Читать книгу Dead City - Joe Mckinney - Страница 6

There’s an empty parking lot near the corner of Seafarer and Rood where I used to go to fight with my wife. Most district cops have some hidden little spot where they go to escape all the crap that comes with working patrol, and that parking lot was mine. From there I was pretty much invisible and I could still make almost any call in my district in less than five minutes.

My wife, April, and I were going at it at least once a week back then. When she’d call with that pissed-off tone in her voice that said I was in for a long one, I’d head straight for Seafarer and Rood. There, I’d pull under the canopy of an enormous oak tree near the back of the lot, and hunker down for an earful of whatever I’d done wrong. I used to watch the curves of its trunk and branches while she yelled at me, and even now, when she grows impatient with some little thing I’ve done, and the old familiar tone creeps back into her voice, I think of the dry, dusty smell of oak.

Six months before that, she’d given birth to a beautiful baby boy, our first. We named him Andrew James Hudson, after his grandfather. That little guy changed my world. After he was born, I’d tell anybody who’d listen that being his daddy was what I was put on this Earth to do.

Before Andrew, I worked the dogwatch shift, eleven at night till seven in the morning. That was back when April and I were first starting out. It wasn’t the best for getting time together, because we only had a few hours during the evening to spend with each other. But I got an extra $300 a month for working at night, and that part was good.

Then, when April got pregnant, we started trying to plan the way things would work, and arguments kept flaring up.

One day she had a long phone conversation with her sister, who had two kids already, and that night she told me, “I’m gonna need you here with me at night. The baby’s gonna be waking up every few hours to feed, and I can’t do that alone.”

So I asked some of the guys at work what I could do and found out I qualified for a hardship transfer. That’s how I ended up on the second shift, 3 to 11 pm with Wednesdays and Thursdays off. April wasn’t happy about me working on the west side, because it was a rough part of town, but when you put in for a hardship transfer, you have to take what they give you.

And hardships are only good for six months. After that, they move you back to wherever they need you, which is almost always on dogwatch.

On this particular evening, we were fighting about me going back to nights when Chris Tompkins pulled up next to me. He rolled down the window of his patrol car, and I gestured to him that I’d be a minute. I kept on listening. April was doing all the talking.

“Eddie, just tell them you need to stay on second shift,” she said. “Why can’t you just tell them that?”

“It doesn’t work that—”

“What do they think? Now that the baby’s born you can just go back to working nights? I need you home now more than ever.”

“I know, sweetie.”

“The whole reason you got the transfer is so we can take care of Andrew together.”

“I know.”

“I’m sure you’re not the only one with a baby at home. Just go in there and tell them you need more time.”

“But, sweetie, it doesn’t work that—”

When she started up again, she was so loud I had to pull the phone away from my ear. I looked at Chris and rolled my eyes.

He smiled uncomfortably and gestured, Do you want me to go? He was cool that way, a good guy with a wife of his own. I hardly ever saw him outside of work, but if someone had asked I would have told them he was good people.

I shook my head, still listening for April to take a break.

Chris leaned back and turned up the volume on his car’s stereo. He was listening to a news station, and I heard the newscaster say something about the flooding down in Houston. Then I heard something about volunteers from the Red Cross being attacked and beaten by the flood victims they were trying to save.

I didn’t really catch it, because April was still going strong. Something about how I had had plenty of time to talk to them about staying on second shift, and the fact that I hadn’t yet made her wonder if I really cared about how hard this was on her, staying at home with Andrew all the time.

I put my hand over the phone and said, “What in the hell are you listening to?”

April barked at me.

“Not you, sweetie,” I said. “The guy next to me is listening to something on the news.”

Chris turned it down.

“Thanks,” I said. To April I said, “Go ahead, sweetie.”

Just as she started up again, the dispatcher interrupted her. “52-70.”

Chris sat up, waiting for me to respond. 52-70 was my call sign. Chris was 52-80.

When I didn’t answer, the dispatcher called again. “52-70, Officer Hudson.”

