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

by S. P. Blackmore

  “Vibeke, let him go! He’s pissed!”

  I ignored Dax’s warning, grabbed Tony’s arm, and yanked with all my strength. He swung around, but his hand came up, clenching around my jaw and keeping me from speaking. I started to wrench myself away, but he jerked me close to him, put his lips against my ear.

  “The house is bugged.”

  I stopped moving. I wasn’t sure I could move.

  “They are listening to everything. They already don’t trust any of us. You want to get locked up with Gloria and Vijay? We have to stay quiet. Respectful.”

  He released me, and stepped back.

  I heard footsteps approaching from behind me. Dax, followed by Evie; they stopped a few feet away. “Vibeke?” he asked warily.

  “It’s cool,” I said.

  “Put the dog back inside and lock the door,” Tony said. “We’re going for a walk.”

  I don’t know how we ended up walking toward Norwall Park. We just did.

  “He’s spying on us?” Dax asked, dismay clear in his tone. Neither of the guys said anything about the rather physical tussle they’d just engaged in. Maybe that was for the best.

  Tony let us walk along for another few seconds before answering. “The dog found one, right after I moved in. She got into a fake plant and came up with it. I played dumb. Pretended to be annoyed with her and scooped everything back into the planter bowl. I made a point of looking around after that. They’re all over. The bedrooms, the kitchen…”

  “The bathroom?” I asked.

  He sighed.

  Oh, great. Keller or one of his cronies was watching me shower. And use the loo. And brush my teeth. And…

  The rage and shock passed through me quickly, giving way to something much like resignation. So Keller was watching me undress. Big damn deal. In the scheme of things that had already happened to me, one stupid little peeping tom just seemed…uninteresting.

  I would, of course, separate his testicles from his body at my earliest convenience.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” I whispered. “Why didn’t you tell us before we even moved in?”

  “What could we even do about it? If we threw out or broke the cameras, they’d know. If we acted overly weird, they’d know. I kept waiting for you to come upstairs and try to complain about work or pastrami or something—I was going to write a note on the inside cover of the Mennonite book. I couldn’t do it downstairs, it’s too well covered.”

  “So that’s why you kept going up there,” Dax said. “Shit. I thought you were just jerking off.”

  We turned down another street. The park had obviously started its show early tonight; we could already hear the shouts and hollering even from a good distance away.

  “You two are the calm ones. I can’t tell anymore…I wasn’t sure…I didn’t know how to feel about this place. It’s safe. There’s no undead running around. If you were happy…” Tony shrugged. “But if you two feel like it’s fucked up, well, maybe we can do something about it now.”

  “He has cameras in the bathroom,” I said. “That does seem pretty fucked up.”

  “If it makes you feel better, I don’t think he’s got any interest in you, uh, that way,” he said. “He’s watching us because he wants to know what’s going on in Elderwood. Because he doesn’t trust me.”

  “Of course he doesn’t trust you,” Dax said. “I don’t trust you.”

  “I’m aware. He also thinks the Elderwood Militia is a big deal. It’s about the last card I have. He has no way of knowing Hammond isn’t about to show up with everyone to come get us.”

  That meant Gloria and Vijay were probably safe for the time being, too.

  Cheers and whistling indicated we were coming up on the park. We were still plodding along, our footfalls sending up tiny plumes of ash.

  I didn’t want to see it. Why did I even ask to come out here?

  “Have you tried to get him to talk to Elderwood?” I asked.

  “I asked once. He said they weren’t answering. I didn’t push it…and I don’t know if he’s lying, or if he just never fixed the radio, or what. If your friend Alyssa is right, he just doesn’t want to talk to anyone out there.”

  Dax stuffed his hands into the front pocket of his oversized sweatshirt. “Then what are we supposed to do? If the radio’s busted or under guard, and our phones don’t work…”

  Here’s your moment, Vibeke

  “Alyssa thought there was a backup radio,” I said.

  “Of course she did,” Dax muttered.

