Officer Barcomb vs. The Undead (Book 1) Read online

  The man was a foot away when Barcomb fired two rounds to the man’s chest, sinking him. Barcomb turned to Munday.

  “What the fuck is going on, Munday?”

  At that moment the lull in conversation was filled by noise from the TV set. An attractive female reporter stood outside the Prudential Center, home of the New Jersey Devils in Newark, as thousands upon thousands of people ran screaming from the stadium. She shouted over the noise, but only a few words made it through: “cannibals”, “insane”, “stay inside”. Barcomb, Munday and Dutroux watched as the crowds swept over the reporter and she and the camera were crushed in the panic. The dropped camera froze with an image of her screaming face amid a sea of panicked people’s feet stepping on her head and back, crushing her to death.

  The dead man in the hallway stood up.

  Barcomb turned and looked. “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” he said.

  He raised his weapon and fired again.

  Chest shot.

  The man kept coming.

  Another shot to the chest didn’t drop him. He kept coming.

  A gunshot sounded behind Barcomb and the dead man’s head exploded, the broken egg shells of his skull embedding into the walls, his brains sliding silently to the floor. Dutroux stood behind Barcomb with his Desert Eagle raised.

  “That seems to work,” Dutroux said.

  Barcomb scowled at him. Down the hall, they could see the stairwell door opening slowly as ravenous, blood-soaked people fought one another to get through. They shrieked and moaned and gasped, all language replaced by hunger and rage.

  “You’re gonna need my help if you’re gonna get out of here alive,” Dutroux said.

  Reyes lay on the floor with his windpipe torn out of his neck, the blood pooling up around his dead body.

  Barcomb looked at Reyes and then back to the on-coming crowd of hysterical maniacs. They clawed at one another to get past. Barcomb had never seen anything like it.

  Barcomb, Munday and Dutroux checked their ammo.

  Reyes stood up behind them.

  Chapter 2: Dead, But Not

  “What the holy fuck is going on?” Barcomb said as the hallway was filled with crazy people fighting with one another to get through to the apartment. They didn’t punch, he noticed, not like regular people. They clawed and bit each other like rabid dogs. They tore at each other. Barcomb had never seen anything like it. Dutroux’s mouth was hanging open in disbelief.

  “I knew I should’ve stayed in Brooklyn,” Dutroux said. “Motherfuckers there be crazy, but this is some other shit!”

  Barcomb moved fast and barricaded the doorway, locking the screen and propping everything up with a set of drawers and a heavy chair. He turned and saw Reyes standing behind Dutroux. Reyes’s head was hanging down, limp. Blood still poured from his neck. Dutroux heard the splashing as Reyes’s blood hit the floor and he froze. Reyes looked up and bared his teeth. Barcomb looked at Reyes closely. He couldn’t see anything of the guy he once knew in there. The eyes still had that dull, matte look, like a corpse or a shark. The eyeballs didn’t move; the entire head moved instead, making Reyes look almost drunk.

  Reyes lunged for Dutroux.

  Barcomb shot Reyes through the eye, sending him slamming back down to the floor.

  Dutroux took a deep breath.

  Reyes lay there bleeding from another part of his body now.

  “He was dead,” Barcomb said. “Dead as I’ve ever seen anyone.”

  “That’s what I was sayin’, homes,” Dutroux said. “They don’t go down. These some undead motherfuckers. That headshot seemed to do the fuckin’ trick though. Shit.”

  Barcomb pulled up his radio. “Ten-thirty-three over at Reilly-Russell. Ten-thirty-three. Immediate assistance. Officer down. Officer down. You catching me?”

  The silence seemed to last forever.

  “Ten-thirty-three at Reilly-Russell,” Barcomb said. “We’re in some real shit over here. Come in.”

  “Negative, Barcomb,” came the response. “We got riots and murders all over the city. There’s no-one left to send.”

  “Say that again,” Barcomb said.

  “There’s not enough cops to go around. You’re on your own, Darren. Stay safe.”

  Barcomb lowered his radio and looked the apartment door. It was starting to give way to the pressure of the undead beyond, the wood buckling and starting to splinter.

  “Motherfuckers,” Dutroux said.

