City of the Dead

Chapter Seven

Annette slammed on the brakes and lurched forward as her car skidded to a stop, missing the other car by inches. It sped past her and slammed head-on into an oncoming truck, and the two vehicles spun around like ballroom dancers, broken glass and smashed metal flying into the air. The truck rolled into a telephone pole, the driver slumped over the steering wheel. The other car slid to a halt in the middle of the street, its entire front end crumpled up like a discarded piece of paper. The driver side door, ripped off in the collision, lay on the ground, rocking slowly back and forth.

The driver of the car fell from the mangled wreckage, flopping to the street. Annette stared in horror, frozen in her seat, her hands clasped together. She heard a scream somewhere, and it forced her into motion. She fumbled for her seat belt latch, and glanced up to see the driver somehow standing up.

Blood drenched the left side of his body, and his left arm hung at his side like a wet noodle, obviously broken. He limped awkwardly forward, groaning in pain, his head tilted sideways. Annette’s hand grabbed the seat belt but stopped as the man walked toward her car. His right eye stared forward aimlessly, the left side of his face slick with blood. Black hair stuck to his forehead.

“No,” Annette heard herself whisper.

Another scream came from nearby, and a woman in jeans and a blue sweater came running from around the corner. She almost lost her balance as she saw the aftermath of the car crash, and shrieked in terror at the sight of the man standing in the street. Annette glanced at her and then back at the crash victim.

He groaned again and began to shamble toward the woman. She ran off, screaming in fright, waving her hands in the air.

Annette glimpsed flashing lights in her rear view mirror, and heard the sirens just as a police car roared up and swung around her car, its lights flashing and siren piercing the eerie silence. The crash victim staggered out from around her car just as the police car roared through the intersection, and Annette watched in sick fascination as the car slammed right into him at full speed. He smacked into the hood and careened off the windshield, flying up into the air and spinning like a rag doll. He tumbled to the sidewalk across the street, a bloody mass of broken limbs.

The cop car’s brakes screeched as it slid down the street, white smoke erupting up from the locked tires. Finally, Annette seemed to awake from her stunned reverie, and pulled out her cell phone to call 911. There was no signal.

She shifted her car into reverse and backed up from the scene of the accident. Turning around in a nearby driveway, she looked out the passenger window to see an old man walking toward her with his thin arms outstretched. His toothless mouth moaned horribly, bulging eyes staring thoughtlessly in her direction.

“No,” Annette said again. “No, no, no.”

She put the car in drive and sped away, leaving the old man grasping empty air. Two more people staggered out into the street, one of them a young man with his shirt covered in splattered blood. He stumbled off the curb as Annette zoomed past, reaching for her car.

“This can’t be happening,” she whispered.

A woman ran into the street, holding out her hands and screaming for Annette to stop. Her face was streaked with tears and the front of her shirt was ripped open, revealing her bra. Annette slammed on the brakes once more and her car skidded to a halt.

“Please help me, please help me,” the woman babbled, pawing at the driver’s side window. There were bloody scratches across her shoulder, where the shirt was ripped. “You have to help me, please.”

From out of a nearby house, a young man stumbled forward, almost losing his footing on the front steps. He moaned hungrily and bared his teeth.

“Help me!” the woman cried out.

Annette slammed on the gas pedal and sped away, leaving the woman standing in the middle of the street. She did not look in the rear view mirror.

She ran the next red light, spinning the wheel to slide through the intersection and turn left, barely taking her foot off the accelerator. Two abandoned cars sat in the other lane. Half a dozen people wandered along the sidewalk or edge of the street.

She didn’t understand how it could have happened, but she must have been blind not to realize it sooner. The ambulances, the lack of traffic, the dazed-looking pedestrians. If she was thinking clearly, and not been so burned-out from her discovery at the lab the day before, she would have noticed the signs. Birkin told her it would happen, but she could not believe it could happen so soon.

Her only question: How? How could it spread so fast? She expected a news bulletin about sick people randomly attacking others. It should have been an isolated cause, a single person getting infected and spreading it to everyone he came in contact with. For so many people to seemingly be infected at once just didn’t make any sense.

As she tried to think clearly, she jerked in her seat and hit the brakes because the street ahead was blocked with parked cars. She saw someone crouching down next to one of the cars, and realized with a sickening visual that there were actually two people. One of them on the ground, and the other chewing on the body. Two more people shambled to the corpse, one of them already coated with blood all around his face.

Annette backed up and turned around again, taking the next street to try to make her way around the blockade of abandoned cars. She had to get back to the school and find Sherry, and it was still a ten minute drive away. Neither she nor Sherry experienced any symptoms that morning, so Annette felt safe that neither of them were infected, but if there were infected people at the school, then Sherry was in terrible danger.

