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

by S. P. Blackmore

  “He was fine an hour ago!” the orderly said.

  Oh, this was a familiar mantra. Was Lattimore going to dress him down, too?

  She glanced at me, the same thought no doubt going through her mind.

  Renati grasped her arm, stopping her from any immediate action. “They are turning faster. Vibeke, help me get him to my lab.”

  No one directly countermanded him, so I moved over past the shaking orderly and picked up the zombie’s left arm. To be fair, he wasn’t really a zombie anymore; now he was just a proper corpse, one of the dearly departed who had shaken off this mortal coil and could now sit back and laugh while the rest of us scrambled around in a panic.

  Renati took the other arm, and together we dragged the dead man out of the tent.

  “I warned her,” he said. “Yesterday.”

  “Glad she listened.” We dragged the dead man to Renati’s lab and heaved him onto the nearest counter, knocking aside a microscope and probably a lot of important paperwork. I looked for something to wipe my hands on, and settled for the dead man’s bloodied white shirt.

  Renati fumbled around, came up with a pan of needles, and moved swiftly to the other side of the bed. He selected one of the needles and then peered into the eyeball I had just ruined. Before I could look away he had jammed the needle into the squashed mass.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I asked.

  “Drawing out some blood,” he said. “If I can get it on a slide I might be able to see what’s happening there.”

  I had to give him points for persistence. “Do you think you can stop them?”

  “That’s a rather large step away from what I can do.” He paused. “I don’t know if I can do anything. But I’d rather not fly blind into this—whatever’s happening.”

  He was right.

  I hated it, but he was right.

  It made no sense. None of this made sense.

  I decided I didn’t care.

  “Well, have fun with him,” I said. More than ever, I wanted to be back in Elderwood, with Hammond’s reassuring speeches and Samuels awkwardly teaching me how to stitch people up. I didn’t want hordes of damaged, sick beings surrounding me. Didn’t want to put scalpels through eyes or watch people I gave a shit about die horribly.

  That’s what’s going to happen to Alyssa.

  I put that thought away, and headed back to work.

  I spent a little too much time in the break room, frantically trying to scrub blood and glop off my hands and face. I kept scrubbing long after the splatters were gone, until my hands, face, and neck were rubbed raw. I grasped the edge of the sink, clenching it until my knuckles turned white.

  It hurt.

  It was good to hurt. To feel something real, something physical, besides the constant sense of bewilderment that had dogged me since we arrived here.

  I heard footsteps behind me. They paused. Dax, no doubt. He was the only one who would stand there waiting for me to do something.

  “Hi,” I said to the sink.

  “Hey.” He paused. “Lattimore’s laying into the guards for not coming in when they heard the screaming. But she says she needs you back out there.”

  I relaxed my grip slightly. “I should shower. I’ve got his germs all over me.”

  “She says that doesn’t matter in the Plague Tent.”

  So she had given up on them, too.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  He didn’t push it, and left me alone. I stood there another few seconds, trying to summon what remained of my energy. I was so tired now…tired of all this. Of fighting off the dead, of sparring with the living, of waiting to become the next person on a shit list or a menu.

  I had to get out of here. Out of the tent. Out of Hastings. Out of the apocalypse.

  There was one thing I might be able to do.

  The mess had been cleaned up by the time I got back into the tent. Everyone was more or less in their beds, though I felt what I thought might be some admiring stares.

  Alyssa was back in bed, her hands folded atop several layers of thin blankets. She smiled at me when I sat down on the edge of the bed next to her, though her face seemed even paler than it had been just a half-hour prior.

  I checked her temperature. Nice and cool. Cold, even.

  “Hail the conquering heroine,” she said. “Undead men troubling you? Call upon…Bedpan Girl.”

  Of all the nicknames I could hope to obtain throughout the zombie apocalypse, Bedpan Girl might be the least appealing. “Tell me that’s not the best one you came up with. You know my prison name was Bone Crusher, right?”

