The Dishonored Dead: A Zombie Novel

by Swartwood, Robert

The Kipling Zoo had once been the premier zoo in Olympus. It had hosted a wide array of animals, from lions and tigers, to giraffes and elephants, to monkeys and snakes. But once The Zoo opened across town (named for the fact that it was the best zoo in the world), the Kipling’s attendance dropped. Soon it was too much for the owners to maintain on such a small budget, and they had no choice but to sell the animals and close. The property had been built in what had become the Ward, and no business in its right mind wanted to open up anything there. For years the city had talked about tearing the zoo down and putting in low-income housing, but there had just been too much black tape. So for decades it sat untouched, its gates closed and locked to the world. The only people who entered it now were the homeless, rebel teens, and the police who once a week came in and kicked them all out.

  At least this was what Gabriel said as they drove through the city, getting closer and closer to the old zoo.

  Conrad barely listened. He was still thinking about his wife and son. Gabriel had given him the phone as they’d sped down the Shakespeare, and he’d used it first to dial Denise’s mobile phone. He’d expected it to ring four or five times before her voicemail picked up, but instead an electronic voice informed him that the number had been disconnected. When he tried the house he expected the answering machine to pick up, but the phone rang and rang and rang, which meant Denise had disconnected it herself, or worse, someone else had done it when they’d come to take her away.

  But he would have to deal with that later. Right now he had to focus on the task at hand, which was taking them through downtown Olympus and into the Ward. Here the houses and buildings went through a sudden transformation where they appeared sunken, dirty, cheap. Windows boarded over, some buildings gutted out, an endless number of walls covered in graffiti.

  “See these people?” Gabriel said as they drove down Dickens Avenue, the kids playing on the sidewalks, adults watching from porch steps and drinking from paper bags, some homeless crouched against the sides of buildings, bundled in blankets. “You think they chose to exist this way? Maybe they did. But place them in a different part of Olympus, in a different part of the world. Give them a chance to do something else. It’s just like Gray’s poem, all these people with so much unused potential.”

  They passed a corner store, bars over its windows, three hustlers outside playing the corner, waiting for their next customer.

  “You want to know something else they won’t teach you in school? After the Zombie Wars, when the Government was trying to establish itself, they wanted everyone to be equal. No rich, no poor, everyone’s all the same. It didn’t last a year. The system was chaos. Communism sounds great on paper, but when put to the test it always fails. So they switched to capitalism, which was what their living helpers had told them to do all along, and that’s why you have the world you have today. People getting richer, people getting poorer, people not being able to afford enough to feed themselves.”

  The Kipling was five blocks away now, the wrought-iron gates growing larger, the cages’ steepled roofs rising into the sky.

  “So put yourself here, Conrad. You don’t have imagination, I know, but just try it. Try to imagine what your existence would have been like had you been born and raised in this section of the city. Different parents, different home, different upbringing. Your father wouldn’t have been who he was, so would you even have become a Hunter? Would you be the same man you are now? Would you have married the same woman that became your wife? Would you have had the same child that became your son?”

  Conrad continued down Dickens, passing the Kipling on the right. He went to the intersection and made the turn, started back toward the rear of the zoo.

  “That’s existence,” Gabriel said, sitting slouched in the backseat, staring out his window, “that’s life. Understanding your potential and doing something about it, not just waiting for something to happen.”

  There were some abandoned buildings at the rear of the zoo, what had once been used for maintenance. Conrad drove between two of these, cut the engine, and unclipped his seatbelt. He grabbed the mobile phone off the passenger seat, stuck it in his pocket, and opened his door.

  They grabbed everything they could from the trunk, the assault rifles, the extra ammunition, even the two plastic explosives. There were also two pairs of night-vision glasses which Gabriel and James took. Then they turned away from the sedan, started toward the fenced-in zoo, toward the waterworks building.

  Litter was scattered all over the pavement, pieces of shattered glass glinting in the sun. The afternoon was so quiet Conrad could hear the detritus crunching under the soles of their boots.

