peppering Skye. She didn’t notice. She was frozen in place, arms hanging limp like the creatures which were steadily approaching, now less than thirty yards away. Her stare was fixed on one shuffling figure, its chest open, exposing torn organs and a broken ribcage.
Skye’s mom locked eyes with her daughter, groaned, and started to gallop.
EIGHT
San Francisco – The Tenderloin
Father Xavier stood in the shadows inside a hair and nail salon, watching the front window through which he had entered. Or, where it had been. It now sparkled in fragments on the tile floor, mixed with bottles of hair care products from overturned displays and larger wedges of shattered mirrors. He wasn’t the vandal, had found it this way. Photos of beautiful African American and Spanish women stared down from every wall, with overdone eyes and red pouting lips, wearing a variety of styles and braid arrangements. The place smelled of burnt hair.
It was only a little past noon, and already the power was failing. Xavier had seen entire blocks blacked-out, traffic signals hanging dark over intersections. Fires had begun, as had the looting, and the experience of a life lived so close to the street assured him that some of the gunfire and screaming had nothing to do with the walking dead. People could be equally predatory with their own kind.
The cop had proven that.
Xavier found him a couple of blocks from the rectory, an S.F.P.D. patrol car engulfed in flames only yards away. The cop had been stripped of his weapons and hung by the neck from the arm of a street light. The priest assumed it had been done before he changed into what he now was. The undead cop dangled and jerked, fists clenching and unclenching, eyes rolling and mouth gaping in a long, continuous gasp.
Behind him in the shadows of the salon, someone sneezed. Another voice hissed to “Shut up!” which was answered by, “Go fuck yourself, pal.” A girl whimpered, and someone lit a cigarette. Xavier glanced back at the people crouched behind the chrome and vinyl swivel chairs. Most looked at him with an emotion with which he was all too familiar; hope.
He shook his head. “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he murmured, looking back out the front. A pair of old black ladies shuffled past the window, the kind of ladies who never missed mass and tried to sit as close to the front as they could. Except one of them had a big bite of meat missing from her cheek, and the other’s scalp was peeled back all the way from her eyebrows, hanging on her neck like a grisly ponytail.
They had almost moved past when they shuffled to a stop, both tipping their heads back at the same time. They swayed, turning their heads this way and that, and then rotated their bodies until they were facing the broken window of the hair salon.
Xavier froze. The sharp smell of cigarette drifted past him, and he tensed, watching the old women. They swayed, heads still lifted and twitching slightly. Then they started crawling through the window.
A woman’s scream in the street outside made them stop and turn their heads, and then they were crawling back out, heedless to the broken glass cutting their knees and palms. They shambled off in the direction of the screams.
Xavier let out a held breath. He turned to the people hiding behind him, his voice a harsh whisper. “I think they smelled the cigarette. Put it out.”
“What?” A large man in a checked shirt was squatting near a sink, a cigarette dangling from his lips. He had a beefy face pocked with old acne scars, and the blown blood vessels of a heavy drinker.
“You heard me,” said Xavier. The man glared at him for a long moment, then crushed it out. The priest returned to his watch.
It had all gone so fast, and the all-powerful authority everyone assumed would take care of them in a crisis folded quickly, replaced by anarchy. Since leaving the rectory, Xavier had seen only a handful of moving emergency vehicles, and only at a distance. Sirens echoed off buildings, and the occasional, unintelligible babble of a public address system floated through the streets. Most of the police cars and ambulances he saw were vacant, doors standing open with no one in sight. There had been no sign of the military, and the beat of helicopter rotors came from above without the aircraft ever coming into view. Plenty of civilian cars, mini-vans and