Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

The Mexicans and the white guys all had prison tats on their necks. The white guys came in two body types. You had the big guys, stout, meaty, biker types. They tended to be the older ones, doing time for robbery or check kiting. Then you had the lean ones, wiry, wild-eyed. They were the loud ones, the meth heads, the fighters, the ones with something to prove.

      Tommy is going to fit in well with the younger ones, Billy thought. He had the body type. He had the same desperate air about him, an urgent need to fit in somewhere, anywhere. But then, all the young white guys who joined the Aryan Brotherhood started out that way. They were all angry, frustrated, a little frightened to find themselves alone in a world that demanded so much and yet seemed to promise so little in return. The Aryan Brotherhood offered safety. It offered direction. It offered a society that gave its members rank and made them something special within their own little world. It offered an “us” and a “them.” For someone like Tommy Patmore, the appeal was irresistible.

      But they hadn’t looked twice at Billy. With a last name like Kline, they all assumed Billy was Jewish. But if he was, his family had neglected to tell him about it. And yet his name was enough to brand him a Jew in the eyes of his fellow prisoners. It made him a sort of nonentity, a prisoner like the rest, yet distinct enough that he didn’t fall inside any of the racial lines that sharply divide all U.S. jails and prisons. At six-one and a hundred and ninety pounds, he was big enough and tough enough to stand in the no-man’s land between the gangs, but it was a precarious existence. He was always watching the man behind him, because that man could turn on him at a moment’s notice, and maintaining that nearly constant state of vigilance wore Billy down, exhausted him.

      That was the big reason why he hated to see Tommy Patmore get sucked into the gangs. He liked Tommy. Now, Tommy was one more individual he’d have to watch out for.

      “Just do me a favor, would you?” Billy said. “Do your time smart. If they try to talk you into hurting somebody, get the hell out. The last thing you want to do is spend the rest of your life in a state pen someplace.”

      Tommy swallowed the lump in his throat. Then he looked down at his hands folded in his lap.

      That was all Billy needed to see.

      “Ah, Tommy, you are one dumb son of a bitch. What did you agree to do?”

      “Please don’t say anything.”

      “What are you going to do? Tell me.”

      Tommy looked around, then folded down the waistband of his pants, exposing a five-inch-long piece of tin that had been hammered into a crude shank, some duct tape wrapped around the blunt end as a handle.

      “They haven’t told me who yet.”

      “Ah, Tommy. For Christ’s sake.”

      “Don’t say anything, Billy. Please.”

      “I won’t,” Billy said.

      He looked away in disgust.

      In his mind, he tried to wash his hands of Tommy Patmore, though it wasn’t as easy as it should have been.

      They were pulling into Centennial Park. The Gulf of Mexico stretched out before them like a flat green sheet of cold pea soup. Gulls circled over the water, filling the morning air with noise. The smell of the ocean was thick and pungent and pleasant. Billy closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. For a moment, he imagined that all his problems were somewhere else.

      But it was the last quiet moment he would ever know.

      The driver parked the bus in the middle of a nearly empty parking lot, and things started to happen quickly after that.

      Billy shuffled off the bus with the others.

      A few of the men stretched.

      A guard came by and collected their SID sheets, the 3 x 5 index cards that contained all their personal information and that they had to present to the guards every time they moved from one place to the next.

      Billy and three of the others were pulled off the line and brought over to the equipment stand.

      A guard handed Billy a canvas sack with a strap meant to go over one shoulder and a sawed-off broom handle with a dull, bent spike shoved into one end.

      “Collection detail,” the guard said. “You’re with Carnot. Over there.”

      Deputy Carnot, who the prisoners called Deputy Carenot because he didn’t seem to give a shit about anything except talking on his cell phone, waved his men over and pointed them toward a large plain of grass south of the parking lot. He didn’t even have to stop talking on the phone. Billy and the other members of the collection detail had all done this before. They knew the drill. Fan out. Fill your bag. Empty it into the garbage sacks brought up by the runners.

      Billy worked steadily for the better part of an hour, going up and down the grassy expanse of Centennial Park, spearing trash, while the others went around emptying garbage cans into sacks and carting them off to a Dumpster that had been brought in for their use. It was easy work, mindless, and in his head he was drifting.

      All that morning, the wind off the Gulf had been trying to clear the clouds from the sky, and it was finally starting to succeed. It was getting hot. Billy walked over to where Deputy Carnot was sitting in a lawn chair next to a yellow watercooler, talking on his cell phone.

      “Hey, boss, you mind if I get a drink?”

      Carnot gave him a frown and a dismissive wave of his hand. I don’t give a shit. Do what you need to do and lemme alone.

      It sounded like he was talking to his girlfriend. Billy shook his head and smiled. Then he filled a paper snow cone cup with water and leaned on his trash spike while he drank it down in one quick gulp. It felt good going down, cold and clean.

      He leaned down again for another drink, and that’s when he saw it.

      He froze.

      About a hundred feet away, DeShawn James, one of the younger black guys on the work crew, was wrestling with a heavy trash can, trying to pull it out of a wooden bin so he could empty it. Behind him, hugging a line of shrubs and coming up fast, was Tommy Patmore.

      Billy could see the tin shank glinting in Tommy’s right hand.

      Damn it, Tommy. You are one dumb son of a bitch.

      Billy glanced at Carnot. The man was oblivious, still talking on his phone. No one else seemed to have noticed Tommy making his move either, and that was good.

      Billy filled his cup, stood, and looked away, anywhere but at what Tommy was doing.

      And that’s when he saw the man coming down the sidewalk toward him. His right arm was dark with dried blood, but he was walking normally, which is why Billy didn’t clue in right away that he was looking at a zombie. Like everybody else, he had seen the news footage from Texas. He had seen the infected wading through the flooded streets of Houston, their movements jerky and uncoordinated. He had seen the fighting in San Antonio and Austin and Dallas. He had read about them in magazines and seen the public service announcements on TV, telling you what to do if you should ever encounter one of the infected. But none of that occurred to him just then. All he saw was a man who didn’t look right but who sent a shiver down his spine just the same.

      It wasn’t until he saw the man’s milky eyes that everything clicked.

      And then he knew what he was looking at.

      “Hey, boss,” he said.

      Carnot rolled his eyes up at Billy. What the fuck do you want?

      Billy pointed at the approaching zombie with a nod of his chin.

      Carnot looked over his shoulder, then did a double take. “Holy shit,” he said. He stood up and backed away from his lawn chair, still holding the cell phone to his ear.

      The zombie stepped off the sidewalk and onto the grass. It raised its arms, its hands outstretched and clutching for them in a gesture of supplication that Billy found strangely