  She thought that over, then shook her head. “Bedpan Girl suits you better.”

  If stories of me got passed down and I was remembered as Bedpan Girl, I was going to be mighty pissed off. But I pushed the thought of eternal embarrassment from my mind and focused instead on my patient.

  My patient, and the only possible route I had to maybe eventually getting out of here. “How are you, Alyssa?”

  She cleared her throat. “I’m not feeling too good,” she said. “Vibeke, I feel weak. I feel so weak…”

  I took her hand and squeezed it.

  “What’s wrong with me?”

  It’s just the flu. It’s a flu bug, silly. You’ll be fine in a few days.

  She wouldn’t be fine. I knew it. She knew it. The zombie we had just put down knew it. Even Lattimore knew it, if she didn’t require me to shower up before treating these people

  I leaned toward her. “Alyssa…I want to try to get help. For Hastings.”

  She blinked up at me.

  “That backup radio you talked about. In a library or something. Do you know where it is?”

  She nodded.

  “Could…could you teach me how to use it?”

  After a moment of silence—shit, what if I misjudged this and she turns me in?—she started smiling. It was a pained smile, but a smile nonetheless.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” she said. “Do you have a piece of paper?”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  “This is stupid,” Tony said, his limp more pronounced than I remembered.

  He’d been repeating that mantra for the last half-hour, from the moment Dax clipped on Evie’s leash up to the point where we left the populated section of the city and headed for the boonies. Dax and I had requested the following morning off, and Lattimore, in a bizarre turn of events had approved both requests. Maybe she figured we’d finally earned a break.

  Of course, that meant it was time to go traipsing into zombie territory to find the backup radio.

  “Do you have better ideas?” I asked. “Because if you do, I’m open to them. And I don’t believe going through official channels works when the place is run by a fucking dictator.”

  “He’s not a dictator. People just…listen to him.” Tony scratched the back of his head. “Though I’ll be damned if I know why. Fucker is loonier than all the inmates at Arkham Asylum.”

  No one paid us much attention as we walked. I guess the grinning golden retriever at our sides kept suspicions to a minimum. Think about it, how many evildoers walk around with golden retrievers? Zero. The way I figured it, we were almost guaranteed safe passage as long as we managed not too look too terrified of being caught.

  “We just need to act like we belong,” I said. “I used to do it all the time at rock concerts.”

  “Rock concert and infiltrating a zombie-infested city. Totally see the similarity,” Dax said.

  “I mean for getting backstage. They have bouncers and security guards and stuff.”

  Tony let out a short, sharp bark of laughter. “Vibby, you never interviewed a band that had fucking security guards.”

  “I did too!”

  Evie yipped gleefully and trotted along beside us, her tail a constant blur. She seemed relieved that everyone was getting along again.

  I plunged on ahead with my reasoning: “Maybe it’s not a huge similarity, b
ut it’s the same concept. If we don’t look like we’re worried, then people won’t worry about us.”

  “I understand the concept just fine, Vibby. I’m just pointing out all your trouble with, uh, the various rock bands in your vast repertoire don’t quite compare to us sneaking past men with big guns and into a city full of flesh-eaters.”

  Tony usually wasn’t nearly this sensible. I found it troubling.

  He added, “We don’t even know how to use a military radio. That chicken scratch you got from your friend isn’t going to help.”

  That chicken scratch was presently the most valuable thing I owned. I had folded it into a small square and tucked it into the interior pocket of my leather jacket, and even now I had to stop myself from reaching into that pocket to check on it. “Well, she couldn’t exactly draw us a diagram. And Dax knows how to do it, right?”

  Dax looked at me in surprise. “Why the hell would I know how to work a military radio?”

  “Boy Scouts.”

  Dax, to his credit, kept walking while staring at me. “I don’t exactly know what you think they teach us in Boy Scouts. It wasn’t the freaking Nazi Youth.”

