Dawn of the Dead (3 page)

“What the hell’s goin’ on in there. Switch . . . switch . . . there’s no switcher . . . We’re losing the picture.”

Over the turmoil, Givens cried to no avail: “Officer . . . stop those men . . .”

The young officer faced the men as they reached his post. Then, as if he had made a decision, he took a grip on his rifle, opened the door and let the group through. Without a backward glance to the now screaming Givens, he ran out the door himself, deserting the losing cause and the crazed pandemonium.

“Get somebody in here that knows how to run this thing,” Givens shouted as he jumped toward the console. He frantically tried to work the complex dials. “Come on, I’ll triple the money for the man that can run this thing . . . triple the money. We’re staying on the air!” He said the last part as if it were a threat. Fran just shook her head in disbelief and moved off slowly toward the studio.

In the big room the tension was thicker than ever. Newspeople went about their business earnestly, trying to perform their various functions, but they wore faces of stone. It was as though any mention of crisis would crack their seemingly calm exteriors. But, the burden of staying calm was even greater with the sound of the agitated discussion that was being played over the airways in counterpoint to the newspeople’s desperate actions.

“They kill for one reason,” Dr. Foster said, as if in a trance. He had his suit jacket off and was mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “They kill for food. They eat their victims, do you understand that, Mr. Berman?” he asked carefully, as though speaking to a child. “That’s what keeps them going.”

A wave of nausea overcame Fran, and she had to lean against the hallway wall, in the shadows. People frantically rushed past her as though running to catch a train. She tried to calm herself and listened to the argument. TV station employees were filing past her, some leaving the studio in disgust.

“If we’d listened. If we’d dealt with the phenomenon properly . . . without emotion . . . without . . . emotion. It wouldn’t have come to this!” Dr. Foster pleaded with the thinning crowd.

Foster wiped his sweat-drenched brow with the now soaking dirty handkerchief. He pulled his tie away from his tight collar and popped the shirt button open. The once calm, collected doctor was now a bundle of nerves, desperate, shivering with anger and frustration. Fran had never seen so radical a change come over a person. She herself was shivering now, and clutched at her shoulders in the thin blouse. She felt so tired, so worn out, she just wanted to lie down and forget the whole mess.

But the rasping, hoarse voice of Dr. Foster droned on, begging the people to heed his cry.

“There is a state of martial law in effect in Philadelphia, as in all other major cities in the country. Citizens must understand the dire . . . dire consequences of this phenomenon. Should we be unable to check the spread . . . because of the emotional attitudes of the citizenry . . . toward . . . these issues of . . . morality.” The man’s frail shoulders seemed to crumble inward. He stood now, clutching the back of his chair with one hand and raising the other in a gesture of defiance:

“By command of the federal government, the president of the United States . . . citizens may no longer occupy private residences. No matter how safely protected or well stocked . . .”

The murmur in the studio began to build to an emotional crescendo. One woman gave a bloodcurdling scream and fell to the floor in a heap, another man cried out over and over again, “Air, air, I can’t breathe . . .” Foster tried to talk over the furor, but his voice cracked, and he could barely be heard.

“Citizens will be moved into central areas of the city . . .” Foster cried to the technicians abandoning their posts, the cameramen dropping their headsets on the floor and breaking for the door. One cameraman’s instrument spun on its liquid head, and on the monitors a whirling blur was seen as Foster continued to speak. Fran moved quickly toward the unmanned spinning camera. She tried to remember what Givens had told her to do in case of an emergency, but her mind was a blank. She aimed the camera at Foster and managed to stare through the viewfinder, not believing what she was seeing.

Foster was on the table, his shirt hanging out of his pants, his eyes like those of a wild man. His voice screeched out. He seemed like a prophet of old, foretelling of doom to an unbelieving population of barbarians:

“The bodies of the dead will be delivered over to specially equipped squads of the National Guard for organized disposition . . .”

Suddenly, a man darted out of the charging crowd and came running quickly up to Fran. She jumped as the figure flashed into her view.

“Frannie,” the man, whom she recognized as Steve, cried, “at nine o’clock meet me on the roof. We’re getting out.” The force of his words caused Fran to let the camera slip slightly. “Stephen . . . I don’t believe this . . . What—”

“We’re getting out. In the chopper.”

