Chapter 1: On the Clock

Sometimes, dealing with the undead wasn’t the big problem. Dealing with the living still tended to be a pain in the ass.

Such was the case when Mike tried to get his Humvee through the mob of press, curious onlookers, and usual run of conspiracy theorists. The press was there because stories about the undead were still gobbled insatiably by the public, even though there was at least one on the front page everyday. The curious onlookers were there because, while sightings of the undead were not uncommon on a global scale, catching a glimpse of one, or its victim, was still rare for the average person. The conspiracy theorists were there for the same reason such people show up anywhere en masse: they had no lives.

And the numbers of all three groups combined to make one big mess that didn’t have the collective sense to get out of the way of Mike’s hummer. It took nearly a dozen uniformed officers to force a gap through the crowd, and the hummer still made it barely, with his rear-view mirrors catching a shirt tail here and a cuff there, but finally, Mike made it inside the barricade. The place was crawling with police, both uniformed patrol officers and plainclothes detectives. There was the usual running around, yapping on the radio, talking to supposed eyewitnesses, and grabbing of mega-doses of coffee and assorted bagels and bear claws. At least this time, the regular patrol officers were kind enough to bring flood lights to the scene, brilliantly illuminating the alley where the attack had taken place, and where the half-crazed victim stood, with his back to a chain link fence, holding a huge knife to his own throat.

Just another day, just another paycheck, just another mountain of paperwork.

Mike got his hummer close enough to the alley and put it in park, leaving the flashing green and blue lights on. A second or two later, Mike got out. Almost instantly, all eyes were on him, and with good reason. Mike was a big, brawny, barrel-chested man of thirty-two years of age, with short dark brown hair and even darker brown eyes. Few would have ever called him handsome, but even fewer would think he was ugly. He was wearing his full tactical gear minus the helmet or goggles, with a tricked-out M4 Carbine slung across his back and a huge Smith and Wesson .357 revolver in a left-handed cross-draw holster. A burning cigarette dangled from his mouth as he approached a uniformed lieutenant who clearly was the ranking officer on the scene. In fact, he had to be. He was the only one who held a coffee cup in one hand and a danish in the other. All other officers had at least one hand free because unlike their boss, they were busy working for a living.

“Goddamn good to see you, Mike. We’ve got the poor guy boxed in at the ass-end of the alley. Every which-way out for two blocks is barricaded tighter than a tiger shark’s asshole. This guy isn’t getting out to save his dick.”
Mike replied dryly “There’s no need for profanity, Lieutenant Tomlin. There are ladies present after all.”

“Sorry, Mike.”

“Now, what in the fucking, shit-pit of hell do we have here?”

As Lieutenant Tomlin opened his mouth to answer, Mike’s partner got out of the passenger seat of the hummer. Officer Marianne McKeller, or ‘Kelly’ as Mike called her on account of her last name, had been Mike’s partner ever since they joined the Denver Police Department’s Special Investigations Division, and most married couples would have envied the rock-solid loyalty they had for each other. Kelly was tall for a woman at 5’-10”, with even darker brown hair and eyes than Mike, and was younger than him by three years. She was certainly prettier than most, but walked with the air of a seasoned cop rather than a pretty princess. As she stood up, she chambered a round in her Browning Hi-Power sidearm, and slung her M1 Carbine over her right shoulder. With all of the fancy-ass high-tech weaponry available to most modern police departments, let alone a heavily-funded elite unit like the SID, Marianne was still of the mind that when it came to small arms, older was better. Both her carbine and her sidearm were years older than she was yet were as reliable as anything brand new, and she was a certified expert with both. Mike agreed that older weapons had a certain style to them that made them psychologically satisfying to own and shoot, and to be sure, Mike’s own antique gun collection would have made Ted Nugent blush, but he didn’t carry them on the job. Better to use weapons that someone else paid for.
“Mike, we have a bite victim. Homeless guy. He’s holding one of those Rambo-style hunting knives under his chin, threatening to kill himself if we get any closer. I guess he doesn’t know our procedure for this sort of thing. According to the one who called it in, looks like he got munched about half an hour ago. There’s a chunk missing from his left arm. No sign of the zulu.”

Mike spit his cigarette onto the ground as Kelly came up. “So, how do you want to handle this one, Mike?” she asked, as she began to unsling her carbine, ready for the kill order.

“I’ll have a little chat with the guy, see if he’ll calm down a bit. I want information.”

Kelly and Lieutenant Tomlin nodded, almost in unison. Mike walked to the entrance of the alley, sticking just his head and hands out to where the victim could see, as a sign that he had no intention of inflicting harm. The victim, of course, was not impressed.

“Get the fuck away! Don’t come near me! I’ll do it myself! I’ll cut myself so fucking deep my head’ll pop clean off! Don’t make me go all John the Baptist in this bitch!” The homeless man pressed the blade firmer against his throat. Not hard enough to draw any blood, but damned close.

“Good evening. I’m Sergeant Mike Rhodes, Denver Police, Special Investigations. I need you to describe your attacker. Gender, height, weight, type of clothing, and where it was heading. I’m told you were bitten half an hour ago. Is this true? Come on, pal, you can talk to me.”

“I said get the fuck back! I won’t turn into one of those walking shit-bags! I won’t! Just get the fuck lost! I’ll do it myself!”

“Sir, I need you to calm down. The one who did this to you is still out there. Other people are at risk. I need you to tell me where it went and what it looked like. I need your help to make sure that no one else will be harmed by that thing tonight. Please, sir. If you don’t help us, other people could die.”

