bullets into him. What the hell happened?"
There was a moaning sound and they all three turned their heads toward it. It was like the groans that old pines make in the forest when the wind makes them twist in unnatural ways. Even a dead tree can move and make that sound.
"What the hell is that noise?" said Kelly. She crossed her arms in front of her robe and glared at the officers. Officer Soul had holstered his weapon but his hand was close to it, and his partner, Officer Todd Wells (it was on his nametag), was looking at her like he knew something. Something bad.
Kelly said, "You two had best start explaining right the hell now what the fuck is going on or I'm going to be having Terry place a personal call to Chief Marshall about this incident. People do NOT GET SHOT ON MY LAWN, DAMMIT!"
She surprised herself with the outburst, but the anger had a way of helping her cope with the dead body on her front step. It focused her. She always felt the same anger when Terry started slapping her around, and it always passed when he was done. Still, sometimes when Terry was beating on her she'd get to thinking about how much she wanted to hurt him back. Throw a punch at his nose and rearrange his cartilage for a change.
Anger was good. Anger was a ditch that channeled all the badness and let you ignore everything else around you. Anger was the ditch and the fast running muddy water inside it, all piss and vinegar and shit.
Now there was another moan from down the street, and it was louder. Kelly's and Terry's place was in a suburban development called Brookside, and the houses were placed on big lots with lots of trees around them for privacy. It was supposed to give a mix of country with the convenience and refinement of country club. It was a place for douchebags who didn't fancy douchebag gold carts racing around their back lawn. Like that was supposed to make the place feel more 'organic.' The act kind of worked, especially because the houses weren't cookie cutter, but right now all the trees made it hard to see what was making that weird moaning noise.
Officer Soul stepped over Marvin's dead body and walked right up to Kelly. He was on the front step, standing in the one place that wasn't covered in dark blood. He and Kelly were face to face.
She looked down at his boots. There was mud caked over shoe shine and black leather. She held her ground and looked up at him. He smelled rank like sweat in polyester and he had stubble that he should have taken care of in the morning but hadn't had time to.
"I have not given you permission to enter my home," said Kelly.
Officer Soul felt something in him snap. He saw a rich woman who he'd thought looked pretty in her designer clothes when he'd pulled her over and even more fuckable now, wearing only a bathrobe. But this wasn't a social call. He wasn't going to sport wood now, because there was something a hell of a lot scarier breathing right down all their necks.
"You want to live," said Frank, "you let me and Officer Wells into your home right now. Then you do exactly what we say. Got that?"
Frank didn't know if the fear was coming through his voice. But he felt it, like a dark, smoking trash pit in the middle of of a lonely wood. He'd shot Marvin, that fucker was dead. But he was an easy one. A dumb one. And there were more. Lots more.
And they were hungry as hell.
3
Kelly let the officers into her house. She looked down at her wrist to check the time and realized that it was a stupid gesture. Just a habit, like biting her nails when she was nervous. She'd taken her watch off before getting in the shower and forgot to put it back on. And now here she was, standing in the foyer of her house with two town cops and a dead guy's brains splattered on her front door.
What could she say to this? The whole situation? Was there a precedent? Had she seen something like this on Law and Order? CSI Las Vegas? The way she saw it, this was going to be like TV. She followed the crime shows, the good ones. Everyone had a role to play, whether they liked it or not. Some people were passive -- hell, even she was passive with all her damn online shopping and long days spent doing jack shit at home -- but that didn't mean she didn't fancy herself a doer. She'd done stuff before, she just had a hard time thinking of a recent example, was all.
She broke the awkward silence. "What the fuck, Frank?" She knew his first name and she used it on purpose.
"Do you have any firearms, Kelly?"
"Why do you ask?"
"If you want to live through this, you're going to answer my questions without dicking me around. Now let me ask you again -- are there any firearms in the home?"
She felt her fear then. It hit her like a baseball to the temple. Except instead of blindness now she was seeing things more clearly. The cops were scared. They weren't playing by the book. And that did not make her feel at ease. She said, "I guess -- Terry has some guns. He keeps them upstairs in a closet. He's a collector. He tells me they're all legal."
