Free Quarantined by Joe McKinney

floor.”
    “True,” he said. “It narrows the field at least.”
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Chapter 10
    Ground zero, the GZ.
    All the homes in the GZ were vacant and scrawled with graffiti. The yards were overgrown with barnyard grass and sunflowers. Hardly a window anywhere was left unbroken. Morning sunlight lanced through the oak trees. Startled pigeons erupted from a hole in a nearby roof.
    Those streets felt haunted. Death seemed to leer out at us from the shadows.
    Chunk and I felt like infidels, drifting through the quiet streets where some terrible, flesh-consuming religion was born.
    The Metropolitan Health District required all personnel entering the GZ to wear protective clothing. Chunk and I wore gray hooded plastic jumpsuits that crinkled when we walked and trapped heat close to our bodies. Even before we stepped out of the car, sweat soaked through our clothes. Our breathing sounded labored and difficult through the gas masks, even though it really wasn’t. I learned to get used to the gas mask early on.
    Outside the car, the MHD had posted orange warning handbills on every light pole and abandoned car in sight, many of the bills so sun-bleached they appeared almost white.
    We had no plan other than to systematically explore every street in the five square miles around the Produce Terminal.
    It turned out to be a more difficult task than we’d thought. Long ago, perhaps in the twenties or thirties, judging by some of the houses we saw, the area around the Produce Terminal had been quite nice. We saw quite a few large, two story Queen Anne-style homes that had fallen into tragic disrepair and had since been carved up into multiple apartments, and an equal number of one story bungalow and Craftsman-style homes. And in between those—stuffed in, really—were an unbelievably large number of leaning shacks and add on sheds that made the place look like a hive. Overgrown alleys crisscrossed every street, and in some places the vegetation was so thick you could barely tell there were homes hiding behind it.
    We went slowly, and wound through street after street, looking for anything unusual.
    “Look at that,” Chunk said, and pointed at a street sign swaying gently in the breeze from an overhead stop light cable.
    The fifteen hundred block of Matamoras Street, I read, and a knot formed in my throat.
    That was the real GZ, the very street upon which H2N2 found its first victims. Somewhere down that street was the home of Mrs. Villarreal, whose chickens were San Antonio’s equivalent of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
    Chunk slowed the car to a crawl and we turned down Matamoras, both of us tense, alert, and more than a little frightened.
    Suddenly Chunk stopped the car—harder than he needed to. I almost went into the windshield.
    I lurched forward, my hand on the dashboard to stop my momentum.
    “You see that?” he asked.
    Ahead of us, parked in the grass in the shade of two large oak trees, was an old EMS wagon. The Fire Department’s decals had been peeled off, though their outline remained.
Converted, by the looks of it.
    “Do you think it might have been left here?” I asked him. It wouldn’t be the only costly piece of City equipment abandoned by the roadside in the early days of the war against H2N2.
    “I don’t think so,” he said. “Let’s go take a look.”
    We parked and approached the ambulance on foot. Chunk checked the cab while I checked the side and back doors.
    “Locked,” he said.
    “Yeah. Back here, too.”
    “Can you see in the windows?”
    I tried to look through the vent windows in the back door, but my gas mask made it hard for me to get a good angle.
    Chunk was trying to look through the side windows. I turned around to tell him I couldn’t see anything, when I saw a man walking towards us from between two houses. He was dressed in the same kind of suit and mask we wore, though his fit better. He carried two dead chickens in his left hand, holding the dead birds by the feet. There was a pistol in a