Dead City. Joe Mckinney

the house, casting long pale streaks across the yard. My flashlight was somewhere near my car, maybe in the grass or out in the street somewhere. I doubted I’d be able to find it again, even though I needed it almost as badly as I needed a car.

      I made my way over the fence and out into the front yard.

      The sound of gunfire rolled away into the distance like thunder. People were still shouting and I could hear the wailing sirens of fire trucks off in the distance, but I was far enough away from the scene that I thought I could risk entering the front yards again.

      But there was no way I was going to risk going back into the middle of that mob. I planned on coming back to the original scene from the east—that way I could stay out of sight of any mobs that were still there and could move in to get my car when it was all clear.

      My guess was that the original mob Chris and I encountered would have moved west toward all the lights and sounds of fighting, which would make getting to my car easier.

      I worked my way through the front yards, trying to stay out of the light and keeping under the cover of trees whenever I could.

      The air had grown unusually cool as the night breezes picked up, and I didn’t have my jacket with me. San Antonio usually has high eighty-degree weather all the way through the middle of October, and I hadn’t figured I’d need it. When I left for work that afternoon, it was sunny and eighty-six degrees, but it felt more like fifty while I was standing in that yard.

      There were no dogs barking. I thought that was really strange. The only thing I could hear was the noise of the crowd from the top of the hill, and then that died away too.

      I stopped and listened to the quietness that had descended on the street. Strobes filled the sky, but everything had grown very still and the only noise at all was the wind washing through the leaves of the trees above me.

      The further east I went down Chatterton, the heavier the tree cover got.

      The houses closest to the elementary school were a little larger than the rest of the subdivision, and they had the biggest lots with the largest trees.

      Those houses were still pretty close to where I had left my car, and the cover they provided made them seem like a natural place to observe the street before I made the final dash to my car.

      As I walked through one of the front yards, I came across a huge Spanish oak with a canopy almost as large as the house it stood in front of. It had never been cut back, and its outer branches sagged to the ground, making it look like a gigantic dome tent.

      A sharp, gusty wind blew through the top branches, tossing them back and forth. The huge oak creaked and groaned under the sudden urgency of the wind. It was strange and beautiful music.

      I walked around its canopy and saw an opening where one of its larger branches curved down to the ground from the central bole.

      There was enough room for a man to walk under it and the space seemed to form a quiet sanctuary, a cave with walls of leaves. I swung open the curtain of leaves and entered it, thinking that if nothing else I could catch my breath there.

      But I saw immediately that it was no sanctuary. A man was already there, on his knees, eating large pieces of viscera from a gaping hole in a dead woman’s abdomen. A long, lumpy rope of intestine dangled from his fingers.

      He wore a blue button-down shirt and his face was soaked in blood. His pants looked brown and very dirty. He wasn’t wearing shoes. His mouth hung open, forming a mean, vacant hole.

      But the most awful part of his expression lingered around the eyes. They were milky white and opaque, a perfect image of death.

      Blindly, I felt for the curtain of leaves behind me and grabbed them, steadying myself for support. I kept my eyes on the man’s eyes, not wanting to look away, and backpeddled into the yard.

      But as I moved, so did he.

      A piece of dark meat fell from his teeth. He stood up slowly, gangly and rickety on his damaged legs, and came after me.

      “What’s wrong with you?” I asked, but didn’t expect an answer.

      What I was looking at was simply impossible. It was wrong in every way. I wanted to yell out at the man that he was an abomination, but when I opened my mouth to speak, nothing came out.

      I felt like I was headed for a meltdown. My heart was beating so fast and so hard it hurt. I could hear the blood roaring in my head. I wasn’t breathing.

      “No,” I said. “You need to get back.”

      I let the branches fall from my hand and I stumbled backwards into the yard, still staring at the oak tree that no longer seemed beautiful, but mangled and unnatural.

      The man appeared from the veil of leaves and came after me.

      The battle I had just escaped didn’t seem real. The crowds of people walking into a wall of armed policemen, fighting with their bare hands and teeth, hadn’t seemed real. But that man, that gore-stained monstrosity, he was real. Looking at him, I no longer had any doubts I was looking at a zombie.

      I reached for my gun.

      As I backed up, I pulled it from the holster and worked it into my grip.

      I saw the green glow of the night sights and centered the front dot on the man’s forehead.

      He never even acknowledged the weapon. The void in his eyes never changed to recognition of the danger. He walked straight at me, and his face remained blank right up to the end.

      I squeezed the trigger, and he fell. The only witness to one of the worst moments of my life was the rustling murmur of the wind through the trees.

      Chapter 4

      After I shot that man, I stood there looking at him, fighting off the urge to touch him. I could almost feel the cold, wet sponginess of his skin against my fingertips, and the thought turned my stomach.

      I still couldn’t believe what was happening. When I left for work that afternoon, the world had seemed normal. Now, everything was upside down.

      Were those people really zombies? I fought against the idea, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. I had seen horror movies. I watched them and I laughed at how stupid they seemed, because the zombies in the Hollywood movies never looked real. Once you’ve seen death in all its splendid horror, a movie version just doesn’t cut it. The walking disasters I had seen certainly looked worse than anything I had ever seen on film.

      As I stood there thinking about it, my doubts continued to grow. The way I understood it, zombies were dead people that went around eating living people. The man I shot under the tree had been doing that. God, he had been doing that. But was he dead? That part I didn’t believe. It went against everything that made up my reality. Besides, he’d bled when I shot him. Dead bodies don’t bleed.

      And that made the horror of what I’d seen even worse. It wasn’t enough that the world was crashing down around my ears. Worse than that, I had actually shot somebody. I’d shot several people. How was I supposed to live with that? They’d been trying to kill me, sure, but that didn’t make it any easier. Killing somebody ain’t easy, not under any circumstances.

      My head was swamped by the enormity of it. I’d seen a lot of good men and women die in the fight at the top of the hill, and I had just stumbled blindly through the worst of it. I was lucky to be alive, and I knew it.

      I turned and headed west, where I hoped to find my car again.

      But I didn’t have far to walk before I saw just how badly my shift had been gutted.

      As I got closer to the spot where Chris and I ran into trouble, I started to see wrecked cars and broken glass and every kind of debris spread out over the lawns and into the street. There were hundreds of bodies strewn across the battlefield, and many of them had faces I recognized.

      An echo of the fight still covered the street like smoke.

      Not