  Tony just sighed.

  The bright lights of the park rounded into view, and it took us a couple minutes to wind our way through the outfield and come to our customary spot beneath the back row of bleachers. The stands were pretty full tonight, but we still had a good view of what was going on. Steel clanged against steel: two women fighting this time, instead of the men. I thought there might be a couple thousand people in the stands watching them fight.

  “No fun,” Tony said. “They’re wearing too much clothing.”

  That part stuck out to me as well. With everything else that had gone on, I was kind of expecting chain metal bikinis, or at least some mud or something. But these ladies were fully clothed in jeans and thermal shirts, and wore arm and leg armor, as well as neck guards.

  Neck guards! That’s something we hadn’t seen much, despite the seeming abundance of neck biting. I fully approved of these women.

  “Winner fights the zombie?” I asked.

  Tony nodded.

  “You never told us how this little show got started,” Dax said.

  “From what I can tell, it began as some effort to train people to fight the dead. At least, that may have been what Durkee intended. People watched it and liked it. Somehow it morphed into this.” Tony gestured to the lady-fighters, who, I might add, were considerably more skilled than the men I’d seen duking it out prior. They must have either had actual sword training before the apocalypse, or they’d acquired some in a hurry when things went down. “Now it’s a sporting event. It keeps the people happy, I guess.”

  One girl got the other in the jaw, and knocked her down.

  The one on the ground flung up a hand. The crowd booed.

  “Now she dies,” I said.

  “Nah. She’s pretty good. They’ll let her up.”

  Well, that was a happy thought. So Keller wasn’t so bonkers he was throwing away living fighters left and right.

  “Where does Alyssa think this radio is?” Tony asked, his gaze still glued on the fighters. The loser got up, bowed to a smattering of applause, and trotted off the field to safety.

  She’d done better in there than I would have.

  The crowd howled. A few seconds later I saw why: a revenant had come stumbling out of the dugout. Another slow mover, but this one had sharp, shiny objects attached to its hands. Blades of some sort, I assumed, tied to its clenching fists with lengths of rope.

  “Oh, fuck me,” Dax growled. “They’re arming them?”

  Revenants with weapons. Camp Elderwood would collectively shit itself if it could see this.

  The victorious fighter danced around the ghoul, seemingly unconcerned. Still riding high off the adrenaline of her victory, perhaps.

  “She said it was by the old library. I don’t know where that is.”

  The zombie lunged for the girl. She caught one of its blades on the edge of her sword and thrust upward. The motion knocked the ghoul off-balance, though it didn’t seem otherwise harmed.

  “That’s in the Quarantine Zone.”

  Well, that was just our luck.

  “And how were you planning to get us in, Vibby?” Tony turned to me. “You’ve got a plan, yeah?”

  The people in the stands above us began stomping their feet in tune with the ragged steps of the attacking ghoul. It might have been scary if they hadn’t been drowning out our conversation and therefore irritating the hell out of me.

  “You told me they aren’t patrolling some sections of
it very well.” I didn’t dare speak any louder, and both of the guys had to clump in around me to hear my voice. “We’ll go through one of those spots, get to the radio room, and call Hammond.”

  Tony ruminated over it for a moment. “And if we get caught?”

  Then we get shot. Wait. No, that wouldn’t work. How would I excuse wandering into a restricted area? I couldn’t say that had been a problem for me before all this shit went down. The biggest problem I’d had with authority had involved speeding tickets. How had I gotten out of those?

  Well, to be fair, I hadn’t.

  I had tried to play dumb. Which might be my only defense here, too.

  “We’ll bring the dog,” I said. “I’ll pretend I didn’t realize where I was going. And you had to chase after me.”

  Tony frowned. Dax screwed up his face in something resembling dismay.

  The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. “Lattimore thinks I’m an idiot and I’m pretty sure Keller thinks that too, now. Why wouldn’t I wander into the Forbidden Zone, or whatever it’s called?”

