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

by S. P. Blackmore

  “What the hell is going on in there?”

  Evie latched on to the nurse’s leg and gnawed at it. He didn’t seem to notice, and instead dragged her furry bulk after him.

  What the fuck?

  “Is there a fucking revenant in there with you?” Hammond demanded.

  “Yeah. Vibeke’s dealing with it.” Tony gestured at me. “Vibeke, deal with it!”

  Dealing with it involved picking up a leg from the chair and smacking the dead man across the face with it. His skin split open where I hit him, which gave him the illusion of an even wider, ghastlier smile. His teeth bore the telltale cracks of the dead—he’d opened and shut his mouth too hard, splitting them right down the middle. Broken teeth never seemed to bother them much, though to be honest I kind of wanted to see what happened once they ground their chompers down to stubs. Maybe once they did that they just gummed you to death.

  Logan let out a dramatic-sounding sigh. “I’ll deal with this,” he said. “All right, Scrubs. Time to fight like men.”

  He stepped in front of me, ignoring the squirming dog between us, and slammed his fist into the zombie’s face.

  He immediately doubled over with his hand clutched against his chest. “Holy shit, he’s all bone!”

  And that is why you never punch a zombie.

  I jammed the pointy end of the chair leg up against Scrubs’s chin, but it wasn’t quite sharp enough to penetrate no matter how much of my weight I threw against it. “Goddammit!”

  The revenant let out a bone-chilling howl.

  “He’s calling his friends,” Dax said. “He’s calling his friends!”

  “Not for long.” Logan yanked out his pistol again. Before anyone could warn him otherwise, he pressed the gun against the dead man’s head and pulled the trigger.

  In the enclosed space, the pistol’s report almost shattered my eardrums. The zombie toppled to the ground. I dropped my stick and pressed my hands over my ears, trying to stave off the ringing in my head. “Son of a bitch.”

  Logan pushed me out of the way and raised his pistol until it was level with the partially closed door and a fucking horde of revenants behind it.

  Logan gaped for a split second. “No fucking way,” he said. “Where did they come from?”

  Evie barked frantically from the center of the room.

  “The door!” I said. Logan hadn’t fully shut it when he tried to spring to my rescue, and now it swung open easily, revealing a great mass of rotting faces, clacking jaws, and staring eyes.

  Logan tried to slam it shut, but they had already begun their steady migration inside, and the door—and Logan—was pushed inward inch by inch. Shit. Shit shit shit.

  “Shit!” Logan dug his heels into the thin carpeting, but kept getting shoved forward. “Grab something, they’re coming in!”

  Evie howled. I lifted up the piece of chair I still clutched. Maybe I could put it through an eye.

  “McKnight?” Hammond’s voice cut through the noise.

  Oh, right. The radio.

  “Hammond,” Tony said. “Hammond, we need help. Lots of help. The entire city needs help.”

  “Um…” The general did sound a touch worried now. “What exactly are you doing over there?”

  “Breakdancing.”

  Logan lifted his pistol. “On the count of three, guys.”

  “McKnight—”

  “One, two…”

  “I gotta call you back. There’s a gaggle of zombies here and I think we pissed them off.”

  I sucked in some air and braced myself.

  “McKnight—”

  “Three!”

  Logan leaped away from the door, swinging around to face it as he did so.

  The horde spilled into the radio room.

  Logan began shooting. He hit everything he aimed at, but more came piling in, moving around their dead comrades and lurching toward the rest of us.

  I dove for the nearest one, angling my sad little stake toward its eye. The chunk of old wood was nowhere near slender enough to fit through the socket, and all I ended up doing was knocking the ghoul’s head to the side. It glared at me and kept moving, so I did the sensible thing and jammed the chair leg into its mouth, and then as far back as I could wedge it. The dead man stood there chewing on it like an oversized stick of gum.

  Ineffective, yes. But it did keep the thing from eating me.

