Grave New World (Book 3): Dead Men Don't Skip

by S. P. Blackmore

  DEAD MEN DON'T SKIP

  S.P. BLACKMORE

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  DEAD MEN DON’T SKIP

  By S.P. Blackmore

  Copyright 2016 S.P. Blackmore

  Cover art by Steven Novak

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  And no, the dead haven’t walked.

  For my family.

  Sorry this zombie thing wasn’t just a phase.

  CHAPTER ONE

  “Do you think he’d eat Spam?”

  You know the apocalypse has gotten a little stale when you can contemplate feeding Spam to a zombie without fearing for your life.

  The dead man ignored my demand. He stretched his hands out, trying in vain to snatch us and drag us into a loving and entirely fatal embrace. The fact that he was securely locked in a cell some ten feet away from us seemed to make no difference to him. Maybe he had poor depth perception.

  The routine had gone on just about every hour on the hour—probably the amount of time he needed to forget his previous unsuccessful attempt—for as long as he had been in here with us. Someone had clearly embalmed him before they chucked him into prison, but even so, he left sticky bits of skin and clothing on the bars that contained him. After a few seconds of trying, something always clicked in his liquefying brain, and he slumped back, giving us all a look that was probably the revenant equivalent of a baleful stare. I swear he made a dissatisfied grunting sound.

  “Seriously, do you think he’d go for it?” Gloria Fey asked. She sat cross-legged next to me, her head turned to stare at the ghoul in his little corner. “Because he can have mine.”

  “Try it,” I said. “Maybe we could have avoided the entire apocalypse with Spam in a can.” And hey, the undead will chew on just about everything besides Spam, including people, animals, walls, paper, and in some cases tires, so why the hell not Spam?

  Gloria scooted to the edge of our cell and stuck her arm through the bars, shaking the can at him. “Hey, Horace,” she said. “Want some Spam?”

  Horace reacted more to her presence than the promise of Spam, and he pushed his rotten self against the bars of his cell again. Gloria waited until he was good and wound up, then rolled the can of Spam through our cell, across the brig floor, and into his little habitation area.

  The can clattered loudly, then bumped into his foot.

  Horace cocked his head, his attention caught by the rattling. He looked at Gloria and then down at the Spam. For a half-second, I thought he might go for it. Holy shit, plague of undead averted by copious amounts of Spam. We’d be heroes.

  But then, in true reanimated fashion, Horace stretched for Gloria instead, his trademark moan rising into what sounded very much like a frustrated squeal.

  “He sounds like my old dog when she really wanted something,” Dax said. He sat in his cell across from us, watching the exchange with great interest as he scooped what remained of our breakfast mush out of a bowl and into his mouth. “Sorry, bro,” he added. “You can’t have our brains. Or our sweet, tasty flesh. Vijay, give him your oatmeal if you’re not going to eat it.”

  His cellmate Vijay didn’t answer, and instead seemed deeply interested in studying the thin mattress that doubled as his bed. The two men, Gloria, and I had been locked up in the Hastings version of military prison since our arrival some two weeks prior—at least, I figured it was two weeks. Couldn’t have been much more than that.

  Two weeks since Tony, Dax, and I had set out from Camp Elderwood in an effort to find out what had happened to Hastings—and to beg for help if they could offer it. For all I knew, Tony had negotiated something the day we arrived, but that didn’t explain why they kept the rest of us locked up.

  It wasn’t all bad, I guess. We each had a mattress and a decent enough supply of food and water, which was more than any of us had on the road. But damn if cabin fever hadn’t started setting in even before they locked the ghoul in with us.

  “What do you think he’s in for?” I asked. I brought it up at least once a day. Seriously, who throws a zombie in jail?

  “Maybe he robbed a bank,” Gloria said.

  Vijay stood up and grasped the bars, prompting a new wave of irritated flailing from Horace. “Guys, we’ve been in here too long. We’re humanizing him. It’s fucked up.”

  Horace began stalking back and forth in front of his bars, seemingly upset by the entire predicament. While I had seen a few ghouls that seemed to think more deeply than most, the majority of the undead did not have a large range of emotion; they tended to default to hungry rage and occasionally cropped up with slightly thoughtful. I had identified things like anger and irritation, but I still wasn’t sure if I was simply ascribing human characteristics to them because it was just easier.

  Horace made a low keening sound.

  I sat up straight. “That’s a new one.”

  Dax rolled his eyes. “They all sound the same, Vibeke.”

  “He actually seems…disappointed.”

  Gloria sighed. “I hope not. First comes disappointment, then comes angst, and then suddenly he’s tweeting about the emptiness of his existence.”

  “I’d rather have angsty zombies than angry ones,” Dax said. “Can we get back to our game?”

