The Dead Don't Bleed: Part 1, The Outbreak (27 page)

"Oh, I have nothing but the deepest respect for you in that area. If things are really going to shit out there without any sign of help from the government, I have a feeling we are really going to need all of this." Calvin said as he picked up one of the AK's and checked the action.

"Well, what do you think our next move should be? My plan was to get as far as your place without having a chunk bitten out of my ass and I have accomplished that mission, but after that I am a little short on ideas."

"We should try and make contact with whatever authorities are available. You said that the last contact you had with a 911 operator mentioned military and state police guarding hospitals and medical centers? That would be a good place to start. Maybe they can at least tell us something, evacuation centers,
refugee camps, the government has to be doing something to help the general population." Garrett replied.

They agreed on a local medical center within a few
minutes’ drive for their first attempt at making contact with local authorities, and then the conversation turned back to the more grim matter of what to do with Steve and Kimberly. Both of them were in agreement that Steve was their biggest threat at the moment. As far as Kimberly went they would take her along with them and see if they could find help for her. From what Calvin had learned on the scanner, not everyone who got sick had died and returned. It that was true, than there may still be hope that Kimberly could pull through. Calvin pulled a coin from his pocket and offered to flip it to see who got stuck with taking care of Steve. Garrett snatched the coin out of his hand and put it into his own pocket.

"I knew him, you didn't. Wait here." Picking up one of the handguns from the kitchen counter he slammed a magazine into the receiver and racked the slide to chamber a round. Taking three deep breaths to muster his courage, he walked stoically from his kitchen into the adjoining living room. He watched the two sleeping forms from the door for a second, Kimberly was breathing softly interrupted by an occasional cough, her face was a sheen of sweat from the fever that would spike and then back down every so often. She was
still out cold and Garrett was pretty sure that even the coming shot would not disturb her. Compared to her Steve was a mess, he was covered from head to chest in running sweat, his skin looked pale and clammy, and he had continued puking even though Garrett was certain he could have nothing left in his stomach to throw up. The room had a thick and stomach churning odor that the vomit was only partially able to take credit for, it reminded Garrett of rancid meat that had been left out in a warm damp room to slowly rot over time.

Garrett moved to within
arm’s length of the man and raised the pistol to center the sights on his forehead. Without giving himself the opportunity to second guess his actions, he squeezed the trigger once and sent a jacketed round through the exact center of Steve's forehead. Garrett was completely focused on his neighbors face as he watched his eyes suddenly roll back in his head as if they were straining to look up towards the dripping wound while the rest of his body relaxed completely and his head dropped down towards his chest and remained still. The bullet had passed straight through Steve's head and dug out a fist size chunk of stuffing from the sofa cushion he had been resting against. That damage could have been overlooked if he were to use the sofa again, but the spray of brain matter that followed along behind the bullet was another matter entirely and left the bottom half of the love seat saturated in a thick stew of partially decomposed brain, blood and a fat chunk of skull with a swatch of hair still clinging to it. Calvin walked into the room following the sound of the shot and without a word passing between the two friends they each grabbed one of Steve's legs and unceremoniously dragged him out the front door and laid him on the grass next to the sidewalk.

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Kyle's plan had been to drive to one of the fire stations in the area and hopefully connect up with the rest of his patrols. He should have been able to reach the station he had in mind in under ten minutes under normal conditions but he kept coming upon road after road completely clogged with traffic. It wasn't your normal
mid-morning rush hour traffic either, cars, trucks, buses and anything else with wheels had been left parked helter skelter in the roads and along the medians of all the major arteries running through the area. In most cases the vehicles had just been left abandoned in the middle of the road and the occupants had simply walked away not even bothering to shut the doors. Using the side streets, he was able to make his way slowly through town until he reached the back road that led behind the station he had in mind. Used as an alternate 911 call center, this station was the largest in town and even had a small section dedicated to police patrols for report writing, storage of riot control equipment and a two person holding cell. He figured that this would work for the time being as an alternate command center for him to work on reorganizing the patrols they had remaining on duty. Periodically during the drive he had made attempts to contact different units over his patrol cars radio with no success, the best he could get was a few moments here and there of confused and excited voices overlapping one another. Since the car radios were boosted through the repeater back at that station house he thought it possible that during the fighting there the high gain antenna had been damaged, resulting in his signal bouncing off civilian sets as well as those from other agencies. He hoped that if the fire house was still intact, he could get the transmitter online and reestablish communications with his patrols and state police units to learn what was being done at the state level in response to the worsening situation.

As he rounded the corner leading up to the fire station his hopes for a refuge and chance to regroup were dashed when he saw the still smoldering ruins of the large building along with the post office and government office building that had shared that end of the block with it. His heart sank even further when he spotted the scorched remains of three patrols from his department parked in road block positions on either side of the road leading to the station. Bodies were scattered all about in front of the cruisers and it looked as though his men had thrown up hasty defense
s to protect the station and more than likely were overrun by sheer numbers just like he found back at his station house.

Shellie had been quietly observing the scene along with him and as the realization that their one hope for help and protection was now gone she lowered her head into her hands and softly wept as her body shook in waves of sorrow and despair.

Kyle pulled the cruiser up to within fifty feet of the first roadblock on that end of the street and then executed a uturn to point them back the way they had come in case they had to leave the area quickly. He put the car in park and then put his hand gently on Shellie's shoulder.

"Shellie, look, I w
ant you to stay here in the car. I will lock the doors once I get out but I need to check this out real quick just in case there is a chance any of our guys made it." Even though he doubted he would find anyone, the area appeared clear of any zombies at the moment and he wanted to see which of his guys he had lost here and at least look over the communications room inside the station in case any useful equipment may have survived the fire.