Frank walked past her and went for the stairs. He turned to Kelly. "You come up and show me where the guns are." Then he looked past her to his partner. "Todd, you stay down here and guard the entrance. You see anything coming you tell us. If it's just one, kill it. If there are more, you whistle and then we all get the fuck outta dodge. Got it?"
"Got it," said Todd.
Kelly followed Frank upstairs. The master bedroom was at the end of the hall on the left and the door was open. Frank went straight for it. He saw a big walk in closet and opened it. He thought: what is it with rich folks and their damn walk-in closets? Like it proved something if the place where you parked your shoes and your underwear was big enough to have its own zip code.
The closet was divided up into a his side and a hers side. On the hers side there were shoes. On the his side, guns. Lots of guns. And a few articles of clothing, but those didn't matter to Frank.
Frank let himself chuckle for a second at the sight of the guns
(fucking private arsenal, hallelujah)
before he remembered what they were up against. It had been a hell of a day. The first calls came in before sunup, and then the outbreak just spread like a goddam wildfire in dry tinder. He knew that at least three quarters of the force was dead or on the other side by now, converted. He'd gotten some panicked radio transmissions from the school sometime around ten in the morning, but those got cut off with screams and shouts and he knew that the school was not a safe place to be a survivor.
Frank and his partner were on foot. That's how they ended up at Kelly's place.Their cruiser was fucked. The flesh-eating fucks had managed to push it down an embankment, and the only reason he and Todd got away was that he used to mountain bike all over the damn place and he knew the local trails. He got Todd to follow him and they ran a couple miles across town on back trails until the moans got distant and faded into the trees and brush.
They ended up here at the Brookside neighborhood. This was the place where you'd find the rich wives with plastic tits and Land Rovers and Beemers and all the other shit rich people liked. That was, if all the rest weren't dead by now. There was no way to know.
Frank told himself that they didn't come here to save the people in the neighborhood because they were entitled to better treatment. It was just where he and Todd had ended up. A matter of survival. This was where the trails dumped out and if they could get into another vehicle and find some backup, even civilians, it might get them the hell out of town in one piece.
Getting Marvin had been a lucky break. They'd found him when he was walking up to Kelly's door. They were just going up the road looking for survivors or a car they could borrow. And nothing funny meant by it, but it was a no brainer to take Marvin out; they moved in for the kill because they could. Frank took him. The new kid Todd didn't have the stomach for it.
That'll change, thought Frank.
Marvin had looked like an ambler, one of the ones that didn't have much left for brains. Kinda like what you imagined from the zombie movies. A dumb dead fuck. What they knew so far, which was hardly anything but it was better than nothing, was that these things were walking dead. And they came in flavors
.
Some of them were dumb and slow, like Marvin. And some of them weren't. Some of them were freakishly fast and they even looked smart. Frank saw the look from one of them right before the cruiser went over the embankment. It was looking right at him like it knew. The fucking thing knew what the swarm was doing and it was playing with him and the new kid.
Could the dead even play games? It sure as fuck looked like it after the rollover. But lucky for them, when they came up on Marvin at Kelly's place he'd been an easy target. The thing was trying to break in to Kelly's house through the front door. Was that what the dumb ones did? Didn't bother going for the windows? Frank didn't know. All he knew was that yesterday everything was normal and now it was all fucked. FUBARed to hell.
Frank took an AR-15 from the closet. He smiled again because this was some nice hardware for a douchebag car dealer. He knew this one was illegal by the size of the magazine, but he wasn't going to give Kelly shit about Terry's gun habits today. More ammo getting fed to the chamber faster was better. The gun felt familiar, but that was because he'd had plenty of practice with the M-16 when he was Army. This AR 15 was close enough to the real deal.
He checked the mag and saw it was loaded. He slid it back in and flicked off the safety. Kelly was watching him. She had a look on her face like she was