Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

looked toward the sound and saw Barnes strolling almost casually down the center of the street, firing as he advanced, dropping zombies with every shot.

      He stopped a little forward of Richardson’s position and kept on firing. His skill with the rifle was almost beautiful to watch. He was so smooth, every gesture one of complete control, the shots coming like the ticks of a metronome. He shot through his magazine, ejected it, slapped in a fresh one, and with barely a pause went right back to firing.

      More zombies were coming into the street from all directions.

      “They’ve got us surrounded,” he yelled to Barnes.

      Barnes stopped firing just long enough to scan the scene.

      “Get them,” he said, pointing at the crowd of people.

      “Where are we going to go?” Richardson asked.

      “Through there,” Barnes said. He was pointing at a narrow alleyway between two buildings off to his right. “Hurry,” he said.

      Richardson made his way over to the crowd and did a quick count of eleven people, four women and seven men. One of the women was Hispanic, about forty, dressed in clothes so worn and weathered they looked gray, though they had clearly once been some brighter color. Next to her, clinging tightly to her waist, was a scrawny white kid about fourteen years old. All of them were armed with makeshift clubs, pieces of rebar, baseball bats, metal pipes. Richardson got a sense right away that the woman with her arm around the fourteen-year-old boy was the leader of the group, the others seeming to gather behind her.

      “I’m Ben Richardson,” he said. “We’re gonna help you. Come with me.”

      “Okay,” she said.

      Richardson pointed the others through the alleyway. They crossed the street behind Barnes, who fell in behind the group and covered their retreat. The woman moved into the alleyway with confidence, and Richardson realized that she almost certainly knew her way around here. She and her group had probably been living as scavengers in these ruins since the first days of the quarantine. He fell in behind her and let her take the lead.

      They emerged into a jumble of wreckage. A seemingly endless field of wheels, paint cans, sheets of plywood, refrigerators, TVs, a huge metal frame like the skeleton of an overhead street sign, toppled trees, light poles, cars, the frame to somebody’s boat trailer, and a whole profusion of bricks and pillows and mattresses and mud stretched out before them.

      “Can we get through that?” Richardson asked.

      “Yeah, through here,” the woman said.

      But before they could move out, there was the sound of a scuffle behind them. An infected woman in a blue dress had stepped out of the doorway of the building to their right and fell on one of the group.

      The man wrestled with the woman for a moment and then managed to toss her to one side. Two other members of the group stepped up with their makeshift clubs at the ready and battered the infected woman into a motionless pulp with a few well-placed blows.

      “Okay?” the woman leading the group said.

      The man who had tossed the zombie to the ground nodded.

      Behind them, Barnes was firing. He paused long enough to shout, “Get moving up there,” and went back to firing.

      “This way,” the woman said.

      She led them through the maze of debris with surprising ease, pointing out the tricky parts for Richardson to avoid.

      “It isn’t easy for the infected to get through here,” she told Richardson. “They get confused easily.”

      He nodded. He noticed that even as they threaded through the densest parts of the debris field, she never let go of the boy’s hand.

      Ten minutes later they were standing in a parking lot, not a zombie in sight. Off to their right were the remains of a shopping mall. Richardson could still read the signs on a few of the buildings.

      “Where are we?” Richardson said to the woman.

      “South side of Baybrook Mall,” Barnes said, coming up behind them. He had a GPS in his hand.

      “Thank you for helping us back there,” the woman said. “We would have died if you hadn’t helped us.”

      Barnes just grunted, didn’t even look at her.

      She turned to Richardson. “We saw your helicopter go down. We were going to see if we could help you, but we got caught in that building across the street from you guys.”

      Barnes moved off from them and took out his radio.

      Richardson watched him for a moment, then turned to the woman.

      “I’m Ben Richardson,” he said.

      “I know,” she said. “You said that already.”

      And then she smiled, and it was a surprisingly pretty smile. Even after two years inside the quarantine zone, her teeth looked white and healthy.

      “I’m Sandra Tellez,” she said. She put her arm around the boy and said, “This is Clint Siefer.”

      The boy didn’t speak. His face was lean and dirty, yet his forehead had a thoughtful heaviness to it that left his eyes in shadow. Richardson had always prided himself on his story radar, that gift he had for spotting the people in a crowd whose story seemed to capture the essence of a disaster. That radar was going full tilt in his head right now, looking at these two. They had a story. He only hoped there’d be time to hear it.

      A young man was standing next to Clint. He looked to be about twenty-five, though it was hard to tell for the layers of grime on his face. His eyes kept darting to the pouch clipped to Richardson’s shoulder.

      “What’s your name?” Richardson asked him.

      “Jerald Stevens,” he said. “Hey, do you have any food on you?”

      His eyes flicked to the pouch again.

      “Uh, yeah,” Richardson said. “I think I got a candy bar.”

      “Can I have it?”

      Richardson laughed, though a bit uncomfortably. There was disturbing urgency in the man’s attitude, something that didn’t seem quite sane.

      “Yeah, sure,” he said.

      He unzipped the pouch and removed a Snickers bar and a small bag of smoked almonds.

      “You want the almonds, too?”

      The man nodded, and in that moment, Richardson had him pegged. He reminded him of that hyperactive weasel from the old Foghorn Leghorn cartoons, and Richardson had a sudden image of the young man with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth, his hands dangling limply in front of his thin, spoon-shaped chest, eagerly bouncing on his toes in nervous anticipation of a morsel.

      “Here you go,” he said.

      The young man, his hair a matted, out-of-control mess, snatched the food away and walked off from the group to devour it.

      Richardson watched him go, then looked back to Sandra Tellez.

      She shrugged. “Things are hard inside here. We eat whenever we can.”

      “I’m sorry I don’t have any more.”

      “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m sure you guys didn’t plan on crashing.”

      “No, you’re right about that.”

      “What happened?”

      “I’m not really sure what happened. There was a lot of smoke. Officer Barnes over there said something about an oil leak. We lost oil pressure, and the next thing I know we’re crashing into that parking lot.”

      “You’re not part of the GQRA?”

      “No,” he said.