Cold Hearted: A Yancy Lazarus Novel (Episode Two) (26 page)

Despite all attempts by the CDC to suppress the spreading epidemic, the infection seems more virulent than ever. The “Green Death,” as it has been dubbed by the masses, continues to hold residents of Seattle enthralled as it sweeps through the streets and ravages those still living. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand residents—nearly half of Seattle’s population—already lay dead, while scores more seem to be dying by the day. Many residents have fled the city only to be quarantined by US Army soldiers who have established containment camps at every major exit route.

Reports trickling out of the containment camps indicate that the epidemic is moving even more rapidly among detainees, likely due to cramped and unsanitary living conditions. Detainees are additionally suffering from a wave of famine, brought on by severe food shortages, and lack of administrative personnel within the camps.

More troubling still is the number of infected individuals contracting a new, more virulent, strain of the disease, a strain which appears to mutate the infected. If a friend or family member contracts the plague but does not die within a day of presenting symptoms, then the CDC advises blockading the individual in a secure location and distancing yourself immediately. Mutation brings on extreme bouts of violence. The city has opened the King County Jail, located on 5th Avenue and James Street, as an infectious detainment center for the violently infected.

Plague. Craptastic. And not just plague, but freaky-deaky plague that mutated people and turned ‘em into violent killing machines. Even better, the collection point for the “violently infected” was only a couple of hundred feet behind us—the very place I’d sensed we were being watched from. Craptastic squared. I glanced back down at the paper—there was something wrong with it.

The date, in the upper right hand corner, kept changing, cycling through date after date, like it couldn’t make up its mind just when this nightmare future had hit: January 16, 2020 … September 15, 2018 … May 13, 2022, July 24, 2029 … On and on the dates flashed, some almost solid while others appeared misty and faded on the page.

“So?” Ferraro asked. “What’s it say?”

“Scary-ass zombie plague is what it says. So I’m thinking we should get our asses moving a little quicker.” I jerked a thumb at the jail. “That’s the place where the government was rounding up all the mutated shitheads.” I ripped 1A from the paper, folded it up, shoved the article into my pocket, and hopped back on Sir Zippy. “It’d be just our friggin’ luck to get away from Fast Hands and his posse, only to get chewed to pieces by infectious monsters.”

The squeal of a door on rusted hinges rang through the air, loud as a crack of thunder in the silent city.

The sound had come from behind us.

TWENTY-FOUR:

Meatbags

I swiveled in my seat, eyes searching for the noise—pretty sure it’d come from that damn jail. But nothing moved down the length of the paved road. No door stood open. No breeze stirred the stale air. Shit, there wasn’t even any freaky horror movie music to announce the imminent approach of something terrifying. If only real life could be as simple as Hollywood—I would have killed for a menacing horror movie sound track.

Despite the stillness, I had the terribly uncomfortable feeling that we were on the edge of a cliff. It was as if the city was holding its breath, and one great exhale would blow Ferraro and I right over the edge. I had to wonder just how long ago that newspaper article had been written: a day, a week, a year, ten years maybe? Hopefully, ten years. Genetically altered zombies probably couldn’t survive in a place like this for ten years, right? But if the article had been penned a week ago … we could be standing right at ground zero.

Something moved ahead and just to the left—a faint rustle of motion right out of the corner of my eye, near a shop up ahead. A red-brick, single-story convenience store with a wraparound window front and a dead neon sign reading “Lotto.” Nothing moved in there now, but dammit, there
had
been something. I’d put my impeccable reputation as a smartass on the line, I was so sure.

Ferraro shot me a look—she’d seen the movement too. Then she nudged the horse to the opposite side of the road and kept moving down James Street. Tall buildings gave way to smaller places of brick and stone—mostly boutiques or family eateries—many of the windows broken out or boarded over. Lots of greenery though; a bunch of trees lined the sidewalk on both sides of the road and everything seemed vibrant and healthy.
Too
healthy—I’m naturally suspicious of anything that doesn’t look at least mildly sick and broken. Damn trees looked like they’d been shooting up Miracle Grow. Didn’t trust a one of ‘em.

