Apocalypse of the Dead. Joe Mckinney
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APOCALYPSE of the DEAD
JOE MCKINNEY
PINNACLE BOOKS
KENSINGTON PUBLISHING CORP.
All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.
For Clay McKinney and David Snell.
Thanks for making it happen.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We’re about to take a long walk together through the wasteland, but before we get started I want to take a moment to thank a few people who deserve a lot more than the mere mention I’m about to give them. No book is ever a solo journey, and this one was no exception. These kind folks helped me get from beginning to end:
Jacob Kier, David Snell, Arthur Casas, Jim Donovan, Gary Goldstein, Lisa Morton, David Wellington, Brian Keene, Kevin Luzius, Amy Grech, Bruce Boston, Marge Simon, Mitchel Whitington, Michelle McCrary, Tobey Crockett, Mark Onspaugh, Mark Kolodziejski, Michael McCarty, Lee Thomas, Charlie Delgado, Michael Starnes, Adam Zeldes, Donald Strader, Gabrielle Faust, Shawn and Grady Hartman, Joe and Jennifer McKinney, Alexander Devora, Tiffany and Clay McKinney, Thomas McAuley, Beckie Ugolini, Caren Creech, Joel Sutherland, Harry Shannon, Kim Paffenroth, Matt Staggs, Angie Hawkes, Chris Fulbright, Greg Lamberson, Corey Mitchell, Michelle McKee, Ray Castillo, A. Lee Martinez, John Picacio, Sanford Allen, Matt Louis, Norman Rubenstein, Richard Dean Starr, Michelle Mondo, David Pruitt, Steven Wedel, John Joseph Adams, Nate Kenyon, Bev Vincent, Brian Freeman, Louise Bohmer, Weston Ochse, Judy Comeau, Graeme Flory, Fran Fiel, and Gene O’Neill.
And, as always, to my lovely wife, Kristina, and my daughters, Elena and Brenna, who make this a world worth living in.
They asked him, then, whether to live or die was a matter of his own sovereign will and pleasure. He answered, certainly. In a word, it was Queequeg’s conceit, that if a man made up his mind to live, mere sickness could not kill him: nothing but a whale, or a gale, or some violent, ungovernable, unintelligent destroyer of that sort.
—HERMAN MELVILLE
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER 1
Down there in the ruins it was low tide. Galveston Bay had receded, leaving the wreckage of South Houston’s refineries and trailer parks up to their waists in black water. Moving over the destruction at eight hundred feet in a Schweizer 300, the thropping of the helicopter’s rotors echoing in his ears, Michael Barnes scanned the flooded ruins for movement. The Schweizer was little more than a pair of lawn chairs strapped to an engine, but its wide-open bubble cockpit offered an unobstructed view of what had been, before Hurricane Mardell ripped the skin off the city, a vast cluster of tankers and docks and refineries and arterial bayous, the breadbasket of America’s domestic oil and gas industry. Now the world below Michael Barnes’s helicopter looked like a junkyard that had tumbled down a staircase.
Flying over the flooded city, Barnes remembered what it was like after the storm, all those bodies floating in the streets, how they had bloated and baked in the sun. He remembered the chemical fires from the South Houston refineries turning the sky an angry red. A green, iridescent chemical scum had coated the floodwaters, making it shimmer like it was alive. That mixture of rotting flesh and chemicals had produced a stench that even now had the power to raise the bile in his throat.
What he didn’t know—what nobody knew, at the time—was the awful alchemy that was taking place beneath the floodwaters, where a new virus was forming, one capable of turning the living into something that was neither living nor dead, but somewhere in between.
Before the storm, Barnes had been a helicopter pilot for the Houston Police Department. Grounded by the weather, he’d been temporarily reassigned to East Houston, down around the Galena Park area, where the seasonal floods were traditionally the worst. The morning after the storm, he’d climbed into a bass boat with four other officers and started looking for survivors.
Everywhere he looked, people moved and acted like they’d suddenly been transported to the face of the moon. Their clothes were torn to rags, their faces glazed over with exhaustion and confusion. Barnes and his men didn’t recognize the first zombies they encountered because they looked like everybody else. They moved like drunks. They waded through the trash-strewn water, stumbling toward the rescue boats, their hands outstretched like they were begging to be pulled aboard.
The city turned into a slaughterhouse. Cops, firefighters, National Guardsmen, and Red Cross volunteers went in thinking they’d be saving lives but emerged as zombies, spreading the infection throughout the city. Barnes considered himself lucky to have escaped. When the military sealed off the Gulf Coast, they’d trapped hundreds of thousands of uninfected people inside the wall with the zombies.