“Yeah? Well fuck them! What, I have to die but you’ll go through hell and fucking high water to save them? Where the hell were you when I needed you? I hope they die! I hope you die! I hope the whole fucking world gets wiped out by those things! I’m taking you all with me, bitches! What do I give a shit? I’m dead already, right? Once I tell you what I know, you’ll just shoot me in the head, right? That’s what you do, right? Well, fuck that! I’m not going to help you! Do your own fucking job! Fuck you!”

A split second later, the homeless man rammed the blade of his knife upwards under his chin with such force that a sharp glint of light indicated that a part of the blade had pierced the top of the man’s skull. He was already dead by the time he crumpled in a heap on the ground, with blood leaking from the wounds to his head and chin.
Kelly spoke for everyone when she uttered the universal response to a situation that could have gone better.

“Shit.”

Mike, not exactly thrilled with the fact that their best source of information on the description of his undead attacker had just killed himself with a cheap knock-off of Sly Stallone’s pig-sticker from those goofy shoot-‘em-up flicks, barely batted an eyelash at the sight of the homeless man crumpled on the ground. It was time to get busy. He’d feel the sting of another unsaved life later. He always did. He choked his emotions back and tended to let them out when no one was around to see how badly the job had gotten to him. Most people who knew him, including those closest to him, tended to regard him as an unfeeling bastard who could look at heaps of dead children and only bother to think about what he wanted on his pizza that night. Only his teammates, especially Kelly, had any idea that the job was already taking a severe psychological toll on him, complete with nights of no sleep and vivid nightmares of all those he couldn’t save when he did manage to sail away to dreamland. He was a sergeant, a team leader. He needed to keep it all in until prying eyes and ears were far away. Then, the emotional deluge would begin. As to more pressing matters, there was a zulu, a zombie loose on the streets of Denver, and he needed to find it and put it down. His other two teammates, a couple of fun-loving self-proclaimed bad-asses named Chris Rowe and Steve Morrison (who everyone called Morris or ‘Mo’ for short…no one ever called him Steve) were already patrolling the area looking for the assailant or any sign of it. No one was seeing home until the walking abomination was taken out, and that could be several hours and several more victims away.

And in any event, Mike had spent all week waiting to catch a documentary on The History Channel about the War of 1812. History, particularly American history, was a subject of much passion for him, and on his own time, either the History Channel or the Military Channel was almost guaranteed to be on. Only an hour earlier, Mike had hoped and prayed and begged every god in human history in alphabetical order that his team wouldn’t get any calls, and that he could get off duty, get home, and put his feet up with a beer in one hand, the remote control in the other, and a well-narrated documentary on the tube. Some undead fuck-nugget taking a bite out a homeless guy who more than likely was an asshole before he was bitten put an end to that. The documentary was first on at 8:00 pm, with an encore at midnight. Mike looked at his watch. It was 10:40 pm.

Fuck.

“Kelly, get on the horn and find out when the doc is getting her ass here. Lieutenant Tomlin, please make sure no one slips past our guys at the barricades. I need another smoke…badly. Once you get an ETA on the doc, call Chris and Mo and find out where the hell they are. I want this walking pus-bag down as soon as possible.” With that, Mike reached into a pocket on his BDUs and pulled out a pack of Camels, lighting one and sucking down the thick gray wind of death with as much pleasure as he could manage. He knew that his habit would probably kill him one day, but when dealing with the undead makes up the first paragraph on your job description, the long-term affects of smoking tend to be regarded as less than important. Kelly had tried telling him (and telling Chris and Mo as well) that smoking was a nasty habit better left to others, and Mike had responded that he didn’t have a smoking habit so much as a smoking hobby. Kelly wasn’t impressed or amused by that remark, even though Chris and Mo thought it was clever and well thought-out.

Mike had finished half of his smoke by the time Kelly had any useful news for him.

“Mike, the Doc is about three minutes out, and Chris and Mo are down around the 16th Street Mall area. Apparently, someone called in a sighting down there, and they’re trying to track the bastard down. Oh, and we have orders to wait for the Doc before going after them.”

“The mall is twenty minutes from here. Where the hell does anyone get the idea that a shuffling pus-bag can get from here to there in forty minutes? Shit, does some retard think these things can fly now? Jumping Jesus Christ. It’s probably some fucking drunk asshole spilling out of a bar and shambling around like a fucking zombie with some paranoid idiot on a cell screaming bloody murder and calling all cars to get the hell over there and blow his brains out. I swear, this job would be so much easier if people weren’t so fucking stupid.”

Around the time that Mike finished his lung rocket, an unmarked gray sedan made it through the crowd of onlookers with an ambulance (or so it appeared to anyone who saw it) right on its tail. Mike let his butt drop to the ground and walked over to his hummer, waiting for the unpleasantness that tended to accompany a case with Doctor Amanda Keitel as lead medical examiner. Of course, it wasn’t the gruesome nature of her work that made it unpleasant, because that he could deal with. It was the fact that Amanda Keitel was a total bitch.
Doctor Keitel’s long, strange trip towards bitchiness probably began at Harvard, where she graduated near the top of her class. She qualified for Harvard Medical School, where she finished closer to the middle and managed to piss off everyone with even the tiniest bit of influence at St. Mary’s Hospital in Boston while she was still a lowly intern. After getting tossed to the medical examiner’s office, where it was believed that she had less of a chance to piss off the dead than the living, she developed a knack for letting her complete lack of sensitivity out for all to see when she informed people of the deaths of their loves ones, and thus got encouraged to hit the road. She wound up at the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office, where she did a first rate job that slightly distracted her coworkers from her fourth rate attitude. Her crack job skills got her a high-paying job at “The Barn” when the Denver Police Department set up its anti-zombie task force, which eventually got the playful euphemism “Special Investigations” when someone decided that the best way for her considerable skills to fully shine was to stick her somewhere that the public was less likely to notice. It did wonders for public relations, but little for the stress levels of the rest of SID. She was blonde, medium height, not unattractive, with Lisa Loeb-style glassed that usually sat on the end of her nose. Now nearing forty, she had still never married or had kids, and few believed that either were in her future.