More movement … couldn’t pinpoint it though, seemed to happen everywhere, like the whole city had finally let out that breath. This place hadn’t died, it’d just gone into hibernation like some kinda giant, hungry animal that’d run short on food. I got the oddest sense that maybe we’d woken it up with all our clomping around.

Ferraro leaned toward me and whispered, “Behind us.”

I looked back and sure enough, there was a man-shaped something or other standing on the sidewalk, framed by a yellowed wooden door that let into a diner, Hole in the Wall Bar-B-Que. Animals, even monsters should know better than to defile a barbeque joint.

Now, to call the thing in front of the shop a man was a generous use of the word; I’ve seen a fair number of halfies that look closer to human than this thing. Really, the best I could say about it was that it was man-
shaped
. Kind of.

Son of a bitch was a lump of deformed, twisted white skin and ropy muscle. Copious amounts of black-green flaps, what could only be rotted flesh, dotted its form in places. An eyeless face of creamy white—head canted inquisitively to the side—regarded us from above a gaping fish-like mouth filled with jagged saw-blade teeth. Really, it was the tattered blue jeans and the shredded flannel shirt clinging to its body that gave away the fact that this guy had once been a card-carrying member of the human race.

The skinny jeans and flannel also told me he’d been a hipster … great. Not just a zombie—a snooty, hipster zombie. My worst nightmare. On the upside, he’d probably refuse to eat me since I was chock-full of deadly carcinogens from my many years of smoking.

Two more pasty white meatbags—one clearly female from the shriveled up tits and thin build—emerged from a doorway further up on 2
nd
Avenue. I heard the shuffle of more lumbering footsteps from ahead of me … I swung back around to face forward. Ah, excellent, two-dozen creatures edged toward us from the direction of the jail, clad in the remnants of orange jumpsuits, all marked “DOC.” Now I really did feel like my head was on a swivel—looking back and forth, trying to track all the clusters of evil zombies circling around us. Another creature, a lone woman, wandered out from an alleyway up ahead while four or five more staggered onto the sidewalk from an enclosed parking garage.

Yet another small mob—these all sporting what had once been business suits—emerged on the street before us. They’d boxed us in nice and tight, leaving absolutely no route for escape, which had probably been their intention from the start. How these ugly, stupid bags of flesh and rot had coordinated between themselves was a mystery, but one that ultimately didn’t matter. We’d been outsmarted. Outsmarted by brain-dead zombies.
Jeez
. That one definitely wasn’t gonna make it into the Christmas letter.

This just kept getting better and better. So far, none of the creepers seemed especially interested in mauling us or eating our brains, but I remembered the warning from the paper: “Mutation brings on extreme bouts of violence.”

“Well shit,” I said to Ferraro, shifting my gaze from one pocket of doom to the others. “This could get interesting.”

“
Che palle
,” she swore. “What should we do?” She gave me a brief look, before turning away—trying to watch everything all at once.

“Right. Do. We do need to do something.” Talk about Captain Obvious, but you try putting a game plan together under those circumstances. I mean,
a man on a moped and a woman on a horse ride into Seattle with a pack of zombies …
it sounds like the set-up for some morbid joke. You just can’t plan for shit like this. I was just hoping that the punchline didn’t end with:
then the zombie hoard eviscerated them
.

“Alright,” I said trying to sound cool, calm, and collected even though I really wanted to pull my hair and shriek like a little girl. “Stay close, follow my lead. Gun out, try to conserve ammo—there are a lot of these meatbags. If we get separated, move your ass, and make it to the Four Seasons. That’ll be our rendezvous.” I took a deep breath, trying not to hunch over and vomit on myself. This situation downright scared the bejesus out of me. Deep breaths, one, two, in, out. Calm the mind. Shut away the fear, the worry. What would be, would be. “Ready?”

“Oh, I’m ready,” she said. “How about you? You sound shaky. Listen, if you’re not up to the challenge, you can just sit this one out—I can handle it without you if you need the breather, old-timer. Oh, and never tell me to move my ass again—I’m a federal officer.” She smiled a little when she said it though, obviously she’d seen through my naturally cool and unruffled demeanor. That’s one thing I love about Marines, regardless of whether they were officer or enlisted: Marines always know how to smile at the Devil and spit right in his eye when they need too. Even in the worst situations they can somehow find a way to be ornery, irreverent, and tough as steel.