  They came to one of the gates, James with one of the plastics in hand, but the lock was already cut and they walked straight through. The same was true of the waterworks building. Not only had the windows in the door been shattered, but the deadbolt had been smashed out. All they needed to do was push it open and step into the dark.

  Here there were cardboard boxes, blankets, discarded needles and empty bottles. A few magazines lay scattered around, the kind with not only naked men and women but also children. Conrad, disgusted, kicked away one magazine that showed a dead having intercourse with another dead made up to look like a living.

  James, the bomb put away and a rifle now in hand, led them farther into the structure. Walking quietly like he had when he was Tracking, taking his time, he took them through one doorway after another, until they came to a locked iron door.

  The explosive was set, timed for just one minute, and they hurried out of the room and waited the long sixty seconds before there was a sudden boom and then they reentered the room, dust everywhere, the plastic big enough to destroy the lock but not too big that it would cause the rest of the building harm.

  Once the dust settled, once James was able to open the door, they entered into a narrow corridor. They went down steps. At the bottom of the steps was another iron door. Unlike the one they’d just gone through, this door was locked by a large iron wheel. Forgotten for decades, disused for even more, this door was now their entrance into the Labyrinth.

  Two miles and an hour later they came to a third iron door, the Milton Maximum Security Prison right above them. They’d arrived with about fifteen minutes to spare. In an hour Eugene Moss would be executed just outside the Herculean, in the same courtyard Scott, Garry, Brooks, and Ruth had been executed. Because Philip wanted to avoid any and all hassles when it came to the swarm of media and possible protesters, Eugene was being transported via a method almost everyone in the city had seemed to have forgotten.

  The darkness was palpable, the silence thick. The only sounds as they negotiated the various pathways had been their hushed footsteps scraping the ground, the zombies’ labored breathing, the distant squeaking of rats. Soon it was just the zombies’ labored breathing taking up the dark silence, Conrad knowing where each of them stood by their intake and release of breaths. He’d been in dark this entire time, Gabriel and James the only ones with the night-vision glasses, Conrad walking with Eric between them and trying not to trip or run into Eric every time Gabriel stopped.

  Gabriel had already gone over the plan of attack, how they were going to surprise Eugene Moss and his entourage of armed guards. Now there was nothing else to do but wait out the silence and count down the seconds until the inside lock was disengaged and the door opened.

  Then, in the dark and hushed silence, James whispered, “What’s that?”

  They listened.

  Eric whispered, “Is that …”

  “Shh,” Gabriel said. He had been sitting on the ground but now quickly stood up. “Follow me.”

  Conrad had been standing this entire time, leaning against the wall. He didn’t know which way Gabriel meant to go, to the left or the right, and he turned to the left only to walk into James, who, wearing the night-vision glasses, pushed him back to the right.

  They started down the corridor, as quietly as possible, while the faint and distant sou
nd of footsteps grew closer.

  They didn’t get far. They turned a corner and Gabriel stopped, tried turning back, and then all at once the new footsteps became even louder, much more frantic, and there were shouts, yells, commands to stop, and before Conrad knew it lights came on, a dozen different flashlight beams cutting the dark, Gabriel and James crying out as they tore off their glasses. Eric was pushed into Conrad, Conrad tripped and fell down, and before he had a chance to stand back up more lights were in his eyes and a gun was aimed at his face and he immediately went for his own gun, the one he’d somehow dropped, he went for it because he wasn’t going to expire in this lost and forgotten corridor beneath the city, he wasn’t going to expire without seeing his son one last time.

  Then a voice said wait. It said lower the weapon. It said get out of my way.

  The gun aimed at his face disappeared, another set of footsteps approached, and that same voice now said, “Hey there, Al, didn’t expect to see you down here. How’s your mom holding up?”

  Chapter 41

  “Believe it or not, I had you pegged for a Hunter the moment I saw you. Standing there along the highway, your thumb sticking out, I asked myself just what in the world was a Hunter doing trying to hitch a ride. Especially since Hunters are now more powerful than ever.”