  Munday was over at the window, her hand on her mouth and almost a tear in her eye. She took a breath and said, “Barcomb, you’re gonna want to see this.”

  Barcomb stepped over the slimy intestines and half-eaten faces of Dutroux’s men to get to the window. What he saw outside made him mouth the word “Motherfucker.”

  Elizabeth burned. Her people were tearing each other apart with their bare hands. Some leapt from apartment buildings to their deaths. Some tried to escape in their cars and were bogged down in the undead before being devoured. In the distance, the airport was ablaze. Two airliners met in the sky in an enormous explosion over City Hall and showered Elizabeth with flaming wreckage and the toasted body parts of five hundred or so people.

  “The whole world has gone to shit,” Barcomb said.

  “What are we gonna do?” Munday asked. Dutroux walked over and saw the chaos outside.

  Dutroux had nothing to say.

  Barcomb looked at Dutroux as he spoke to Munday: “What the fuck do we do with this scumbag, now, do you think?”

  “Shit is fucked. You need me, homes,” Dutroux said.

  Barcomb punched Dutroux in the face, slamming the back of his head against the wall, and took his weapon.

  “Come on, man!” Dutroux said, his eyes tearing up and his breathing erratic. “You guys is fucked without me, homes. You’re as dead as your friend there!”

  Barcomb squinted at him and gritted his teeth. He dropped him to the floor and said, “You’re right. I need you.” He handed Dutroux his Desert Eagle. “You better hope I keep on needing you for some time, because the second I don’t I’m gonna feed you to these crazy bastards.”

  The door caved and the undead began to pour into the room. They looked different in their general appearance - crack addicts, prostitutes, and a pizza delivery boy - but they all shared that hungry shark look in their eyes. They were different, but the same, like a colony of ants all driven by one purpose: to destroy.

  Opening the window, Barcomb swung a leg out and looked down. It was a big drop. He barked orders at Munday: “I’m heading into the room below. I’ll clear it while you watch Dutroux. Send him down next, then you. It’s a small drop, but we can do it. There’s too many up here.”

  Munday fired a couple of rounds into one of the undead who made it past the barricade, the bullets taking chunks from the person’s head until he collapsed in a heap. The sight of blood seemed to make the others even more frenzied.

  “This is nuts, yo,” Dutroux said, looking out the window. “I can’t let go and grab that next shit.”

  “If you don’t, it’s a long way down.”

  Barcomb holstered his weapon and stretched his fingers out and back in, looking down at the window ledge below which he had to grab onto.

  This isn’t exactly how I expected today to go, Barcomb thought.

  He took two deep breaths, looked up at Munday unloading her glock into the swarm of the undead trying to get through the door and realized he didn’t have time for a third. He jumped.

  He felt the air rush by his face and the felt the impact of the window ledge beneath knock the wind out of him. He grabbed onto the inside of the window frame. It was mercifully open. He felt his grip loosening and scrambled up, pushing his feet against the wall. Within moments he had pulled himself inside and rolled over onto his back and drawn his glock. The apartment was empty except for a mattress on the floor, a TV on a crate and empty vodka bottles.

  “Come on down!” Barcomb shouted up. He stood by the window as Dutroux dangled
his legs from above.

  “Don’t you let me fuckin’ drop!” Dutroux shouted. He let go. “Shiiiit!”

  Dutroux hit the window ledge chin-first and bounced back. Barcomb grabbed him by his shirt and then his wrist, but Dutroux was too heavy. Dutroux flapped around and squealed.

  “Don’t you fuckin’ let go of me, motherfucker!” he shouted.

  Barcomb felt his grip failing as Dutroux’s weight was pulling him out of the window. He heard Munday firing upstairs, shouting about ammunition.

  “Grab the next ledge!” Barcomb shouted.

  “What?!” Dutroux screamed.

  “The next ledge down! Fuckin’ grab that one, you fat sack of shit! Three, two-”

  “Don’t you-”

  “One!”

  Barcomb let go of Dutroux and he fell screaming to the floor below. He hit the window ledge and clung on for his life. He hung there kicking his legs frantically before finally pulling himself up. Barcomb heard glass break and Dutroux disappeared through the window.

  Fuck, Barcomb thought. I’m not losing this prick.

  “Come on down!” Barcomb shouted at Munday.