Another technician stepped over to take the camera from Fran. Steve pulled her over, away from the man’s hearing, and spoke more quietly.

“Nine p.m. All right?”

“Steve, we can’t . . . we’ve got to—” she protested.

But Steve was forceful. “We’ve got to nothing, Fran. We’ve got to survive.”

She looked into the soft brown eyes of the man she now loved. His dark hair was a mess, his clothes in disarray. His slight body, barely taller than hers, shook with a combination of nerves, fatigue and astonishment at what he was about to do.

“Somebody’s got to survive,” he tried to convince her. “Now you be up there at nine. Don’t make me come lookin’ for ya.”

Just as swiftly as he had surprised her, he was gone. Fran looked nervously back at the cameraman, feeling guilty that he might have heard their plotting. As the room emptied, the sound of Foster and Berman’s senseless argument grew louder and louder.

“Go ahead,” the cameraman said to Fran, without taking his eye from the viewfinder, speaking quietly and slowly. “We’ll be off the air by midnight anyway. Emergency networks are taking over. Our responsibility . . . is finished, I’m afraid.”

Trancelike once again, Fran walked to the corner of the room where she had left her pocketbook and coat. All she had to do now was wait the forty minutes until nine o’clock. And what then? What next? The thought made her shudder.

2

Compared to the frenzied excitement of the newsroom, the rest of the dusk-laden city of Philadelphia was calm. The buildings of the sprawling low-income housing project, interconnected by walkways and playground areas, stood like tombstones as the first stars tried valiantly to appear in the murky, pollution-filled, dark blue sky.

Suddenly, the glint of a grappling hook was noticeable against the lip surrounding the roof. Silent figures, as graceful as ballet dancers, climbed to the top of the building. Men in the armored vests of the S.W.A.T. police, clutching the latest in special weapons to their breasts, took position on the roofs and in the dark corners of the development.

In the shadows, squatting alongside the entrance to one of the building’s fire stairs, Roger DeMarco felt a sharp shooting pain in his thigh. Still in a squatting position, he tried to stretch out the aching leg to relieve the charley horse. Three other team members were poised silently beside him.

The stillness was deceptive: it didn’t seem that this was the national disaster that the politicians had been crying about for months. The population really felt that the government was putting one over on them. No one, particularly the uneducated, the superstitious and the very religious, really believed the government’s explanations of why the dead were returning to life. No one wanted to believe that the husband, the wife, the child or the parent that they had just lost would return to terrorize and devour human flesh. Even Roger, who wasn’t particularly politically astute, realized that the administration in power didn’t have the faith and confidence of the people. The stock market had plummeted way below the lowest point of the Carter administration; unemployment had soared, and inflation was rampant. With a presidential election coming up, most citizens felt this was just another ploy to get the country behind the administration’s candidate.

Roger looked at his watch. The figures next to him checked their weapons. The sweep hand on his watch reached twelve.

“Lights,” Roger mumbled to himself.

As if on cue, large searchlights bathed the side of the building in a soft amber glow.

“Martinez,” came the sound of a disembodied voice from behind a large truck. It was the troop commander, shouting through an electronic bullhorn. “You’ve been watching,” he continued to the Puerto Rican leader of the tenants’ uprising. They had refused to evacuate the building and were creating their own cemetery in the basement of their building. “You know we have the building surrounded . . .”

At the sound of the electronically amplified voice, any lights inside the project that had remained on blinked out one at a time.

“Little bastard’s got ’em all moved into one building . . . dumb little bastard,” the commander said to the sergeant on his left.

“Looks like they’re gonna try to fight us,” the sergeant responded.

The commander took up the bullhorn again.

“Martinez . . . the people in this project are your responsibility. We don’t want any of them hurt, and neither do you!”

Roger cocked his ear for the reply but was met with silence. The great concrete slab was mute to the commander’s demands. The four S.W.A.T. team members crouched in readiness.

“I’m giving you three minutes, Martinez . . .” Roger mouthed as the commander bellowed the familiar refrain through the bullhorn.

