Dead City - 01 Read Free Page A

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