SURVIVORS OF THE DEAD: FROM THE ASHES (7 page)

With one final glance,
Harry left his apartment, feeling the need to lock the door to what would surely become nothing more than a dusty time capsule. Or more likely it would be completely consumed by fire. He then made his way down the main hallway to the building’s front entrance and approached one of the side windows next to the door.

Carefully looking through the
small window, he was satisfied that at least for the moment the immediate area in front of the building was clear enough for him to slip out. The Zs appeared to still be distracted by whatever they had found in the building across the street, or whatever zombies did in their spare time, and it was time to move. Glancing out one last time to make certain the coast was still clear, Harry quickly exited the building and made his way down the street, using the many stalled vehicles for cover as much as possible.

Harry’s
first destination was the closest police station to the Bay, which was Central Station located on Vallejo Street. He knew that he needed to reach the Bay, the marina specifically, to work his plan, but along the way he wanted to follow Commodore Allen’s suggestion of eliminating as many zombies as possible.

To
accomplish that, he reminded himself once again that more fire power was needed. He had been assigned to Central right before retirement, and usually reported there when he was on reserve duty, so knew the layout very well. But the most important thing Harry knew was that this station housed one of the SWAT units, which meant there could be some interesting items still in the armory. Whether anything was left after the heavy April 1st response was unknown but he needed to start somewhere. Harry figured that not enough officers had been able to make it to the station to have taken all of the equipment and weapons.

When Harry left the apartment building, d
awn had just began to break, giving just enough light to see the otherwise darkened streets. He immediately saw it was the typical San Francisco morning he had needed, cold and with a heavy high fog. This was not the typical fog most people recognized, covering everything; rather it was a higher, swirling type.

It was m
aybe a hundred and fifty feet up from the ground, but with a mist that left a heavy layer of moisture on everything. Exactly the kind he had hoped for. This was the type of morning Harry had worked into his plan, and would use for cover while making his way to the police station.

Harry knew that from his current location on Pine Street, he would need to go west one block
and then turn north onto Powell. If he were very lucky he would be able to take Powell the ten or so blocks to where it intersected with Vallejo Street. Then he would turn east on Vallejo, as Central Station was located about half a block down on the left-hand side. Seemed simple enough at first glance, but he knew things were never “that simple”.

As he slipped through the streets
, he begin to see zombies roaming the area directly in from of him, although the heavy moisture in the air seemed to be affecting them. They were stumbling around, seemingly disoriented and in a rage, clawing at themselves as if on fire. There were probably thirty to forty that he could make out in the dim morning light.

Thankfully, t
hey were spread out, with the closest one to him being almost two hundred yards away. He was sure there had to be more, but he had to focus on what he could see for now. He knew this was going to become a running battle, and he hoped his alliance with Mother Nature would help him out or it was going to be a very short campaign.

With a sardonic smile he knew it was time for
Dirty Harry Lancaster
to start kicking zombie ass and screw taking the names part. It would only be a matter of moments before Harry Lancaster would embark on an all-new form of police work. He was still serving and protecting, but now he would be doing it with a shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality.

With one fluid motion he withdrew
his Glock from the breakfront on his right side, pulling back the first trigger safety, and took aim at the nearest zombie. A famous line that
Harry Callahan
had said from
Sudden Impact
popped to mind: “
To me you’re nothin’ but dog shit, you understand? And a lot of things can happen to dog shit. It can be scraped up with a shovel off the ground. It can dry up and blow away in the wind. Or it can be stepped on and squashed. So take my advice and be careful where the dog shits.”
With that thought, he completed the finger pull on the trigger and blew the top of the first zombie’s head off.

The Glock is not the
easiest weapon to use in an extended firefight due to the safety features built into the trigger pull, and it took practice to master any real accuracy, but once mastered it produced some awesome results. Results Harry was appreciating greatly at the moment.

He cont
inued to fire while steadily moving forward, stopping briefly to aim, watching the zombies approach while trying to zero in on his location, and then falling under the impact of the heavy .45 caliber hollow point slug. Advance, aim, discharge the weapon; advance, aim, discharge the weapon. Drop the empty magazine; place the empty in the left rear pocket of the jeans. Insert a fresh mag, pull the slide, sweep the area for the next threat, aim, and discharge the weapon. A smoothly controlled, automatic process with accurate results.

Several of
his shots went low but Harry was close enough that even though the shots to center mass did not kill the zombies, it was enough to put them down, and they were slower to recover. Harry took macabre satisfaction in seeing chests explode, legs and arms blown off, and in many cases spines shattering. The zombies, paralyzed with those wounds, could then only stare at him while he passed.

It dawned on Harry
, as he kept up his steady progress down Powell Street, that he did not have to achieve kill shots on every target. Although many of the rounds he discharged were effective in removing large portions of zombie heads, he just needed to inflect severe enough damage to slow them down. The .45 caliber hollow point round obliged very nicely toward that end. Harry began to target center mass along with the pelvis area, which would take the legs right out from under them.

11

Harry was making headway, and had gotten maybe six blocks when, as he feared, more zombies began to appear from some of the buildings; they were drawn, he was certain, by the noise from firing the gun. As he had already seen, they knew he was there, somewhere, but they still could not focus enough to get his precise location. He even watched, to his horror, a group of at least eight of them start running in his direction as he was changing out magazines. “Fuck me!” was all Harry could say. But to his surprise they ran right by him.

