Authors: Joe McKinney
I turned it over in my head, thinking about how to say it, but everything I could think of sounded equally cruel and inadequate.
And yet, for all that, I didn’t turn the truck around. I kept going, driving and thinking about—
Gunfire.
The muzzle flash caught the corner of my eye. I recognized the high, metallic pop of a small caliber pistol and I locked up the brakes.
I slid the truck to a stop and I jumped out, looking around for the shooter and whatever he was shooting at.
Ken jumped out behind me. “What are you doing?” he said. “Get back in the truck.”
“Gunfire,” I said back to him. “That means somebody back there has a gun. Maybe they can help us.”
“Don’t be stupid, Eddie. Let’s get out of here.”
“This first,” I said.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m not staying.”
“What?”
I was already in the yard. He never left the street. Before I could stop him, he jumped in the truck, threw it in gear, and peeled out down the street, leaving me in a cloud of acrid smoke.
I screamed for him to come back, but of course he didn’t.
I couldn’t believe it. The bastard left me alone and exposed, just like that. No warning. No nothing.
Just then I heard another gunshot, and that snapped my attention back to the houses behind me.
There were no zombies that I could see. I pulled my gun and started slowly toward the spot where I saw the flash.
“Police,” I said.
Silence.
“Police,” I said again. “Can you hear me?”
I inched my way around the back corner of the house, ready to fire. There was an officer standing in the backyard with his back to me. In front of him was a patrol sergeant and two other men, and they had that zombie look in their eyes.
There were two other bodies face down in the grass.
The officer with his back to me spun around and nearly shot me.
“Stop,” I said. “It’s me, Eddie Hudson.”
He didn’t say anything, but I recognized him. His name was Arguello, from the Downtown Division. It looked like he had been through hell. His shirt was torn at the shoulder so that I could see his body armor and T-shirt, and he was covered in dust.
When I looked at his face for some indication that he recognized me, I saw his cheeks were streaked with tears.
“Step aside,” I said, and dodged around him to fire at the zombies behind him.
The one in front changed direction when he saw me. I fired once at his forehead and put him down. Then I turned to the zombie in the sergeant’s uniform.
But I never got the chance to fire. Before I could pull the trigger, Arguello tackled me from the side and slammed me to the ground so hard it knocked the wind out of me.
I broke contact with him when we hit the ground and rolled away. He came after me, scrambling to keep me from getting to my feet.
I slapped at him as I rolled away, but he had the jump on me, and he was stronger and faster than me, too. He was able to kick my legs out from under me and push me face down in the dust. He held me there.
“What the hell are you doing?” I said. “Let me up.”
He didn’t answer. I struggled to turn my head back in the direction of the house, and saw the two remaining zombies were getting closer.
“Let me up.”
“I won’t let you shoot him,” he said, his voice choked with tears. “I won’t.”
“Let me up, damn it. Hurry.”
My gun was a few feet from my face. He got off me, picked it up, and tucked it into his back pocket.
I rolled away as fast as I could and got to my feet. The zombies were closer to him, and they both turned on him.
Arguello moved quickly, stepping around the sergeant and firing one shot at the zombie in civilian clothes. That one folded to the ground instantly.
But he didn’t shoot the zombie sergeant. He wouldn’t even point his gun at him. He let his gun fall to his thigh and as the zombie got closer, he just stood there and cried, his whole chest shaking with sobs.
“What are you doing?” I said. “Shoot him.”
He turned his gun on me. “You stay away from him. Stay away!”
The sergeant’s face was torn to pieces. His neck was a gaping hole, and there was dried blood all down the front of his uniform.
Arguello stood there, letting the zombie inch toward him. He didn’t make any attempt to move out of the way.
When the sergeant got close enough I was able to read his name tag. It said ARGUELLO, and I didn’t need to ask any more questions after that. I knew there was a Sergeant Arguello, and I knew there was an Officer Arguello, but it never occurred to me that they were father and son.
“You can’t do anything for him,” I said, my voice softer now that I understood.
“Shut up, Hudson.”
“You have to protect yourself. No one can help him now. You have to look out for yourself.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know shit, Hudson. I can take him somewhere. Somebody can do something. Maybe they have a cure.”
“He’s too close to you,” I said. “Back up.”
He didn’t answer. He just cried.
As calmly as I could I reached up and grabbed him by the shoulder. He shook me off the first time, but then he let me pull him back.
When I got him out of the way, the zombie turned on me.
I backed up slowly, and stepped away from Arguello so the zombie would follow me instead.
When I was far enough away from Arguello I let the zombie reach for me. As his hands came up I grabbed his right wrist and twisted it upwards, sidestepping around the body and pushing the back of his head with my other hand.
It was easy to take him off balance, and I threw him face down on the ground with a standard arm-bar takedown. I’ve done the same move a thousand times on a thousand drunks.
I came down on top of him with my knee on his back, wrenched his arm all the way up, and cuffed him as quickly as I could.
It happened fast. As I slapped the other cuff on, I heard Arguello screaming at me, and I braced for the impact.
He laid into me with his shoulder and sent me flying off the thing that used to be his father.
The whole time he was screaming at me, but nothing I could understand. He was totally overcome with grief and rage and there was no reaching him.
As I scrambled out from under him I saw his gun pointed at me. I slapped at him and with a lucky blow managed to knock the gun from his hands.
He didn’t bother to go after it. He charged me, bear-hugged me, and threw me to the ground.
We both went down, kicking and punching. He was all over me. Every time I got a grip on him, he was able to break it and turn my weight against me.
He swung his elbow up and caught me in the bottom lip. I saw purple and tasted blood. Then he tossed me to one side and I landed hard on my back.
As I hit the ground all I could see was a spot of ground lit up by my flashlight.