  A body flew through the air past the window at speed, landing on the concrete below in a huge splash of dark blood. Barcomb felt a surge of instant panic and looked down.

  It was one of the undead.

  Munday swung her legs down and then dropped. Barcomb caught her and pulled her inside, his hands on her ass, and they both landed on their backs inside the room. She was as firm as she looked, he thought. No wonder the guys at the station all tried to land her.

  “You get a good feel?” she said, adjusting her tactical vest.

  “Saved your life, didn’t I?” Barcomb said. “Let’s go find Dutroux. The fat fuck dropped an extra floor.”

  “Maybe you should’ve grabbed his ass?” Munday said with a smile.

  *

  The corridors of the fifth floor pounded with the noise of the undead masses upstairs. They screamed and screeched and bounced off the walls as if completely possessed. Barcomb and Munday moved quietly towards the stairwell, their boots squelching in the carpet wet and black with blood.

  They must’ve taken the whole building, Barcomb thought. Where the hell did they all come from?

  As if reading his mind, Munday whispered, “They must’ve all been dead before we even got here.”

  Barcomb realized something. “The drug buy must’ve been a trap,” he said. “Hell House is owned by Dutroux. All his men and their families live here. The supplier must’ve been a competitor, taken everyone out during the exchange.”

  “Taken out everyone?”

  “Maybe not, but enough of them must’ve died to get a couple of these undead fucks up and running. Enough to make sure everyone had a real shitty day.”

  “Whoever that supplier was, he chose a bad day to stage a massacre.”

  “Yeah,” Barcomb said. “No fuckin’ shit.”

  They moved in and out of the shadows created in the hallway by the broken lighting. Apartment doors had been left open. Barcomb glimpsed broken furniture, bloodied walls, and empty cribs. A scream from the stairwell sent Barcomb and Munday running for it.

  Dutroux was pistol-whipping an undead attacker over and over. “Fuck off me!” he screamed, over and over.

  Barcomb nailed him with a headshot and Dutroux’s mouth was suddenly full of hot brains and sharp skull fragments. He pushed the corpse off and spit everything out, rubbing his tongue on his shirt to get rid of the foul, metallic taste. He scowled at Barcomb.

  “You’re welcome,” Barcomb said.

  Their voices echoed in the scum-encrusted stairwell and Barcomb was conscious that the others might follow the sound of the gunshot.

  “We better get out of here,” Munday said.

  “Come on, baby,” Dutroux said, moving to leave. “I know a place.”

  Barcomb slammed Dutroux’s back to the wall with one hand and shoved the barrel of his glock to his cheek. “Where do you know?”

  “A place, man! Come on!”

  “You remember me,” Barcomb said. “And you must remember my old partner.”

  “Look, motherfucker! That shit was just business! That’s all! I did him quick!”

  “Barcomb, we need to get-” Munday began.

  “Business?” Barcomb said. “You put his head in a box and send it to Infernal Affairs. What sort of business is that?”

  Dutroux cracked a smile: “Fed Ex?”

  Barcomb shattered his nose with the butt of his weapon.

  “Motherfucker!”

  Barcomb dragged him back to his feet and got real close. “Now, you’re out of ammo, you piece of shit, and you ain’t got nothing else to help us through this. I could kill you right now,” Barcomb said. “Say something to stop me. What place do you know?”

  “In the hills, homes.” Dutroux tried to wipe blood from his nose. Barcomb gave the back of his head a slam against the wall. “Shit, man! It’s not my place, OK? I know the guy. It’s like a fuckin’ fortress up there, I swear to God, man.”

  “Who? Give me a name.”

  “Look, man, this fuckin’ guy. You won’t know who the fuck I’m-”

  Barcomb slammed Dutroux’s head against the wall again.

  “Torrento, man! Shit! His name’s Torrento!” Dutroux tried to hold his aching head and Barcomb knocked his hand away. “He’s big time, man. This motherfucker, he makes my shit look like nothin’. I put your partner’s head in a box? Big fuckin’ deal. He’d send you the rest piece by piece and, if he fuckin’ felt like it, he do the entire family like that, too. He’s into some real fuckin’ Columbian-style shit, homes. But it’s like a motherfuckin’ fortress up there. I know the guy. He’s a fuckin’ psycho, but - you know - he likes me. I can get you in, no problem.”