She looked up at him with tears still streaming down her cheeks and fear evident in her eyes, "you are going to leave me here?" she asked.

"I will just be a minute or two. You can see down the road in front of us and if anything starts coming this way just honk the horn and I will come running." As he said it he knew it sounded like a weak plan, but he didn't want the burden of having to deal with her out there amongst dead and disfigured bodies where there was a better than average chance that she would lose it. "If the radio equipment inside the station survived the fire we might be able to use it to call for help."

That last part seemed to help give her a shot of hope and Kyle suddenly wished he h
ad just kept that to himself. The chances of finding any working equipment in that smoldering ruin of a building were very low and by pinning their hopes of rescue and salvation on it, he was setting her up for a crushing blow when he returned with the bad news that help was not going to be coming any time soon. But at least it seemed to convince her to remain there in the car while he made a sweep of the area. He popped the trunk of his cruiser before stepping out and then walked around to the back and retrieved his M4 rifle and spare magazines from the storage compartment before moving out to the roadblock. As he closed the trunk he spied Shellie turned around in her seat and watching him with a spark of hope and contemplation in her eyes. He gave her a thumbs up and then turned and walked towards the half charred cruiser that he now recognized as having belonged to Patrol Officer Givens, their canine officer who would have come on duty with the day shift that morning.

Stepping cautiously over and around the bodies leading to the canine car
, he examined a couple of the dead and confirmed his suspicions that they had the same signs of undead he had seen in others back at the main station. They also had obvious bullet wounds to their bodies with the ultimately fatal headshot that had sent them back to their rightful place once and for all. It looked as though the officers manning this position had been spraying rounds pretty rapidly, stitching their targets across the torso and then walking their point of aim upward until finally making the final headshot. As he got closer to the cruiser the number of rounds per body dropped as the range decreased and hitting their mark became possible with less shots. There as a gully on the side of the road just before the improvised road block that he had not noticed until he was right there almost on top of it. Looking down from the level of the road he saw a pile of seven or eight more bodies all crumpled together on top of each other. Mixed in with the corpses he also observed the hind quarters of a blood soaked German Shepard and knew that he was most likely seeing the remains of Officer Givens working dog. He recalled that the dog had been named Rocco and he remembered watching an attack demonstration that Givens had provided to a group of citizens the previous month. Rocco had taken down a pair of hefty volunteers who had thought they would be able to just throw the powerful animal around like a stuffed toy but had been embarrassingly surprised when they were taken down by the dog and forced to cry out for the attack to stop. The loss of a working dog like Rocco was almost as bad as the loss of a fellow officer, the members of his department, himself included, had a great deal of respect and admiration for those animals that would lay down their lives in a second to protect their handler. It looked to Kyle like Rocco had lived up to that expectation as was evident by the clear bite marks on the bodies of several of the zombies strewn about in that gully with him, he had gone down fighting hard. Turning his back on the scene before he started crying or lost the nerve to proceed he hefted the M4 up into the ready position and eased past the front end of the patrol car parked in a blocking position in the middle of the road. Clearing the other side of the car he saw that the ground was completely littered with spent shell casings and shotgun cartridges, evidence of an intense and brutal fight. There were no signs of the officers who had held this position though and Kyle figured that as the tide started to turn against them they were forced to fall back on the fire station, just like those officers at his police station who had been pushed back inside by the growing numbers who had eventually just overwhelmed them with sheer volume.

The fire had burned out into the grass in front of the station house and as he walked up the drive leading to the open bay doors he spied four or five skeletonized remains strewn along the smoking black remains of the grass. From the position of the remains it was clear that they had been moving away from the fire hose when they finally succumbed to the flames. He also noticed that next to one of the bodies was the burnt remnants of a rifle just like the one he was carrying, he was pretty sure that he had found at le
ast one of his missing officers. The other bodies may have been firefighters or workers from the fire station who had fled in an attempt to escape the fire. A shiver traveled down his spine as he thought of what they must have faced with, trapped inside the burning fire station while under siege by a flesh hungry mob of zombies. Faced with the choice of burning alive or being eaten alive he didn't know what he would have done in the same situation but he imagined eating his own pistol would have been another alternative. He was about to turn back towards the open bay doors of the station when one of the burnt figures made a lunging dive across the blackened patch of earth towards his ankles. Kyle jumped back several steps and raised the rifle to his shoulder ready to fire. He resisted the urge to shoot at the thing because it was not going to be a threat to him as long as he kept out of arms reach. The entire lower body was so badly burned that when it had turned and lunged towards him, the upper portion of its body from the belt line up tore completely free of the lower half. It was so intent on reaching out for Kyle that it didn't have the presence of thought, or whatever may still pass for thought, to try and crawl forward by pulling itself with its arms. Stuck with just rolling back and forth on its exposed rib cage like some type of teetering toy, it just rocked back and forth in place while lashing out desperately trying to reach Kyle. The head still had a partial covering of singed meat over the skull and Kyle guessed that it had been protected from the inferno just enough that the portion of the brain required to allow the zombie to thrive had not died off in the flames. It was unbelievable the amount of body trauma one of these things could suffer and still be just as potent a threat as ever. It was certainly something he needed to keep in mind and not give any corpse the benefit of the doubt until he was sure that there was a hole through its head. He turned away from the morbid scene and left the creature to struggle on its own, the thought of ending any possibly misery it may be suffering occurred to him, but he remembered how the zombies back at the police station had reacted to his gunfire, there was no need to risk attracting any attention to himself.