  The shooting continued, everything in the room blending into a terrifying stew of noise and screams and shooting and groans. From the corner of my eye, I saw Dax dive under the desk. He popped back up holding the PC tower, then ripped the cording out from its back. He lifted the tower over his head and slammed it directly into a zombie’s face. The back of the machine fell off upon impact, and the video card and fan toppled out.

  Evie sprang at another revenant, her paws landing against its chest. It went over backwards, then batted at her as she made a gallant effort to tear its throat out. I scanned the room for something I could use against these dead fucks besides my fist.

  My gaze landed on sections of pipe the dog had so diligently inspected earlier.

  Hey, it was better than nothing.

  I snatched up a pipe and started swinging.

  The first crack sent a vibration up my arms; the second made my wrists hurt. I crashed through the horde, not really caring what parts of them I hit, as long as the dead fuckers stayed the hell away from me.

  The pipe slammed into heads and torsos. Our poor lighting meant I couldn’t really see what the hell was going on; I just caught flashes of those grinning faces, the feral eyes, the snarling mouths and bloody, broken teeth. Clack-clack-clack. They were all hungry. Where the hell had they come from?

  “What the fuck is going on?” Hammond demanded.

  “Zombies!” Tony whipped out his pistol and took aim at the nearest shambler. “Zombies are going on, General! Help us!”

  He joined Logan in firing on the revenants. The room lit up with each muzzle flash, and I saw just how many ghouls were trying to jam their way toward us. They wouldn’t all fit in here. They couldn’t possibly.

  How did they all know we were here? We must have attracted the attention of a herd when we were coming in. But where had the herd been hiding?

  “This is a death trap!” Logan bellowed. He slipped one pistol into its holster and yanked out the other one. “Everybody outside! McKnight, you lead. Vibeke, Dax, you follow. I’ll clean up after!”

  “McKnight?” Hammond’s voice cut through the chaos once more. “McKnight, are you alive?”

  Tony picked up the receiver again. “This city is fucked up, General. Send the tank, send everything, send the fucking cavalry!”

  “McKnight, I said go!”

  Holy shit, Logan sounded like a real soldier right then.

  Tony didn’t need further instructions. He barged through the crowd, throwing elbows and blasting away with his pistol.

  I went after him, not stopping to see if Dax and Logan were following. I swung that pipe like it was going out of style, striking a head sinking into rotting flesh each time. My arms started to ache, and the smell—oh God, the smell—bits of flesh flew off with each connecting strike. They landed on me, clogged my nostrils, nearly got in my eyes.

  Where’s the door? WHERE IS THE FUCKING DOOR?

  I would not die in here. Could not. Could not go out this way.

  I swung harder. I hacked. The pipe blazed up and down, briefly illuminated with each flash of Tony’s careful shots. Dead, glazed eyes reflected the light, and now and then I caught a glimpse of teeth. One placed itself in front of me, its jaw opening up, ready to turn me into a nice little midday snack.

  I bashed it in the mouth. Teeth scattered and flew across the room, some of them hitting its compatriots. It didn’t care—it was beyond the help of a dentist anyway—and turned its head back to me, opening its mouth again.

  “Go fuck yourself,” I said, jamming the pipe straight into its mouth and back. I shoved, pushing all my w
eight against the rod and pushing the ghoul backward, right out the door and into the corridor wall.

  The pipe pushed through its head with a crunching noise, and it flailed for another second before falling still.

  I yanked the pipe out and swung to the left. I had a narrow space to maneuver now, and charged blindly after the sound of Tony’s pistol and the brief flashes it emitted as he barreled down the corridor toward the warm, welcoming square of grayish light pouring in from the open front door.

  The door, and the handful of revenants still staggering through it.

  They followed us. The fuckers followed us. But how? There hadn’t been any of them when we made our way through the Quarantine Zone. It had been completely empty. Zombies weren’t supposed to plan, or hide out quietly waiting for us to distract ourselves. But they were doing just that. Had been doing just that.

  Oh, God, what if they could plan?

  No. They don’t plan.

