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

by S. P. Blackmore

  I sighed and followed him into the night, until we were standing at the edge of our block beneath a stop sign. Multiple sets of tracks in the ash were the only indication that others had come through here.

  “Now,” he said, puffing away on the cigarette, “what happened?”

  “Logan’s sister came in. She used to be a radio operator.”

  Tony snapped to attention pretty quickly. “Is that so? And what does she have to say about their whole broken radio story?”

  “I didn’t have much time to talk to her. She did say it broke, but that Durkee tried to get it replaced. Then he died and Keller stopped all efforts to fix it, and then replaced her.” I paused, racking my brain for anything else she’d said. “She assumed he had fixed it because it had been so long. She thought there was just no one answering.”

  He stared at me for a few seconds. Then he slowly put the cigarette down and squashed it with his boot. “How the fuck did you do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “I’ve been trying to schmooze these guys since I got in. You talk to some chick and suddenly there’s a whole new wrench in things.”

  I shrugged. “For starters, I wasn’t trying to schmooze her. I was making conversation, and she was as surprised about the radio as I was.”

  He stuffed his hands into his pockets and tipped his head back, as if to look up at our dark, heavy sky.

  “We’ll work on it,” he said. “Could she have been a plant?”

  I blinked. “Like a ficus?”

  “No. Could Keller have sent her to you to…to throw you off?”

  I hadn’t thought the conversation could get much weirder. “Why the hell would Keller do that?”

  “He’s paranoid. Maybe rightly so.”

  Was she testing me? I thought I was a pretty good judge of mood and character; years of interviewing had given me a halfway decent set of tools to determine if a smiling face concealed rage or boredom or something else. Alyssa had seemed honest, forthcoming. And tired.

  We were all so damn tired.

  “I don’t think she’s a plant,” I said. “I mean, she could be. But I don’t think she is.”

  “Then talk to her again. I’ll try sniffing more, but you’re the first one to come up with a lead of any sort.” He grinned at me, a twinkle coming into his eye. “Look at you, getting into espionage.”

  I rolled my eyes, and he clapped me on the shoulder.

  We walked back home together.

  I heard the cheering again that night, long after I’d cranked out a hundred push-ups and crawled into bed. It stretched on into the late hours, filtering into my dreams, making me remember one concert or another where I’d found myself at the front of the stage, screaming with everyone else, blasting out my eardrums for the sake of rock and roll and a good story.

  The cheering faded away after about an hour. I rolled over, eager to sleep again, only to be jolted out of bed by a piercing electronic screech and the harder, more distinctive sound of gunfire.

  I leaped out of bed and scurried to my window. Lights came on in the houses on our street, but no one came outside. The siren blared a few moments longer and then paused, sputtering out.

  The shooting didn’t.

  I threw a blanket around my shoulders and went downstairs. Evie and Dax were already there, the former prancing nervously in front of the door, the latter holding on to the most weapon-like object he could find: a space heater.

  “That’ll help us,” I said. “Melt those goddamn zombies.”

  He made a face at me.

  Tony came down the stairs a few seconds later, wrapped in a flannel robe and looking more like a slightly displaced Jedi Master than Camp Elderwood’s fearsome militia leader. “It’s just an attack, guys,” he said.

  “Just an attack,” I repeated. “Just an attack?”

  “Means ghouls,” he said. “Revenants. They broke through somewhere and the Army is fighting them. That’s all.”

  That’s all? That’s all?

  I must have looked astonished. Surely we were supposed to do something. Call the military cops. Duck and cover. Run out into battle carrying household utensils as weapons.

  Something.

  “We’re just going to sit here?” I squeaked.

  Tony shrugged. “What do you want me to say? We’re not allowed to help out. This is a military-only operation.”

  He let that statement sink in.

  “Just go back to bed,” he said. “Try to sleep. We’ll find out what happened in the morning. And Dax, if you break that space heater, I’m going to superglue your toes together while you sleep.”