I said to April, “They’re calling me. Hold on a second.” April was still talking when I found the mike and said, “Go ahead, 52-70.”

“52-70, take 52-80 with you. Make 318 Chatterton, 3-1-8 Chatterton, for seven to ten males fighting. Complainant says they look intoxicated.”

Chris dropped his car into gear and waited for me to do the same.

I waved my hand at him and said, “Hold on.” To the dispatcher I said, “52-70, ten-four. I’ve got 52-80 with me.”

Chris still had his car in gear. He was looking at me with a mixture of impatience and uncertainty.

“Hang on,” I told him.

To April I said, “Sweetie, they gave me a call. I’ve got to go.”

“You weren’t even listening to me, were you? When are you going to talk to them about staying on second shift?”

“Soon.”

“Your transfer expires next month.”

“Come on, hon, I’ve gotta go.”

“Fine.” But her tone said it wasn’t fine. It was very much not fine, and I was going to hear about it later.

I put the phone down on the passenger seat, leaned back, and covered my face in my hands. She wore me out and I had to take a second to regroup before I left for my call. All I needed was to take that frustration with me and then have it erupt during an argument with some drunken asshole. Officers go to Internal Affairs for stupid mistakes like that.

“You okay?” Chris said, but I knew he meant it was time for us to get moving.

“You’re too eager,” I told him. “Let them fight it out. By the time we get there, they’ll be too tired to fight us.”

The newscaster on Chris’s car stereo was talking about rioting again. I only half listened to it, though. Like most people, I’d grown numb to the terrible destruction that had been all over the news for the last month.

The city of Houston, not 250 miles to the southeast of us, had been hit with five major hurricanes in the span of four weeks, leaving most of the city wasted beneath flood water and debris. Every morning, after I crawled out of bed and turned on the morning news, there were more images of mud-colored water two-and three-stories deep, moving sluggishly through the streets of Houston, the roofs of houses and buildings looking like rafts floating in sun-dappled, oil-stained sludge, and of course there always seemed to be blackened and swollen corpses drifting through the wreckage.

The news had taken a lot of heat for showing all the dead bodies. They claimed they were trying to be discreet about it, but there always seemed to be corpses just the same.

Some of the guys from our police association had gone down to Houston to help out, and they all said that it was the worst thing they’d ever seen. Sanitation was nonexistent, and the whole place smelled like death. Something like two million people had been forced to evacuate, and most of them had come to San Antonio. All five of our military bases and every out-of-business shopping center, had been turned into temporary shelters of some kind, and yet they kept coming. I heard on the news that FEMA was flying as many as ten commercial airliners a day into Kelly Air Force Base, and every single plane was packed with evacuees.

Supposedly, there were still at least a million people to evacuate from the areas south of Houston, and conditions for those left behind were nightmarish. Listening to Chris’s stereo, I figured they were talking about food riots or something, because there had already been plenty of those.

“Can you believe this?” he asked me, wrinkling his nose in disgust at whatever he was listening to now.

“I haven’t really been listening,” I said. April’s voice was still ringing in my ears.

“It sounds like Houston’s gone nuts,” he said. “They’re saying the survivors are attacking the boat crews that are going in to help them. This guy is even saying people are eating people down there.”

“Great,” I said. “And those are the same lovely people that FEMA’s gonna fly in to our shelters. Can’t wait for that.”

“This guy’s saying the riots and everything have been going on since last night. They’ve only just got word of it from people that were evacuated this morn—”

“52-70.” The dispatcher calling me again.

“Crap.” I keyed up the mike. “Go ahead, 52-70.”

“52-70, second call. I’m getting it as burglars-in-action now. You and 52-80 getting close?”

“Ten-four, ma’am,” I lied. “Still on the way.”

“Ten-four, 52-70. Make it Code Two.”

“Ten-four.” To Chris I said, “Now we go.”

“Roger that. I’ll follow you.”

