Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

Looking down, he saw a tripwire under his foot that led up the doorjamb to a shotgun mounted in the ceiling. Another inch, and they’d have been cleaning him up off the floor with a sponge and some hot, soapy water.

      He had that same feeling now. Moving slowly, he stepped up to the corner of the hallway and looked around. He saw a long, dark smear of blood on the sidewalk. The trail turned in to a room a few doors up the walk. He glanced behind him and saw Julie standing in the doorway, watching him. He motioned her back inside. Then he set off toward the blood trail.

      The door was propped open, and inside he saw two paramedics and Art Waller’s legless nurse feeding on the body of a supine woman, her torso ripped open like a canoe. The body shook and twitched as the zombies tore into her.

      Ed nearly vomited.

      Three blood-smeared faces looked up at him.

      Ed backed away.

      One of the zombies, a tall, slender kid in his twenties whose only injury seemed to be a small but festering wound on his shoulder, got to his feet.

      The next moment he was running at Ed.

      Fast mover, Ed thought. But before he could react, the thing had closed the distance between them. The zombie raised its hands for Ed and Ed sidestepped him, coming up behind him and pushing him headlong as he swept his feet out from under him.

      The zombie crashed headfirst into a bougainvillea bush and got wrapped up inside its dense inner branches.

      When Ed turned back to the cottage, the second paramedic was already on his feet and limping more slowly than the first toward him. The legless nurse was dragging herself toward him on her belly.

      He stepped out of the doorway and almost ran down the hallway to Julie’s cottage, but he stopped when he realized the zombies would follow him.

      He couldn’t lead them straight to Julie and Art.

      He looked around for a way out.

      The first zombie, the fast mover, was pulling himself out of the tangled bougainvillea. The second one stepped out of the doorway. And now he could hear their moans. The sound carried through the courtyard and it made his blood run cold.

      Without a plan, he took off running across the courtyard, away from Julie’s cottage.

      They were still behind him, but he had a pretty good lead. A few quick turns, and he lost them somewhere near the path that led down to Tamiami Road and Centennial Park.

      And that’s when he heard voices.

      One voice, actually. A woman’s. “It was such a lovely wedding,” he heard her say. “Your Daddy was so proud. I remember watching the two of you come down that aisle, you holding on to his arm, just smiling ear to ear. I think it was the only time I ever saw him cry.”

      Ed followed the woman’s voice. It belonged to Barbie Denkins, whose husband had died thirty years earlier and left her obscenely rich. The woman was in her late eighties now and thoroughly senile, Alzheimer’s. Her cottage door was standing open. There was blood on the door frame. Inside, her quarters were packed with unopened boxes of sporting goods and picture frames and vegetable juicers and miracle cleaning products, all of it sold to her by unscrupulous telemarketers she was too starved for attention to hang up on.

      Off in a far corner of the room, a zombie was bumping into boxes, trying to fight its way to where Barbie Denkins sat, chattering happily away.

      “You didn’t want those red flowers on your cake,” Barbie said. “But I went ahead and did it just the same, and it was a better cake for it. You tell me it wasn’t.”

      The zombie saw Ed and turned his way.

      Beside Ed, next to the door, was an umbrella and a wooden Louisville Slugger baseball bat.

      He picked up the bat.

      The zombie stepped around a row of boxes, its head leaning to one side at an unnatural-looking angle. One of its cheeks had been torn open so that the mouth was elongated, the bloodstained rows of its teeth visible all the way back to the molars.

      It moaned as it raised its hands at him.

      Ed took a step forward and swung for the fence, planting the sweet spot of the bat on the side of the zombie’s head.

      The thing went tumbling backward against the wall, then landed in a heap on the floor.

      It didn’t move.

      There was a pain in Ed’s left shoulder, and he worked it around in the socket. The joints were protesting the sudden exertion.

      “Stay here,” he said to Barbie.

      Outside her door, the first of the two paramedics was coming around the corner about fifty feet away.

      The second one wouldn’t be far behind.

      He flexed his shoulder once again and raised the bat for another blow. He’d take care of these two, then go back inside and get Barbie.

      Piece of cake.

      CHAPTER 6

      “What are we gonna do?” Richardson asked.

      He was following Michael Barnes as best he could, wading through water that looked like melted caramel, holding his AR-15 up above his shoulders to keep it from getting wet.

      “Be quiet,” Barnes ordered him. “I’m gonna get us to a secure position. A roof, if possible. From there, we’re gonna call for extraction.”

      “They’ll extract us? You’re sure?”

      Barnes put a finger to his lips. Then, using hand gestures, he indicated that they were going to go around the back of the grocery store and into the buildings behind it.

      They couldn’t use the roof of the grocery store. Richardson knew that. Scared as he was, he’d been able to tell from the air that the building’s roof had collapsed in on itself. It wouldn’t be safe.

      He turned and looked back at the wreckage of their helicopter. The thing looked like the jumbled exoskeleton of some enormous insect. A thick column of smoke rose into the air. Beyond the wreckage, he could see the infected already coming into the area. They were attracted to noise. All their senses worked, but their sense of hearing was the strongest. And the moaning of those already in the area would only make things worse.

      He’d read Eddie Hudson’s book about the first night of the outbreak in San Antonio, and like a lot of others had, he found it hard to believe that so many of the infected could pour into a street that was completely empty only moments before. But after seeing it for himself, he knew it was true.

      Michael Barnes clearly knew it, too. Like all members of the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority, Barnes was a graduate of the Shreveport Survival School. Richardson had interviewed some of its instructors and had even been through an abbreviated version of the program before being allowed to go inside the quarantine zone with GRQA agents. He had a sense of what Barnes was trying to do by guiding them against the side wall of the grocery store. Richardson was ready for the slow but steady pace of their advance, stay quiet, stop, listen, scan, and move out again. While at the Shreveport School, he had felt like a kid playing cops and robbers. But this was the real deal.

      Ahead of him, Barnes stopped and looked around. He motioned for Richardson to come forward.

      “When we go around this corner, we’re not gonna stop, okay? You’ll see a strip center just ahead of you. We’re gonna stay to the right of that. You got me?”

      “Yeah,” Richardson said.

      “That weapon you’ve got there can fire through a magazine in a hurry, so don’t lose your cool and empty the whole thing into the first zombie you see. Every shot counts, or you don’t take it.”

      Richardson nodded.

      “Okay, let’s go.”

      Barnes stepped around