  He went back upstairs.

  After a few moments of confusion, Dax and I followed him up. What else could we do? We had no working guns. It wasn’t like we could go dashing off into glory.

  I don’t think any of us slept a wink.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Not unsurprisingly, the zombie ward had gone critical overnight.

  Lattimore sent Pete the Stoner to get me and Dax as soon as the sky began brightening. He then proceeded to trail behind us, entirely too high to walk any faster than a leisurely stroll.

  The doctor shoved a suturing kit into my hands as soon as I came in, and then pointed me toward a clump of soldiers and civilians who had evidently materialized in the last half-hour. “Next time you hear those sirens go off, you come straight to work, no matter what time it is,” she said—and I could not wait to rub that in Tony’s face. “This is your group. Get these guys cleaned up, send the hard cases to me.”

  I had no idea what constituted a hard case anymore. My perception had shifted somewhat since a flayed man coughed up blood all over me. But Lattimore had already dived into the fray and started barking orders.

  I busted out my suturing kit and stared at the dozen or so people standing in front of me. Not too bad so far; these all looked like limb wounds, injuries to the hands, arms, legs, maybe one torso. Some of them had probably started to clot on their own. No major muscle tissue torn away. That was a blessing, at least.

  They all stared at me expectantly. Oh, right. I was supposed to be helping them. Finally, after staying up all fucking night worrying, I could do something.

  “Okay,” I said to the group at large. “Arm bites here, leg bites there, torso bites in the middle.”

  “What if I have multiple bites?” a woman asked as the others shuffled into the order I’d indicated. She had her hand against what appeared to be a bite mark on her cheek.

  I bit my lip to prevent myself from expressing further dismay. “Well, I guess it’s your lucky day. You’re first on the list.”

  I might as well have told her I was going to foreclose on her house. “You’ve got a funny definition of lucky,” she said.

  “I know. That was not one of my wiser sentiments.” I carried my kit over to her. “Everyone else, just…try to stay calm. And don’t touch your wounds, okay? They get worse if you pick at them.”

  “People pick at these things?” one of the soldiers asked.

  “People pick at anything.” I looked over the woman with multiple bites and had to fight to maintain a straight face. She had a wound on left arm, the one on her cheek, and a bloody chunk missing from her right side. “How the fuck did this happen to you?”

  She stared at me. “More stitching, less bitching.”

  I liked that. I was going to steal it as my personal suturing motto.

  I started with her face, since that seemed the most egregious part. She’d obviously already been dosed with one painkiller or another, and probably a sedative as well; it was probably the only reason she wasn’t screaming her head off or passed out from the pain.

  Frankly, all of those fine folks looked slightly tranquilized. Maybe Pete had passed them the good stuff.

  I cleaned out the wound, paused, and wiggled something gray out of her cheekbone. I dropped the tooth into the pan, where it landed with a distinct rattle.

  Everyone looked over.

/>   “Tooth,” I said.

  She blinked at me. “Did you just pull a tooth out of my face?”

  “I did. They’re losing more and more of them.” How many teeth had I pulled out of bites since this all went down? And how were we not seeing more toothless zombies gumming at things?

  “What the fuck?” one of the other soldiers whispered.

  “I…” She sat there, looked down at her hands for a moment, and then looked at the tooth. “I don’t know why that’s shocking to me.”

  “Well. It’s not something you’re used to. Teeth belong in mouths, not cheeks.” I wanted to get her cleaned up before infection could set in, but she didn’t seem quite ready to offer me her face again.

  “Can I keep it?” she suddenly asked.

  I saw no reason why she couldn’t. “Sure,” I said. “Gonna put it on a necklace?”

  “I thought I’d burn it.”

  That seemed like an even better idea. “Yeah, I’ll wash it up for you,” I said. “Just…here. Hold still, okay? I’m going to put some more numbing agent on, but facial wounds never feel good.”