  One must have spotted us and others followed. Right?

  I dodged between them. They were slow, packed together by the confines of the corridor. I started using the rod as a jabbing weapon, rather than just swinging. I went for the soft bits. The eyes. The mouth. The throat. Even if I didn’t quite possess the strength to knock them down with one blow, I could slow them down and get them out of my way.

  Some wore military uniforms. Some wore street clothes. The undead here had come from all walks of life, converging on us days or weeks after their deaths.

  Death equalizes everyone. Soldiers and civilians. Engineers and creatives. Republicans and Democrats.

  I swatted, elbowed, and shoved. Bony hands grabbed me. I shook them off, wishing more than ever for my rifle, for Tony’s pistol, for something explosive I could lob into a gaping mouth and detonate. But I just had my legs and hands and the pipe, so I kept using it as a club, smashing it against rotten faces and slamming it into mouths when they got too close.

  I burst out of the library door and into the gray day outside. Tony had run out of ammunition and resorted to using the pistol as a bludgeon; he crouched down over a zombie, bashing its head in with the handle.

  “I got this,” I said.

  Tony stared at me for a second, and then moved aside.

  I hefted the the pipe high overhead and brought it down, and the zombie’s head split open with a dreadful popping crunch. Brain matter spilled onto the cement, and fuck, this guy must have been rotting internally for a while. I’d thought they smelled bad before, but holy shit, this guy reeked.

  I heard more gunshots.

  Tony yanked me aside, and just in time: Logan, Dax, and the dog came running out the door a second later, followed by three more zombies who clearly wanted to have a word with them.

  Logan twirled around and fired off three rounds. Pop-pop-pop.

  Three head shots, three kills. No more revenants.

  I still had my hands wrapped tight around my makeshift club.

  Evie grinned at us, her jaws stained with brackish blood.

  “That’s gross,” I said to her. My voice sounded strange in my head, as if I were speaking underwater. Shit. My ears were going to be ringing for hours after this, if not days.

  No other zombies came after us. We seemed to have fought them off…at least for the time being.

  Logan, at least, seemed nonplussed. “Well,” he said, holstering his pistols, “at least I finally got to shoot something.”

  I could hear him, at least. Not well, but our little shootout hadn’t deafened me completely.

  “Bro…” Tony paused, then seemed to decide what he wanted to say. Finally, he shook his head in grudging amazement. “You are fucking wasted at that food truck.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Once it became clear we were at least sort of safe, I sat down on a curb to spare my shaking legs. My arms itched, and I scratched at them furiously; though I couldn’t see anything immediately wrong with them, I was sure the dead had pressed giant red handprints into my skin.

  We’re alive. We’re alive. We’re all right. You’re all right, Vibeke.

  I didn’t feel all right. I was fairly sure I would never feel all right again.

  Are they thinking? Do they think? Did they plan an ambush?

  We needed to get out of the Quarantine Zone and return to the inhabited part of the city. We’d already been gone too long.

  And somehow I had to get my shit together enough to go into work.

  I put my head down and made myself breathe evenly.

  After a moment, I was able to look at the others.

  Dax paced back and forth. The dog followed in his footsteps, turning when he turned, shifting her weight when he shuffled his feet. It would have been kind of cute if he hadn’t been ranting: “They’re smart. They’re fucking smart zombies.”

  On the plus side, I wasn’t the only one thinking it.

  “Shut up, Dax,” Tony said.

  On the minus side, well, smart zombies.

  Logan stood quietly off to the side, reloading his pistols. His face seemed calm and collected, but his hands quivered slightly, and he had to pause before successfully getting the magazine into one of them.

  “They planned that! They hid out and waited for us!” Dax’s voice went up about an octave. Tony rounded on him and managed to shut him up with just one dark stare.

  “Zombies don’t plan,” he said. “They don’t plan, they don’t think, they don’t do shit. We got lazy and unlucky. That is what happened.”

  Evie yipped.