“Sergeant Rhodes, dare I presume that the dead man with the bite on his arm and the knife through his brain is the reason I was called here?”

Indeed, total bitch.

“Take a wild guess, Doc. Homeless guy, bitten about forty minutes or so ago. One of Tomlin’s uniforms is questioning the witness now. We might get a description of the zulu if the poor sap would stop blubbering for a second or two. I tried to get this guy to describe his attacker, but instead he went ape-shit and offed himself with that big-ass blade jammed through his head. He still had at least two hours to turn, judging by the location and severity of the bite, wouldn’t you say Doc?”

“Sergeant, why not leave the thinking for me, and I’ll let you know if something or someone needs their heads blown off? Thank you.”

Amanda walked into the alley and crouched next to the body, examining the bite wound with gloved hands. She twisted and turned the arm and let it fall to the ground. She got up and turned towards Mike.
“Judging by the level of infection, I’d say he was bitten about forty to fifty minutes ago. Considering the man’s age and general health, I’m guessing that death and reanimation was approximately two hours away.”

God, I hate her.

“And while I’m thinking about it, I think we can rule his death as something other than ‘misadventure.’ I’m going to take a wild shot in the dark and rule it suicide by self-inflicted knife wound to the head. Also, I’m fairly certain that this was, in fact, a zombie bite. Either that, or we’re looking at someone who just randomly bites homeless people on the arm for yucks.” Amanda’s smug tone was enough to make both Mike and Kelly want to strangle her where she was. Although it seemed like a good idea for the sake of all who knew her, their hands were stayed by the volume of paperwork that would inevitably result. Also, killing a doctor for just being a bitch was still a crime in the state of Colorado.

“So, Sergeant, how many homeless in the last two weeks? This would be the fifth?”

“Yep.”

“Mike?” Lieutenant Tomlin came up, acting as though he had just struck gold. “The witness calmed down long enough to give a description.” He took a quick glance at his notepad. “Looks like the undead assailant was male, probably mid-to-late forties, dressed in gray slacks and a white dress shirt with a tie. She wasn’t able to make out much else, since she ran inside her building screaming her ass off. She says that it was around the time that the news was starting that she came outside for a smoke that she saw the zulu biting the screaming homeless guy. That puts it around ten.”

Mike turned to Amanda, with his own smugness neatly displayed across his face. “Thank God you were here, Doc. It takes someone of your advanced level of education to determine the time of infection when every member of SID is trained to do the same damned thing. Please tell me they don’t pay you for this.” Somewhere behind him, a muffled chuckle escaped Kelly’s mouth. She hated Amanda with as much passion as Mike did. She believed that the Doc gave professional women a bad name.

“Well, Sergeant, I’ll have a lot more once I get the stiff back to the Barn’s morgue and do the usual cutting up. I should have everything by…”

Kelly interrupted Amanda with an exited shout. “Mike! I just got off the horn with Chris and Morris. They just checked out that call at the 16th Street Mall. Turns out someone drunk off his ass saw what he thought was a zulu staggering around in the street. They found the so-called zombie. It was just a beered-up college kid who stumbled around and passed out in an alley. No bites. Didn’t think that a zulu could get there in only forty minutes.”

Mike smiled. A twenty minute drive without taking traffic into consideration, and a zombie staggering there in forty minutes when an old man with a walker could outdistance a zombie with a little effort, there was no way. If the call had been legit, and a zombie had been waiting for Chris and Morris, it wouldn’t have been the one that munched the arm of the now-dead homeless man. It would have just been another zombie to kill, with another still staggering around looking for fresh meat. This night just might be easier than he feared.

“Tell those two to get their asses up here. If we get a call, I don’t want to have to wait on them forever. Tell those two circus clowns to use their sirens and lights. I want them here right fucking now.”

Mike continued, turning his attention to his least favorite blonde, bitchy medical examiner on the face of the earth. “Anything else?”

“Nothing I can tell from here. You get everything tomorrow.”

“Look forward to it.”

The so-called ambulance pulled close to the entrance of the alley, while two armed paramedics jumped out, and the body was hauled away in a matter of minutes. From where they were, Mike and Kelly could easily hear the disappointed groans of a crowd that just realized that they came out here for nothing. The press was denied their snapshots of chewed-up victims or zombies with fresh bullet holes in their foreheads. The curious onlookers didn’t get their chance to finally see with their own eyes an undead or a victim, and the conspiracy theorists had to go home without any new bullshit to print in their college newspapers or plaster across their websites. With any luck, if the zombie was found, there wouldn’t be a mob of people without lives to get in the way. Again, in a world that had to acknowledge the existence of zombies, dealing with the living was still the bigger bitch. As the ambulance drove off to the Barn, another team moved in, having spent the whole time in a vehicle that closely resembled a delivery truck. The truck was white, with “Smithson Sterilization Services,” the company that was contracted by the city to clean up the messes that zombies left behind. Three men and one woman jumped out at Kelly’s signal, carrying the usual array of cleaning equipment and supplies. They were at work right away, and would be for at least two hours. They and other companies like them were probably the only ones who were universally thrilled that the zombies had risen and started eating the living. One man’s horrible, lingering death was another’s business opportunity.