Every way she tried to drive, she found blocked streets. She zoomed down the next street but once again was forced to stop and try to turn around because the way was blocked. She pulled into a fast food restaurant parking lot and drove around to the other entrance to get around the blocked intersection. A small mob of infected people were outside the building, pressing against the large glass windows, trying to get inside.

Her car skipped the edge of the curb as she drove out of the parking lot. The intersection was partially blocked this way as well, but Annette pulled up onto the sidewalk to squeeze past the cars. Half a dozen more infected people stumbled near the car, getting their hands on it just as she drove by.

She realized she was crying, and angrily wiped her face with the back of her hand. There was no time for that now, she had to focus on finding Sherry.

She made it almost halfway to the school before running into a huge traffic jam on one of the main streets. Thirty cars were jammed around the intersection, across all four lanes. There was even an ambulance sitting in the middle of the crowd of cars, its lights flashing but siren turned off. Before Annette could back up, two more cars came up behind her, blocking her way and trapping her there.

Suddenly, she heard gunshots being fired, and ducked down, covering her head with her hands. She glanced up over the steering wheel to see a man firing a pistol at a crowd of infected people standing in the intersection. Blood spurted up from their chests as they jerked back but did not fall over. The shots were like claps of thunder. More screaming erupted from all around.

The infected were everywhere. They surrounded one of the other cars and pounded savagely on the hood and windows. Annette glimpsed a woman in the car, frantically screaming and trying to get her car unstuck from the traffic jam. It slammed back into the car behind it and then slammed forward into the car in front, crushing the legs of the infected man trying to climb onto the hood.

Behind Annette’s car was a large pickup truck. The driver jumped out of the vehicle and ran down the street, abandoning it there. Annette shouted angrily and got out of her own car, just leaving the door open. She would never get anywhere in a car, there was too much gridlock, too many infected people crashing the cars they drove, and too many panicked people just abandoning their vehicles in the street in the hopes of escaping on foot.

The driver’s side window of the woman’s car shattered, and the infected people reached in to grab at her. Annette could not watch as they dragged her kicking and screaming from the car and tore her apart.

The man with the guns gave up and ran away, leaving his empty pistols lying on the sidewalk. He managed to shoot a few of them in the head before he ran away, killing them for good, but many of his shots missed their mark. The infected people walked toward Annette as she ran by. She wove in between the mass of abandoned cars and continued down the street, running as fast as her legs could carry her.

There was a huge mob of them marching across the other side of the street, at least fifty of them. Each second it seemed like more and more of them showed up. For a brief moment, Annette wondered how she had been spared. If all these people were hosts, they must have been infected almost two hours ago at the least. Some of the infected people showed wounds that indicated they were killed by a host, and then came back due to the transmitted infection. The initial spread of the disease must have started several hours ago for it to reach an epidemic stage by now. But several hours ago, most of these people were just getting out of bed. What could have infected them all ...

“Oh, Christ,” Annette whispered. The water supply. Something must have gotten into the water supply. Annette realized that she and Sherry had not used any water that morning. Annette usually made coffee, but she neglected to do so this morning. And Sherry did not brush her teeth even though Annette had told her to. Both of them could have been infected by now. If either of them used any water, they might have become one of the mindless hosts wandering the streets right now. The thought of how they avoided infection totally by accident made Annette sick to her stomach.

When she was only a couple of blocks from the school, she heard a helicopter overhead. She ran through someone’s yard to cut across the block, avoiding the growing undead in the streets. She emerged within sight of the school.

The helicopter lowered towards the ground almost directly above her. The powerful blast of wind made her back away, shielding her eyes. When it was twenty feet off the ground, long black ropes dropped from inside, and soldiers slid down the ropes to the street. They wore green and brown camouflage uniforms with Umbrella logos on their shoulders, and wielded long black assault rifles. One of them immediately drew his weapon and pointed it at Annette.

“I’m not infected!” she screamed, waving her hands. “I’m not infected!”

“Get down!” he shouted back.

Annette fell to the concrete and the soldier opened fire, blowing away the two zombies that were coming up behind her. They collapsed to the ground, their heads split open like melons. Annette gasped for breath and got back to her feet.

The soldiers ran down the street in the direction of the school. By now, Annette could make out a crowd of people there, more than a hundred of them. She ran after the soldiers and saw that the crowd was half made up of students. Her stomach twisted at the thought of so many children being infected.

She could not see Sherry. All of the students wore uniforms, and it was too hard to tell the difference between all the girls wearing identical blue blouses and blue checkered skirts. She tried to look for brunette girls, but there were too many of them.

The soldiers formed a semi-circle facing the crowd of infected students and faculty. Annette realized what they were doing and screamed for them to stop. But her voice went unheard.

The soldiers opened fire on the crowd of infected children.

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