Ryan was thrown backward. He struck the wall and fell onto a gurney before finally hitting the floor. Branagan, the majority of his face missing, towered over him. His shiny star-shaped badge was no longer pinned to his shirt, but was instead sticking out of the side of his cheek, planted deeply enough that two of the star’s spokes were trapped entirely beneath flesh. The Sheriff hauled Ryan up by his hair and said, “I’m gonna enjoy eatin’ your brains, boy.
Real slow
.”
Ryan felt himself sailing through the air again, this time colliding with a metal cart. The cart toppled over, spilling surgical tools across the floor. Instinctively, Ryan’s hand went for his firearm, but brushed the worn leather of his empty holster. He could see his Glock in the corner, ten feet behind Branagan. Sheriff Branagan advanced, smiling down at him, his face looking like something that should have been on display at the
Body World
Exhibit. The Sheriff sniffed the air. “Goddamn, your brain smells
gooood
.”
When Ryan had arrived at the hospital fifteen minutes earlier, it had looked like a scene out of a disaster movie. An ambulance, lights still flashing, had crashed through the hospital’s front doors. Ryan had had to climb over the vehicle’s hood to gain access to the hospital. Inside, bodies were strewn everywhere, many of them mutilated beyond recognition. And whatever had caused the massacre hadn’t discriminated; patients, nurses, and doctors littered the floor.
But that wasn’t the half of it, and Ryan had known then that there would never be a way to
unsee
any of it.
Jesus,
he had thought,
am I
really
seeing this?
Not everyone was dead, but it had taken Ryan’s mind a long time to decipher what that meant, because the people that were alive weren’t
normal
by any stretch of the imagination. He had seen a woman with gray hair and wearing a nurse’s uniform bent over an obese man, one of his nipples clamped between her teeth, tugging on it until she bit down and snapped it off; he had seen a little boy, no more than nine or ten, his head bald (probably from chemo, Ryan had thought absently), burrowing his face into Dr. Kirkman’s open chest cavity. The boy made slurping sounds like a cat lapping milk out of a bowl. Ryan had gagged, one hand cupped over his mouth, while drawing his gun with the other. “Stop!” he had shouted at the boy, and when the boy had slowly turned his head, Ryan had seen Kirkman’s liver hanging from the boy’s mouth like a giant pink slug. Ryan had squeezed the Glock’s trigger and blown the boy’s brains out.
Right away, he had thought:
zombies
, and his mind had immediately rejected that explanation. But as he had made his way down the long hallway, peering into room after room, the fluorescents lining the ceiling overhead flickering off and on, his brain had gradually accepted the truth.
By the time he turned left at the hallway’s first intersection, he had emptied his Glock’s magazine. He ejected the spent magazine and loaded a full one from his duty belt. He had made a beeline for one of the hospital’s emergency exits when Sheriff Branagan’s voice had echoed down the hall. “Where do ya think you’re goin’, deputy?” And then Branagan had plowed into him, coming down on him with 260 lbs. of rotting flesh. The Glock had flown out of Ryan’s hand and skittered across the floor out of reach.
Now here he was, Branagan standing over him, the only obstacle between Ryan and the exit.
Ryan groped for the tools that had spilled from the cart. As Branagan’s hand swooped down and gripped him around the throat, Ryan picked up a scalpel and rammed it into the Sheriff’s stomach. Hot black ooze gushed onto Ryan’s hand. He drew the blade across the length of Branagan’s stomach. The Sheriff’s intestines came spilling out, flopping to the floor like a coiled snake.
Branagan doubled over. A guttural sound boomed from his mouth, which, at first, Ryan mistook for a bellow of pain.
The motherfucker is laughing,
Ryan thought.
His guts are on the floor and he’s
laughing
!
Ryan seized his chance, crawling past Branagan toward the Glock. Branagan turned, striding toward him, his intestines untangling and catching the corner of the overturned metal cart.
“No use fightin’ it,” Branagan said, talking over the noise of the cart as it bounced and clattered behind him. “You just need to learn to go with the flow, deputy.”