  “Neither do bites,” she muttered.

  More stitching, less bitching. I cleaned out her cheek, then threaded my needle and began the slow, delicate process of closing the gash. I knew I had to work very, very carefully if I wanted to avoid nasty scarring—a little bit was inevitable, considering my prior experience and the whole need to get her patched together quickly. But I made sure my stitches were small and close together, and hoped she wouldn’t be too angry at me for not being a plastic surgeon.

  Working on a face was an entirely new experience, and I was glad she didn’t look at me while I stitched. As long as I looked at it as something mechanical, like closing up a pillow, I did okay.

  The instant I remembered I was sewing a living person, my stomach clenched. Mustn’t puke on the patient, Vibeke, I thought. I’d managed to retch all over several revenants during the course of this apocalypse, but I had so far avoided upchucking meals on the living. I hoped to keep that winning streak intact.

  I stitched up her abdomen and arm next; both wounds were pretty deep in her flesh, and required more scraping than I would have liked. But we both got through it, and I pushed on to the next patient, a redheaded kid probably fresh out of boot camp when everything went down.

  None of them seemed keen on talking about what happened. I was dying to know what the hell had gone down, but asking about it only drew frowns and shaking heads and whispers of it was so horrible.

  Of course it’s horrible, I wanted to scream. It’s always horrible. Now tell me what happened.

  I could only assume someone had told them not to talk in an effort to prevent panic. That might have worked back in the beginning, when no one knew what was really going on and everything was fucking scary no matter what way you looked at it, but now we all knew the dead were up and walking and longing for the sweet taste of human flesh. No sense in telling people it was nothing. The less the soldiers said to me, the more frightening possibilities my sick little mind conjured up.

  It took me the better part of the morning to get through those people, and that was after sending three of them off to Lattimore to cope with bone-deep injuries that I should have noticed when they first got in. Rookie mistake, Vibby, Tony’s voice said in my head. Should’ve triaged better.

  Triage. I hated triage.

  More were trickling in, mumbling about a fence that still hadn’t been fixed.

  Two more medics came in to relieve me. “Doc says you need to take lunch,” one of them said.

  Oh, Praise Ezekiel. “I’m going,” I said, depositing my kit at the opposite end of the room for sanitizing and stumbling off to be sanitized myself. There weren’t enough hot showers in the world, but I needed to wash my hands, and my face, and maybe reapply some deodorant if I could find some.

  I found Dax in the small, smoky tent that masqueraded as a break room. He had a crossword in front of him and a pen in one hand, but did not seem to be paying much attention to either.

  “It’s bad,” I said.

  “Yeah, I saw.” He handed me a bottle of water.

  “Found another tooth,” I said.

  He blanched. “How many is that, now? Five?”

  I shook my head.

  “I want to go see that field of theirs,” he said, returning his attention to the crossword. “They keep us up all night, the least we can do is see what’s going on there. Want to come with me after you eat?”

  That probably meant he’d forgiven me for the whole blood-cleaning incident. I nodded, pulling my MRE from the cubby with my name on it. Pastrami again.

  Goddammit.

  We had an hour for lunch, but we scarfed down our MREs in record time and set out in search of adventure as soon as we could.

  It took us a few minutes to orient ourselves with the city streets. Dax kept looking at me to direct him, but in reality I hadn’t visited Hastings for years, and even then my knowledge of it had been fleeting.

  But a couple of questions asked of semi-friendly inhabitants soon had us on our way to the stadium. We moved slowly past gray buildings and the gray sky. It seemed there were two lunch shifts as well; Dax and I were part of the first, and we saw a number of other people walking around with their lunches or bottles of water.

  Pastrami. Pastrami everywhere.

  “Maybe there’s a black market for the good stuff,” Dax said. “You know. Like, ‘I’ll give you this pistol if you can find me a frozen McDouble somewhere.’”

