Last Stand on Zombie Island (6 page)

Durham depressed the hand mic on his radio once more, “GS5, Dispatch: be advised I am 26 here and need priority assistance,” Durham said giving the ten codes that meant
Detaining subject, expedite.

He replaced the mic on the clip on his shoulder and laid the little girl’s head back down on the ground. Reaching slowly for his shotgun, he never took his eyes off cargo-shorts-man in the doorway.

“Step back into the room, sir, and let me see your hands,” Durham said firmly.

The man’s eyes went wide and he seemed to Durham to have a shocked look on his face.

“Really, officer, this is not what you think. She attacked
us
,” the man protested.

As he walked backwards into the room with his palms up, he continued to talk while Durham brought the shotgun up to his chest.

“What is your name, and what are you doing here?” Durham asked through hard lips.

“Billy Harris, and I just came up here to get my son. I heard there was some sort of riot or shooting or something and I just wanted to get my boy. My daughter is here with me, too,” the man said.

Durham saw the man’s daughter for the first time as Billy backed into the room and the police sergeant followed in his wake. She was a slender teenager with blonde hair, highlighted with some sort of extra color. She looked as if she was bugged out to say the least, and was busily biting her fingernails.

“He is telling the truth,” the teenage girl said again, pronouncing every syllable.

Durham lowered the shotgun and asked Billy for his ID as he turned and locked the door to the wrecked classroom, closing the three new acquaintances in together. He tried to call Dispatch again on his radio to verify that Billy did not have any wants or warrants but he could not get them to answer.

Billy and Cat explained briefly the experience they had had that morning, first Cat at the high school and then the two of them together so far at the Elementary school, to catch Durham up-to-date.

Durham peered out of the window of the classroom to check on the pigtailed girl who had attacked Billy. She was nowhere to be found. Durham walked across the classroom and crumpled enough of the venetian blinds to look out into the parking lot to where he had left the deputy to wait for backup.

What he saw he would have trouble believing if he had read it in a report.

««—»»

Spud was, to put it mildly, shitting bricks. He had gotten up that morning and left the house to move some recently acquired goods. On the way to his parole-job doing fast lubes, he was arrested. That meant a parole violation and a return to the repeat offender segregation at Donaldson State Pen for about ten years. He once saw an inmate stabbed in the throat with a plastic spoon there for not being successful sneaking in dope through his wife’s ass.

However, compared to the current situation, he would rather be in Donaldson. At least you had a fighting chance there.

When he watched Sergeant Durham smoke those two maniacs that morning, he had fought a strong urge to piss his pants. There is nothing more helpless than being handcuffed in the back of a police car, and forced to be an eyewitness to a vicious double killing. To top it off, here he was at the school he had gone to just a dozen years ago, looking out the window to mutilated bodies.

Just as they had arrived, Durham had told him to sit tight before running into the school with his shotgun.

“Where the hell would I go?”

He saw Durham disappear into the entry of the school and shortly afterwards saw a young girl in pigtails come running out as fast as she could toward the deputy.

Her whole face was covered with red splotches and her purple neck bulged as she attacked the deputy. She was on top of him and his short scream further abbreviated in a gurgle. Spud half stood up in the back seat to get a better vantage of what was then happening on the ground. Horrified, he saw the little girl shove her fingers down past the deputy’s lips and into his mouth. First, she forced one tiny hand and then the second, all the way in past the wrist. He saw the deputy claw for the pistol at his side before his chest heaved and he stopped moving.

Spud locked eyes with the pigtailed girl as she looked up from the deputy. She was sitting on his chest with her hands still down his throat almost to her elbows. He looked into her mottled eyes as she pulled a lump of apricot-colored hard flesh out of the stricken man’s throat and tossed it to the ground.

Spud settled down into the seat as low as he could and tried to melt out of site. He willed his body to turn into jelly and simply puddle down the seat almost to the floorboards. Seconds ticked by with each heartbeat as he closed his eyes and willed the little monster to go away. He wondered with his eyes shut just what she had pulled out of the deputy. His larynx? His heart? Spud swallowed in an attempt to keep from becoming nauseous and prayed that Durham would be back to take him to a nice, safe, jail as soon as possible.

He felt the thud on the car glass before he heard the sound. He refused to look and started to hyperventilate. It took him a full second, spread out over what seemed like a week, to figure out the next sound he heard. His brain searched the database of stored and catalogued sounds built-up over a lifetime of noises, and identified it.

The door latch opening.

Spud rotated his body around as if he was a six year old on a sit and spin again. His hands, handcuffed earlier, were useless behind his back. The rear door of the police car had no interior latch or lock. There was neither window control nor ashtray. All of those normal items were replaced on the police car by a smooth sheet of thick plastic. The only item he saw was a nylon strap, about the size of a suitcase handle that hung horizontally from the center of the door.

He lunged for the strap with his face, grabbing at it with his lips like a catfish as he willed his jaws to elongate enough to bite the strap. As his teeth found purchase on the thick dirty nylon and he bit down hard, he felt the door jerk violently outward.

He heard the growls of the pigtail girl yanking on the car door from the outside. Spud was prostrate on his stomach, legs akimbo, pulling back with his neck and grinding his knees into the bench seat for traction. His jaws ached and he felt an incisor pop forward at an angle it had never had before, but he held the door from opening any further with every muscle in his body.

Spud heaved his body into something resembling an upside-down sit up and pulled the door closed. He sat listening in silence for a few seconds, teeth still sunk into the door strap. He felt the vibration through the door of the outside latch being worked again before he even heard the
click
. Just as the door began to open, again he pulled back hard with his neck, slamming it neatly.

