Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

      “Yeah,” Barnes agreed. “There aren’t many perks to this job, but that’s one of ’em.”

      Richardson watched the dolphins until they finally turned off and swam into the deeper water east of town. They were getting closer to Houston proper now and seeing larger and larger buildings, the ground-level floors flooded to the ceilings.

      Richardson crinkled his nose. “Hey, you smell that?”

      Barnes looked aft and cursed under his breath.

      Richardson turned around in his seat, as much as his seat belt would allow, and saw a long, thick cloud of brown smoke trailing out behind them.

      “Holy shit, are we on fire?”

      “No, we’re not on fire,” Barnes said. He sounded annoyed. “The smoke is brown. We’re burning oil. The smoke from a fire would be dark black.”

      Barnes turned back to his controls and started checking gauges.

      “Are we going down?”

      “We’re fine,” he said, a bit peevishly. “Just keep quiet and don’t touch anything.”

      Barnes keyed his radio and said, “Quarter Four-One to Dispatch.”

      “Go ahead, Quarter Four-One,” said a woman’s voice.

      “Quarter Four-One, we’re losing oil pressure. I’m smoking pretty bad. I’m gonna try to get us back to Katy Field.”

      There was a pause on the dispatcher’s end that Richardson didn’t much like.

      “Ten-four,” the dispatcher said at last. “What’s your location, Quarter Four-One?”

      “Quarter Four-One, we’re over Bay Area Boulevard and El Camino Real. You have any other units in the area?”

      “Negative, Quarter Four-One.”

      There was a pause on Barnes’s end that Richardson liked even less than the dispatcher’s.

      “Ten-four,” Barnes said.

      “Quarter Four-One, be advised. I have Katy Field standing by for your approach.”

      “Ten-four,” Barnes said.

      Richardson watched Barnes’s hands flying over the controls. He had no idea what the pilot was doing, but he could tell plain enough that they were in some serious trouble.

      “Officer Barnes?”

      “Shut up.”

      Several tense moments went by. Barnes continued to work the controls. A terrible acid fear spread through Richardson’s gut as the engine continued to sputter and smoke. Despite Barnes’s best efforts, they were losing altitude and their airspeed was slipping.

      The engine sputtered once more, and smoke began to pour into the cockpit. Warning lights lit up all across the control panel.

      “Quarter Four-One, we’re going down. Repeat, we’re going down. Coming up on El Dorado and Galveston Road.”

      Richardson didn’t hear a reply. The helicopter shook beneath him, and the next moment they were going down way too fast, coming up on a large grouping of trees and some overhead power lines.

      “Hang on,” Barnes said.

      They hit the water with a hard smack that knocked the air from Richardson’s lungs and threw his whole world forward like he was caught on the crest of a wave. The blades of the helicopter’s props struck the water with a series of loud slaps before they snapped completely free of the fuselage. The control panel sparked, and for a moment there was so much smoke that Richardson couldn’t see.

      Then water started to pour over his legs.

      He screamed.

      He felt hands groping at his chest. He tried batting them away, but couldn’t. “Stop it,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m trying to get you loose.”

      And a moment later, Richardson felt himself coming out of his seat, strong arms pulling him across the cockpit of the helicopter and into cold water that came up to his waist. He coughed and tried to rub the acrid smoke from his eyes. The water in his mouth tasted nasty, oily.

      “Are you okay?” Barnes asked.

      Gradually, Richardson’s vision cleared. He looked at the officer and nodded.

      Barnes turned on the helicopter and then punched it. “Fucking piece of shit,” he said. “Goddamn worthless fucking piece of shit.”

      Richardson was still too stunned to take in the fact that he had just lived through a helicopter crash. It was all he could do to stand on his own two feet.

      Barnes, meanwhile, was digging through the cockpit for the emergency kit and his AR-15. He came up with an orange backpack and two rifles. He came over to Richardson and stuck one of the rifles into his hands.

      “You know how to use that?”

      Richardson took hold of the rifle, gripping it like they’d taught him in the army twenty years earlier.

      He nodded.

      “Good,” Barnes said. “Because we’re about to have company.”

      Only then did Richardson get a sense of their surroundings. They had landed in what looked like a grocery store parking lot. He could see the tops of cars and trucks just rising above the water. Off to their right was a subdivision, the houses sagging in on themselves, empty black holes where the windows and doors had been.

      There was movement all around them.

      The noise of the crash, he thought. It’ll be like a beacon for the infected.

      Ragged shapes that hardly looked like people anymore stumbled into the water from the subdivision, filling the air with the sounds of their splashing and their moaning.

      He looked down at the gun in his hands, then at Barnes.

      “Let’s move out,” Barnes said. “We’re on the clock now.”

      CHAPTER 5

      Art Waller was eighty-four years old and suffering from the classic one-two punch of gastrointestinal nuisances that nature so generously doles out to the elderly: a fixed hiatus hernia and a peptic ulcer.

      Add to that two bad knees, a back that screamed at him every time he had to reach below his thighs, and a palsied shake that he was pretty sure was the advance calling card of Parkinson’s, and his life was basically an object lesson in misery.

      Still, for all that, right now, he had no intention of giving it up.

      He turned slightly. Just enough to see that the thing behind him was still gaining.

      Art needed a walker to get around. The tennis balls on its legs softened the noise, but the contraption still clanked each time he put his weight on it.

      Clank clank. Clank clank.

      He was creeping along, but it was as fast as he could go.

      He chanced another look at his pursuer. There, on the sidewalk, less than ten feet behind him now, was one of the infected. It shouldn’t be here. They were supposed to be quarantined. He had seen them on TV, and they had said they were all locked up behind the wall. It shouldn’t be here.

      But it was. And it was about to catch him.

      The zombie used to be a nurse here at the Springfield Adult Living Village, but she was nothing but a mess now, no legs. They’d been torn off below her thigh. Now, she was pulling herself along on her belly with raw, bloody, mostly fingerless stubs that had once been her hands, leaving a thick blackish-red snail trail behind her.

      And she was getting closer.

      He gasped. The sound came up inside him like the rattle of dried beans in a coffee can. He was ashamed at the