The zombies knew he was there because they stopped just a few yards past him
, moaning and growling in apparent frustration, arms extended with hands almost claw-like, turning their heads as if on a pivot to look for him. It appeared as if the moisture in the heavy fog caused some serious sight distortion in their unblinking eyes.

Harry didn’t waste time in contemplating the reasons; he just got his ass in gear and
took advantage of this newly confirmed information. He was not going to stick around to find out how keen their sense of smell might be.

Harry
had been able to put some distance between him and the last grouping of Zs. Realizing they were probably being drawn more to the sound of the gun discharging than actually seeing him, he decided to try a slightly different tactic. Down to two full mags, twenty-six rounds, there was little choice.

He did not think he could call a time out to reload the
three empty mags that were in his back pocket. Reloading the rather bulky .45 round into spring-loaded mags, even ones well broken in, could be a bitch in the best of times, let alone when there were zombies trying to eat one’s face off.

Making sure there was a fresh mag inserted,
Harry holstered the gun and deployed his ASP expandable baton that was located on the left side of his belt. He cross drew it across the front with the dominant right hand for greater control. He had carried several different forms of batons over the years, which were striking weapons to force compliance, and were very effective in most cases.

Harry’s
first baton had been a 28” straight stick. Because of his 6’6” height, he was able to handle a 28” length over the standard 24”. The baton was made from the hardwood of the Mexican Cocobolo, a very hard and dense wood similar to rosewoods, which had an intensely beautiful grain. In those days it was one of the most common batons available. As cocobolo became harder to locate and more difficult to get into the United States, those batons became very expensive, giving way to polycarbonates.

Also in the cast of batons he had used was the PR-24 side handle, which was very effective for close quarter engagements
, and finally the expandable metal batons. The biggest drawback to the expandables was that they could collapse down during use, basically rendering them useless, which could be a real problem. The ASP model baton had proven to be the most reliable on the market, and most in law enforcement used that particular manufacturer.

With
all the shit a cop had to carry on a duty belt, the reduced size and comfort of an expandable baton soon outweighed some of the downsides. Also, an expandable was always on the belt, so during the adrenaline rush of a pursuit or hot response an officer no longer had to worry about forgetting to grab their baton as they exited the car. This tended to happen more frequently than one would think.

Harry
flicked his wrist, extending and locking the baton to its full 26” length. The ASP had been touted as the more reliable and effective baton on the market. It was made from 4140 steel tubing, and had been purported to be twenty-five percent stronger than the standard steel shaft competitors, with a much higher tensile strength. Having used the ASP many times over the years, training extensively on the proper methods of body strikes to effectively force compliance, Harry had never considered, nor attempted, to use it as a lethal weapon.

But circumstances certainly dictated thinking outside the box right now.
“Let’s just see if the sales hype was
all that,
” he said as he advanced on the nearest zombie. Swinging the baton with a standard side sweeping blow to complete a peroneal nerve strike, hitting the area roughly a hand span above the knee towards the back of the leg, brought no results from the zombie. Normally this strike would have taken down a normal person almost instantly; now all it did was assist the infected to hone in on Harry’s precise location.

“Well t
hat’s not going to work,” Harry said aloud while immediately changing his stance and bringing the full force of the next strike directly across the side of the zombie’s head. The thing went down and Harry instantly delivered an obviously fatal blow to the thing’s forehead, caving it in with a wet, cracking sound. The zombie remained motionless, apparently truly dead.
One down, a few hundred thousand to go
, Harry thought dismally.

12

He began to jog the rest of the way down Powell, reciting a cadence of “I’m getting too old for this shit, I’m getting too old for this shit, I’m getting too old for this shit,” punctuating the words as each foot made contact with the street. He would momentarily stop to deliver his newfound striking technique to the head of any zombie in his path, and then continued his advance, finally reaching Vallejo Street. Rounding the corner, he nearly collided into possibly the largest woman he thought he had ever seen except on maybe a vintage Russian exercise film.

Harry had been fairly close to many of the zombies he had taken out, but
had never really looked at them in his haste to keep moving. This time, however, he noticed every detailed feature of this particular zombie who was preparing rip him apart. The eyes were like those of a corpse, yet at the same time appeared feral. The ever-moving mouth, like it was chewing on something, contained a bloody, white frothy discharge around broken and blackened teeth, those teeth having all manner of obscene sinew stuck between them.

There were chucks of skin and muscle missing from the
Z’s cheek and both arms. Its clothing hung mostly in torn rags. One foot was missing a shoe and was at an impossibly wrong anatomical angle. The long hair was matted, with a large section missing on the right side revealing the ivory skull below. There were streaks running down the inner thighs but Harry did not even want to consider what might have been the source. With each exhalation of breath as it emitted the ever present moaning, the putrid odor that emanated from it engulfed Harry’s personal space, gagging him and bringing tears to his eyes.

The huge Amazonian
zombie began to close the very short distance that separated it from Harry. It was too close to execute an effective blow with the baton, so Harry brought the ASP up and simply shoved it into the gaping mouth with enough force to collapse it completely back into the ready position. If a zombie could look surprised, this monstrosity certainly did. It stumbled back a step, clawing at the piece of metal shaft protruding from its mouth, not seemingly aware enough to grasp and pull it out.