Code Two means lights, but no siren. We’re allowed to go ten miles an hour over the speed limit, but we can’t blow stop signs or red lights. That’s reserved for Code Three.

Of course, nobody ever does Code Two. It’s either get there when you get there or go balls to the wall. There’s no in between.

I hit my lights and Chris and I tore out of the parking lot, leaving long, looping skid marks behind us. We headed south on Seafarer, down to Plath Street, and made a left. From Plath we turned into the Geneva Summits subdivision, went down four blocks, and turned left onto Chatterton.

Chatterton goes up a gradual rise to the left, and then breaks right suddenly and goes downhill all the way to the end where it dead-ends into the back of the Arbor Town Elementary School. That curve can come up on you quick, and if you take it too fast you can end up in somebody’s front yard.

I came off the gas as I got to the curve and turned on the car’s alley lights.

As we pulled up to the three-hundred block, everything seemed normal. There was a small group of people off to the left who didn’t seem too concerned about a pair of police cars lit up like Christmas racing down their street, but otherwise the street seemed quiet.

I took a quick count of four men and two women, and turned my attention back to the houses on the right.

Most of the houses in Geneva Summits are small, two-and three-bedroom one-stories with brick fronts and old, weather-beaten wood siding on the sides and backs of the houses. It was one of the bright spots in my district, with regular folks who had regular jobs. No dope houses. No meth labs. No hookers. Just regular, decent people who did pretty well compared to the rest of the west side. They didn’t call the police much.

It was already getting dark and most of the houses had their lights on, their owners settling down to dinner and the TV.

But farther down, as we got closer to the call, the street seemed different. Something was just a little off, but I noticed it just the same.

I pulled my car up to the curb three houses down from the call in front of a red-brick one-story with long, knee-high hedges running down both sides of the walk.

“52-70,” I said to the dispatcher. “Myself and 52-80 are ten-six at the location.”

“Ten-four,” she answered back. “All officers hold the air until I hear back from 52-70 and 52-80.”

I got my radio and my flashlight and Chris and I started toward the house, working our way quickly through the cover of the trees.

We didn’t see anybody at first. I could hear dogs barking not far away, but nothing else.

Still, it felt wrong somehow.

Then I saw her. She stumbled out from around the corner of the house and headed toward the street in an aimless, confused sort of way. She was a short, plump, dark-haired Hispanic woman in her mid-to late-twenties, wearing a light blue T-shirt and black pants that were a little too tight for a woman with her kind of figure.

The way she moved, I thought for sure she was drunk.

She didn’t seem to notice us.

Chris and I stayed back for a moment, watching her and the house at the same time.

The woman moved closer to the street, and in the soft buttery light of the street lamps it looked like she had spilled something on her shirt. It was wet, with dark splotches on her shoulders and sleeves and a massive tear down her left side.

And then, from the same corner of the house where the woman had come from, more people appeared. They all moved with the same stop and start lurching motion that made me think of the drunks that sleep under the rail bridge behind the homeless shelter downtown. They all had that same kind of career-drunk haze about them.

Chris and I turned our flashlights and guns on them at the same time. The beams from our flashlights raked across their faces and I counted six people.

Chris shouted, “Stop! Police!”

They didn’t respond—at first. Then they staggered in our direction.

“Stop! Let me see your hands!”

I keyed my radio. “52-70, we have six at gunpoint!”

“Ten-four,” the dispatcher said, her voice glassy smooth and calm. “52-60, 52-62, 52-72, start that way. Make it Code Three.”

I heard the melodic cling clang cling clang of my radio’s emergency tone going off and after that I stopped listening to it. All of my attention was focused on the problem in front of us.

The street lamps threw an uneven light across the yards, creating deep pockets of shadows between the trees. As the group of drunks moved toward us, I kept losing them in the shadows, and it wasn’t until they were up close that I really got a good look at them.