  They had moved about fifty yards away down the corridor, making lefts and rights, and now they were crouched together in a circle, the four of them and the seat-bouncing, cigarette-smoking, pistol-carrying truck driver. Only he wasn’t a truck driver. And his name wasn’t Ben. And the load he’d been transporting, it wasn’t for the new Hunter General and his army so much as it was for those zombie sympathizers getting ready to take a stand against them.

  “How did you know I was a Hunter?” Conrad asked. He stood leaning against the wall, staring down at his pistol.

  “It was obvious. I used to be a Hunter myself.”

  His real name was Harper. Like Conrad, he’d grown up in a family of Hunters—his brother a Hunter, his father a Hunter, his father’s father a Hunter. But Hunting wasn’t something Harper wanted to do with his existence. He felt bad for the living (“At least as bad as a dead can feel, if you know what I mean”), and while he went to Artemis, did well in his classes, graduated and was recruited, he never had any desire to kill zombies. But he stayed in it. He stayed because he had gotten in contact with the underground movement of zombie sympathizers, and they needed someone on the inside, someone who knew the system, who knew who all the top Hunters were and where they were located and how to get to them.

  Now Harper held his flashlight up toward the low ceiling, so that they could all see each other, the small man who’d driven the tractor-trailer looking completely different to Conrad than he had on the long drive back to Olympus. It had been a part Harper had played, just as he’d played a part his entire time as a Hunter.

  “That bomb Eugene planted?” he said. “It was the second one. The first was at the fuel station.”

  Conrad glanced up from the pistol, stared back at Harper.

  “I won’t lie to you, Conrad. You were always our target. You were the number one Hunter in the world, and we knew if we got to you … well, it doesn’t really matter now, does it?”

  Right then the radio on his belt beeped. A voice said, “It’s time,” and like that, Harper turned off the flashlight.

  They stayed motionless in the sudden dark, waiting silently. Harper had come with nine others in the zombie sympathizer underground, men who in their other existences worked as Special Police or Hunters. They had come prepared to do what Conrad and the three zombies had planned: to rescue Eugene Moss from his entourage of armed guards, to ensure that Eugene was not publicly executed by Philip.

  Conrad pushed himself off from the wall, planted his two feet squarely on the ground.

  Fifty yards away, back at the iron door they’d been waiting at before, there came a click as the lock was disengaged. Then there came a low screeching, rusty hinges scraping against rusty hinges, and the sound of voices and footsteps.

  Conrad raised the pistol, flicked off the safety.

  The voices and footsteps approached. Harper’s men were already hidden around corners, out of the way.

  Conrad stepped forward silently, aiming the gun toward that direction.

  Past the approaching voices and footsteps, the sound of the iron door being slammed shut traveled to the five of them waiting there.

  Conrad fingered the trigger, ready now, certain that somehow Harper’s men wouldn’t come through and that it would be left up to him.

  A few seconds passed and nothing happened, the voices and footsteps getting even closer. One of the men said something and the rest—what sounded like no more than a half dozen—laughed in response.

  Harper whispered into his radio, “Now.”

  At once Harper’s men opened fire, the cacophony of gunfire in the corridors deafening. The salvo was over almost immediately. Conrad found himself lowering his weapon and flicking back on the safety, knowing within just a few seconds that his help would not be needed. Harper’s men were more than prepared—they each wore night-vision glasses, so they had no problems taking down their intended targets.

  He wasn’t aware of the silence until about a minute afterward, because his ears were still ringing. Then a voice came across Harper’s radio—“We got ’em all”—and like that, Harper’s flashlight turned back on.

  Smiling at them, Harper said, “Let’s go meet our friend.”

  Conrad brought up the rear as Harper led the way. Of this entire operation he’d been dreading this moment the most—the actual confrontation with Eugene Moss. Yes, the man had done a terrible thing, he was a criminal and he deserved to be punished, but at the same time Conrad had done nothing as the man’s living son had been tortured, nothing as the rest of his family had been expired. He’d just stood there, watching those floating dust motes, and he knew nothing could ever rectify that wrong.

