Chapter 18: Bad Cop, Worse Cop

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“Oh my God, they have John and David.” Abby gasped as she saw the men surround the two boys on the street below.

“Damn. I can’t get a clear shot.” She murmured. Even if she could somehow manage to kill or disable the four men surrounding John and David, there was no guarantee she could do it in time before one of them shot the boys. Nor did she know if guards inside would come out and see her shooting, possibly endangering everyone in the unit.

She picked up her walkie talkie and called it in.

“Advising the base and all units on the ground, we have hostile groups out in the police station. They’ve taken John and David. They’re alive, but I don’t know for how long. Please advise, over.”

After a few seconds, the walkie talkie buzzed to life.

“We’re coming over.” Rick’s voice came through the walkie talkie.

Sophia could do nothing but continue to observe the situation.

“Stay alive, guys.” She wished in her heart.

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John’s mother wept when she heard the news and tried to go save her son right away, but James stopped her.

“Let me go! I have to go to my son. He needs me!” She cried while struggling in his grasp. The others stood somber as they also felt fondly for the boys who had saved and led them.

Jacob was trying to hold back tears. “Is John going to die, too?” He was the only man left in the warehouse to protect his mother. He had to stay strong, our at least that’s what he kept telling himself.

James tried to comfort John’s mother. “It’s okay. We’ll get your John back. I promise.” He didn’t know whether they could, but they had to at least try.

Rick nodded. “We’ll get him back.”

“Are we taking on an entire group of armed people just to save two kids?” The others looked towards who had said such a thing, and it was Harry. John and Jacob’s mother, Jessica Rider, could not believe what had come out of the man’s mouth. She stood up and walked up to him and gave a resounding slap across his face.

With seething anger, she said through clenched teeth, “That’s my son. And we are going to get him. If you have a problem, leave.”

Harry rubbed his cheek. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t save them. Do we even have a plan? Those are real people with guns, Jessica. This is not some game of king of the hill we’re doing here.”

James put his hand on Harry’s shoulder. “We take care of our own. You understand? They don’t know about us. We still have the element of surprise.”

Rick was already planning on how to save the boy who had rescued him and his son when they were mere days away from starvation and death. The others had already gotten their guns and were ready to go. All they needed was a plan.

“We try to stay as quiet as possible. We can take down the guards at the front and slowly make our way inside. If we get found, we open fire and take down everyone as fast as we can.”

“That won’t work.” Dan, one of the others said. “We don’t know where he is. If we go in guns blazing, they’ll probably hold them hostage and we’ll never get to them.”

“They’re already holding them hostage!” Jessica Rider said.

“This isn’t a matter of whether or not we can get to them. It’s a matter of whether we can do it without getting ourselves killed.” James reasoned.

They were stumped. How would they be able to get to the boys without getting caught or killed in the process?

“Is the front entrance the only way in?” James asked Sophia on the radio.

“Let me check.” She said. After almost 10 minutes, she radioed back. “Yeah it looks like it’s a service entrance. It looks locked.”

“We can get through that.” Pete said. “We picked up a few drills on our supply run. We could use those to break the lock and get in but it’s going to make a lot of noise.”

“We need a distraction.” Rick thought. He suddenly had an idea. “We use the infected. Draw them in towards the front and we go in through the back, take out anyone from behind. It’ll keep them occupied and we can search the building.”

“That’s suicide!” Harry yelled. “How are you going to attract them? There’s no way you can control that large of a group plus prevent any more from coming in from the gunfire!”

“Sophia said there weren’t a lot of infected in the area. If we take a group from someplace else and lead them there, there’s probably not going to be any surprises.” Rick argued back.

“Do we have another option?” James sighed.

“We could take hostages of our own! We could sneak in at night and kill them in their sleep! There are so many other options!” Harry yelled back frustrated.

Rick shook his head. “They’ll probably have patrols at night and we don’t know if hostages will work. They could just as easily just kill off the boys out of spite. We don’t know how they operate.”

“I like the night idea though. We could combine the two. Hold the infiltration at night would confuse the people more and give us more time to get in.” James said.

“You’re all looking for death.” Harry said and walked away in frustration.