  Well, there went all my warm feelings about the Boy Scouts. What, exactly, were we doing with our young men if not grooming them to look after us during a possible apocalypse?

  We eventually put the well-maintained buildings and frequent pedestrians behind us. Now we had come to the real show: the no man’s land filled with buildings that might be structurally OK but had been abandoned to the elements as a buffer for the Quarantine Zone.

  I had seen it all before, of course. Parts of Muldoon looked like this. Hell, so did much of Elderwood. It felt a bit like being at a wake; just because the living dead hadn’t overrun this part of the city didn’t mean it was still alive.

  Alyssa had told us to slip through the eastern gate—which was not so much a gate as it was a waist-high fence that even I could hop over. Tony picked up Evie and handed her to Dax over the fence, and her tail thumped against both of their faces before they set her back down on the asphalt.

  Just like that, we entered the Quarantine Zone.

  “They aren’t guarding this very hard,” Dax said.

  “I’ll pass that information on to Keller,” Tony said. He looked at the fence in utter disgust, grasped the top, and shook it. “What the hell is this? Only one of them needs to lean on this thing for things to go bad.”

  We looked around us at the buildings, now tall and silent, and the empty pavement of the streets. Not even crashed cars dusted this area; Keller or his predecessor, Durkee, must have cleaned the place out at some point.

  We paused in front of a bulletin board hastily affixed to a building wall. Some of the papers adorning it had faded, but I recognized the theme well enough: missing posters. People searching for loved ones. Tommy Horner, was at the hospital. Erika Mendez, lives on Bruges St., careful she has guns.

  This part of the city must not have always been in the Quarantine Zone.

  “I wonder if they found any of these people,” Dax said.

  “Unlikely,” Tony said. “They’d have taken down the messages if that were the case.”

  “Not if this place got closed off.”

  Tony snorted and kept walking.

  Evie bounced along, her tags jangling with each step. She usually went a little nutty when the dead came around, so I was trusting in her superior senses to warn us if some hungry fiends came calling.

  Unless the dead were learning stealth. That would be just our luck.

  Still. No ghouls yet, and no resistance. So far my harebrained scheme was going exactly the way I’d envisioned it.

  Well, not exactly the way I’d envisioned it. In my wildest dreams, I had fantasized about having some weapons, at least; the old assault rifle I’d grown so fond of, or at least something beyond the measly pistol Keller permitted Tony to keep because he was too afraid to take it personally. Even a machete or something. Dax and I had snagged forks and severely blunted knives from the kitchen before we left. If the dead attacked, we would have to face them mano a mano.

  They do call me Bone Crusher, I thought.

  No they don’t, my logical side shot back. You gave yourself that nickname and you’ve never once proven you can crush anything, much less bones. They call you Bedpan Girl.

  I shook off the doubt. Now was not the time to question my abilities.

  Tony stopped moving. “You hear that?”

  We all stopped. Aside from Evie’s panting, I couldn’t hear anything out of place. “No…what?”

  “Exactly.”

  “You mean it’s too quiet,” I guessed.

  “Yeah. Maybe we’ve just gotten too used to Hastings, but I seem to remember there was some sort of noise even in Muldoon and Elderwood…”

  “Like the shuffle of undead feet?” Dax asked.

  Tony’s scowl was enough to tell me that yes, that was exactly what he thought.

  “We can’t do anything about it,” I said. “Maybe the zombies left.”

  Tony rolled his eyes. “And went where? Hawaii?”

  “Or somewhere with more meat. I don’t know. But if they were out here, they would have attacked us already.”

  “You realize the longer we sit around arguing, the more time we give them to track us down or smell our sweet, tender flesh?” Dax asked. “Or whatever it is they do now when they hunt. So will you two quit your bitching and get a move on?”

  He tugged on Evie’s leash and set off in front of us.