  Tony pointed at her. “How about instead of screaming over the dead planning an assault, you figure out why the hell your damn dog didn’t warn us about it?”

  When Evie did something good, she was our dog. When she made a mistake, she was Dax’s dog. I assumed that was how parenthood worked, too.

  Tony rounded on me next. “Vibeke, get up. We have to get back to civilization.”

  I stood. My head swam, but I stayed on my feet.

  “They did seem awfully…organized,” Logan said. “When they swarmed us at the checkpoint, they were just…there. Is this what they’re like Outside?”

  Outside. He said the word like it was an actual place, and not just a mile past the big Hastings wall.

  “No,” I said. “That’s never happened. They’ve followed us and they sometimes sneak up, but it’s just…not often.” I took a breath, trying to block the sea of undead faces from my mind. “But a big group of them like that…we would have heard them coming down the hallway, wouldn’t we?”

  Tony scowled at me. “Not you, too.”

  “What if they are getting smarter?”

  “They’re not getting smarter,” he insisted. “If anything, we’re getting dumber.”

  Maybe that was it. Maybe the evil stardust had sunk into our brains and we would make increasingly bad decisions until we straight up invited the dead over for dinner.

  He started the long walk back in the direction we’d come from. I started following him, and felt the other two men and the dog slowly migrating after me. “Is Hammond coming?” I asked. “Do you think he’ll come?”

  “I don’t know.” He kept walking.

  Awesome.

  Well, at least Hammond knew we were alive and having issues.

  “What the hell did he mean about Keller killing Durkee?” Logan asked. He quickened his step until he was walking next to Tony. “Was that serious? I mean, look, none of us particularly like Keller, but I can’t see him killing the CO. Not that Durkee would let him do it, anyway.”

  “Hammond mentioned a junior officer in the Hastings camp that he didn’t like. Wonder if that was Keller.” Tony favored his injured leg even more heavily than he had before. I found myself wondering if I ought to examine it—was it healing correctly? Was it infected? “I don’t know if they’ll come. They only have one working tank left…they’d have to come on foot and that could take…days…”

  He left out the part where Hammond had sent us to Hastings to check on
them and hopefully get help—not the other way around. If he was answering the radio it probably meant he’d gotten things straightened out in Elderwood, but who knew if they were in any shape to launch a rescue mission?

  Not to mention a rescue mission for three people and one dog—no matter how adorable she might be—seemed like a potential waste of men and resources that had been running thin even before we left.

  At least now Hammond knew we had made it. We hadn’t wandered off, or been eaten alive, or said the hell with the mission. We’d gotten to Hastings and reported back.

  We did our duty.

  Great job, Vibeke. Now what the hell are you supposed to do? Babysit the dying in triage?

  My stomach growled, then gurgled softly, as if caught between hunger and terror.

  Yeah, babysit in triage and eat pastrami the rest of my life. Sounds about right to me.

  We walked along in silence for some time, all of us lost in our own thoughts. I kept returning to the idea of Keller killing Durkee. Hammond must have had some pretty intense intel on our esteemed captain if he’d jumped to that conclusion so quickly.

  “Fuck,” Logan muttered.

  We had reached our initial entry point—but so had several armed soldiers.

  “Hide,” Logan said.

  Too late: they spotted us before we could try to dip into an alleyway. “You!” one of them barked. “Get over here!”

  Evie wagged her tail and tugged at her leash. Dax held onto her, then thought better of the entire operation and picked her up. She squirmed in his arms, her front paws looping over his right elbow. I guess she looked pretty cute. Maybe that cuteness would stop them from shooting us.

  We approached the soldiers warily.

  “What the fuck are you doing there?” the leader said. “Andrews? What the fuck?”

  Tony’s right hand had clenched into a fist, and I had no doubt he was on the verge of taking a swing at one of them. I stepped in front of him. “I’m sorry,” I said, working up the simpering tone I’d used to middling effect while trying to get into clubs without paying a cover charge. “I’m so, so sorry. I was walking the dog and she got away from me and ran back there. I went after her.”