Slowly, the crowd started to disperse, vanishing into the night to return to whatever passed for their lives. The witness who took her sweet time coughing up what she saw was allowed to go home after pocketing Lieutenant Tomlin’s card. Soon, Amanda was back in her car, heading off to her twisted lair in the bowels of the Barn, and within a few minutes, most of the police cars had taken off, joining other cars in the search for the lurking freak of nature that chewed on a homeless man. By the time that Chris and Morris’s hummer pulled up, it was only two police cars, Mike and Kelly, and the cleaning crew. By then, it was almost eleven. Considering that a zombie was still unaccounted for, Mike was finally realizing that he just might have to miss out on what was probably going to be a great documentary.

“Hey, Sarge. So, what went down here?” Chris was the first out of the hummer. He was in his late thirties, about the same size as Mike, with a mustache and a smile that seemed to be a permanent resident on his face. On his belt was his baby, a Colt M1911 .45 that he custom-built himself out of parts, and his M21 semi-automatic rifle with the short-range scope was already slung over one shoulder. He was Mike’s best friend in the world.
“Oh, you’re going to love this. That homeless guy with the bite wouldn’t tell us shit. He just jammed his own knife into his brain and crumpled into a dead heap right then and there. You’d think the guy might want a little dignity before the end, but no…had to die as an asshole. Probably was one his whole life.”

Morris chimed in, “What a bitch. If I get bitten, remind me not to be such an asshole.”

Kelly replied, “Are you saying that if a zulu takes a bite out of you, that you’re going to go through an instant personality shift?” The giggles were pretty muted. Everyone was dog-tired.

Officer Steve Morrison had just turned forty earlier that year, and had sixteen years on the force behind him. His age was showing, both in his graying hair and the fact that he was running out of hair to go gray. He was about as fast with a dirty joke as he was with the .40 Sig Sauer he wore on his belt or the Remington 870 shotgun slung across his back. With a long list of departmental medals and letters of commendation behind him, he’d garnered quite a reputation for himself. He’d turned down more than one chance to put on sergeant stripes or go plainclothes, all under the belief that ‘real cops’ get down and dirty with the messy work. His face and voice were well-known in damned near every precinct in Denver, leading Morris to constantly refer to himself as “fucking famous.” Before joining the force, he did a four-year stint in the Army, making him the perfect teammate for the rest of Team Three, since Mike did a hitch in the Navy as an Aviation Electrician’s Mate, while Kelly and Chris both did a hitch in the Air Force, she as a helicopter mechanic, while he did his time in military police. While prior military service was hardly a prerequisite for assignment to the SID, most of the unit’s members had been there, done that.

For the next ten minutes, the four stood around, smoking cigarettes, shooting the shit, and generally talking about anything that didn’t involve the dead, the undead, Amanda Keitel, or anything else unpleasant. It was just passing time until someone called them with a confirmed sighting on the zulu, or they were officially declared off-duty and could leave the whole thing to another team. After all, Mike’s team, Team Three, was one of ten that operated out of the Barn, and just like the other nine, Mike’s team felt like they had to do everything themselves. Just once, Mike would be perfectly okay with someone else taking over to deal with their loose ends, just as they had done so many times for the rest of the SID. Just once, he’s like the brass to say that they’d done their job for the day and someone else would take it from there. Just once…

“Dispatch calling Team Three! We have a Code Yellow! Pick up!”

No such luck.

This time, Mike grabbed the radio mike out of his hummer, not looking forward to the details about to spill out of the other side. “This is Three, go ahead.”

“Madison and Industrial. Confirmed sighting. Cars en route. Get there most ricky-tick.”

“Team Three, let’s get a move on! The Zulu was just sighted at Madison and Industrial. Let’s haul ass!” Within a matter of seconds, the two hummers were tearing ass into the night, green and blue lights flashing, sirens blaring, leaving the two remaining police cars and the people from Smithson Sterilization Services to continue their respective jobs alone.

By the time the two hummers raced the one measly mile to Madison and Industrial, it was about eleven. If Mike was really lucky, he just might get the whole thing wrapped up and catch the better part of that War of 1812 documentary that had dominated more of his thinking that night than zombies or suicidal homeless people with chunks missing from their arms. That a zombie would stagger one mile in about an hour was easily possible, and he silently hoped that all of those onlookers who decided to waste a perfectly good evening waiting for a glimpse of a zombie or a dead man would eventually realize how lucky they were that it didn’t show up at their backs and start chewing before any officer could do anything about it. Mob mentality at its finest.

Even though the distance was only a mile, Mike, with a sense of urgency coming from more than one source, weaved in and out of what little traffic was on the road like a terminally ill stuntman, so much so that Chris and Morris had to struggle to keep up.

Just get home before midnight…that’s all you have to do…get home in an hour. You can do that. Pop the bitch in the head, the meat wagon will show up, no need for an army of cops, no need for Keitel…just one shot, get the bastard to the Barn, and you’re home free.

Mike’s driving was so edge-of-the-seat that Kelly began to seriously consider having an “oh-shit” bar installed. In the time that they’d been partners, both had taken the concept of urban, high-speed driving to unprecedented levels, but this was bordering on warp speed. As Mike cranked the wheel one way then the next, the expression on his face didn’t change one bit. It was a hell of a ride, and Kelly’s only consolation was it was only going to last a mile, which might be all of ten seconds considering Mike’s speed.

No one said anything during the short trip, but as the hummers pulled into the intersection of Madison and Industrial, the four jumped out and the orders were duly barked.

“Kelly, on me! Chris, Mo! Back us up!” He then turned to the officers who had arrived just before him and had already begun sectioning off the area. Fortunately, no press or other onlookers had yet arrived. This time, everyone was locked in their homes, terrified to come out until they were certain that the undead attacker was as dead as nature intended.