Frustrated growls and short yells punctuated by the sound of little fists beating on the door and window convinced Spud to hold on to the strap. The driver’s door opened and the pig-tailed girl sprang into the front seat. Spud released the strap as he rolled over and looked up at her. She threw herself at the sandwiched cage and Lexan screen that normally insulated the driver from the antics of a suspect in the back seat without effect. Spud could see her dead eyes, her swollen neck, and bubbling congealed blood smeared across her face, looking down on him.

“Surprise, bitch,” he said without even thinking. He never expected to be grateful for that cage, no matter how many times he looked through one.

She screamed and beat her tiny, blood-washed fists against the cage. He could see blood, thick like spilled paint, on her face and hair, splatter with every shake of the child’s body.

He lay there watching her pound repeatedly on the cage without letting up, tearing her hands and nails. She seemed to be solely determined in her desire to get to him. It was as if whatever the child used to be had been replaced by a demon who’s purpose was to tear through the cage and get Spud.

He heard more growls from outside the car and saw two, four then six more children pour into the front seat. Once they saw him laid across the backseat only inches away, they joined in the effort to tear apart the cage. Several of the children had the same horrible look to them as the pigtailed girl. Bloodied eyes, broken swollen faces, some had bite marks, torn clothes and one chubby boy looked as if something had removed his ear at the skull.

Spud became as small as he could in the backseat. His hands were numb and he laid on them behind his back. He could not tell where his fingertips were anymore. He could not run away, he could not fight, he could not hide, and he could not call for help. There was nothing else he could do but puddle up on the seat and wait to see what would happen next.

He heard the terrible sound of the door latch opening again. This time it came from the door at his feet. Just as the door started to pull open, he took both feet and kicked it as hard as he could. The door sprung open and knocked over the kid that had opened it before bouncing closed again. Spud wedged a foot up the door panel and into the strap on the door, holding it closed.

The door latch next to his forehead clicked and started to open again, and as it did he craned his neck sideways and back as far as he could to get his jaw on the strap to hold it closed. The rear bench of a Crown Victoria Interceptor is 60 inches from door to door and Spuds 5’ 6” frame just barely managed to span this distance, holding both doors closed from the inside as the kids on the outside of the car tugged at each.

The crowd growling and banging in the front seat continued to grow both in their numbers and in the violence of the assault. He tasted the copper of his own blood in his mouth as his teeth ached and strained in their roots to hold the nylon strap from slipping away. His leg was trembling and shin aching from being held two feet up in the air to pull the opposite door closed. Spud screamed through his clenched teeth as hot tears ran up his cheeks and across his forehead. This only had the effect of urging the
Lord of the Flies
-gang to a fury as tiny bloody hands rang against the car like a meteor shower.

He heard gunshots and screaming. Men outside the car were yelling orders and the unmistakable sound of shotgun slides racking between shots filled the air. The door window of the patrol car exploded inward and small pieces of safety glass rained down on Spuds head and chest. He felt grainy fragments in his mouth after they slid past his lips.

The crowd of frantic children in the front of the car melted away. More gunshots and growls, screams and shouts passed until the only sound left was the ringing in his ears.

A chiseled face that could have once belonged to a Greek statute poked into the front of the car.

“You alive, sir?” the face asked.

Spud blinked the glass and tears from his eyes and spit the door strap from his mouth. The face belonged to a man in his late twenties in a multicolored grey camouflage uniform. He had a combat helmet strapped tight on his head and a pair of high-speed sunglasses covering his eyes.

“Sir, are…you…ok?” the soldier yelled over the ringing in Spud ears. The man’s breath smelled of Slim Jims.

“Yes, yes, thank you,” Spud muttered.

“You didn’t kill anyone did you?” he asked Spud. His drawl was strong even for south Alabama.

“No, never,” Spud shook his head.

“Not even a little?” the solder asked with his head cocked slightly to the side.

“No, boss,” Spud said.

“Rape? Arson? Rob anybody?” the solder asked.

“No, never.”

The soldier nodded once and disappeared from view. “I’m going to let you out.”

Spud heard the door latch then felt several strong hands pull him from the car by the shoulders and stand him up.

He was still blinking glass and salt from his eyes as he glanced around. There was a stack of new bodies surrounding the car. The majority of them looked like the crazy kids that had only seconds ago been attacking him. Notably he also saw the addition of a camouflaged soldier sprawled out with his eyes missing and his throat bloody.

“Be advised we are River City,” Spud heard his savior call into a radio handset. “I am engaged here with several EKIA’s.”

There were a dozen soldiers huddled around the shot-up police car in a semi-circle. Most of them brandished well-used shotguns besides the pistols at their sides. Two of the younger ones were busy taking pictures with their cellphones of the unreal scene around them. They were all loaded down with Kevlar vests, kneepads, elbow pads, ammo pouches, and gloves. He did not know much about the military, but he knew from action films that the grey and black
MP
patches the soldiers had on their left sleeves labeled them as military police. This was confirmed when his savior ordered that Spud’s handcuffs be removed from one hand so that he could use his arms again.

The man left the cuff on Spud’s right hand so that, “When this all settles down we don’t misplace you. Looks like you are hanging out with us until we get to somewhere safer and can turn you back over to civilian law enforcement. So forgive me if I make you earn your keep,” he said as he tossed Spud a gym bag that rattled like a box of Lincoln logs, “Tote this.”

Spud eyed the tall, powerfully built soldier. He had the same rank bar over the sternum of his uniform shirt as the Captains Spud knew from Donaldson. He took that and the rifle and oak leaf badge over the nametape that said US ARMY to mean he was in charge. On the right side of his chest was a patch that said
STONE
and on his right sleeve was a patch with an Indianhead on it.