Once upon a time, at a little place called the Chosin Reservoir, Marine General Chesty Puller found himself in a situation not too dissimilar from ours … well, no zombies, and he was in Korea not Seattle. But that’s really just semantics. Chesty and his battalion were surrounded on all sides and outnumbered twenty-two to one, with no possible hope of escape. The Army had pulled back, giving the unit up as a lost cause. Without batting an eye, Chesty turned to his lieutenant and said, “They’re on our left, they’re on our right, they’re in front of us, they’re behind us … they can’t get away this time.”

It was time to pull a Chesty and spit right in the Devil’s eye.

I drew my pistol, a thin scrape of metal rubbing leather. The ugly sons of bitches were moving now, slowly—lazy even—but they were getting closer and their numbers seemed to be multiplying by the second. Time to rock and roll, baby, show these slow moving shit-heels why cannibalism doesn’t pay.

“Just try to keep up,” I said as I revved the engine of my moped—
zing-zing-zingggg
—before zipping away toward the alleyway, guarded by the solitary woman-thing. The scooter put her in my range half a second later—I leveled my pistol while zooming forward like the Flash on a Rascal, and pulled the trigger. Just a single squeeze, followed by a soft
pop
. Her head exploded from her shoulders; her neck and the lower half of her jaw simply vanished in an arc of greenish gore, while the top half cartwheeled through the air. The head landed with a sickening wet
thunk
, her body fell to the side, arms and legs thrashing with sporadic movement.

That seemed to be the straw that broke the ugly, cannibalistic, mutated camel’s back. The whole horde—what the hell did you even call a group of zombies? … Murder, yeah, definitely a murder of zombies—broke into action, surging onward, as though the act of violence against one of their own had unlocked some need for vengeance. A sea of eyeless faces, molted skin, and sharp, tearing teeth bore down upon us like an ocean tide crashing on the shore.

I scooted into the alley, Ferraro raced in behind me on her horse. The alley was maybe ten feet wide, with red brick to one side and rough gray concrete on the other. Not a great fighting position: the murder could still approach four or five abreast. Still, it was a helluva lot better than being swarmed and crushed in the world’s grossest and most uncomfortable doggy pile.

I holstered my pistol, planted one foot, cranked the brake, and brought the moped about face before redrawing my gun. “Stay mounted,” I called over my shoulder to Ferraro, “alternating fire pattern. Groovy?”

“Got it,” she shouted, her Glock already in hand.

“We’ll just thin ‘em out a little, then we’ll blow this nightmare popsicle stand.”

The murder of meatbags from the parking garage were the first to make contact, lurching into the alleyway with all the grace of drunken frat boys after a long bender—staggering, stumbling, and jockeying to be the first at getting a nibble. I leveled the gun and started firing, not slow, but not fast either. I was scared, but measured and accurate fire would serve me far better than desperate pray-and-spray shooting. Plus, these guys made it as easy as target practice at the range. These freaks were dead things that didn’t seem to be afraid of pain or death, so they weren’t struggling to find cover and they weren’t shooting back.

They just staggered along, five of ‘em in a rough row, and walked right at me. Idiots.

So I took my time. Inhale. Exhale.
Pop
. The barrel raised a fraction of an inch and I let it reset naturally. Inhale. Exhale.
Pop
. Nice and easy, slow, steady breaths. Rinse and repeat. Each bullet careened into a neck or face, dropping corpses left and right, twitching bodies hitting the floor. As a side note, these sons of bitches were far hardier than those brain-eaters you see in most films these days. Decapitated heads continued to work jaws—if they still had them—and bodies still floundered and flailed on the ground, even though they were rendered dumb and impotent.

I ran dry after the first five zombies fell, but more meatbags flooded in, stumbling momentarily on the pile of corpses blocking their way. The bark of Ferraro’s Glock cut into the air, her pace faster than mine, but still even and purposeful. The Glock carried more rounds but couldn’t dish out the same damage my hand-cannon could. So Ferraro was compensating by firing three shot groups:
crack-crack-crack
, two to the chest, one to the head.