  You know you’ve made a mistake when Dax takes you to task. Tony and I followed him, properly shamed into silence for the time being.

  As we moved deeper into the city, the familiar signs of destruction cropped up. Cars abandoned in the middle of the road. Belongings hanging from open windows—makeshift laundry lines, I thought, or perhaps signals to the military that people were living there. Over time, the signs grew more obvious. HELP US, someone had written on a window. PLEASE COME, said a piece of paper taped to a door.

  Of course, this did make me wonder if the soldiers had come through at all. I didn’t see any faces in the windows, but that didn’t mean people weren’t there. They might have given up, might be huddled in their living rooms, hoping they wouldn’t attract the attention of the dead. They might not know we were out here at all.

  I kept scanning for faces, even rotten ones.

  Nothing.

  It was like even the dead didn’t care for this area. How strange.

  How strange, I mocked myself. How strange, you dimwit. Things have been strange since the goddamn sky fell down. Why don’t you think of some other similarly ridiculous platitude and write that down?

  Ever been alone with your own thoughts for too long? They start to get obnoxious.

  We passed an overturned dumpster with a brown stain emanating from beneath it. I couldn’t decide whether the stain was the blood of someone trapped under it, or the stain of all that leaking garbage that had probably congealed against the lid. Neither option was particularly appetizing.

  I stopped when the hospital came into view. It was still a good ways off, lording over the city from the top of the hill it had perched on. “Behrens Memorial,” I said.

  “That where Gloria interviewed Lattimore?”

  I nodded. “I used to drop people off here sometimes. It’s a nice hospital…or it was, anyway.”

  “People die in hospitals,” Dax said.

  “People live in them, too.” I felt like I needed to better defend that statement. “Surgeons fix people. Babies are born there. They aren’t just where people go to die.”

  “But people die in them.”

  “Well, now they come back, so that should make you happy.” I charged on ahead, not entirely sure what to make of the feelings suddenly buzzing around.

  We hooked a right and found ourselves in another suburban area. This place, it seemed, had not been touched at all. The cars were parked in driveways instead of out on th
e streets, and the dead grass in the front lawns still stuck up straight. Windows were unbroken, doors left on their hinges. No messages left behind. If anyone had lived here, they had departed in an orderly fashion, leaving behind no sign that this place had even been abandoned.

  We turned left, and there it was.

  Costner Public Library lay just a block away, tucked behind numerous barbed wire barricades and looking like it had taken a bit of a beating itself. There had been some action here, though obviously it had long since passed. Spent ammunition, pieces of armor, and other equipment were scattered across the ground. Tony bent over, picked up a shell casing, and held it in his fingers as he looked around.

  “This is an Army base?” Dax asked. “This is—damn.”

  “Temporary base,” Tony clarified. “They set up a perimeter here and hoped for the best. Obviously it didn’t work out.”

  “And that’s where they set up their comm station.” I said. The library had been a pretty striking building when it went up ten years prior—three floors, several units broken apart by genre, and a weekend social hour a former roommate had dragged me to now and then. “I wonder what they did with the books.”

  Dax pointed at a lump of something not far from the structure. I had to stare at it for a few seconds before realizing it was a pile of books. “No one’s reading right now, Vibby.”

  Some ridiculous part of me hoped they hadn’t been burned. That just seemed wrong, even now.

  “Well, the backup radio’s in the library,” I said.

  “And you received this information from a soldier who may or may not be dying of the plague.”

  I shrugged. “No reason to lie to me.”

  “This is your worst idea yet, Vibby.” But Tony took the lead, as I’d secretly hoped he would, and limped toward the library’s left side. The radio room was located in there, in one of the offices once reserved for administration.

  I trailed after him, and Dax brought up the rear, still trying to hold back our rather excited dog, who apparently thought everything smelled just wonderful.

  It was just so quiet. I kept looking over my shoulder, waiting for something to come lurching at me from the darkness, but there was nothing.