  “Where does this Torrento guy live?”

  “I ain’t stupid, man,” Dutroux laughed. “I tell you that, I’m as good as dead. No fuckin’ way, homes.”

  The stairwell door above banged open. Munday grabbed Barcomb by the shoulder. “Barcomb,” she said. “We gotta get the fuck out of here right fuckin’ now. Let’s go.”

  Barcomb looked back at Dutroux: “You just made yourself useful again.” Barcomb took out his cuffs and stuck them on him. “You try to run, I’ll cut you in half.”

  Chapter 3: The Competition

  They reached the ground floor quickly with Barcomb on point and Munday pulling Dutroux along at the rear. Barcomb yanked the fire exit open and looked around. The street was full of people screaming and the undead shrieking. Cars had crashed. Plane parts had fallen from the sky. People begged for death as they were being eaten alive by their friends, family and neighbors. Blood flowed in the gutter.

  “The back is safer,” Barcomb said. “The way we came in. We get back to the car.” He looked at Munday: “Don’t fire unless you really have to. Low profile. Got me?”

  Munday nodded.

  Dutroux looked scared. “What do you think started this shit?” he said. “You think it’s some kinda punishment?”

  “Call it what you want,” Barcomb said. “I’m surviving this shit, wherever it came from. I got too much to live for.”

  Barcomb looked around, checked his mag, and then nodded.

  “We go now,” he said.

  Moving swiftly through the yard, they weaved between the burnt out cars and abandoned shopping carts. When the ground gave way beneath Barcomb, he landed hard on his arm. He felt something wrap itself around his ankle and turned himself around to look. An almost completely rotted corpse, its flesh green and gray and almost dripping off its bones, had hold of Barcomb and was tearing at his pants. Barcomb took a moment to realize what he was looking at, to comprehend it. This corpse was years-dead, and still it hungered.

  Barcomb kicked at it and a cloud of dried blood and gray brain slime erupted as the top half of its head broke completely free and it slumped still half-buried in the ground. Barcomb looked up at Dutroux, who hadn
’t moved a muscle to help. “What the fuck is this? This is a graveyard?” Barcomb said.

  Dutroux shrugged. “When we don’t feel like going to the bay, we just bury my competition in here.”

  Six different sets of skeletal hands clawed up through the dirt and grasped at the night air. “Business must be booming,” Barcomb said.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Barcomb saw much more freshly dead person. He raised his gun and looked down its sights. It was a woman, all fucked up. Blood coated her short shorts and her day-glow tube top. She was a prostitute. Her head was dangling almost free from her neck. She’d been done with an axe, from the look of it. The head dangled almost completely sideways, only hanging on by a few shreds of flesh. The body ambled slowly forwards towards Barcomb. Barcomb turned his head to get a better look at the face and immediately recognized her.

  It was Rhona, his informant.

  “What the shit…” he said, trailing off, lowering his gun. He took a moment, and then anger rose up inside him and he looked at Dutroux. He drew his gun on him.

  “Wait!” Dutroux screamed. “I didn’t do that shit!”

  Barcomb pinned Dutroux to the floor and pushed his gun barrel into his mouth. Dutroux tried to speak through it, but it was too muffled. He just got spit all over the gun.

  “You fuckin’ scumbag, I should’ve shot you the second I laid eyes on you.”

  Dutroux kept trying to speak.

  Barcomb took his gun out of Dutroux’s mouth, turned and shot Rhona in the face. She fell in a heap.

  “That wasn’t me, man!” Dutroux shouted. “That was my competitor, homes! I swear to God! Those motherfuckers, they came in here and they fucked everything up. They couldn’t have a better time to kill all my boys, because now the motherfuckers are crazy cannibal undead shit.”

  “What happened?” Barcomb growled, his hand on Dutroux’s throat.

  “It was just a buy, man. That’s all. Wasn’t even a big one. These fuckin’ guys show up I ain’t seen before, talking all kinds of bullshit. They got all their shit up in my place, then they pulled and started massacring motherfuckers. Some senseless shit, man. And one of those motherfuckers had an axe, man, I’m telling you.”