Dead City. Joe Mckinney

an act of sheer will to do it. He was a human train wreck.

      My police car had been demolished. All four windows were smashed in, and the front windshield was a spiderweb of cracks. It looked like the front fender on the driver’s side had been hit with a shotgun blast. There was a jagged, gaping hole in the metal, and the tire below it was flat.

      The driver’s-side door was open, and the inside was even worse than the outside. The shotgun was missing. My briefcase was in pieces and spread all over the floorboard. A bullet had pierced the steering column and the ignition wires were hanging from the hole. Somebody had knocked the computer out of its mounting bracket. My cell phone was nowhere to be found.

      “Fucking perfect,” I said out loud, and slammed the door closed. What little glass was left in the window frame collapsed and came tinkling down on the pavement. “That’s just great.”

      I stood in the street beside my car with my fingers in my hair, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do.

      There were no other police cars at the scene.

      I could see long skid marks leading back up the hill. I guessed the officers who came down this far did the same thing Chris and I had done and got the hell back up the hill as soon as they realized their little .40-caliber cap guns weren’t doing the trick.

      But they had left their dead behind. I saw six dead policemen and one firefighter amid thirty or forty dead civilians. It looked like it had been an expensive battle for everyone.

      Chris’s flashlight was in the grass on the other side of the car. The bodies of two men in their late twenties and an older woman were less than ten feet away, and when I reached down to pick up the flashlight, I was careful to keep my eyes on them.

      A voice from somewhere in the shadows said, “Don’t worry, they’re dead.”

      I fumbled for my gun as I turned on the voice. “Who’s there?”

      “It’s me, Eddie.”

      It was Carlos Williams, one of the field-training officers from my shift. He was stretched out with his back against a tree over by the corner of the house, his gun still in his hand.

      “Carlos?” I said. He looked bad. “Where are you hurt?”

      “They bit me,” he said, and shrugged his shoulder so I could see where. He was wearing his short sleeves, like me, and his left arm was torn up pretty bad. There was a nasty wound on the side of his bicep so jagged and deep black with blood it had to be a bite mark.

      I went over to him. “Can you stand?”

      “I think so. Help me up.”

      I got my arm under his and heaved him up. “I nearly shot you,” I said. “Don’t scare me like that.”

      “Yeah, you looked pretty jumpy.” He laughed to cover up the pain. “I wasn’t worried. I’ve seen you shoot.”

      “You’re funny. Come on. Let’s clean that off.”

      I guided him around the side of the house and turned the water hose on his arm.

      “Hold still,” I said. “I know it hurts.”

      I turned the flashlight on the wound. It was still bleeding freely, but I got most of the dirt and grass and shredded bits of his shirt out of the wound.

      “It looks deep,” I said.

      “I’ll be all right.”

      “Come on. I think there’s one of those blood-borne pathogen kits in the trunk.”

      There were dead bodies all over the yard, and it seemed like everywhere we stepped there were brass casings sticking up through the grass.

      “You guys really shot the place up.”

      “It takes so many shots to kill them,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like that. They just kept coming.”

      I nodded without listening.

      His wound was starting to scare me. The blood was still pouring down his arm, and he looked pale. I remembered how bad Chris got and how fast he started to go downhill, and I didn’t want the same thing to happen to Carlos if I could help it.

      He was bigger than me by about eighty pounds and holding him up was difficult. I sat him down in the backseat of the patrol car and had him turn his arm so I could see it.

      I got a look at his face in the pale white bulb of the car’s dome light. His eyes had turned piss yellow, with deep red pools at the edges. His chin and the front of his uniform were stained with a foul-smelling black liquid that I guessed was vomit. I forced myself not to gag, focusing on the wound.

      “Keep that in the light,” I said to him. “Let’s see if we can stop the bleeding.”

      “Look at those guys over there,” he said, pointing with his chin.

      “Where?” I turned quickly, half expecting to see more of those zombies coming after us. “What guys? I don’t—”

      “I shot them. I shot them all. Look at them. Each one’s got a hole in the middle of his forehead. They kept coming, but I shot them all.”

      It sounded like he was trying to convince himself it had really happened.

      I got the blood-borne pathogen kit out of the trunk and tore it open. Fancy name, but there’s not much to it. It comes with a couple of rolls of bandages, some latex gloves, a paper filter mask, a plastic squirt bottle, some hand sanitizer, and that’s about it.

      I put on the gloves, poured the whole bottle of hand sanitizer directly into the wound, and then unwrapped the bandages.

      “This is gonna hurt, okay? Try not to move.”

      I worked the bandages around his arm, trying to make it snug without hurting him too badly. He growled under his breath, but he let me fix him up. The blood was already soaking through by the time I had it secured.

      “Fuck,” he said, pushing my hands away. His voice sounded like a growl. “That’s good enough.”

      “We’ll have to change the bandages again in a bit. They’re already soaked.”

      “Yeah, okay. Here, get out of the way. It’s too damn cramped in here.”

      I backed off and let him climb out. When he finally got himself out of the backseat I realized just how big a guy he really was. He wasn’t over-muscled, but he wasn’t fat, either. There was just a lot of him. A big square block.

      He was a few years older than me, maybe 37 or 38. His hair was thin, light brown, and he wore it short and trimmed.

      Even if he hadn’t been in uniform, and I didn’t know him from Adam, I think I would have recognized him for a cop. He just had that look about him.

      “Look at her,” he said, pointing at an old woman laid out in the grass. “I shot her, too.”

      “You had to do it,” I said. “She would have come after you like the others.”

      “She’s the one who bit me. Her name’s Sylvia Perades.”

      “You knew her?”

      He nodded. “About twelve years ago I caught her son in the backseat of a stolen car. I brought him home instead of booking him and held him down while she slapped the fuck out of him. After that, she used to make me tamales to bring home to Kathy every Christmas. She made dinner for me and brought it to the hospital the day Matthew was born.”

      “You needed to protect yourself,” I said.

      “It didn’t look like she recognized me at all.”

      “She probably didn’t.”

      He stared at her for a long time, saying his goodbyes. He stared at her so long I thought he was fading out on me.

      “I forgot you