Benjamin and I did a quick head count. There were forty-five of us. I formed up a traveling unit. Six senior citizens went to the back of the group. I felt like an utter bastard doing that, but I had no choice. They would slow us down. So would three adults who were overweight and out of shape. They went to the rear as well. Conaghan barely made the cut, and he gave me a shrewd look and a grateful nod. There were twelve children, and only a few with their parents. The children went inside a moving circle. There were eight teens including Benjamin. They would form part of a defensive wall around the little ones, along with fifteen fit adults, and me.
Our weapons were pry bars, axes, baseball bats, and my sword. A couple of the older children had cans of pepper spray. The effects of pepper spray didn’t last long, but a good burst really messed up a grin for a minute or two, leaving them struggling for breath and hacking up copious amounts of phlegm.
“You keep heading for the pier,” Randall said. “I’m heading in the other direction.”
Benjamin shook his head. “Dude, are you nuts?”
I had told Benjamin and Randall what Renfield had told me earlier on the stairs.
Randall gave him a bitter smile. “There’s a Police Station at Eddy and Jones. I’m hoping that I can get there, get inside, and find anything left behind—weapons, ammunition, batons, anything—and then catch up with you.”
I gave Randall a nod. I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk him out of it.
“I’ll need a volunteer,” Randall said. “If I do find anything… guns are heavy.”
A sturdy Latino named Ayala agreed to go with Randall. Ayala’s wife and little girl would be coming with me to Pier 39.
“On a normal day it’s a fifteen minute walk,” Randall said.”
I gave him a grim smile. “On a normal day.”
He had put a leash on Clyde. He handed the leash to me. “If I don’t make it back, take care of him.”
He squatted and gave Clyde a hug, and then turned and trotted down Market Street, with Ayala right on his heels.
We went straight down Market Street to the arc of the Embarcadero that ran between city and shoreline. Night was falling and the streetlights had gone dark long ago. This wasn’t the quickest route, but it was the safest. Market Street and the Embarcadero were wide. With a little luck, we would see any attackers coming. Cutting through the city would mean edging around cars, navigating close sidewalks, narrow streets and pitch-black alleys where anything could be lurking.
We passed the Ferry Building, the clock tower looming over us silently in a shroud of chilling fog that was rolling in off the bay.
I looked up, knowing that if the fog descended to street level we might as well be walking blind.
We passed silent piers on a walkway that was once a favorite of tourists and locals. All that remained of the sun was a red-gold glow ahead of us. I hoped we still had a couple of hours to get out of the city.
We had just passed Broadway and were coming up on Pier 9 when I heard the slap of boots on the street. A grinning firefighter whose skull was mostly exposed bone was loping toward us. Two men in our group stepped up and took the thing down with pry-bars. I looked at the dead grin’s hands and was reminded of the young boy killed after I set Jillian’s body into the bay. The man’s hands were huge, his fingernails like rough blades of polished stone. Was the smiling sickness physically changing people?
The group was moving at a pace that I thought was agonizingly slow. Soon we were passing Pier 33, where tourists used to embark on ferries to a location very much on my mind. At the end of Bay Street, not far from Pier 39, Renfield laughed and said, “Hey, I’ve seen that little guy before.”
A long gray and white cat was running hell for leather from the opposite end of the Embarcadero.
Clyde pulled on his leash, and I pulled back.
The cat worked its way into the center of the group and huddled among the children.
“Something spooked it,” Benjamin said.
We walked another few blocks and were in sight of the pier when we heard the noise.
It was like the boom of the surf out at Ocean Beach, and the murmur of an excited crowd watching a Giants game at AT&T Park. Within that vast susurration, that soft roar, were stark popping, snapping sounds. A flare was fired into the sky, the light stark and intense.
Then we saw the grins. There had to be hundreds of them, running and shambling and stumbling. At first they were running blind, running from something, and then they saw us, and began making desperately greedy noises as they ran toward us.
Many of the grins appeared to be fresh, for lack of a better term. Aside from the terrible rictus and filthy or torn clothes, they looked almost normal. Grins that had been infected for a longer time appeared to be undergoing some sort of physical change. Their hands were bigger, huge clawed weapons intended only for tearing. Some of them had larger jaws and their teeth were longer and sharper. Their faces and torsos were thin and wasted, the skin pulled brutally tight over the bones, as if something had been taken from those emaciated areas and used to build up the hands and jaws. The older grins now looked more adept than ever of achieving their singular purpose—tearing open a wound in a new host and spreading the parasites even further.
Behind the horde of grins were two green army vehicles with mounted guns. The guns were firing. The grins were being herded right into us.
I turned and shouted for everyone to run as fast as they could, for the pier, for the docks on the east side.
We ran. It was madness.
I heard cries behind me. An older gentleman stumbled and fell. His name was Tom and he used to be a mutual fund trader. A heavyset woman with a red face was struggling to keep up. I turned away from them. They were too slow. Too damned slow. A little boy was lagging behind. I scooped him up, still holding Clyde’s leash, and ran.
The grins fell on the old man and the heavyset woman.
My people disappeared behind the Aquarium of the Bay building.
I felt but did not hear the shot that tugged at my go bag. I looked in that direction and saw that one of the vehicles had stopped and a soldier was pointing a rifle in my direction. I waved my arms and he fired again, and my left collarbone was chipped, the bullet tearing a channel through the top of my shoulder. The pain was excruciating. The soldier must have seen only the left side of my face. He must have thought I was a grin.
Either way, the soldiers would probably slaughter all of us if they still thought of San Francisco as a quarantine zone. We had to move.
I ran.
The commotion was scaring away the sea lions that had taken over a few of the docks more than twenty years ago. To tourists and businesses that made a buck off of the sea lions they were living landmarks. To people who lived on the docks and eventually had to move, the big mammals were stinky and loud—so loud that on a quiet evening their characteristic ork-ork could be heard as far away as Pacific Heights. Now they were awkwardly rolling and crawling off of the docks, and the moment they hit the sea they were graceful and fast, disappearing from sight.
I begin looking over the boats in the area while trying to ignore the pain in my shoulder. Anything that appeared seaworthy had already sunk or was sinking. I could see the bullet-riddled hulls of otherwise pristine pleasure boats. What were left were creaky old boats turned living quarters. Among all the abandoned and scuttled boats at the many slips, I saw two inflatable Zodiac boats fifty feet apart. They might have been ignored because they sat low in the water, and they were old, but they were still floating, and I hoped the outboard motors had plenty of fuel in them.