In an alley just off the intersection, Mike and Kelly, with Chris and Morris following, finally saw the zombie. It was banging weakly on a garbage dumpster, with dull whimpering coming from the inside. The zombie, although many details were hard to see even in the illumination afforded by the headlights of Mike’s hummer, was dressed in a red tie, gray slacks, and white shirt. It was male, and with that in mind, Mike was unconcerned with trying to determine how old the poor bastard was when he shucked his mortal coil in favor of a rotting skin suit and a craving for human flesh. This was the zulu, no doubt about it, or at least it would have been one hell of a coincidence if it hadn’t been.

At such a close range, Mike and Kelly only had their pistols in their hands, while Chris and Morris were following with their long arms shouldered and ready. Mike cocked the hammer on his .357 as he raised the sights to eye level.

“Hey asshole!”

The zombie turned around. Blood, still wet, covered its mouth and neck, while numerous bite marks were clearly visible on its arms through shredded sleeves. Having noticed new potential sources of human flesh, the zombie began to slowly close the twenty feet between itself and Mike. The zombie barely took three steps before Mike squeezed the trigger, blowing the top half of the zombie’s head clean off, knocking it back with such force that it impacted against the side of the dumpster with a loud bang before falling forward on what remained of its face. It stank like raw fish and fresh shit. Bits of brain and skull were quite visible on the dumpster, while the rest of its brain began slipping out of its destroyed skull to form a sickening pile on the ground. This zombie was clearly not getting up again.

“Clear! Kelly, with me. Chris, hold position. Morris, when Kelly and I lift this lid, have that scatter gun ready to pop!” Mike and Kelly moved to both sides of the dumpster, Mike having to step over his dead handiwork in the process. They lifted the creaking lid, and Morris aimed his shotgun inside, taking his finger off the trigger when he noticed that two young people, a man and a woman, were huddling inside, holding each other, shaking like leaves in a whirlwind.

“No! Don’t!” The woman screamed as she saw the business end of a shotgun aimed at her face.
“They’re alive.” Morris said matter-of-factly, as he slung his shotgun over his shoulder and began to help the terrified couple out. “Chris, it’s okay, they’re just a couple of scared kids. Fucking zombie had them trapped.”
Mike and Kelly let the lid to the dumpster fall, and all three helped the couple out into the intersection, where the street lights could give them a better account of their physical state. “Chris! Get on the horn to the Barn. Get two meat wagons down here, and tell them to haul ass.”

“Two?”

“That’s right, two.” With the added light of the street lamps, Mike, Kelly, and Morris saw what they feared the most in such situations. It was not just fear that caused the two to whimper as they hid in the dumpster from the walking death outside. It was also extreme pain. The man had chunks of flesh missing from blood-soaked arms, while the woman was missing a part of her shoulder so large that a bit of bone was visible, even in the less-than-perfect light, and none of them needed the help of one Amanda Keitel to recognize a bite when they saw one. The three of them laid the couple on the street and backed away. Morris unslung his shotgun, while Mike and Kelly began slowly reaching for their sidearms. Mike, who knew that this was going to be fresh nightmare material for a few nights, did his best to keep his tone professional, which wasn’t easy considering that he was talking to two young people whose life expectancies could be measured in minutes.

“Listen, I’m Sergeant Michael Rhodes, Denver Police, Special Investigations. How long ago did this thing attack you?”

While the young man was still in a fit of whimpering, sounding much like a lonely lost puppy, the woman managed to regain enough of her composure to eek out an teary answer. “Maybe twenty minutes ago. We saw the guy. We didn’t know he was one of them. He tried to see what was wrong with him, but then he bit me! Then he tried…he tried to stop him, and it bit him all over! We ran away! We got in the dumpster, but it kept trying to get us! My fucking god…it just wouldn’t stop! My god, that’s it, isn’t it? We’re going to die, aren’t we?” As her short story ended, she began to cry without any attempt at control. As her crying got louder, so did her companion’s, and the whole scene, a city intersection with flashing lights, a dead zombie, and two young people, covered in their own blood and tears and their terrified wails that seemed to fill the night air, was certain to haunt everyone there for a good long time. It was surreal. It was almost gothic. It was enough to break some people. It was enough to drive a sane person past the brink of madness. Kelly choked back a tear or two of her own, knowing that losing it wouldn’t help anyone. Morris stepped back, with his shotgun at the ready, muttering something to himself that no one else could hear. Chris came back up, calmly informing the others that the meat wagons were on their way as he readied his rifle. Mike just kept his even, professional demeanor.

“Young lady, I’m sorry that this happened. I promise, you won’t become one of them. I won’t let that happen to you. We’re here. We’ll take care of you.”

In as much as no one wanted to become a zombie, few were impressed at the prospect of “being taken care of” by the SID. That only meant one thing. The crying was steadily approaching banshee-level in the few minutes it took before the meat wagons, the ambulances that the SID used to haul dispatched zombies and their victims to the Barn, showed up, lights flashing. Without much in the way of visible emotion, the medics (for want of a better term) got out, and made no attempts to be gentle or sympathetic as they cuffed the couple’s arms behind their backs, slapped them in leg irons, and shoved ball gags in their mouths. Black hoods here strapped over their heads, muffling their terrified shrieks, and they were unceremoniously shoved into the backs of the wagons. The other crew simply zipped the dead zombie into a body bag and was tossed in like a bundle of recycled newspapers. Within three minutes of their arrival, the meat wagons were gone.

Mike, trying with no small amount of effort to hide the emotions welling up inside of him, calmly called out,“Who’s ranking officer?”

A stern-faced, veteran female patrol sergeant came up right away, hand on her Glock pistol, obviously ready to play some greater part in the whole mess then waving traffic away. “Sergeant Bernsen, of the One-Five.”

