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Shaw’s screaming.
    Don Dragna broke into a sprint for his Packard. When his men saw their godfather, the ones not already cowering behind their steering wheels jumped into vehicles. The LAPD that had been present peeled away from the scene before the mob. In less than an hour, radios inside those prowlers would be squawking reports of monsters terrorizing Los Angeles at what would be known as L.A.’s “Battle of Evergreen.”
     
     
    “ There,” Kennedy said, pointing at the scramble of vehicles in the vicinity of Evergreen Cemetery.
    Charlie gunned her cab towards the fracas, stopping just inside the cemetery gates. Kennedy recognized the godfather’s luxury wagon immediately. He got out and stood in the road, blocking Dragna’s escape. Charlie joined him.
    Dragna pulled to a stop and cranked his window.
    “ Move!” he yelled. From behind, a sudden commotion caused the godfather to lose his composure and spin away from the window. Flailing fists. Sal!
    Kennedy’s attention was taken from the Packard to the swarm behind it. The sound of hundreds of dead bodies moving on broken and atrophied limbs as fast as they could, racing after the fleeing vehicles, poured like an ill-wind across Potter’s Field. It wasn’t the shuffling dead he had always imagined. These things were like necrotic berserkers stampeding after living prey.
    Shots were fired with little effect. A zombie would take a hit, but unless the blow was to its brain pan, the thing would keep going. Still, bullets tore through dead body parts like a bloodless slaughterhouse. Some of the undead were reduced to human worms, inching their way forward with terrifying quickness, driven by hunger for living flesh.
    The fight in the Packard ended with a harmless shot that went through the roof. Sal spilled out and sprinted towards Kennedy. A Thompson chattered behind him, but the shots went wild as Don Dragna heard the stampede and turned towards the carnage behind him. Another sound caused the godfather to whip back towards Kennedy’s direction just as Sal fell against the cab with eyes wide as saucers.
    “What in God’s name is that?” Sal yelled.
    The earth rumbled. Window panes rattled. Loose brick and mortar began to fall from the dilapidated brownstones throughout the Evergreen district. Street lights blew out one after another in nearing succession as the unseen menace approached. A raging army.
    Don Dragna stared at the wave of mechanaughts cresting the horizon line behind the two men and Charlie Shaw. They moved as a military unit, a wave of steel men in full Nazi regalia, eyes glowing bright green.
    The mechanaughts poured past the cowering don as he struggled to roll his window tight, targeting the violent ranks of undead crawling out of the earth and towards the living meat. But it only took one nervous triggerman to fire on a single mechanaught. The tide turned in that instant.
    In the next hour, Potter’s Field became a pandemonium of bullets, steel, flesh, and rot. The mechanaughts’ rifles fired plasma bolts, concentrated blasts of electricity that exploded undead heads like rotten melons, but took at least twenty seconds to recharge. The mobsters’ bullets did little to the mechanaughts, but each time a shot pinged off of a metal trooper, a mobster found himself holding a charred arm stub or laying on the ground with a gaping manhole-sized wound in his middle. Soon, the fighting was too close for rifles, and both zombies and goons found themselves being bludgeoned and ripped apart by the mechanical soldiers’ iron fists.
    “ Hey, boss!” Sal yelled. “Looks like we got ourselves a squirter!”
    As the melee continued to grow more chaotic, Don Dragna guided his Packard to skirt along the edge, away from the danger.
    Charlie hopped to the passenger side as Kennedy took over and gunned it, hitting the Packard like a missile. They slammed into Dragna’s left rear fender, sending the Packard into a full spin.
    The godfather kicked open