  “The apocalypse happened a few months ago,” I pointed out. “I’m betting they already raided the fast food joints.”

  He frowned. “Then work your magic on Food Truck Guy again. Those sandwiches…”

  I couldn’t help but flinch. Logan had seemed decent enough, but passing me top-secret sandwiches seemed like a great way to accidentally get us all into trouble. “I’m sure that was just a thank-you gift,” I said. “He was really glad he didn’t turn into a zombie.”

  We hooked a right on Loring Street and passed some stores that were apparently still open, boasting nearly-new cold-weather gear and outrageously expensive camping equipment.

  No one here smiled at us. Not that I made much of an effort to engage them in the first place. Talking to people just seemed like too much effort right now.

  God, I was tired. I had never dealt with this many patients at once at Elderwood, not even after scouting parties went badly and ended in blood and bites. Even then, the bites had been pretty uniform. Oh, we saw some nasty shit, but eventually you got used to it.

  This place…

  I rubbed my hands together.

  “We should be dead, shouldn’t we?” Dax asked.

  “Dead?” I tried to picture us as revenants and decided we would not be very attractive.

  “Yeah. Like…dead. No sunshine, all the bad air, we’re eating this crap food. We should be dead.”

  Oh. He actually wanted to know how we were physically still alive. I shrugged. “Probably. But we’re not.”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  People had flung out a variety of answers to just that question—Dax was hardly the first to wonder. Tony said it was evil stardust that came with the meteors: whatever brought the dead back somehow kept the living, well, living, provided it didn’t kill them outright. There were more scientific answers, of course; Samuels had been fond of highlighting humanity’s determination to survive cataclysms like this before. He didn’t mean the living dead, of course—he kept talking about some volcano that blew its stop thousands of years prior and covered that part of the world in ash for a good long while. People survived then, he said. And we’ll survive now.

  So we survived. For the time being, anyway.

  “Who cares?” I asked. “We’re here.”

  “We’re here,” Dax said, and seemed to accept it.

  It’s too easy to get philosophical when shit like this goes down. You start to question everything you eve
r did, everything you’re ever going to do, and everything that mattered to you. If you sit there and think about it too long, you start to wonder if anything matters at all—and that’s when things get dangerous. That’s when you think you might as well let some ghoul chew on you, because not existing must be better than this.

  I hadn’t fallen that far down the existential spiral yet, but I could see why others did.

  We turned left on Vickers Street, and finally came up to Norwall Park.

  The last time I’d seen it, Norwall had been a lush green field surrounded by brand-new bleachers. It had hosted football, baseball, and soccer games, and had a snack shack beloved by all the local players. The grass was dead and gone, and parts of the chain-link fence that surrounded the field had been patched by boards. A number of staggered bleachers had been brought in, essentially cutting off a portion of the outfield and creating a smaller, more enclosed space around what had been the baseball diamond and the infield.

  “People here really like their sports,” I said. “You can fit a lot of people in these seats.”

  “This field isn’t big enough for a soccer game,” Dax said.

  I could count the number of soccer games I’d seen on one hand, so I decided he was probably right in that regard. “Maybe the lights in the outfield don’t work. So they closed it off, brought everything closer to the power source.”

  I had no idea what I was talking about, and it showed.

  “Maybe.” He sounded dubious.

  He pulled open the gate and walked in. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone in the vicinity, and followed him.

  The dirt had been kicked up and mashed down multiple times. Dax scuffed his boot along the edge of what had been the pitcher’s mound, then stomped down on it. “This place gets a lot of use,” he said. “Look at all these prints.”

  There were indeed many shoe prints.

  I paused in front of a darker patch of dirt. “Is this newer?”

  Dax joined me, crouched down, and reached toward the dirt. Then he seemed to think better of it, withdrawing his hand. “Y’know, all the shit we’ve come across, I’m thinking it might be better to just not touch whatever’s there,” he said.