“Bernsen, call your precinct. Have them send at least six cars, two cops each, on a patrol through this area. Give it a five block radius. Tell them to keep a look-out for anything else. I don’t expect they’ll find anything, but if you see anything that looks like a zombie or some poor schmuck with a piece missing, call it in to the Barn. Team Seven is taking over at midnight.”

“You got it.”

“And another thing, Bernsen. When your precinct sends that patrol out, you and the rest of your people stay here. Keep the traffic away, and just hold the fort until the cleaning crew arrives to wipe up this mess. If any crowd forms, get rid of them. Just tell them that some dumb kid got knifed during a drug deal or some shit. I don’t care, just don’t tell them that a zombie attack happened here. I’ve already been through one circus tonight. Once the cleaning crew starts their work, stay with them until they’re done. Good to go with that?”

“Will do.”

“Good night, Sergeant Bernsen. My team and I are heading back to the Barn.”

The trip back to the Barn was silent as though death itself kept watch, ready to pounce on any attempt at conversation. The meat wagons were already minutes ahead, but Mike driving one hummer and Chris driving the other made no meaningful attempt to catch up. If the young woman was telling the truth, and she had no reason whatsoever to mislead, it would still be awhile before death and reanimation, and it’s not as though anyone on the team was in any hurry to get back to the Barn and do what inevitably would follow. Instead, cigarettes were smoked, lights flashed, and calloused fingers were rubbed through hair. It was not a pleasant ride.

It was a few blocks to Interstate 25 and from there, a few exits and a few more blocks until the Barn, an unofficial name that gave no idea about what purpose the building served or what tended to happen inside. The Barn was officially referred to as the “Special Investigations Division, Main Precinct,” but no one either inside or outside ever called it that, and no one seemed to remember who coined its unofficial name and no one cared. The Barn was built as a six-story police building in the 1950s, but was abandoned when a better and more modern one was built a few blocks away sometime when disco was all the rage. Some new pharmaceutical company bought it, and since such companies tend to like their privacy, they added a cinder block perimeter wall that reached to eye-level with a wrought-iron fence on top that added four more feet of height, with all vehicular access going through a sliding iron and wooden door that a bull elephant on roid rage couldn’t break down if he wanted to. When Regan was in office, the company went under because of one scandal or another, and the building ended up empty with no buyers. After a couple or three decades, the world changed, giving this forgotten building a new lease on life. The first reports of zombie sightings began to come out of Sierra Leone, and a few months after that, the entire world was forced to admit that zombies exist as confirmed sightings were reported in countries that the western world actually cares about.

Denver, like almost all major American cities, began to organize a specially-trained unit within its police department for the specific purpose of investigating and eliminating any zombie activity within its jurisdiction, hence the creation of SID. The building, with its well-designed perimeter and controlled access, was immediately solid-gold real estate, and the city went through no small expense turning it into the new home of their brand-spanking new elite unit. The underground level became the medical examiner’s office, and had from the beginning been the lair of Amanda Keitel, who glided past her considerable staff on snowy-white bitch wings, bossing them around with all the expected irreverence of one who never gets it in the sack. The six floors above ground would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who had ever seen a cop movie or TV show. It was the usual bag of offices, locker rooms, shooting ranges, evidence rooms, interrogation rooms, weapons storage closets, and so on. On the second floor was a series of dorm rooms, and the roof had the expected helipad.

Of course, Amanda Keitel’s dungeon was not the only underground level. Between her lair and the ground floor was the underground parking garage, where more than just parking took place. Near the ass end was a large area sectioned off by a high chain-link fence, behind which were two rooms that resembled the last stop for Russian political prisoners who would walk into such places with a bullet in the back of the head immediately following.

This was not a coincidence.

It was these two rooms, which the SID officially referred to as “Purification Rooms” and unofficially as “Caffeine Closets” (because a trip there was almost guaranteed to lead to sleepless nights), that would soon require the attention of Mike and his team. It was for this reason that his foot was light on the gas, which he tried without success to mentally reconcile with his raging desire to get home and get the History Channel on the tube.
Team Three’s two hummers finally reached the main access gate of the Barn, each driver gave their names, badge numbers, with the countersign to the day’s code word, and seconds later, all four were exiting their rides near the gate to the Caffeine Closets, with the meat wagons and their doomed cargo waiting impatiently.
The first was a “medic” named Ryan Adler, a brawny brown-haired man who made up for his considerable height by being short on attitude, but he had a wife and two children waiting for him at home, and that night, his patience level was starting to plummet as Team Three took their sweet time getting to the issue at hand.
“Looking to make this last all night, Sarge?” Adler asked, with arms folded.

“How long until you deal with your cargo?” Mike replied.

“That’s your job, Sergeant.”

“I’m glad you remember that. Bitch to me when you have to do the real work. Now get the packages into the rooms and make sure the dead zulu gets to Keitel’s dungeon ASAP. Once we’re done, the other two are all hers. Now let’s turn to. I’d like to get the fuck home before I get offered my retirement package.”

Ryan Adler, with his patience level still dropping, did what he was told. The zombie which had caused so much shit for the team and so many others, and lost the top half of its head for its troubles, was tossed onto a gurney and wheeled away to the dungeon, the gurney’s wheels squeaking like a puppy’s chew toy in the mouth of a Bengal tiger. Mike turned his head as the two hooded and bound figures of a young man and woman were half-carried, half-dragged to the rooms for which they were destined the moment they were taken alive with zombie bites. Except for the pay, there wasn’t much about Mike’s job that was pleasant, and out of everything that ever caused him nightmares or sleepless nights, blank stares at work, trembling hands, or dark images staring back at him while he shaved, this was by far the worst. He knew all too well the necessity of this part of the job, but nowhere in his job description did it say that he had to like it.