  Tony laughed, but there was no humor in it. “Forbidden Zone. I like that. Okay, my little mastermind. Next problem. We don’t have weapons.”

  “He let you keep your pistol, didn’t he? Can’t you—”

  “No, I can’t get us weapons.”

  “Well, we’ll think of something. Or we’ll just be really, really quiet.”

  Dax pulled his sweatshirt hood up over his head. “Million-dollar question. Do you know how to work the radio?”

  I had a pretty good feeling a military-grade radio wasn’t going to look anything like the little transistor thing I used to listen to while doing the dishes back in the pre-apocalypse days. “Alyssa will tell me.”

  Tony nodded. “And you’re going to remember her undoubtedly detailed instructions?”

  “I have an excellent memory.”

  He conceded that fact quickly enough. “And if Hammond’s dead? What if no one picks up?”

  That was the one part of our situation I hadn’t really considered.

  The revenant flung itself at the fighter, sloppily hacking at the air with its rudimentary weaponry. I wasn’t sure it quite realized it could use the swords to cut; it more or less did the usual zombie thing and tried to grab at her with short daggers instead of bare hands.

  Everything about my plan hinged on someone picking up on the other end. If Hammond was gone, if Camp Elderwood had been completely overrun, then there was no one to save us. Then all of this was for nothing.

  It couldn’t be for nothing.

  Of course, that line of thinking wouldn’t work on a hardened pessimist like Tony.

  “What if he’s dead, Vibeke?”

  “If he’s dead, he’s dead. We figure out a way to make it work here. Maybe I’ll sign up for fencing lessons.” I gestured to the fighter dancing around the dead guy. “But we came here for a reason. To get help for the people in Elderwood.”

  Six thousand people were waiting for us in our previous camp. Well, maybe considerably less, now, but still. We’d been sent here to help them. We had taken too long already.

  Tony grunted softly. “Seems like the people here might need our help more than the Elderwood group.”

  The lady fighter whirled around, and sliced off the ghoul’s hands. The rotten appendages dropped to the ground, the weapons still affixed to them.

  Of course, the dead man didn’t seem bothered. He just continued to go after her, waving his stumps around. Even from this distance, I could tell his jaw was still working.

  “We have to try,” I said.

  The crowd stomped and cheered, the noise rising into a deafening crescendo over our heads.

  Tony grunted in what I hoped was assent.

  The fighter jammed her blade through the zombie’s head, and the crowd went wild. She hacked her way through the skull, then thrust her blade in the air as the dead thing toppled over.

  Maybe this was what surviving off pastrami alone did to people.

  Tony sighed.

  “Go find out how to work the radio,” he said. “I’ll find out what kind of weak spots that fence has.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I wandered into total chaos at work the next morning.

  Two orderlies were holding down a man—well, holding down might have been too strong a term. They were getting knocked around pretty hard.

  Alyssa wobbled in front of them, a scalpel clenched in her hands.

  One of the orderlies spotted me. “Medic! Help!”

  I dashed over. I knew immediately the man they were fighting wasn’t dead: he foamed at the mouth, bloody spittle flying around with each jerk of his body. One of the orderlies got an elbow into his gut and managed to hold him down for a split second, giving me enough time to check the wild man’s eyes. They were clear. Alive.

  He just seemed…angry.

  “Sedative!” I squawked.

  One of the orderlies tore himself away and ran for the back of the tent. I took his place and threw myself on top of the thrasher to hold him down.

  “How did this happen?” I gasped, pushing all my weight down on him. All those push-ups I’d been doing since the brig were finally coming in handy.

  “He just lunged at me,” the remaining orderly puffed.

  “Want me to stab him?” Alyssa asked.

  She didn’t look capable of poking him with the scalpel, much less stabbing him. Fortunately, the second orderly came back before I had to ask her to do anything. He held out a needle. I snatched it, jammed it into the patient’s neck, and pressed down on the injector.

  He snapped his head to the side—right into my face.