“I’ll handle bringing the infected. You guys can come up with an entry and extraction plan in case anything goes wrong.” Everyone nodded and they got to work planning.

“I can’t lose my son, too. Please. Oh please, be alive.” Mrs. Rider pleaded in her heart.

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John went in and out of consciousness. Whenever he awoke by a strong slap or a bucket of some liquid splashed in his face, he would be questioned.

“Who sent you here?”

“No one.” A taser would follow after that kind of answer. The man in the policeman suit did not like such an answer.

“Are you alone.”

“Yes.” John couldn’t give away the position of his friends. He still got a jab in the stomach or the ribs for the answer anyway. There was no satisfying the man.

“You lying to me, boy? I told you to tell me the truth. Do my words pass right through you, huh?” He would emphasize each question with a forceful hit to John’s thighs, arms, shins, or ribs. He felt that several of his bones were broken. He had barely done anything to oppose or upset the man, yet he seemed to take pleasure in beating the living daylights out of him.

When next he awoke, he was taken into another room. It was similar to an interrogation room except it had been decorated with the brilliantly cheerful color of blood. Skin, hair, teeth, fingers, even an eyeball were strewn around the room as if they had been thrown about by a rampaging bear.

He looked up to see a despicable man. With greasy blonde hair and a pudgy face. His potbelly protruded out of a dirty blue colored shirt emblazoned ironically with the city police department shield.

John had to spit out a ball of congealed blood that had gathered in his mouth. It spun away, landing with a splatter next to the excavated eyeball. It was quite marvelous really. The eyeball had somehow remained intact during extraction and most likely had been scooped out right from the socket.

As John glanced at the eyeball, it failed to escape the notice of the man, and he grinned proudly.

“You like that? Your friend was brought in here before you and he wasn’t too cooperative, you see.” The man’s words implied more than enough. John’s face paled. David had held out but at what cost?

“We decided to take a little souvenir from him.” The man said as he shambled over to the eyeball. He picked it up and brought it to the metal interrogation table. He sat down on the other side, lifting up the eyeball to the light to admire it.

“Fascinating thing, this. You wouldn’t imagine how much blood and screams came out of him as we were taking this out. We had to get two others to hold him down so I could pull this gem out.” The man gloated. John raged. He struggled in his chair.

“Piss off!” John yelled, spitting another ball of blood at the man’s face. He dodged it, but it landed on his clothes. The man’s face grew red and he stood up.

“You stained my shirt you little fuck.” The man said as he slammed his fist into the side of John’s already swollen face. He once again grabbed his face.

“Here, let me give you a little treat.” The man pried open John’s mouth and stuffed the eyeball in it. John tried to resist but the hand was too strong and he didn’t have enough strength. The man’s filth covered hands pushed the eyeball into John’s mouth and closed it. John’s eyes watered in disgusted and he could feel the bile already forming at the back of his throat.

The man pinched John’s nose, blocking airflow. He also covered John’s mouth, forcing him to swallow. And with no choice and a rapidly decreasing air supply, he did. As the slimy mass went down his throat, tears of pain, disgust, and anger poured out of his own eyes.

At long last, the man stepped back, and John immediately hurled onto the floor in front of him. The swallowed mass once again reemerged and he puked until there was only bile. He yelled for a long time out of shock and anger, trembling visibly as veins all over his body popped out as he struggled against his restraints. His wrists had chafed until the raw muscles against the rough used to tie them. He could feel the blood from various cuts and wounds all over his body seeping down towards the ground.

He lowered his head again in exhaustion. The recent regurgitation had taken whatever energy he had managed to regain during his short, but blissful, reprieves.

“Now I don’t think we’ve had formal introductions. My name is Lieutenant Steve. What’s yours?”

John didn’t say anything. Steve frowned and picked up a dismembered finger.

“You know, there are a lot of other things that we can allow you to sampl-”

“John.” He said. “It’s John.”

“Well John, now wasn’t that easy?” The man sat back and smiled, placing his hands on his stomach.

“Now look, I know you’re concerned about your friend. You want to keep him alive? I can do that. What do you want?” He asked. “Tell me what you want, John.”

John didn’t reply.