  So it was no surprise at all that when they’d met up with the rest of Harper’s men in the corridor, the night-vision glasses off everyone’s faces and flashlight beams slicing the dark, the six expired Hunters lying on the ground, Eugene Moss now getting his handcuffs undone, Conrad was the first person the man noticed.

  The shocked smile fell from his face. His black eyes hardened. He said, “You fucking son of a bitch,” and charged right at Conrad.

  Conrad had already slipped his gun back into his pocket. Though he knew he shouldn’t, he went for it anyway, and it was the extra few seconds of standing there, reaching for his pistol, that gave Eugene the advantage. He plowed past the rest of the men, all who hadn’t been expecting it, grabbed a rifle out of someone’s hands, and fired at Conrad.

  The bullet struck him in the chest, right where his dead heart lay. He staggered back, tripped over his own feet, and fell to the ground.

  Eugene went to fire again, aiming now for Conrad’s head, but the men intervened, grabbing the rifle out of his hands, pulling him away, Eugene screaming at Conrad that he was a bastard, that he was fucking going to expire him.

  Harper shouted, “Enough!” and somehow that seemed to work, Eugene going momentarily quiet. He looked up at Harper as Harper approached, and listened as Harper explained that Conrad had come with the three other living to save Eugene’s existence, believe it or not, even though Harper himself wasn’t quite sure why. Turning toward Gabriel then, he said, “Maybe now you could tell us why?”

  Gabriel was watching James and Eric help Conrad to his feet, Conrad now with a hand over the spot where he’d just been shot, as if trying to hold in all the nonexistence blood.

  Harper cleared his throat. “Gabriel?”

  Gabriel looked at Harper.

  “Make it quick. More Hunters will be coming along any minute, and this time we won’t have the advantage of surprise on our side. So tell us, why are you here?”

  Gabriel regarded Conrad once again. “We came for Eugene to get in contact with
people like you.”

  “Great. Now you have us. So what do you want?”

  “What I have to say I don’t have time to explain right now. I certainly can’t do it in less than a minute.”

  Eugene, still being held back by Harper’s men, spat at Conrad.

  Harper said, “Well then, I’m sorry, but we have to leave.”

  “Wait,” Gabriel said.

  Harper turned back to Gabriel, raised an eyebrow.

  “I know a place we can go.”

  Chapter 42

  Through the corridors again, hurrying along with everyone else, Conrad was barely aware of where they were going or why they were going there. Instead he was concentrating on his chest, on the hole that was there, and how he felt no true pain. He remembered Kyle just recently in the emergency room, complaining because it hurt so, so bad, but his son really hadn’t been feeling anything. It had all been in his mind, just like now Conrad’s mind told him he should be in excruciating pain, that he should be too weak to walk on his own. But here Conrad walked with no trouble, sandwiched between two nameless men in the army Harper had gathered to go up against Philip.

  They weren’t in darkness anymore, about half of them using flashlights. Word had spread down the line that already Hunters were scurrying the Labyrinth, posting men at every known entrance and exit.

  Still, Conrad barely noticed. He was thinking about where he had just been shot, how if Gabriel or one of the other living had been shot there they would now be dead. But Conrad wasn’t. The only way to kill a dead like that was to shoot them in the head, something everyone knew, and this made Conrad wonder about his own existence, about the many different pieces that made up the whole. How if you took a number of those pieces away he was still him, he was still Conrad, the man who had once been a boy whose mother had read him stories, who had told him to question everything, who had done everything she could to make sure he made his own decisions. If he were to have his hand cut off, he would still be him. The same with his leg, his ear, his nose, maybe even his torso. Right now his body was decaying at a very rapid rate, he was losing more hair and skin than normal, but at what point would he stop being Conrad? At what point would he lose too many hairs, too much skin, that the person he had been all his existence suddenly was no more?