Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

he said. “What’s the count?”

      “Eight of them,” she said.

      “Okay, that’s no problem.”

      He loaded each of his revolvers in turn from the speed loaders in his gun case. Then he stepped up to the door, a revolver in each hand.

      “Margaret, come over here and do the door for me. When I tell you to, you throw it open, you hear?”

      “Where are we going, Ed?”

      “I left Barbie Denkins in her apartment. We’re gonna go get her. Then we’re gonna make our way over to Julie Carnes’s place. She should still be with Art Waller. From there, I don’t know. You ready?”

      She nodded.

      He turned and winked at the kids. Then he said, “Okay, throw her open.”

      Margaret opened the door and Ed rushed outside. There was a zombie right in front of the door, and Ed put a bullet in its forehead.

      He stepped over the body and went for the others. He didn’t waste time letting them come to him. The sound of gunfire would bring more of the infected, and they had to be gone before that happened.

      Careful to make every shot count, he dropped five of them in short order.

      “Ed!”

      He turned at the sound of Margaret’s voice.

      Two of the infected had gone for the open door instead of for him. They were on the sidewalk now, one on either side of the door.

      Ed stepped between them, raised his revolvers, and dropped both zombies simultaneously.

      When he turned his attention to Margaret and the kids, the boy was looking at him strangely. His eyes were wide, and he wasn’t crying. He was smiling.

      “Whoa,” the boy said. “Mister, that was cool!”

      CHAPTER 8

      Ben Richardson was looking over the side of the roof at a small group of zombies clustered around the doorway of the building opposite them. There was another group doing the same thing around the door to their building. What exactly they were doing he couldn’t tell, but something was going on. It almost looked like they were communicating, discussing something.

      He and Barnes had spent most of the morning on the roof of the Clear Lake Title Company, waiting for the infected to get bored and wander off. But they hadn’t. If anything, there were even more of them down there than before. The sound of their moaning chilled some deep interior part of him, something vital. It hadn’t been like this in San Antonio.

      “Hey, Officer Barnes.”

      No answer.

      Richardson looked back. Barnes was sleeping with his back against the stairwell door, a white hand towel draped over his head. Richardson had heard stories of U-boat captains who sometimes took their boats deep to avoid a depth charging and fell asleep, even as the boat creaked and groaned and shuddered all around them. It was one way to show their men there was nothing to fear so as to keep up their morale. For a moment, he wondered if Barnes was trying to do something similar now, but just as quickly he chased the thought away. He didn’t get that sense from Barnes. The man had a stoniness to him that didn’t seem to allow room for compassion for another man’s fear.

      “Officer Barnes.”

      “What do you want?”

      “Can you come here for a second, please?”

      Barnes lifted the towel, annoyed at having his nap interrupted.

      “Please?” Richardson said, and waved him over.

      Barnes crawled over to him.

      “What do you want?”

      Richardson pointed at the zombies clustered around the doorway across the street. “Look at them over there,” he said. “Why are they doing that?”

      The tide was starting to ebb again, and most of the zombies were only up to their knees in water. They were all at a fairly advanced stage in the infection. Their skin was gray and leprous, open sores on their arms and neck and face, but they moved with a confidence that the more freshly turned Stage One and Stage Two zombies couldn’t match.

      Beside him, Barnes studied the crowd. He was frowning. He pulled himself up and peered over the side of the building at the group that was gathering around the door to their own building.

      “How long have they been there?” he asked.

      “I don’t know,” Richardson said. “I just saw them.”

      “Shit,” Barnes muttered.

      “What is it?”

      “They’re getting ready to make entry,” Barnes said. “We’re gonna have company pretty soon.”

      “What do you mean? How can you tell?”

      Barnes pointed at the zombies out in the street. “I thought you went through the Shreveport School.”

      “Well, I—”

      Barnes cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You see those zombies there? The ones walking there? If you watch them long enough, you’ll notice that they’re circling the building. The same ones have been doing it all morning, making that god-awful racket. These others have broken away from the main group, though. They’ve given up trying to flush us out. They’re coming in to get us. Those ones over there, they’ve probably trapped something inside that building. A dog, maybe. There’s still lots of dogs around here.”

      Richardson was shocked.

      “You’re serious? They’re capable of that kind of cognition? They can set up a diversion?”

      “Of course,” Barnes said. “They’ll fuck you up if you’re not careful. Bubbas like these guys can do basic problem solving. They can open doors and crawl through windows and hunt in packs. I watched four of ’em trap a raccoon once. I don’t know if you ever tried to catch a raccoon, but it ain’t easy.”

      “You call them Bubbas?”

      “Stage Three zombies, like those guys. They’re not real bright, but they’re bright enough to get the job done.”

      Richardson shook his head in amazement. He’d heard rumors that some of the Stage Three zombies had limited cognition. At Shreveport, they told him some of the more advanced zombies could respond to their names or cooperate on kills, that kind of thing. But he hadn’t believed those rumors. It seemed more like wishful thinking from the growing sector of the American public that wanted the government to go in and try to administer a cure for the necrosis filovirus, even if that meant risking the quarantine.

      Richardson had seen it before with Dr. Sylvia Carnes’s expedition into San Antonio. She’d taken twenty-eight college kids, all of them members of the University of Texas at Austin’s Chapter of Ethical Treatment for the Infected, into the quarantine zone, and gotten most of them killed in the process. Richardson had been along as an embedded reporter on that disastrous trip, and was one of three to make it out of San Antonio alive. It was there he’d solidified his opinion that the infected were beyond help. But seeing the infected like this complicated things.

      “So what are we going to do?” he said to Barnes.

      “We’re gonna need to get out of here. You ready to move?”

      There was a loud crash from somewhere downstairs.

      “What was that?”

      “Shit,” Barnes said. His rifle was leaning against the wall next to the stairwell door. He ran over and picked it up, ejected the magazine, checked it, slapped it back in. “How you doin’ for ammo?”

      “I only fired twice.”

      “Okay, good.”

      Barnes