  I stretched out three squares of toilet paper in front of me and read over the responses etched in the garish pink ink of a pen Gloria had stashed into her pocket before we got tossed locked up. I think she meant to use it to write about our experiences here, but it was quickly requisitioned as a prop for the only game we could all agree on: Cards Against Zombies, better known as our homemade version of Cards Against Humanity. We tossed the pen back and forth between our cells—further irritating Horace—and wrote on TP, which at least was replenished daily. Our jailers must have thought we were on the toilet all the damn time.

  I cleared my throat. “My life was complete until blank arrived. You guys said…” I had to squint at the squiggly writing on some of them. “…The living dead…Jay and Silent Bob…and…what does this say?” I held up the last scrap so Gloria could see it.

  She cocked her head to the side. “Looks like Orlando Bloom.”

  I tossed the scrap aside. “You guys suck at this game. Orlando Bloom is not relevant to my interests.”

  The zombie whined.

  “See?” I pointed at him. “Horace agrees.”

  Vijay sighed and sat back down, tucking his hands around the bars and glaring at me. “I’m deeply sorry, Vibeke. I don’t particularly enjoy playing card games when I’m locked up in some military prison.”

 
; “You guys are reporters,” Dax said. “Didn’t you get detained and stuff?”

  “I was a cameraman,” Vijay sniffed.

  “And I was an entertainment reporter,” Gloria said. “Handled the red carpet. Interviewed the big stars. Not exactly stuff that would get me thrown in the brig.”

  After two weeks in our strange little confinement, no one had come forward to explain to us why we were being held.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. We knew why Gloria and Vijay were on lockdown: They’d been transmitting top-secret information about the end of the world to what remained of the masses, and according to Doogie Howser—a.k.a. Captain Keller, the gawky blonde kid in charge of Hastings—that there was a hanging offense. Dax and I, along with our friend Tony, had fallen in with them right before we arrived in Hastings. Tony had somehow convinced Keller that he was a military officer, but the two of us had gotten unceremoniously tossed into the brig along with post-apocalyptic America’s two most wanted fugitives. I liked to think it was because we looked so damn dangerous.

  Hey, I can dream, right?

  “We should have told him we were military, too,” Dax said.

  “Because we look like military people,” I said. Tony could apparently pass as a hardened commander of some force or another. But then again, Tony could probably talk his way out of or into pretty much anything he wanted. Which was why he was hanging out with Commander Keller, pretending to be very, very important, while Dax and I were sitting in the brig with two would-be outlaws and a potentially depressed zombie.

  The zombie in question reached down, his gnarled fingers stretching toward something on the tattered jeans that encased his legs. I couldn’t quite figure out when he had died; he reeked, and clumps of his pasty skin had begun to sag off, but not quite as much as the usual free-roaming ghoul.

  He shifted around, and the stench wafted over us anew. No, it wasn’t as bad as what we’d encounter outside, but holy shit he was overpowering.

  “This must be the new psychological warfare,” Vijay said. “Put people in with a zombie to remind them of what will happen to them if they don’t do what you want.”

  Gloria pushed herself to the opposite end of our cell, as far away from Horace as she could get. “You’ll turn into one? Or you’ll get fed to one?”

  “Or you’ll smell like one,” Dax suggested.

  We all considered the zombie. He bent awkwardly, fingers stretching toward the Spam.

  I had seen this once before, months ago, while sneaking around a house in the suburbs. A revenant trapped in the floor had realized she wasn’t about to reach us, and had simply stopped trying, opting to sulk instead. I wasn’t sure whether that suggested some sort of intelligence some possessed that we hadn’t yet figured out, or if they were just learning to conserve their energy.

  The door to the brig flew open, and several heavily armed guards marched in. Our previously resigned undead cellmate began flinging himself against the bars in renewed frenzy, his hands stretching uselessly for the big men. Dax and I edged to the other end of our cell, just in case he managed to wedge himself through. Not that it seemed likely, but you know, after an apocalypse you can never count on what kind of luck you’re going to get.

  I heard a clicking sound, then a clank of metal. I could almost see the lock on Horace’s door shattering.

  The revenant sprang loose. Dax shouted a warning, but the dead man flung himself at the guards, his voice spiraling upward into that awful wail that seemed to cut straight through any self-preservation technique the unknowing living possessed, rendering them motionless, helpless sandwiches on two legs.

  “Cover your ears!” I screeched.

  The first guard got his gun up in time, but couldn’t seem to find the trigger. The dead man collided with the living one, and the next horrible seconds heard screams turn into gurgles. Blood fountained across the room, nearly drenching Vijay and Dax.

  The other guard struck the zombie in the head and successfully knocked him over. Horace twisted around to wail at him as well, and the guard poked his shotgun into the huge scarlet mouth. The head shattered when he pulled the trigger, leaving the body to sag over what remained of its prey.

  The fallen guard grasped at his throat, flailing around. I squinted at the wound, trying to identify the damage. Carotid artery…can’t stitch that up.

  His buddy agreed with me, and quickly ended the man’s suffering.

  Vijay and Dax edged away from the puddle of blood rapidly spreading into their cell.

  “Clear,” the surviving guard called. “Had a bit of an incident with Alfred.”