Chris and I both backed away, guns and flashlights at the ready. I caught sight of a man as he moved across my beam, and in the split second I had the light on him I could tell his face was all cut up. His cheeks had the swollen, lumpy look of someone who has just lost a fight, and there was a gory mixture of fresh and dry blood on the side of his neck. His eyes were clouded over with a milky white film, like a dead man’s.

He moved more quickly than the others, but still with that clumsy, falling gait of someone who seemed to have forgotten how to walk. He didn’t register the gun pointed at his face, and he didn’t blink or look away or avert his eyes, even though I had my flashlight shining right in his face.

It looked like he didn’t even see it.

“Get down on the ground!” I yelled at him, keeping the beam on his face. “Do it now!”

If he heard me at all, he gave no sign of it. I was yelling at a blank slate.

“Spray!” I yelled over my shoulder. That was for Chris’s benefit. When the pepper spray gets in the air, you can go down coughing even if you don’t get hit by it directly.

I holstered my Glock and came up with my canister of pepper spray.

“Get down on the ground!”

When he kept coming, I squeezed my finger over the trigger and waited for him to get in range. Pepper spray works best inside of three or four yards.

As he got closer he raised his hands to grab me. I pointed the canister at his face and pulled the trigger, giving him a tight, one-second burst and then backing away, just like in training.

Pepper spray takes a split second to do its damage. When people get hit with it, they usually stop, not hurt, but stunned, for just a moment, and then fall to the ground screaming, clawing at their eyes, and yelling like mad because that stuff fucking burns.

But the guy I sprayed didn’t even skip a beat. He kept coming, and for a second I wondered if I missed or if he blocked the spray with his hands somehow. I let him get close again and then pumped another short one-second burst at his face.

I got it in his eyes. I was sure I got him in the eyes. But nothing happened. He didn’t even blink. He opened his mouth and the skin around his neck tightened, but no sound came out.

There’s enough spray in one canister for six one-second bursts. When I hit him with it again, I got in close and emptied the rest of the pepper spray right into his face.

I threw the empty canister to the side as I stepped back and stared at the man in amazement. I was riding a wave of adrenaline, and I had to force myself not to charge him and take him down with my bare hands. The air was thick with spray and I didn’t want to get incapacitated by it.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered the pepper spray course they taught us at the Academy. They said three percent of the population is naturally immune to the effects of the spray, but I had never actually seen anybody from that three percent.

The only other people I ever heard of who could shake it off like my guy was doing were meth freaks, and he wasn’t moving like a meth freak.

As I backed up I heard Chris yell. I looked over at him and saw that the plump woman in the spandex had somehow managed to get right on top of him. I was surprised to see him go down. He wasn’t big or anything, but he was in good shape.

She was clawing at him. Her fingernails raked across his face, cutting him, and then suddenly she knocked the gun out of his hand.

He slapped at her with his flashlight, but couldn’t break away completely. Their arms were caught up in each other.

He landed a good jab with the butt of his flashlight and backed away. Then I heard the sharp metal on metal snap of his baton as he extended it and cocked it back over his shoulder.

He swung it down on her knee sharply, and then again, punctuating the second stroke with the sickening crunch of broken bones.

The woman’s whole body reeled from his blows, but she didn’t cry out and she didn’t go down.

He hit her again and again, moving around her, keeping her at arm’s length and striking her legs when she got too close, but no matter how hard he hit her, she wouldn’t go down.

“What the hell!” he yelled. They were moving around each other in a strange, clumsy type of dance, Chris keeping the beat with his baton on her legs. “Why won’t she go down?”

But I couldn’t help him. I had my own problems to worry about.

The man I just pepper-sprayed was still reaching for me. He put out a mangled hand and I dodged underneath it. Before he could turn around, I kicked the back of his knee and pushed him down.

He didn’t even try to break his fall. Didn’t put his hands out or anything.

In the distance I could hear sirens and the uneven rise and fall of the roaring engines, and I knew help was getting close. But there were more people gathering around us now, and as I turned slightly I thought I recognized the people from across the street we had seen as we came in.

That’s when Chris went down.