Still, tonight was not Mike or Kelly’s turns. Chris and Morris had to do the shit job.

“I’m going to go point Percival at the porcelain. Take care of those two while I’m gone. Let’s not drag this shit out any longer than we have to.” Mike hurried off to the crapper while Chris and Morris’s faces began to turn the powdery white that tends to indicate someone about to do something they really don’t want to do but can’t avoid. Kelly, Chris, and Morris putting off this particularly shitty part of the job by making small talk wasn’t what Mike wanted to see as he returned from the urination station.

“What the hell? Is it done yet?”

“Naw, Sarge. We’re going to get to that in…” Morris replied, with no trace of the smile that usually graced his face.

“Get to it when? You think there’s a such thing as working your way up to this shit? Jesus Roy Orbison Christ, if I don’t do the shit, the shit just doesn’t get done. Give me your fucking sidearms.”

“What?” his three teammates answered in unison.

“Unless I developed a speech impediment since I left to take a piss, I’ll assume you heard me the first time. Chris, Morris, your weapons, right fucking now.” With puzzled expressions, Chris and Morris handed over their weapons, with which Mike stormed off to the Caffeine Closets, Chuck Norris style (meaning one in each hand). He stashed Chris’s M1911 in his belt and used his free hand to lift the heavy steel crossbar to one of the rooms. Inside was a cowered figure, with bound legs and hands, curled up in a corner of the ten-by-ten room. He could tell it was the young woman. Not only from the clothes and figure, but from the distinctively female pitch of the whimpering that for all he knew, had continued almost unabated since she crawled into the dumpster forty minutes earlier.

“Young lady, I promised you I wouldn’t let you become one. Every minute we delay means that turning into one becomes more and more likely. Please stand up.” The young woman was too lost in her own doomed world to understand, but instinctively rose and started for the voice, hoping deep within herself that there might be some comfort in the arms of whoever had just spoken to her. It was easier on her than it was on most people who spent their last miserable minutes in the Caffeine Closet. They usually knew what was going to happen and by the time they got there, often began to panic at the certainty of imminent death in a lonely room in a parking garage. This woman, however, had no idea what was to happen, so damaged as she was from being trapped inside a garbage dumpster by a soulless killing machine in human form. She had no idea that Mike was raising Morris’s Sig Sauer in his left hand, had no idea that he aimed at her head, and had no idea that he squeezed the trigger, providing with a 40 caliber round the only comfort it was in his power to provide. She fell immediately, spared the knowledge that she had entered that room to die and the seemingly comforting voice was there to speed her on her way. Mike walked out, putting the Sig Sauer in his belt, and made haste to the next room. This would not be quite so easy on the young man, since the one design flaw in the construction of the Purification Room was the fact that they weren’t totally soundproof.

As Mike lifted the crossbar and walked in, he found the young man, still bound and hooded, but the ball gag had slipped, and much to the horror of his soon-to-be mercy killer, he spoke.

“Hey, what the fuck was that? I heard a gunshot! What happened? Is she…”

If the unfortunate young man had any idea that he was speaking his last words, he might have attempted to find something more profound to say, and although concern for the woman in the next room was admirable, it would have been more so if he had known that it would be the last time he would express concern for anything. But after uttering the word ‘she’ and before he could put voice to the word ‘okay,’ a 45 caliber round from Chris’s Colt went through his head and dropped him, his inquiries concerning the well-being of the young woman remaining unanswered for all time.

Mike left the room with rage on his mind. He came right up to his three teammates, tossing their sidearms at them with little regard for the possibility of a discharge. Fortunately, Chris and Morris caught their weapons easily, holstering them in preparation for the well-deserved ass-chewing that was obviously looming.
Mike turned around to face the medics. It was time for his rage to gain speech.

“Who the hell fixed the ball gag on the male?” After six or seven seconds during which the medics seemed to have better things to do but answer, he asked again, but this time managed to purge all patience from his tone.
“Last time. Which fucking retard amongst you forgot how to slap a simple ball bag on a victim?” This time, one shy medic slowly raised his hand. He was not lacking in experience, meaning that being new on the job would not serve as the bullshit excuse. Instead, he was one of the first paramedics hired from the private sector into the Barn. He had dealt with his share of victims, and just this once, suffered from the one occupational hazard that will kill as quickly as inexperience.

Overconfidence.

The medic almost cowered when Mike grabbed the front of his shirt and yanked him close. “This is your first and final warning, dipshit. If you ever fail to restrain a victim in appropriate fashion as determined by SID policy, I’m going to drag your ass in front of the captain after I administer your first-class beating. If you think I’m exaggerating or just trying to scare you with hollow threats, I fucking dare you to test me. You getting me, genius?”

“Yes…Sarge.”

By this time, the other medics were returning from their little delivery to Keitel’s lair, arriving back at the garage in just enough time to have Mike in their faces.

“All right, dumbasses. There’re two more chunks of meat for the dungeon. Get your asses in gear and get on it. And this time, make sure maintenance gets down here right away. We have two rooms with blood and brains that need cleaning. They don’t get paid to watch infomercials.”

It was Ryan Adler who replied. “Okay, sure. We’re on it.”

But it seemed to Mike that things weren’t happening at the pace he would have preferred. The medics were moving as though they had all night, and were about to learn that Mike's patience, while not in abundance in the best of times, had completely run out.

“I didn’t say when you fucking felt like it! Move! For the love of God, have you forgotten what just happened? Take those poor kids the fuck out of there! Would you want to be left curled up on the floor of those death chambers with your brains on the back of your shirt? For fuck’s sake, hurry your asses up!” No one bothered to contest him. Instead, he heard the usual half-assed remarks of compliance, and everyone turned to their jobs with all possible haste. Mike then decided to cap his unpleasant shift with a little chat with his team.