Ryan tensed himself, diving forward, his hand finding the butt of the Glock. He rolled over onto his back, brought the Glock up, and fired. The shot pierced Branagan’s left eye and exploded out the back of his skull. The Sheriff went to his knees and fell forward, doing a faceplant onto the floor.
Ryan crawled over to Branagan’s body and pulled the badge from the Sheriff’s cheek. He wiped it on his jacket. “Consider this an early retirement,” he said and headed for the exit doors.
Becky had been on the phone with her mother for fifteen minutes when the line went dead.
She had spent all morning cleaning her apartment, absently thinking up excuses to call Ryan as she vacuumed the carpets, dusted the shelves, Swiffered the kitchen floor, and finished a week’s worth of laundry. And in between all that, she had found time to watch the episode of
The Office
she had DVR’d the night before.
Her parents were still in Florida, where her father owned a timeshare at a condo close to the beach. She had called at one o’clock her time, which meant it was two o’clock in Miami. She had told her mother that she was just checking in (it had been a week after all), but she had really called to talk about Ryan. So she had waited, listening to Marilyn Russell talk about the beach, the scalding sun, and her now considerable knowledge of the pros and cons of various brands of suntan oil. After a five minute rant, her mother had finally asked, “How are things with you?”
Becky had done her best not to sound like a teenage girl gushing over her first crush, but hadn’t done a very good job of masking her excitement. It didn’t help that her mother kept interrupting her. There had been a time not that long ago when her mother would have begged to know what was going on in Becky’s life. Ever since Becky had graduated from ISU, her mother had become less intrigued with what Becky was doing and more concerned with living her own life. It was as if her mother had been hiding the fifteen year old version of herself somewhere and had finally let that younger, more carefree girl out after years of being chained in the basement. Becky wasn’t certain she cared for this new side of her mother. In fact, during the last two years, Becky thought her mother had become downright selfish. When she had confronted Marilyn Russell with this, Becky’s mother had simply said, “Honey, listen, maybe after you have kids of your own and become a parent, you’ll understand. Believe me, I’ve
earned
this.”
Becky had been able to hear her father asking questions in the background. She could even picture him standing there, overweight, wearing only swim trunks and his gold watch as he sipped a mojito.
“Your father wants to know what this boy does for a living,” her mother had asked.
“He’s a cop,” Becky had said and waited for a reply. She heard her mother whispering to her father. “He’s really nice,” she added.
That was when they got disconnected.
He’s really nice?
she thought. Well, it was the truth wasn’t it? It occurred to her then that this was what Ryan had been talking about: that he wouldn’t measure up. Becky had to admit that perhaps (if it was her parents doing the judging) he had been right.
Becky picked up the phone and listened for a dial tone and got nothing but dead air. She checked her cell phone.
Full signal,
she thought.
Must be something wrong with the landlines.
An explosion outside startled her. She went into the kitchen and looked out the window to the street below. An SUV had jumped the curb onto the sidewalk and grazed a telephone pole. It had tipped over and come to a rest on its side. Becky saw people coming down the street toward the vehicle. At first, she thought they were coming to the driver’s aid, but then something struck her as unusual: they were
walking
.
When the group reached the SUV, they began pounding and clawing at the roof of the vehicle. Smoke billowed out from underneath the SUV’s dented hood.
One of them climbed up on the side and tried to open the driver’s side door, but either the door was locked or the accident had caused it to be jammed shut. Another person, an older man who appeared to have a severe limp, stooped down and picked something up from the ground. It was too far away for Becky to see what it was, but from a distance it looked like a rock or a chunk of cement that had crumbled away from the curb. The old man smashed whatever it was against the SUV’s sunroof.
It’s on fire,
Becky thought,
and they can’t get to the driver.
At that moment, she was still under the assumption that the people were trying to help the SUV’s driver, who appeared to be trapped inside.
The man struck the sunroof again, and this time the safety glass shattered into an intricate spiderweb mosaic. The old man dropped the rock and pried at the glass, tearing it away. He squeezed through the sunroof, and some of the others followed after him.
