Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

was a slow-motion pursuit, but she was going to catch him. It was just a matter of time.

      Clank clank. Clank clank.

      He tried a few doors, but it was the Fourth of July weekend, and there was almost nobody left here at the Village. Just a skeleton crew of staff and a few residents.

      He tried another door.

      “Help me,” he cried. “Please.”

      Behind him, the thing crawling on the sidewalk began to moan.

      The sound of it unhinged something inside him. Union troops, he remembered, waiting on one knee in some cornfield someplace, their rifles ready at their cheeks, told stories of hearing the Confederates coming toward them, the rebel yell echoing off the surrounding hillsides. It did something to you deep in your bowels, they said, rattled you.

      This was infinitely worse.

      He tried to go faster.

      Clank clank. Clank clank.

      Just ahead, there was a hallway. He could hear voices. A man’s deep voice. A woman’s laughter.

      The man’s voice again.

      Ed Moore, he thought. The retired U.S. Deputy Marshal.

      “Help me,” he said. “Ed?”

      He put everything he had into it.

      Clank clank. Clank clank.

      Ed Moore had moved to Florida back in February because he liked the weather. For eleven years after his retirement from the U.S. Marshals Service, he’d lived in Amarillo, the Texas panhandle, where the winters were an endless parade of icy sleet and gray skies and wind that never stopped howling. Compared to that, Florida, with its comfy little villas nestled among the bougainvillea and palm trees and the live-in staff who wandered the place in their golf carts, was an absolute paradise.

      The woman, Julie Carnes, was new to the Springfield community. She’d moved in at the end of June. She’d caught his attention right off, slender, a pretty face. Not handsome, but pretty. Still wore her hair long. He liked that. He leaned against the doorway to her private cottage and tipped his cowboy hat to her through the screen door. Ed said he thought it was time he introduced himself.

      She was knitting something. She folded the needles together and rested them on the lap of her white dress.

      He was wearing loose, faded blue jeans, black boots, a clean white shirt open at the neck. He doffed his cowboy hat to her as he entered, exposing a thick, uncombed tangle of white hair before sliding the hat back onto his head. There was a weatherworn look about him, like he should be trailing a cloud of dust.

      She said, “You the resident cowboy?”

      He smiled. He didn’t mind smiling. He still had all his own teeth. “You’re just like I figured,” he said.

      “Oh? And what did you figure?”

      “Well, I figured I’d found somebody I could talk to.”

      “How do you know you can talk to me?”

      “Well,” he said, “I ain’t never seen you in purple. I hate purple on a woman. All the women around here, they wear purple like it’s some kind of uniform.”

      “You mean an old-lady uniform? I’m seventy-five years old, Mr. Moore. I don’t need a uniform for people to know I’m an old crone.”

      “You ain’t a crone,” he said. “You wanna know the truth? I think you’re about the best-looking woman in this place. I mean that. I’m talking about the staff, too. And by the way, you can call me Ed.”

      She nodded. There was a lull.

      “So, you’re here by yourself?” she said.

      “For the last six years.”

      “You’ve been here six years?”

      “I’ve been here since February. I’ve been on my own six years.”

      “Ah,” she said. “Two years for me.”

      “You get lonely?”

      She shrugged. “Sometimes. A girl can knit only so many scarves. Why, you asking me out?”

      “Jerry Jeff Walker’s gonna be in Tampa next Friday.”

      She laughed. “I knew it. A cowboy. The hat isn’t just for show, is it?”

      “Been wearing it all my life. Don’t see any reason to give it up now.”

      “You mean now that you’re not a marshal anymore?”

      “How’d you know about that?”

      She looked down at her knitting needles, fidgeted with them. “I asked around about you,” she said. He thought he saw a blush, but that might have been the light.

      Encouraged, he said, “They’d don’t have cowboys where you come from?”

      “I’m from Monroeville, Pennsylvania. They got George Romero, and that’s about it.”

      “Ah.”

      “You like living here?” she asked.

      “It’s okay. Actually, to tell you the truth, not as much as I thought I would. I don’t play golf, and I don’t read like I planned on doing. Most of these other guys here, they sit around all day and watch the news and talk about how much better things were when Ronald Reagan was in office. It makes me wanna pull my hair out.”

      “So what do you do?” she asked. “Sit around with them and wait for something to happen?”

      “Well, I had kinda thought that something just did happen.”

      She blushed that time. He was sure of it.

      He was about to ask her if she wanted to come back to his place for a drink when they heard panting outside the door.

      “Help me,” came a man’s voice. “Ed?”

      Julie looked at Ed. He frowned. He went to the screen door and poked his head out, a silhouette standing there in the sunshine.

      “Art? What’s wrong there, buddy?”

      “The nurse,” he panted. “Out there. She’s infected. Oh, Jesus, after me. Ed…please help me.”

      “Hold on there, Art. I’ll help you.” He turned to Julie. “You mind if I bring him in here?”

      “Of course not,” she said, and rose from her chair and started clearing skeins of yarn and magazines from a couch in the living room.

      They sat Art down on the couch, the two of them lowering him onto his seat even as he went on frantically babbling about something going on outside in the hallway.

      “What happened to him?” Julie asked.

      Ed shook his head.

      “Out there,” Art said. He was gasping. “She’s out there.”

      “Who’s out there?”

      “The nurse. She doesn’t have any legs.”

      “What?”

      “Ed,” Julie said. She looked frightened.

      “I’ll go check it out. You stay here with him.”

      He slid out the door and stood there for a moment, looking around, then headed off in the direction from which Art Waller had come.

      The hallway was empty, quiet, checkerboarded with patches of sunlight and shadow, but Ed could still feel the hairs standing up on the back of his neck. Something felt wrong.

      Back in 1992, he’d gone into a house in Hugo, Oklahoma, with an arrest warrant for a militant white supremacy nut accused of a church bombing that killed two black women. The house had looked empty, but Ed