“Turn over your weapons and surrender . . .” the commander, a brisk, wiry, gray-haired man in his fifties, continued.

“There are no charges against you . . .” Roger mouthed.

The commander repeated, “There are no charges against you or any of your people . . .”

“Yet,” Roger said aloud, to no one in particular. The men beside him were struggling with their own feelings of nervousness and excitement toward the impending battle.

“Three minutes, Martinez,” the amplified voice of the commander boomed out across the inanimate fortresses, the deserted playgrounds, the parking lots filled with rusting second-hand cars, a few pimps’ Cadillacs sprinkled throughout.

Roger lifted the luminous dial of his watch to his face.

“And counting . . .”

The project was like a still-life photograph.

“Come on, Martinez!” Roger rooted out loud.

One of the silent squatting figures suddenly lurched toward Roger.

“Yeah, come on, Martinez,” Wooley lashed out viciously. “Show your greasy little Puerto Rican ass . . . so I can blow it off,” spat the seasoned veteran, a redneck of the first order, who had come up North like a mercenary.

Distressed, Roger looked over at the big man, who was so caught up in his violence that he jumped up from under cover and was a perfect moving target for the snipers.

“I’ll blow all their asses off,” he rambled on. “Low-life bastards. Blow all their little low-life Puerto Rican and nigger asses right off . . .”

Roger could see that the Alabama man was starting to crack. He was also concerned about the smooth-faced rookie sitting on Wooley’s other side. The boy’s eyes flickered nervously from Wooley to the ground below.

“Keep cool,” Roger cautioned quietly. “Just don’t pop off in there when we go in.”

The boy nodded gratefully. Roger was pleased that in this confusion and terror he was able to add a word or two of human kindness.

Wouldn’t Louise be surprised at him now. She was always screaming at him that he didn’t have an ounce of human kindness or consideration in his five-foot-ten, one-hundred-and-seventy-five-pound muscular body. She claimed he loved his guns and his Vietnam medals of commendation more than her, and sometimes he wondered if he did, too. He often wondered if her attraction to him was only physical—he was often told by women that his sandy hair, well-chiseled face and good build really turned them on. But for all her screaming and hollering at him, he would give anything to be with her now, curled up on the sofa watching Johnny Carson. Even though they’d been divorced for almost two years, he would marry her all over again just to be away from this mess.

His thoughts were interrupted by Wooley’s strident voice:

“Why the hell do we stick these low-lifes in these big-ass fancy hotels anyway? Shit, man. This’s better than I got. You ain’t gonna talk ’em outa here. You gotta blow ’em out. Blow their asses!”

The boy had listened to this sickening tirade and his face was ashen.

“You gonna be all right?” Roger asked.

The boy managed to nod in the affirmative.

“Let’s get on with it,” Wooley snarled and started pacing like a caged animal. “This is a waste of
my
time!”

Abruptly, without warning, the metal door to the fire stair burst open, and several figures rushed out of the cavernous darkness. Shots fired from handguns crisscrossed in the night air. A bullet smashed through the skull of the ashen-faced rookie. He died with an expression of confusion on his face, falling against Roger, a pleading look in his eyes. Roger experienced a sinking feeling, but then darkness-cloaked figures charged here and there, distracting him. More gunfire echoed through the night, and other S.W.A.T. men dodged and dove for cover. Wooley stood, unprotected and arrogant, and fired off a round with his automatic weapon.

On the street, the commander, upon hearing the gunfire, ordered through the bullhorn:

“Move in . . . move in. Goddammit!”

“All units, all units,” the sergeant screamed into the walkie-talkie. “All units, full operation!”

With a sense of repulsion mixed with sadness, Roger struggled to remove the dead weight of the young rookie. His M16 was wedged between the inside lip of the roof and the boy’s torso. Random shots rang out, making it hard for Roger to manipulate the body and stay clear of the bullets.

A small group of black and Puerto Rican youngsters scattered about the rooftop, almost as if in play. Suddenly, another S.W.A.T. patrol, their guns drawn, emerged from behind a large elevator housing. A blast of gunfire, and the retreating young civilians had to step over the bodies of their less lucky comrades who were mowed down in their haste.