What are they doing? Why are they
all
going in?
Becky took out her cell phone and dialed 911, never taking her eyes from the scene outside the window. She held the phone to her ear, surprised when all she got was a busy signal.
The old man crawled back through the sunroof, but now he was dragging a woman behind him. There was blood on the side of her head, and Becky guessed she must have been injured during the accident. The old man wasn’t gentle as he dragged her out either.
He’s probably afraid it’s going to explode any second now,
Becky told herself, but her fear worsened as the old man slid her along the pavement and stopped. The rest of the group gathered around the unconscious woman.
Don’t just stand there – do something!
Becky undid the latch and slid the window open, ready to call down to the people below, but…
Suddenly, the old man went down on his knees, the others following suit (
are they praying,
Becky wondered), and their hands clawed and dug and tore at the woman’s body. The woman regained consciousness and screamed once before she was silent again. Her sweater was ripped from her body, her stomach was clawed open. The old man went straight for the woman’s head, grabbing a fistful of hair and repeatedly slamming her head onto the street until a geyser of blood jetted from her nose. He thrust his hand into her eye socket, forcing it through until his wrist and lower forearm disappeared into her skull. He brought his hand back out, and it was clutching a chunk of her brain. He stuffed it into his mouth.
Becky screamed. The old man and the other people on the street paused momentarily and gazed up at her. Becky backed away from the window.
Seconds later, she heard the thunder of footfalls coming up the wooden stairs outside the 4-plex. She ran to the door, locked and deadbolted it, and stepped away just as something slammed into it. She ran into the bedroom, rushed into the closet, and closed the slatted door behind her. She pushed herself back into a corner and waited.
The pounding continued. She heard the sound of the front door being forced open, followed by five loud pops, one right after the other. She heard footsteps.
Oh God, they’re inside,
she thought, and the image of the old man pulling the woman’s brain out through her eye socket flashed across her mind.
They were in the apartment. Becky could hear them moving, but they weren’t as loud as she had expected. She could see through the slats in the closet door; her bed, the comforter and sheets piled on top because she had washed them earlier, the nightstand with a worn copy of
Twilight
sitting at the edge. She had her cell phone in her hand. Did she dare try calling someone?
Becky heard footsteps in the hallway. She thought she saw someone pass by the bedroom. They were in the bathroom now. She could tell because she heard the sound of the shower curtain being drawn to the side.
The footsteps echoed in the hallway again. Becky saw someone enter the room.
Only one of them
, she thought, holding her cell phone out in front of her as if it was a warding talisman. The slats in the door made it impossible to get a clear look, but she saw a figure approach the closet, heard the sound of a hand falling on the knob, saw it turning.
As soon as the door swung open, Becky closed her eyes and threw her cell phone as hard as she could. Someone said, “
Ouch,”
which was the last thing she expected to hear, and when she opened her eyes Ryan was standing there.
“I’m one of the good guys,” Ryan said, and helped her out of the closet.
“What’s happening?”
“I’m pretty sure zombies are taking over the town.”
“That’s…”
“Yeah, I know,” Ryan said, “but let’s argue theory later. We need to get out of here.”
Ryan took Becky’s hand and led her out of the apartment. They stepped over a haphazard pile of dead bodies on the landing outside the door. She recognized one of them as the old man who had pulled the woman from the SUV. As they descended the stairs, Becky said, “You did that?”
“Yep.”
They raced down the stairs and to Ryan’s patrol car, which was parked out front.
“You actually killed them?”
“I shot the Sheriff, too,” he said as he opened the passenger door and let her get in. He got behind the wheel and turned the car around. Becky was staring at him. “I thought you weren’t the judgmental type?”
“I’m not judging,” Becky said.
“Really? Because it seemed like you were judging.”
“It’s not every day that your boyfriend admits to killing a whole bunch of people.”
Ryan leaned over and opened the glovebox. There was a snub-nosed .38 revolver lying there. He handed it to Becky.
“What am I supposed to do with this?”
“If someone tries to eat you, shoot them in the head,” Ryan said.