  My vision clouded, then filled with stars. I toppled off him, but my hands caught the side of the cot. I hauled myself back up, and he jerked his head toward me, his jaws snapping.

  The orderlies latched onto him again, preventing him from ripping my face off. “How long does that shit take to kick in?” one of them puffed.

  “A few more seconds…” I stuck two fingers out against his carotid artery, searching for the elevated heartbeat he surely possessed.

  Nope.

  Nada.

  Oh, fuck.

  I jabbed my fingers against another spot on his neck, hoping I’d just grossly misjudged the artery’s location. His head snapped from side to side, and his mouth dropped open, revealing beautiful white teeth and rapidly graying gums.

  Well, there went my morning.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “He’s fucking dead.”

  “Fucking A!” the second orderly looked up at me, eyes wide. “Do something!”

  The dead man slammed his hands down, and then lurched upward.

  The second orderly went flying. The first one hung onto him and forced him back down onto the bed, but he was rapidly losing his grip on the flailing right arm.

  Alyssa darted in and jabbed the scalpel into the soft flesh of the dead man’s neck. It slipped in easily enough, but whatever strength she’d summoned drained from her immediately afterward.

  The blade wobbled, then slipped from her fingers.

  The dead guy flailed about with his free left arm, and his fist struck her across the face. She toppled to the ground.

  Okay. Now they were hitting people.

  “What the fuck?” Lattimore exclaimed. She stopped just short of joining our little wrestling-fest. Renati and a third orderly stood just behind her, evidently drawn by the commotion. “When did he wake up?” Renati demanded. “When did he die?”

  “He was alive when I came in,” the third orderly said. “He was fine!”

  “Hold him,” I growled, and reached for the scalpel still stuck in his neck.

  The dead man curled forward and let out a single, piercing howl.

  All sound in the ward came to a screeching halt. My outstretched hand halted where it was.

  Even Lattimore seemed transfixed.

  Oh, this was bad.

  Alyssa tried to p
ull herself up from the floor.

  “Stay down,” I said. “Stay down, Alyssa.”

  He shrugged the first orderly off him and leaped to his feet. He straightened, looked back and forth, and howled again.

  The dead man weaved back and forth, trying to get his balance. The scalpel glinted brightly in the white flesh of his throat. I could just imagine him breaking free of the Plague Tent and roaming through the city, tearing off bits of people’s faces as he went.

  I snaked my hand back out toward the scalpel. If he bit me, he bit me.

  My hand closed around it. I started sawing, trying to slice through his neck with the tiny blade.

  I don’t know if he felt pain, or if he just grew stronger with each passing moment. I ground my teeth and pushed the tiny blade through muscle and flesh. He thrashed harder. Only one of the orderlies scrambled up onto his back and tried to hold him still.

  Wait.

  Why the hell was I carving away at his neck? He had a perfectly vulnerable eyeball right in front of me.

  I yanked the scalpel out of his throat.

  His eyes focused on me. Narrowed.

  He saw me. Saw me as a threat, instead of just a snack.

  “Fucking stay dead,” I muttered. I jammed the scalpel into his eye and pushed on it, driving it straight through the socket before I could think on it anymore. The recognition went out of him—everything went out of him—and he slumped forward.

  I pushed him away.

  He fell to the ground.

  For the second time in as many days, the Plague Tent was silent. No spontaneous applause broke out. No one said a word.

  I swiped at the glop that had landed on my cheek and rubbed it on my shirt.

  Alyssa cleared her throat. “Can I get up now?”

  I crouched down beside her and helped her up. She sagged, the strength seemingly gone from her limbs.

  I helped her back to her cot and checked her pulse. Wildly erratic. Not exactly unexpected, given what we’d just experienced, but threadier and weaker than I wanted.

  “Doctor,” I said. “Check her.”

  Lattimore appeared at my shoulder. “Get the body out of here,” she said. “When did he turn?”

  “I don’t know, I just got here.”