Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

the building below them. Something was crashing around inside the stairwell, making its way up.

      Barnes looked back to Richardson. “We’re about to get some company. Remember, make your shots count. Don’t rock back and start firing or you’ll burn through that magazine in a heartbeat.”

      Richardson nodded.

      There was a booming crash against the metal door. It rocked against its hinges.

      Another crash.

      “Next one and they’ll be through,” Barnes said.

      Richardson swallowed the lump in his throat and tried to focus. His vision was tunneled around the door.

      There was a final crash and the door exploded outward. A zombie stood there, three more behind him. The first one lumbered out onto the roof. He looked half-starved. His shirt was little more than a scrap of soiled cotton looped around his neck and his left shoulder. Richardson could count the man’s ribs down his right side. They protruded like ripples in a pond through his yellowish-gray, abscessed skin. But his eyes were clear, intent on aggression, full of feral intelligence behind a curtain of wet, dark hair.

      Richardson’s finger twitched against the trigger, but he didn’t fire. Barnes did that for him. Four quick, well-aimed shots. The man looked like he was practicing on the range. He kept himself in a crouch, making every move count.

      The exchange lasted maybe three seconds.

      Barnes advanced into the doorway without saying a word.

      Richardson went after him.

      There was one more zombie in the stairwell but Barnes put it down with another well-aimed shot.

      In the stairwell, the sound of the AR-15 was like two boards being slapped together. It echoed inside Richardson’s head.

      A moment later, they stepped out onto the fifth floor. From there, they were going to have to take the exposed interior stairwell that led down through the center of the building and into the lobby. Debris had collected all over the floor, and Richardson had to scramble over it just to keep up with Barnes.

      They were on the second-floor landing when they spotted their next zombie. It crashed out of an office to Richardson’s right, and Richardson gasped in surprise as the thing clapped a mangled hand on his shoulder.

      He ducked away from the woman and spun around, bringing the muzzle of his rifle to bear on the woman’s head.

      He fired, and the woman’s head exploded all over the wall behind her. The headless corpse fell backward against the wall and sagged to the ground.

      Richardson lowered his rifle and looked at the damage he had caused.

      “My God,” he whispered.

      But when he turned around, Barnes was out of sight.

      “Officer Barnes?”

      He heard the sound of footsteps below him. He looked over the railing and saw Barnes moving in a crouch across the lobby.

      Realizing that Barnes had no intention of waiting for him, Richardson ran down the stairs as fast as the debris in his way allowed. All sorts of trash had floated into the lobby with the ebb and flow of the tides, and scrambling across it was hard. Barnes made it look easy, never letting his weapon dip from the low ready position, but for Richardson, it was humiliatingly difficult to navigate the mess of chairs and tables and plastic boxes and piles upon piles of plywood that seemed to be everywhere.

      He came up next to Barnes and looked out into the street. The noise of their firefight had attracted scores of the infected. They stumbled out of every doorway, from around every corner, advancing through the knee-deep water with varying degrees of skill. Some almost seemed to bound through the water. Others moved in fits and starts, like badly handled marionettes.

      Richardson raised his rifle, but Barnes put a hand on the muzzle and forced it down.

      “No,” he said. “Save your ammo.”

      “What are we gonna do?”

      “We’re gonna move fast. Come on.”

      They ran up the narrow street, zigzagging through the wreckage, hugging the walls of buildings wherever possible. Richardson kept as close to Barnes as he could, but the man was fast. By the time they reached the corner of the building, Richardson was a good ten yards behind him, and losing ground.

      But then Barnes stopped. He peered around the corner, then looked back at Richardson. His gaze didn’t stay on Richardson, though. It drifted to the area behind him, and his face took on an odd, puzzled expression.

      Richardson stopped and turned to see what Barnes was looking at. None of the infected had followed them. They had run right through the crowd, but now the infected were all turning away and forming a tightening ring around a knot of people who had just emerged from the building across the street from the Clear Lake Title Company.

      Even from a distance of two hundred feet or so, Richardson could tell they weren’t infected.

      “Oh, my God,” he said. “Officer Barnes, do you see—”

      “Uncles,” Barnes said. “Come on.”

      He made a move to duck around the corner.

      “Hey, wait,” Richardson said. “We have to help them.”

      “They’re uncles,” Barnes said. “They’re dead already.”

      “You’re kidding. You’re just gonna leave them? You can’t.”

      “Just fuckin’ watch me.”

      Barnes turned away. Richardson stared at his back, amazed that the man could disengage from the scene so effortlessly. He only had a moment to make up his own mind: follow Barnes or do what his gut told him was the only humane thing to do.

      He went with his gut.

      While Barnes slipped around the corner, Richardson ran out into the middle of the flooded street and began to scream at the top of his lungs, “Hey, hey, hey. Over here.”

      He jumped up and down, splashing water everywhere. He waved the rifle over his head and shouted some more.

      From the shadows, Barnes hissed, “What the fuck are you doing?”

      Richardson glanced at him. “Help me,” he said.

      When he looked back to the street, some of the infected had broken away and were stumbling toward them. Most were still advancing on the small crowd of people.

      “Fuck it,” Richardson said, and charged.

      Running and shooting was not easy, and Richardson’s shots were mostly misses. He burned through his entire magazine in seconds and scored only four hits.

      Now he found himself in the thick of the fight.

      He grabbed the rifle by the still-hot barrel and used it as a club. A zombie in the remains of a business suit staggered forward. Richardson could see its wide, intensely wild eyes. Dark ropes of saliva oozed from the corners of his mouth and down his neck. As it reached for him, Richardson brought the rifle over his head and slammed it back down again on top of the zombie’s skull.

      The gun sent a painful shudder up his forearms, like he had hit a baseball with the neck of the bat instead of with the sweet spot, but the zombie folded to the ground and went facedown into the water. Dark blood oozed from the wound and into the water like a curl of smoke coming up from a pipe.

      When he looked up, four more zombies were right in front of him. The one to the far left looked emaciated to the point she could barely hold her arms up. Her face was dark, the cheeks sunken, and her eyes appeared to protrude oddly from the sockets, like the skin had puckered around them.

      He flanked her, intending to use her as a barrier between himself the others. Then he brought up his rifle again and prepared to swing it at the woman’s head.

      He