“Enough of this shit, people. You all should damn well know by now that there’s no easy way to do this shit. You do it and deal with it, end of fucking story. No one ever said it would be easy, and I’m telling you right now that when it’s time to suck it up, you suck it up.” The sarcasm in Mike’s voice now reached critical mass.

“Congratulations, Chris…Morris. You have terminated the victims in accordance with the policies of the Special Investigations Division, Denver fucking Police Department. You guys now have the pleasure of going to the clipboard and signing out their times of termination. The time is…”

Holy fucking Mary Mother of shit!

It was 12:10 am.

“Well, I hope we’re all happy! I goddamned missed it! Shit!” Mike stormed off to his hummer, grabbed his carbine, and headed towards the main doors that lead into the Barn proper, but still managed to turn around and say, “Oh, and…god job, tonight…guys. Get some sleep. Kelly, I’ll see you outside.” And with that, he vanished inside, off the locker rooms and then for home.

Chris finally spoke. “Jesus, what the hell is up his ass?”

Kelly answered, “Oh, you wouldn’t believe it, but he’s waited all week to catch a documentary on the History Channel. Something about the War of 1812. It started ten minutes ago. He’s already pretty much missed it.”

Morris, with his characteristic irreverence, just tossed out, “Mike needs to get laid like a crackhead needs to score rock.”

No one disagreed.

It was about a half an hour later that Kelly, now dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, and a black tank top, with her Browning Hi-Power on her hip, finally made it to the parking lot where Mike waited for her. He had also changed, leaving his SWAT gear in the locker room, and now leaned against the front wall of the building wearing an open short-sleeved black shirt with a black Ted Nugent t-shirt underneath, with camouflaged BDU pants, and his .357 revolver on the right side of his belt, still in its cross-draw holster. His head was down, as though wrestling with something in his mind (which of course, he was), while a burning cigarette dangled from his mouth. His keys were already in his hand. He didn’t notice Kelly until she spoke.

“Shit day, huh?”

Mike popped back into reality as though he had just woken from a coma. “I admire your gift for understatement. This day is for the books. A long, fucked-up, shitty ass book.”

“While I’m thinking about it, what was that thing with the ball gag? I heard you chewing out the medics over something like that.”

“It was the guy we brought in. His gag slipped. He was talking when I plugged him. He heard the shot from the next room. He was asking about the chick. I had already shot her. His last words were wondering if she was all right. I’m guessing they were boyfriend and girlfriend or something. Fuck, he died without knowing what had happened. He didn’t even know that she was dead. He didn’t get a chance to say goodbye or any such thing. Poor bastard. This one’s going to stick with me for a while. The chick didn’t even know what I was about to do. She just got up and started towards me, like she was in a trance or something. But she was still alive. She wasn’t one of them yet. I promised her she wouldn’t become one. I guess I kept that promise. She was almost shell shocked or something. I guess that’s the only easy way to take it if you end up in that fucking room.”

“Mike, why did you shoot them yourself? It was Chris and Morris’s turn. It wasn’t really because they were taking their time, was it? Those two still had a while before they would have died and come back.” Kelly thought for a bit, and went ahead and answered her own question with another question.

“Why do you put so much of this shit on yourself?”

“Kelly, every night I hit the sack, either I don’t sleep or I have these messed up dreams about the job. I see the people we couldn’t save. I see them…the zombies. I see shit that might happen one day; you and Morris and Chris, staggering around, with bites all over you, and me with a gun, knowing what I have to do. I can’t remember when I slept well. I really can’t. This whole thing is already regally fucking up my mind. You guys don’t need that shit. You just don’t.”

“Mike, we’re a team, and you and I are partners. We’re supposed to look after each other. We’re supposed to back each other up. You can’t keep doing this. You can’t act like you have to do all the suffering for us. There’s plenty to go around, man. You don’t have to keep falling on your sword or you’re going to eat your six-gun one day, and I promise you, all that insanity you tried to spare us will hit us like a freaking bomb. I’m your friend, and I’m telling you this because I won’t see you go down that road. We’re all in this mess together.”

“Still, I wear the sergeant stripes, I wear the burden. That’s just the way it is. The three of you have a fighting chance of getting through this whole thing with your skin still attached and your minds still functioning. I think that I’m headed for a crash. I just don’t need you all following me.”

“Mike, you’re our team leader. You’re our friend. Wherever you go, we follow, even if the end is a crappy one. That’s what friends do. We don’t watch like a spectator while one of us falls apart.”

Mike got the point, and although he gave a half-hearted agreement to her logic, inside he still knew that he was going to have a very bad mental end and he was going to spare them that to his dying breath, whether they liked it or not. She could talk all day about what friends do, but he knew a thing or two more than she did about what leaders do. But, as that subject waned, and the need to lighten up a dark mood came, he let her in on a major contribution to his mood.

“It’s that documentary I wanted to catch tonight. It started forty minutes ago. Shit, I just wanted to prop my feet up with a beer and not think about the dead and undead for a while. You know how I am when it comes to history, Kelly. All I wanted was to watch it and go to sleep. I guess I was asking too much of this fucking world.”

“Mike, when are you going to learn how to program your VCR? Ever?”

“Are you kidding? It took damn near a week just to get it out of the box.”

“Well, consider yourself lucky that I can program mine. Right about now, that precious piece of history you’ve been yapping about all week is being recorded. Remind me, and I’ll get you the tape soon. So, who’s your buddy, who’s your pal?”

“Kelly, you’re the most awesome chick on the face of the fucking earth.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah?”

“You need to get laid.”