Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney

be happy to hear that,” he muttered.

      Out of the corner of his eye he saw movement, a splash of orange coming around a line of shrubs.

      It was Tommy Patmore. His arms and his stomach and his thighs were soaked with blood, but he didn’t look infected. He looked shell-shocked, confused. The shank was still in his hand.

      From behind Tommy, one of the other prisoners was coming up fast. He was limping, a bad bite wound just below his knee, but he was still moving with frightening speed.

      A fast mover, Billy thought. The articles he’d read had mentioned how some of the zombies, the ones who were in really good physical condition before they became infected, sometimes managed to maintain a measure of their former physical prowess when they turned. But the same article had also said that it took longer for those people to turn. They’d only been out about two hours. How had this happened so fast?

      He shouted, “Tommy, look out!” and ran for his friend.

      He got there just as the fast mover was closing on Tommy, and he jammed his trash spike into the zombie’s ear. The zombie fought like a big fish on a hook, but it eventually went down.

      Billy pulled his spike out of the zombie’s head and turned to Tommy.

      “Are you okay? Did you get bit?”

      Tommy’s mouth was working like he was chewing gum, but he wasn’t making words.

      “Tommy, answer me.”

      “I…I killed him. I did it.”

      He was crying, his body shaking all over.

      “What? Who?”

      “DeShawn James. They wanted me…They told me to…I stabbed him in the belly and then I stopped, you know, I…I had changed my mind. I didn’t want to hurt him. I didn’t. But then he started fighting me.”

      Tommy glanced down at the shank in his hand like he didn’t know what it was.

      He said, “I didn’t want to. God, there was so much blood.”

      “Yeah, well, you did. Now it’s time to cowboy the fuck up and deal with it. We’re in a world of shit here, Tommy. Are you bit anyplace?”

      “Bit?”

      “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Tommy. Are you hurt?”

      “No.”

      “Good. We got to get to someplace safe.” He scanned the buildings across the street. The hotel would be no good. Zombies were already walking up to the covered carport at the main entrance. But farther south, he saw a place that looked promising, a few low structures behind a large pink stucco wall. “Over there,” he said. “Come on. Stay close.”

      And together, they ran for it.

      CHAPTER 4

      From the notebooks of Ben Richardson

      Houston, Texas: July 5th, 3:15 A.M.

      I saw my first zombie from the window of a registered charter bus on the Gibbs-Sprawl Road as we entered the quarantine zone around San Antonio.

      That was eight months ago.

      She was weirdly sexless, not anything like what I expected. I remember she was standing barefoot in the weeds that had grown up at the edge of the road since the city was abandoned, and her greasy, stringy hair hung down over her face like a wet curtain. Her body was thin and rickety looking. She was wearing a baglike, bloodstained hospital gown, and to me she looked like an emaciated crack whore. She never even looked up, not even as our bus rolled on by. She just stood there, hugging herself with her bone-skinny arms in the cloud of dust our bus had kicked up. I wasn’t disgusted like I thought I would be. I just felt sad.

      But, like I said, that was eight months ago. I’ve seen a lot of zombies since then, a lot of death. I’ve studied them. I’ve gotten closer than I would have liked at times. Eventually—hopefully—all of these notebooks will get turned into some kind of cohesive whole, some narrative of the zombie outbreak that has brought our great nation from superpower status to the level of a ticking time bomb for the rest of the world, and in that narrative I’ll try to find a reason for it all.

      If there is one.

      Somehow I doubt there is.

      I’m growing more and more convinced that there aren’t reasons to explain this world we live in. Not good ones anyway.

      Maybe that’s what makes catastrophes so horrible—the lack of a reason. I mean in a teleological sense. Our brains are wired to see the world in terms of cause and effect. Even the atheists among us find some small measure of comfort knowing that there’s a reason things are so bad.

      These days, I find myself more interested in the zombies themselves than I am with the traditional things with which a historian and commentator should be concerned. Xenophon, Plutarch, Sallust, Suetonius, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Raphael Holinshed, Francesco Guicciardini, Edward Gibbon—those great chroniclers in the history of historians—they all sought to cast a wide net, giving equal attention to personal agenda and facts. I would like to cast a wide net, too. And I have plenty of opinions. The economic impact of the outbreak at home and abroad, the political flare-ups, the big, empty speeches on the floor of the U.N. and on the White House lawn—all those things have their place in a history with any claim to completeness. But I find it hard to give a rat’s ass about them. The politicians aren’t out here on the street dying with the rest of us. They’re all stashed away in some secure, undisclosed location, waiting it out. And their eloquent speeches don’t tell the part of the story that needs telling.

      I read Eddie Hudson’s book and a dozen others just like it. I know what they described—all the shambling corpselike people flooding the streets, attacking every living thing they could find. Well, I’ve seen what happens after almost two years. The infected aren’t dead. And like all living things, they’ve changed, adapted. The ones who have survived since the first days of the outbreak—and granted, there aren’t many of them—have become something different. And yet, for all that, they are still dangerous; they are still unpredictable. They still attack. They’re like alcoholics who can’t help coming back to the bottle. Even if they don’t want to.

      That’s the side of this thing I want to talk about.

      July 5th, 5:40 A.M.

      We’ve got about twenty minutes until takeoff and I wanted to jot down a few notes about the quarantine zone. Sometimes I find it hard to wrap my mind around how big it is. The logistical scope of the project is simply staggering.

      Back in its heyday, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency patrolled the 2,000 miles of borderland between the United States and Mexico. Of the agency’s 11,000 agents, more than 9,500 of them worked along that 2,000-mile stretch of desert. They hunted drug dealers and illegal aliens with a huge array of tools, everything from satellite imagery and publicly accessible webcams to helicopters, horses, and plain old-fashioned shoe leather. Even still, the border had more holes in it than a fishing net.

      In comparison, the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority only has a wall of some 1,100 miles to patrol. The wall stretches from Gulfport, Mississippi, to Brownsville, Texas, paralleling the freeway system wherever possible to aid in the supply and reinforcement of problem areas. The GRQA keeps this stretch of metal fencing and sentry towers and barbed wire secure with just over 10,000 agents, most of them former CBP and National Guardsmen and cops. They are aided at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard and in Mexico by federal troops.

      Yet despite their numerical advantage over the old U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency, their job is infinitely harder. Nobody in the old CBP thought too much of it that a steady stream of illegals got through the border every day. They just shrugged and went on with life. But the GRQA can’t afford to let even a single zombie through its line. That would spell disaster. The pressure is high; the price of failure is apocalyptic.

      Their job terrifies me. These guys are frequently posted outside