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A little Middle Eastern boy walked blindly across the tarmac, most of his lower face gone. His empty eyes turned toward us and he reached out with small hands.
A fat woman with most of her blouse torn away walked in a sloppy circle, hands clamped to her stomach to try and hold her intestines in place. Her strength failed and her guts spilled out and I heard Bunny gag.
“What the fuck, boss?” he begged, but I had no answers.
Instead, I turned to Torres. “What can you tell us?”
She cut me a brief look. “The president is in his suite,” she said quickly. “He has some Secret Service left, and there are some officers on the scene, but it’s all falling apart. We have the lobby barricaded, but it’s a big hotel and it’s right next to the convention center. There’s a couple of dozen ways in. When I left, the place was already under siege.”
“Can you get us in?” I asked.
She took too long to answer that. “I’m not even sure I can get you all that close. People are going crazy in the streets.”
Top leaned forward. “Did anyone tell you what this is? Do you know what’s happening?”
“I heard a lot of crazy rumors. Some kind of terrorist attack. A bioweapon or some shit. Or an accident at some government lab. Everyone has a story.”
“What do you think is happening?”
She looked at him in the rearview mirror. “I think someone left the back door of Hell unlocked.”
We said nothing.
“I shot a guy in the chest. Three rounds, center mass,” said Torres. “He went down because one of my bullets must have hit his spine. But even on the ground, even with a hole drilled through his fucking heart, he kept trying to bite me.”
“Jesus fuck,” said Bunny.
“I put another round in his head,” said Torres, but there was a hitch in her voice. “I shot him while he lay there on the ground.” She wiped at a tear and then looked at the wetness on her fingertips. Then she smeared it on the arc of the steering wheel. “I don’t know what’s going on. All I know is that death is broken.”
She reached Airport Terminal Road, which was choked with cars, some of them stopped in the middle of the road. People—alive and undead—were fighting between the cars.
“Hold onto your dicks,” she said. She crossed herself and wrenched the wheel over to send the Armada punching through a line of neatly-trimmed hedges. The big vehicle had four-wheel drive but it wasn’t built for this, and seatbelts or not, we were whipped and slammed around as the wheels crunched over curbs, shrubs, and fallen bodies. Then we burst out on North Harbor Road, which was also congested but not as badly. The engine roared as she accelerated while zigzagging around cars and people.
A man stepped out into our path and there was a godawful thump. He went flying, crashing into the windshield hard enough to punch a spider web of cracks into the safety glass. I had a microsecond to see the man’s face. I saw the pain and panic in his eyes. Maybe Torres saw it, too. Maybe knowing that she’d crippled or kille
d an uninfected person would ruin her. Maybe she was already gone by then. Don’t know. The car muscled on and she never took her foot off the gas. The wind blowing past us pushed beads of dark red through the labyrinth of cracks.
“They didn’t tell us it was this bad,” said Bunny.
Torres laughed. A single snort that was a shuffle step away from hysteria. “I walked my dog this morning,” she said after a few seconds. “I had coffee with my boyfriend at Starbucks before my shift.” She shook her head. “When all of . . . this . . . started, it seemed to just explode, you know?” She cut us looks, hoping we’d understand. Needing it, as if to say that this was bigger than her, that it wasn’t her fault.
“Yeah,” I said, which was lame, but what else could I say?
We roared on. She steered the car like she’d spent her entire life training for this ride. My heartbeat was like a machine gun and my blood pressure could blow bolts out of plate steel, but I kept it off my face and out of my voice.
“It’s a plague,” I said. “A bioweapon.”
I told her the story. I told her the truth. Because why? Because fuck it. The world was falling off its hinges and this cop was in hell. In actual hell. And because she deserved to know the truth. I did not give a cold, wet shit about national security or need-to-know. That was as dead as the bodies in the street.
I knew that Torres appreciated the truth. I knew it hurt her, too. The truth is like that.
“Turn on the news,” suggested Top. I did, and most of the channels were filled with pre-programmed music. Not the time for an Eagles retrospective or classic hip hop. I found the local news and the reporter was weeping so brokenly that I couldn’t make out a single word. On another station, there was a field report from some guy back in Pennsylvania that was being broadcast nationally. His opener would have been a joke two hours ago. It wasn’t now.
He said, “This is Billy Trout reporting live from the apocalypse . . . ”
The story he told was about him and a cop named Dez Fox and several busloads of school kids trying to make it from Western Pennsylvania to Asheville, North Carolina. The roads were mostly blocked and the dead were everywhere. I heard gunshots and screams, and then the feed died. There was dead air for maybe ten seconds and then a reporter came on and tried to apologize for losing the feed.
Apologize. Jesus Christ.
