ago managed to lead nearly seventy people to safety here at this church. Good evening, Doctor.”
“Good evening, Sandy,” the man said. He was a lean-faced man with a military officer’s haircut and a self-assured posture. I also got the feeling from him that he was used to people fawning over him.
“Dr. Stiles, tell me a little about your situation here.”
Stiles steepled his hands together in front of his chest and frowned in concentration. “A little while ago, University Hospital was overrun by people infected with the necrosis filovirus. Most of the hospital’s security staff was either killed or infected themselves. Luckily, I was able to get these people out of the hospital. We managed to make it out to the front lawn of the hospital, where we requisitioned two city buses that had been abandoned there, and drove them to this church, where we’ve been ever since, waiting on the authorities to get us out.”
“And how many people were you able to save, Dr. Stiles?”
“Sixty-three.”
“You worked on some of the first reported cases of infection here in the city, is that right?”
“That’s right. We saw the first cases last night. They came in from Houston on one of the flights bound for the shelters. We had no idea at the time what we were dealing with. It was only in the early hours of this morning that we realized we were dealing with something completely new. Unofficially, we began calling it the necrosis filovirus.”
“Can you tell us about that please? What exactly is the necrosis filovirus?”
Stiles exhaled deeply, his frown spreading further across his golf-tanned face. “The necrosis filovirus is closely related to the family of viral hemorrhagic fevers that include Ebola, Marburg, and the Crimean-Congo viruses. It’s a biosafety level-4 agent, which makes it about as dangerous as any virus you’re ever likely to deal with. Laboratory protocols call for a pressurized, heavy-duty biosafety suit to handle a level-4 agent. AIDS is a level-2 agent, if that gives you some measure of comparison. The thing about the necrosis filovirus that makes it different from the other hemorrhagic fevers is the incubation time. A person who contracts Ebola or Marburg is likely to exhibit a headache, backache, and other flu-like symptoms within five to ten days. The necrosis filovirus, on the other hand, seems to amplify within the host in just a few hours. After that, well, you’ve seen the infected walking the streets. They experience depersonalization to such a degree that they essentially become a zombie. The illusion is all the more complete when you see the clouded pupils, the smell, the rotting skin, and the almost complete lack of sensitivity to pain.”
“What about the unbelievable acts of aggression we’ve seen, Dr. Stiles?”
“That, unfortunately, is a recorded symptom of the hemorrhagic fevers. Though truthfully, I’ve never heard of any disease that turns people into cannibals. The thing is, in Ebola and Marburg, the disease devastates the host’s ability to move around. Those diseases are so deadly, so incapacitating, that the host usually does not get a chance to spread the disease very far geographically before quarantine measures can be put in place. Up to this point, every recorded outbreak of a viral hemorrhagic fever has been restricted to a relatively small number of victims. The necrosis filovirus, though, incubates faster, allows its hosts to move around with comparative ease, and, as you just said, makes them very violent.
“There’s one thing I want to point out though, Sandy. None of the hemorrhagic fevers have a one hundred percent mortality rate, and I have no reason to believe that the necrosis filovirus does either. We may not be able to save every person infected with the virus, or even most of them, but we can save some, and that puts us in a delicate situation ethically. These are not criminals we’re dealing with, after all. The infected are normal people, and they can’t be held responsible for their actions. That’s just not fair. The problem demands a more delicate solution than just sending in the military to shoot all the infected. After all, if this were an outbreak of another kind of disease, such as the bird flu, or something comparable, we wouldn’t go around shooting the victims. We can’t do that here, either.”
Stiles went on talking, but Marcus and I both had had enough. Marcus turned to me and said, “This guy is nuts if he thinks he can cure those people.”
“I know,” I said.
“We need to get out of here.”
“I know.”
While the others were listening to Stiles, Marcus and I headed back for the car. We didn’t make it very far though. I had my hand on the door when Sandy and one of her cameramen came up behind me.
“Are you leaving, officer?”
I dropped my chin to my chest and sighed. Then I turned around and braced for another round with Sandy Navarro, Channel 9 News bulldog.
“Yes,” I said.
“Just like that? You don’t plan to do anything for these people?”
“I thought we’d settled that,” I said. “I can’t do anything for them. And I have a family of my own out there. I intend to find them.”
Before she could say anything else, Marcus stepped back around the car. “Sandy,” he said, taking her by the arm and leading her away from me a little. “Why don’t we go inside? Officer Hudson and I will talk to the people. Let them know help is on the way. It’d be a good shot for you guys, and maybe you could tell me a little more about what you know about what’s going on. After all, if I’m going to be out in the middle of all this, it sure would be helpful to know a little more than I do now.”
She brushed the long black hair from her face and smiled warmly. It was amazing to watch, the way she changed. That same flip of her hair turned her into a serious professional journalist in front of the camera, but around Marcus, it made her look like a schoolgirl who’s just been introduced to her favorite rock star.
Unbelievable, I thought. How does he do it?
Marcus nodded to me. I knew the look. Go in and put on a good show for the public, it said. I’m right behind you.
I sighed, turned, and went inside the church, Sandy, Marcus, Stiles, and the cameramen trailing behind me.
The door led into the gymnasium, which was large and barnlike, decorated with banners from the church’s youth group, announcing them as the Baptist Youth Basketball League Champions of 2002 and 2004. The whole place danced with yellow candlelight, and people were everywhere. They had taken the tumbling mats down from their brackets on the wall and laid them out in one corner of the gym so a few of the older folks would have a place to sit down. That handful of older folks watched tiredly from their corner as the others bustled around them with a sort of aimless agitation. Nobody looked to have a plan.