Free Apocalypse Of The Dead by Joe McKinney Page A

zombies clustered around the doorway across the street. “Look at them over there,” he said. “Why are they doing that?”
    The tide was starting to ebb again, and most of the zombies were only up to their knees in water. They were all at a fairly advanced stage in the infection. Their skin was gray and leprous, open sores on their arms and neck and face, but they moved with a confidence that the more freshly turned Stage One and Stage Two zombies couldn’t match.
    Beside him, Barnes studied the crowd. He was frowning. He pulled himself up and peered over the side of the building at the group that was gathering around the door to their own building.
    “How long have they been there?” he asked.
    “I don’t know,” Richardson said. “I just saw them.”
    “Shit,” Barnes muttered.
    “What is it?”
    “They’re getting ready to make entry,” Barnes said. “We’re gonna have company pretty soon.”
    “What do you mean? How can you tell?”
    Barnes pointed at the zombies out in the street. “I thought you went through the Shreveport School.”
    “Well, I—”
    Barnes cut him off with a wave of his hand. “You see those zombies there? The ones walking there? If you watch them long enough, you’ll notice that they’re circling the building. The same ones have been doing it all morning, making that god-awful racket. These others have broken away from the main group, though. They’ve given up trying to flush us out. They’re coming in to get us. Those ones over there, they’ve probably trapped something inside that building. A dog, maybe. There’s still lots of dogs around here.”
    Richardson was shocked.
    “You’re serious? They’re capable of that kind of cognition? They can set up a diversion?”
    “Of course,” Barnes said. “They’ll fuck you up if you’re not careful. Bubbas like these guys can do basic problem solving. They can open doors and crawl through windows and hunt in packs. I watched four of ’em trap a raccoon once. I don’t know if you ever tried to catch a raccoon, but it ain’t easy.”
    “You call them Bubbas?”
    “Stage Three zombies, like those guys. They’re not real bright, but they’re bright enough to get the job done.”
    Richardson shook his head in amazement. He’d heard rumors that some of the Stage Three zombies had limited cognition. At Shreveport, they told him some of the more advanced zombies could respond to their names or cooperate on kills, that kind of thing. But he hadn’t believed those rumors. It seemed more like wishful thinking from the growing sector of the American public that wanted the government to go in and try to administer a cure for the necrosis filovirus, even if that meant risking the quarantine.
    Richardson had seen it before with Dr. Sylvia Carnes’s expedition into San Antonio. She’d taken twenty-eight college kids, all of them members of the University of Texas at Austin’s Chapter of Ethical Treatment for the Infected, into the quarantine zone, and gotten most of them killed in the process. Richardson had been along as an embedded reporter on that disastrous trip, and was one of three to make it out of San Antonio alive. It was there he’d solidified his opinion that the infected were beyond help. But seeing the infected like this complicated things.
    “So what are we going to do?” he said to Barnes.
    “We’re gonna need to get out of here. You ready to move?”
    There was a loud crash from somewhere downstairs.
    “What was that?”
    “Shit,” Barnes said. His rifle was leaning against the wall next to the stairwell door. He ran over and picked it up, ejected the magazine, checked it, slapped it back in. “How you doin’ for ammo?”
    “I only fired twice.”
    “Okay, good.”
    Barnes leaned against the door, listening. Even from where he stood, Richardson could hear moans inside the building below them. Something was crashing around inside the stairwell, making its way up.
    Barnes looked back to Richardson.