All his attention was focused on the woman, and he never saw the two men who grabbed him from his right side.

I saw one of them bite him and Chris screamed. He spun around frantically, knocking their hands and faces away as he landed on the ground.

They reached for him and he rolled away. He jumped to his feet with his gun in his hand and fired two quick shots at the man who bit him, nailing him squarely in the chest.

The sound broke the air, but I was the only one who flinched. No one else in the yard even registered the shots.

The man he hit staggered backwards, knocked straight up by the force of the impact, but he didn’t fall.

I watched him shift his weight from one foot to the other in a clumsy, teetering dance and then start to walk forward again.

Chris fell backwards, clutching his neck, the blood already jetting between his fingers. Even as he fell he kept his gun leveled at the man.

I ran over to him and pulled him back.

“He fucking bit me!” Chris shouted.

I put Chris behind me and yelled at the man he had just shot. “Stop! Don’t you fucking move!”

I had my gun barrel trained on his chest and still he kept coming.

I couldn’t help but look at his face. There was nothing behind it, like one of those zombies in the movies. His gaze fell on me, but I knew somehow he wasn’t looking at me. There was no cognition, no intelligence in his eyes. They were clouded over, a mystery.

Chris and I backed into the street, careful to keep our distance.

“Shotguns!” I yelled, and waved Chris toward our cars.

We both scrambled back to the patrol cars, avoiding the people who were coming after us from three sides now.

As we circled around to the trunk of my car I noticed that Chris was having trouble keeping up. He had gone pale, and his breath rattled in his throat, like he was choking on phlegm.

“You won’t be able to shoot,” I told him.

“I’ll cover you. Get the shotgun.”

I popped the trunk and pulled out my shotgun case. The Department gives us the Mossberg 500—a standard, tough-as-nails twelve-gauge pump, built to take a beating and fire just about any kind of shell made.

I dumped six green beanbag shells into the magazine tube and another into the breach. We’re not allowed to use slugs on patrol, only the less-than-lethal beanbag rounds.

The beanbags are still pretty fierce, though. One or two hits at less than ten yards can put almost anybody on the ground and leave them with a couple of broken ribs, no matter how tough they think they are.

I closed the trunk. “You ready?”

Chris nodded, but he looked very sick. “What’s wrong with them? I shot that guy. How come he’s still walking?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

They stumbled closer. Watching them come, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was looking at a crowd of walking corpses. It was like they had stepped right off the screen of some Hollywood horror film.

We moved out, staying on the driver’s side of our cars and careful to keep the engine block between our positions and the crowd that was still advancing on us through the grass.

The whole time we were doing that I could hear our cover officers getting closer, and from the way the engines and the squealing tires were starting to drown out the sound of the sirens, I figured they were just outside the subdivision.

Help was less than two minutes away.

I pointed the shotgun at the three men who had just entered the circle of street-lamp light next to our cars.

Chris was still standing, but he was bleeding badly. It was running down the side of the car where he was leaning for support.

I focused the shotgun’s ghost ring on a man about ten feet away and yelled, “Get down on the ground!”

The man ignored my order and walked right into the fender of my patrol car. It was like he expected to just walk right through the car.

“Get down on the ground!” I yelled.

He turned and moved around to the front of the car, his hands out in front of him, ready to grab.

When he stepped into the street, I fired.

My first shot went wide of center mass, hitting him in the shoulder. The impact spun him around, and he went down to his knees, but he didn’t cry out. He didn’t even try to clutch at the spot where the beanbag hit him.

I racked the next shell into the shotgun and raised the barrel, ready for another target.

When the man I had just beanbagged stood up, turned, and faced me again, I felt my heart sink down into my stomach.

People just don’t do that.

I’ve beanbagged people before, and nobody has ever just stood right back up, even from a glancing blow.

I searched his face for some indication that I had hurt him, but there was nothing there. There was no emotion, no expression, no content of any kind. He was empty. The eyes seemed to look through me into nowhere.

“Stay down! I’ll hit you again. Stay down!”