He got to his feet first and charged me. I grabbed the flashlight and swung it at him, catching him hard under the jaw with a good solid stroke.
He fell to his knees, bleeding, and I didn’t wait for him to get up again. I swung the flashlight again and hit him right behind the ear. He fell backwards, and stayed down.
I staggered up to my feet, swaying all over the place. The yard was spinning so fast I had to double over and put my hands on my knees just to keep from falling over.
“Holy crap,” I said, wheezing through the blood. A long rope of bloody spit fell onto the ground between my boots.
I picked up both guns from the ground, holstered mine and unloaded his. Arguello had six rounds in the gun and a full magazine on his belt.
I took the full magazine and put the magazine with the six bullets back in his belt. He rolled over and groaned, but was nowhere close to getting back on his feet.
“Don’t you hurt him, Hudson,” he said. “I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am.”
I threw his empty gun in the dust in front of him and walked back to the street.
I could hear him yelling at me the whole time.
There were zombies in the street. Not many at first, but enough to make a break for it into a suicide run. And there were more coming. Some of them stayed close to a nearby car, while others entered the yards on either side of me.
I wondered briefly if Ken had seen this coming.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to make it to the car. They had it surrounded. I could have dodged some, and shot some more, but there were so many of them they would have overwhelmed me long before I could get the car moving.
I ran back between the houses. Some of the zombies were close enough to grab at me, but I was moving fast, and their reaction time was slow. I never let them get a solid grip.
Arguello was on his hands and knees, trying to stand up. He had crawled part of the way across the yard, over to where his father was still trying to get back on his feet, but he hadn’t gone very far from where I left him.
I ran by him and took the back fence at full speed, jumping onto it, and swinging myself over without bothering to look at what I was jumping into.
As soon as I hit the ground, I froze. There were more zombies entering the yard from the next street, pouring into the backyard on both sides of the house. I looked to my right, prepared to move that way, but the next yard over was already overrun.
I couldn’t go back, and I couldn’t go forward. Somehow I was surrounded and I hadn’t even seen it coming.
My heart was hammering inside my chest. I backed up into the fence and looked around for I don’t know what.
There was a small storage shed back in the corner of the yard. I ran to it and jumped up on the roof.
From the roof, I could see the zombies pouring into the yard and surrounding Arguello. He was back on his feet, but he was still groggy and he staggered as badly as the zombies.
A group of them closed in on him.
He picked his gun up and tried to fire, but nothing happened when he pulled the trigger.
He stared at it stupidly for a moment before his training kicked in. Arguello came up with a magazine, slapped it into place, and pulled back on the slide, ready to shoot.
The first shot wasn’t even close. It hit high up on the corner of the house. The next shot hit one of the zombies in the shoulder.
After that he started firing wildly into the crowd, wasting all his ammunition.
The zombies took him down, and ripped him apart, but through it all he never made a sound.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
But I had problems of my own. I was completely surrounded. There were dozens of zombies slapping their hands against the sides of the shed, reaching for me.
I pushed myself up to the highest part of the roof, looking everywhere for a way out.
They couldn’t reach me—at least not yet. But there were enough of them that the weight of their bodies pressing up against the shed could topple it over. They had already torn down a section of the wooden fence and were moving back and forth between the two yards.
The yard where Arguello had just died was crowded with zombies. There were just as many around me. I couldn’t go into either yard and expect to last very long. I turned around and around on the roof of that little shed, looking for a way out, but I kept seeing the same things and same shredded faces over and over again.
As I turned I slipped, and my knee hit the shingles.
Off balance, I started to slide.
I panicked, shot a hand out, and caught a corner of the roof. The suddenness of it caused my head to jerk up, and I managed to get a quick glimpse of the yard to the left of the one I was in.
It wasn’t more than six or seven feet away, but I was so panicked I hadn’t even seen it until just then.
I counted eight zombies. They were banging against the fence to get to me, but there weren’t enough of them to break through.
It was a way out. I thought if I could jump into that yard I could hit the ground running and keep going.
The only problem would be fighting off the zombies when I landed.
But then I remembered I didn’t have to fight them. All I had to do was shoot them. I had a pistol. There were almost thirty rounds in the gun. I could just pop them from where I was and jump into an empty yard.
Piece of cake.
But I hadn’t figured on aiming while the zombies below me were rocking the shed.
The distance to the target was no problem. My shooting wasn’t the greatest, but three yards was pretty easy, even for me. At least I thought it would be easy.
It was like trying to shoot from a surfboard on choppy seas. Getting a clean head shot was hard, and I knew from past experience that it took too many body shots with a pistol to put even one zombie down. I put a lot of rounds into their faces and glanced a few off the sides of their heads, but I only got a kill shot every six or seven shots I made.
By the time I ran out of ammo, there were still two of them left on their feet.
And the zombies below me were rocking the shed. It was getting harder and harder to keep my balance, and I knew that if I was going to make a break for it, it would have to be right then. It was the last, best chance.
I crouched down like a sprinter at the gates and tried to focus on the jump. The yard below me was a seething carpet of faces and hands. I took a breath, forcing down the nausea and the fear, and jumped.
One of the zombies grabbed me as I landed. We both tumbled to the ground and I rolled off him. Once I was on my feet I took off running and didn’t stop until I was out in the street, all the zombies behind me.
I stood there huffing, looking around in utter disbelief. I had heard people talk about mental exhaustion, about getting to that point when the mind refuses to go any further, but I had always thought it was just hyper-bole. I didn’t realize it was actually possible to get to that point.
But even as I stood there, listening to the hordes behind me as they crashed through the fences like an approaching tidal wave, a little voice inside me pleaded for a little more. You’ve got to move.
Ken Stoler’s act of treachery had left me without a ride, and I felt like a doomed man, waiting for the gallows door to drop.