  Alfred. We’d taken to calling the zombie Horace, but apparently his name was Alfred.

  Captain Keller himself strolled in, still looking more like a frat boy in a Halloween costume than an actual military leader. He was followed closely by our very own Tony McKnight, who had ditched his usual jeans and jackets for military fatigues very much like the captain’s. Tony took in the two dead men and his eyes widened, but he was careful not to say anything. Keller just looked down at the pair and shook his head. “So did we use shitty locks, or do they just break down after repeated bashing?”

  No one answered him. He sighed, and fixed his pale gaze on each one of us in turn. “Good afternoon, folks,” he said. “I see you’re all in good order.”

  I held my tongue.

  Gloria didn’t. “That might be a stretch. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  Keller smiled at her. “Looking for you, actually.”

  Well, that didn’t sound promising.

  “Bring them to HQ,” he said to someone behind him. More guards, by the looks of them. They began filing in.

  “What do you want with us?” I asked.

  “You? Nothing.”

  Tony glanced my way and shook his head ever so slightly—just keep quiet, Vibby—and then turned to Dax, presumably to pass on that same message. We stood there, wordless, as the other guards came forward, opened up our cells, and began dragging our compatriots out.

  “Where are you taking us?” Gloria demanded.

  “Processing,” Keller said.

  Some guys can just make a word sound ominous.

  “You have information I want,” he said. “If you talk, it won’t be so bad.”

  Really ominous.

  The reporter and her cameraman went without much of a struggle, perhaps because leaving the cell meant they wouldn’t have to inhale the godawful stench of Horace/Alfred anymore…or they realized there wasn’t a damn thing they could do besides get themselves and the rest of us maimed or killed.

  I watched them go.

  Keller glanced at Tony, his gaze narrowing. “You can have your friends,” he said, as if he were graciously offering the man the last slice of cake at a birthday party. “But if there is any trouble from them…”

  “There won’t be,” Tony said. “They’re pussies.”

  Dax shrugged. I folded my arms.

  Keller looked us over. “Sure,” he said. “I can see that.”

  Bless you, child. The kid obviously didn’t believe him. After all, when we wound up in his custody we were all toting some pretty impressive firepower, and had just single-handedly fought off a horde of the undead and a nasty gang of biker brigands. I could continue to entertain my fantasy of being a total badass for at least another week.

  The guard standing in front of my cell beckoned to me. “Well, come on.”

  I stepped toward the cell door and edged past the man. Dax did the same, stepping over the puddle of blood and tip-going around splatter to reach freedom.

  Tony’s expression warned us both not to say anything.

  Keller spotted our squares of scrawled-upon toilet paper. “My guards thought you had IBS,” he said. “What were you doing?”

  “Playing Cards Against Humanity,” I said. “Well. Cards Against Zombies.”

  “Who won?” Tony asked.

  “No one. They all sucked and someone’s a closeted Orlando B
loom fan.”

  “Can we have our stuff back?” Dax asked. “These clothes smell like zombie and feet.”

  “Your belongings are with your commander,” Keller said. “You were both in the militia with Commander McKnight?”

  We nodded.

  “Interesting,” he said. “We didn’t realize Elderwood placed such high importance on the militia.”

  They hadn’t. And Tony wasn’t really a commander in it, as far as I knew, but whatever. The man had played his hand and now we had to play along.

  Keller looked us over once more. “Welcome to Hastings. We’ll be keeping your guns.”

  I hoped that meant my leather jacket was intact. I liked that jacket.

  Wait, did he just say they’re keeping our guns?

  I liked my gun. I’d grown attached to it.

  “Come on,” Tony said, undoubtedly to keep me from protesting aloud.

  He left the room. Dax and I swiftly followed him down a narrow, brick-walled corridor. We emerged into the heavy gray skies that had become the new normal since meteors pummeled the planet a few months prior, though after the fluorescent sting of the brig lights, the relatively neutral natural light was almost welcome. I took a few seconds to try to get my bearings; Hastings had been on my ambulance run years ago when I worked as an EMT, but I’d obviously never come to this part of town. I thought I recognized a handful of larger buildings in the distance, but I had no way to be sure.

  Keller brushed past us, tipped his cap to Tony, and kept walking.

  I kept my mouth shut. Keller seemed just paranoid enough to have developed supersonic hearing.

  Tony ushered us a block away from the brig, toward a small plaza that had probably once hosted food trucks and open-air markets. “You guys okay?” he asked. “They had a fucking revenant in there with you? Why?”

  “No idea,” Dax said. “They just stuck in him in there a few days ago.”

  “Maybe he committed a crime,” I said. “Like…a zombie crime. So they locked him up.”

  Tony lifted a dark brow. “Considering what I’ve seen of this place, that’s not too far out of line,” he muttered. “Do me a favor, kids, and don’t ask too many questions yet. Shit’s going down and I’m not sure where it’s going to land. But we have housing, we have food, and I got you jobs.”