Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

pointed to the kids—“the two of you help Mrs. Denkins onto the couch there and try to make her feel comfortable. Talk to her.”

      “What do you want me to say?” Randy Hargensen said.

      “Just talk to her,” Ed said. “You’re my deputy now. It’s your job to think of something.”

      Ed turned back to the window.

      “How many more bullets you got?” the prisoner said.

      Outside, the infected were closing in on the nurses’ station and several had already started slapping their hands against the glass, smearing it with blood and dirt. The window was shaking. There were no drapes to close.

      “Not nearly enough,” Ed said.

      He glanced at the prisoner, then back at the courtyard.

      “Your name’s Ed?” the prisoner said.

      “Ed Moore.”

      “Billy Kline.”

      Ed nodded. “Good to meet you.”

      “Yeah, right,” Billy said, and laughed.

      Just then Margaret came up behind them. “Ed,” she said. “The line’s busy. I tried a bunch of times but I can’t get through. I tried my son’s cell phone number, too, and I got a message that the network is busy.”

      “Okay,” Ed said. “Keep trying, Margaret.”

      He looked behind him. The others were talking quietly among themselves. Everybody seemed to be doing okay except for Art and Barbie. The two of them looked so frail.

      “We’re gonna have to do something pretty darn quick,” Ed said.

      “What’d you have in mind?” Billy said.

      “I don’t have a clue.”

      “Well, that makes two of us.”

      “Where’d they all come from?” Ed said. “I went out for a walk this morning and the streets were empty. All of the sudden, there’s hundreds of those things.”

      He had intended the question rhetorically, but to his surprise, Billy answered him.

      “Most of these are probably from the hotel next door. My guess is a boatload of the infected got out of the quarantine zone and made landfall here sometime last night.”

      “What makes you say that? Did you see a boat?”

      “No,” Billy said. “It’s just a guess.”

      “Based on what?”

      “Well, they’re not gonna come by land. I mean, I’ve seen the quarantine wall on TV. Nothing’s getting through that. Coming by sea is the most logical way to do it. There’s a lot of ocean, and the Coast Guard’s only got so many patrols. Besides, before it all started, I saw a few of the infected that didn’t look all that fresh. It was their clothes. They looked like the people I’ve seen on the news from inside the quarantine zone.”

      And then he told Ed about the man and the young boy he’d seen tied together at the wrist.

      “Yeah, but zombies aren’t gonna know how to pilot a boat. That has to be at least a six-hundred-mile trip from here to the closest part of the quarantine zone.”

      “Well, we don’t really know what a Stage Three zombie is capable of. But you’re probably right. My guess is it was a boatload of refugees. There were probably one or two who were infected, and they spread it here when they landed late last night or early this morning.”

      “How do you know when they landed?”

      “Jesus fucking Christ, old man, I don’t know. I’m just guessing. Late last night makes the most sense, though. Yesterday was the Fourth of July. I saw all the trash left out at Centennial Park from the celebrations. There must have been a bunch of people there last night. If the infected had come ashore any earlier, they would have run into all those crowds and we would have heard about it before now.”

      Ed nodded. The kid reasoned pretty well.

      He pointed at the crowds in the courtyard and said, “Why do you suppose they’re all able to move around like that? If the zombies are eating them, don’t you think there’d be more of them that are, you know, not able to move? Shouldn’t they be dead?”

      “I don’t think it works like that.”

      “What do you mean?”

      “I don’t think the Stage One zombies attack to feed. Not like you mean, anyway. Maybe the Stage Two and Stage Three ones do. The Stage One zombies might even do it, too, if enough of them are attacking an uninfected person at the same time. But I think the Stage One zombies attack just to increase their numbers.”

      Ed stared at him. He’d never considered that.

      “You mean they’re like big viruses? They attack just enough to reproduce.”

      “Exactly.”

      Ed thought about that, and it explained a lot. “Where’d you hear that?”

      “Some of it on TV,” Billy said. “Some of it’s just stuff I’ve been thinking about. It explains why the outbreaks spread so fast, you know?”

      “Yeah. Huh. That’s pretty smart thinking.”

      “Yeah, well, I may be wearing this thing, but I ain’t stupid.”

      They stood there for maybe half a minute, Ed trying to think of what they were going to do and not coming up with anything, when two things happened more or less at the same time that decided the matter for him.

      Margaret O’Brien had managed to get a 911 dispatcher on the phone and she was shouting to send help. Ed started that way. He was going to tell her to calm down, just tell them the address, that they needed help right away. But he didn’t make it more than halfway across the room before there was a loud crash and the sound of splintering wood from the doorway. The desk got pushed back a good eighteen inches as the door crashed open. Arms and hands and mutilated faces jutted through the opening.

      A moment later, a window broke somewhere in the back of the station.

      “Heads up, everybody,” Ed said. “We’re about to have company.”

      He crossed to the door, drawing his revolver as he advanced, and fired four shots into the opening. Then he backed up and motioned for the others to get Barbie and Art onto their feet.

      “There’s too many of them,” he said. “We’re gonna have to get out of here.”

      “Ed,” Margaret said. “They’re coming through the back.”

      Ed looked around. They were surrounded. The infected stared in at them from every window. They were pushing their way over the desk at the front door. He could hear them breaking more glass somewhere in the back.

      He saw a flash of orange in the hallway to his left and looked that way. Billy was pulling the attic access ladder down from the ceiling, unfolding it.

      “Come on,” he said. “Up here.”

      Ed ran over to him and looked up into the attic. Then he looked at Billy.

      “That’s brilliant,” he said.

      “Not my idea. I got it from Night of the Living Dead.”

      Ed just laughed. “It’s still brilliant,” he said.

      Ed was the last one up the ladder, covering their retreat with his revolvers.

      “We’re in,” Billy said.

      Ed looked up again. Billy was holding a hand out to him.

      “Hurry it up, old man.”

      Ed scrambled up the ladder after him. When he reached the top, the two men turned, folded up the