I aimed my next shot more carefully. I took my time and centered the ghost ring right in the middle of his chest.

He was less than five feet away when I fired, and he took the full force of what a twelve gauge can do. The blow knocked him backwards, off his feet, and laid him out flat on his back.

At that distance I wouldn’t be surprised if I smashed his sternum into dozens of little pieces.

I racked the shotgun again. That noise usually clears every room that hears it, but none of those people seemed to care.

They didn’t run, or blink, or look to each other for support. They never paused at all. Their pace never varied, even when they reached out to grab at us. Every move was slow and plodding, like an old woman trying to climb a flight of stairs.

More of them were coming around the front of the car now and I fired two more beanbags as quickly as I could at the first two in line.

The one closest to me went down.

The one behind him staggered back, but didn’t fall.

“Stay back!” I yelled. The air around us was filling with gun smoke, and there were so many of them coming at us that, even with the shotgun, I couldn’t keep them back.

The first guy I bean-bagged walked into my car again. I jammed the barrel into his chest and fired. I fired again as he fell to the ground.

Chris and I backed up.

We were out of shells and the shotgun was useless without them.

I went for my Glock.

“What are they, Eddie?”

“Move! Move!” I said, and pushed Chris along the side of the car. I almost had to carry him to get him to go because he was having trouble supporting his own weight. He couldn’t run at all.

As we reached the back of my car, I froze.

From between my car and Chris’s car another man stumbled into our path.

He turned and faced us and in that one moment I lost all composure. His face and his arms were a mess. There was blood everywhere, and his face was so badly shredded that I could barely recognize his features.

What looked back at me wasn’t a face at all. There was a massive gash starting just below the left eye. It was blood red and protruding from the socket like a squashed grape. The gash opened downward in a jagged triangle that spread around the jawbone, ending at a flap of skin that was caked over with dirt and hanging uselessly from his neck. Gleaming white pearls of teeth showed through the sinews of what remained of his cheek.

His right arm was just a bloody stump, but he reached for me with it like there was still a hand attached.

I lowered my weapon in confusion and disgust, then snapped it back up. “Stop! Don’t move!”

But he kept on moving.

I fired a single shot square into his chest, and he rocked back on his heels, teetering for a moment before regaining his balance.

His gory arm came up again, and he reached for me.

I aimed with both hands.

My gun barked three times, and all three shots slammed into his chest. Again he rocked back, but I couldn’t make him fall.

My training told me that it was body armor—nobody can take that kind of pounding unless they’re wearing body armor.

When he came at me that last time, I aimed for his face and fired a single shot. The bullet struck him in the cheek, and a gory bloom of blood spray and bits of flesh and bone and teeth spread out across the white hood of the police car behind him.

The man flew backwards, landing on the car’s push bumpers. I watched him struggle to regain his feet and more than anything else in the world I wanted to run as fast and as far away as I could. The shock of what I had just seen and the juice pumping through my system made me want to throw up.

I grabbed Chris by the shoulder and pushed our way to his car. I tossed him in the backseat and forced my way back to the driver’s seat.

So many people had gathered around us. They were everywhere, hands tugging at my uniform, pulling me away from the car.

I climbed in and slammed it into reverse.

There were people banging on the doors and windows and the trunk, but I didn’t bother to avoid them.

I stepped on the gas and peeled out, knocking people to the ground as I shot away from the curb. Swerving like a drunk, I kept the pedal on the floor all the way back up Chatterton.

At the top of the hill I was doing maybe fifty miles per hour and was completely out of control. I glanced off two parked cars and careened across the lanes just as two police cars came up on me.

When I saw their strobes I cut the wheel sharply and went into somebody’s front yard. I couldn’t keep the car in a straight line and the front end got away from me. The car spun suddenly to the right, and when the wheels caught, the car shot back toward the street.

We finally came to a stop after hitting a brick mailbox and the back end of somebody’s parked car.

The last thing I remember was the airbag exploding in my face.