Then, Rodriguez: “Oh, shit. God. We got—”
Jack took a deep sniff, hoping that whatever scent he just inhaled had been more in his mind than anything else.
The smell was metallic. A smell of decay and blood, so powerful here.
“Rodriguez, hold on there,” Jack said. “We better—”
He shifted on his feet. Rodriguez shouted back, “Motherfucking guy has been shredded, Jack. Christ, come in here.”
Then the sound of movement, steps, feet hurrying. Jack tried to imagine the likely layout. A small kitchen, a dining area to the side, a bathroom down a hallway, bedroom to the left.
The front door behind him slammed.
Stupidly, he turned to see what even his muffled ears already knew had just fucking happened.
Gunfire. The sound of Rodriguez’s gun blasting away. But only a few bursts and then the blasts abruptly ended. Jack’s hand went to his chest and the control for his two-way radio, his lifeline with the station house.
“Officer down!”
He raised his gun just as two of them appeared in the hallway.
Sometimes you saw Can Heads and they didn’t look any worse than homeless guys from decades ago, wearing their tattered clothes, eyes bulging out of drunken sockets, mouths open, teeth brownish, rotten.
These were not like that.
Thin, wiry, the two of them human animals, barely wearing shredded clothes, which made them look even more crazed.
Their eyes opened wide as they looked at Jack, close to being on all fours as they raced toward him.
“Command!” Jack yelled. Then: “Shit!”
There was a response in his ear bud, mostly static and then drowned out by his own gun, now shooting an erratic spray of bullets at the two creatures.
Enough bullets that the Can Heads flew past him, their bodies ripped open.
Nothing from Rodriguez, and as much as Jack didn’t want to… as much as he wanted to get the hell out of there, he ran deeper into the apartment.
A few steps. His handgun out now, too.
Jack passed a short hallway on his left, then the entrance to the kitchen, and arrived at the small living room.
He started firing crazily even before he knew what he was seeing, blinking as he took in the scene. Four Can Heads down on the carpeted floor, the rug turned a wet, bronze red, like the floor of a charnel house. They squatted around Rodriguez, his body armor roughly peeled away in jagged chunks.