“Tell me how you want to deal with this situation you’ve put you and your friend in. You can’t go back home. But you don’t have to let your friend go through this anymore. Let me help you find the strategy to save your friend. Who are you working for? Why did you--come snooping around our home?” The man asked patiently.

“For the last time...We work for no one. We just came looking for supplies and we saw that there were people. That’s it.” John struggled to say.

The man sighed. “John, you know I had a lot of faith in you. I believed you would be better than this.” He stood up with a sigh and walked up behind John. “But it looks like I was wrong.”

Suddenly he slammed John’s head against the table, holding it there. The force was so strong that it had split a wound open on his forehead and a pool of blood collected around his head.

“I really didn’t want to do this, but you leave me no choice.” The man took out a long knife and started to tap it against the table only an inch away from his eyes.

“Now...should I take an eye? A finger? An ear?” And as he said that last body part, the man leaned down and licked John’s ear.

John summoned from some unknown place, a new-found energy and slammed his head into Steve’s face.

Steve cursed as he took several steps back. His nose had become crooked and it was bleeding. The shock had caused him to clamp his mouth down on his still protruding oral organ, which had been bitten through halfway.

Steve quivered in anger and was about to attack John, when a man ran into the room.

“Steve! Infected coming straight toward us!” The man said frantically. Indeed, as John listened, there were countless groans and moans and the rhythmic pops of gunfire.

Steve turned to John. “Wait right here, you brat. I’m not done with you.”

His words were garbled as he tried to talk around his injured organ.

Cursing, he left the room and the door slammed shut. John immediately began to try to undo his bindings.

John noticed that Steve had dropped the knife onto the ground after having his face smashed in by John’s head. John struggled to bounce the chair near the knife and with great difficulty, tipped the chair over. As the chair fell, it slammed against the ground and a searing pain stabbed at John’s ribs and legs. He was positive a few bones had been broken and the force of the impact had done little to help him.

He wiggled over and grabbed the blade with his fingers. As he struggled to reposition the blade towards the ropes tying his hands, he heard the groans of the infected growing louder. To hear it from here, it most likely signalled an extremely large body of infected numbering in the thousands.

He finally renegotiated the position of the knife and frantically moved his wrists up and down, slowly whittling away at the rope. After what felt like an eternity, he finally cut through the rope and freed his arms. He could barely move them because of the injuries on his wrists that stung at every movement. The entire process of cutting his arms had left his entire arms burning.

He bent over and did the same for his legs and crawled up from the ground, almost slipping on the floor that was slick with blood. Whether it was his or David’s, he did not know. As he made his way to the door, he stumbled and walked to the door.

He tried opening it with the handle, but it was locked.

Of course it’s locked, John muttered to himself. Hyperventilating to prepare himself for what he was about to do, he rammed his arm into the door, trying to break it down.

He gasped as the pain once again paraded through his body. He slid down against the door and gasped for breath as he waited for the pain to subside. Once it did, he stood back up and continued again.

After the fourth repetition of this, he slammed through the door, breaking the lock.

The door had been an old, wooden door and the interrogation room had been only retrofitted from an office room.

As he stumbled out, he hit the window on the other side of the narrow hallway, looking down on the lot in front of the police station. There, he could see countless infected shambling towards the police station. the policemen were futility struggling to keep the infected at bay.

There were so many that it felt as if the collective heads of the infected manifested into an undulating sea of death. His face paled and his breath quickened as he pushed himself off the window and looked around. There was a stairwell at the end of the hallway and he walked towards it.

His vision swayed and dimmed with each passing step and his breath was ragged. He could feel each heart beat pushing blood through his veins, seeping out of the various wounds across his body.

He made it to the door of the stairwell and opened it. He made his way downwards, clutching onto the knife as it was his only defense and with the other hand, grasped the railing.

As he went downstairs, he came out into the jail holding area and he looked for David. Not being able to find him, John made his way to the door. Just as he was about to go, he heard a groan. He turned around and saw that in the back of one of the cells, was a figure huddled into a ball.

“David?” John called out.

He walked up to him slowly, opening the jail cell door with a button on the wall. David remained motionless, lying there on the ground.

As John approached, he took out his knife, expecting the worst. He slowly reached out his hand and touched David’s back.

He turned David around.

John put a hand to his mouth in shock at what he saw.