I listened to my voice bounce around and disappear, but nobody answered. I pressed on and looked for anything suspicious. I went inside the diner. What had looked empty outside was anything but, inside. There were devoured bodies all over the floor, piled one on top of the other. Most of them had their heads torn off and their skin was stripped clean to the bone around the arms, legs, and some of the torso. There were a couple who still had heads. I steered clear of them, in case they came back.

Back outside the diner I sucked a lungful of fresh air and scoped the scene. It was odd. Usually these outbreaks were like zombie riots. They were everywhere. Not in Mendez, though. The place was a ghost town.

I checked the bingo hall and had a little bit of luck. There were four zombies fighting over the body of a young woman. They were tearing her to shreds, pulling and shoving and grunting. When a piece would break off, a zombie would huddle on the floor like a caveman and suck down his hunk, then get back into the fight for more.

I stood there a full minute before one of them smelled me. When it looked up and sniffed the air I stepped quickly across the floor, planted the sawed-off against the bridge of its nose, and blew his head clean off from the lower jaw up. The other three started moaning and flailing and came at me faster than I’d ever seen zombies move. I shot two with the Magnum and the third with the long-barreled 12-gauge.

I thought I was done in the bingo hall, but I wasn’t. The girl they’d been tearing apart, despite massive quantities of tissue loss, began to move. When I glanced at her, she was gnashing her teeth in my general direction. I stared into her eyes. They were shocking: focused on me. That, and the flesh eating, eliminated any voodoo possibilities. These freaks were probably the result of someone’s wrongdoing, or radiation.

I didn’t want to shoot the girl, but I couldn’t risk the spread so I put a .45 slug through her head. There was a bit of a spray from the exit wound, but despite the wedges of missing flesh, she looked like she just fell asleep.

I left the bingo hall knowing a little more than I did the minute before. I knew I wasn’t looking for a person. What I needed to find was the location of an explosion maybe or some sort of radiation leak. I combed the rest of the two-block area called “downtown,” then proceeded to the larger residential streets.

That’s where everybody was.