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

by S. P. Blackmore

  Tony barged past Durkee and promptly snatched his shotgun and the Carbine Dax had been using. He picked up the STG and thrust it into my hands. At one point the big rifle had felt like an extension of myself, and I recalled missing it intensely while we were here in Hastings. But it was so heavy, and I had an AR and an axe and—

  “It served you pretty damn well,” Tony said. “If you don’t take it, I will.”

  I looked at Poltva.

  “That thing saved your ass a few times,” she said.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now we were getting sentimental about weaponry. “Fine.” I stretched my hand out, closed it around the stock, and pulled it toward me. “And aren’t we going to stop finding ammo for it at some point?”

  Tony grinned. “I keep hearing that, and yet it keeps turning up.”

  I slung the gun over my shoulder. The weight settled against my back, bringing with it a strange comfort. Familiarity, I guess; something I knew and had grown used to. My old STG was the forerunner of the lighter rifles of the modern military, and for all I knew it had taken a long, strange path to wind up in my hands. It might well have been pried from Nazi fingers during World War II, passed from collector to collector, and finally used again on the goddamn undead.

  I was glad to see it again, and the thought chilled me.

  “All right, kids,” Durkee said. “Shall we see to the fence?”

  “Sure,” I said, and then pointed at his ragged socks. “Gonna fight the undead in those?”

  The captain looked at his feet, made a humph sound, and then looked back at me. “Good call,” he said, as if I’d merely suggested he put on a hat. “I’ll go find my boots.”

  Durkee didn’t drag us immediately into zombie combat. Points to the captain for thinking things through.

  Instead, he took us several stories up to the top floor of the building, then up another flight of stairs tucked behind a closet. There was no scent of decay here, no reek; the undead had never reached these floors. Of course, the stench hit us as soon as he opened the door to the roof, but the temporary reprieve of recycled air had been welcoming.

  He led us to a corner and looked down.

  This was clearly the tallest building in the area, and as such the view was commanding. On a regular day in the old world, the view might have been mundane: the tops of other buildings, and streets populated by people going about their business, doing their thing. Briefcases, high heels, food trucks, faces bent over phone screens. Nothing exciting.

  Now, though…

  I could just make out a huge, shifting mass moving along through a swath of smoke some two streets over.

  “That’s Chapman Street,” Durkee said. “It runs straight through the city.”

  Smaller, faster figures ran out ahead of it; the living, perhaps, or more likely the handful of runners in a sea of shambles. Here and there I could make out other figures holding still, the report of gunfire stretching back to us.

  “Those are probably some of my men,” Poltava said, her voice strained. “They aren’t going to be able to hold that for long.”

  “They aren’t going to be able to hold that at all,” Durkee said. “Damn. And more and more are going to join them.”

  “I take it we can’t get the wall back up,” I said.

  “No. That spot they’re at is where the wall used to be, I think.” He peered over the side of the building, considering our options. “We could detonate some of the buildings along there…no, that won’t work, but…wait…”

  He walked to the other end of the roof. The three of us followed him, Tony nearly dragging his leg behind him. I was going to have to look at it, provided we survived all this.

  He pointed at a group of houses seemingly clustered around Chapman. “Those are the Garnet Cloisters,” he said. “No, I don’t know who named it. It’s pretty much the outskirts of living territory. But that neighborhood…I guess it straddles Chapman. There’s a pedestrian overpass linking the two sides. Guess a toddler got run over or something years ago.”

  “You want us to take down the overpass,” Poltava said immediately.

  Durkee smiled grimly. “It’d create a hell of a lot of rubble and we could wire it up pretty quick. Might stop up the dead long enough for us to put up new fencing, or blast them, or whatever Hammond thinks he’s going to do. Did you bring C-4?” He glanced at me. “That’s an explosive.”

  “I know what C-4 is,” I said. “I knew that before the apocalypse.”

  Poltava let out a harsh bark of laughter that startled even me. “Did we bring C-4? We’re swimming in it. Yeah, we can knock down the overpass. But what about the neighborhood?”

  Durkee roamed back over to the other corner. “Not too many breaking off from the main pack,” he said as we trailed after him.

  “You only need one to cause a problem,” I said.

  “I know. But we’re up against the clock. Poltava…tell the general to get us the C-4. We’ll handle the rest.”

  We will? He wasn’t volunteering me for this, was he?

  Poltava already had her walkie-talkie out.

  Durkee turned to Tony and me, and his smile took on a grim cast.

  “What do you need us to do?” I asked, praying he would tell us to just go home, that the Army would handle it from here.

  “Well, you’re going to help me evacuate that neighborhood. And maybe hold off the early wave of the dead, if they get there before we can blow the overpass. Which is likely.”

  I must not have looked very amused.

  “Just until reinforcements arrive,” Durkee amended.

  Which might be never.

  Well, nothing else about this day had gone right. Might as well keep improvising.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  We’ll handle the rest, Durkee had told Poltava.

  We meant me, and I didn’t know how, exactly, I was supposed to go about doing that. I rehearsed the speech in my head over and over again, and it never got any better: Hey guys, you’ve survived the apocalypse in your own home. Congratulations! Now split so we can blow it up.

  It seemed cold.

  Tony and I took the south side of the Garnet Cloisters, and Poltava handled the north side. Hammond dispatched two squads were dispatched to the areas between the fallen barrier and Garnet to clear out anyone still lingering there, along with several bags full of explosives.

  We had a load of houses to move through before Hammond and Durkee could detonate the overpass (or before the dead arrived and made a fruit salad out of us), so time was of the essence. Poltava had met up with several other soldiers and they had begun the process of placing the explosives—and let me tell you, knowing there’s someone rigging the overpass above you to explode is really, really uncomfortable.

  I rapped on the front door of a tidy, yellow-walled house.

  A pleasant-looking older man opened it, a cane in his left hand. “Hello,” he said. His eyebrows lifted somewhat—I guess mine would, too, if I opened my door and found a bloodsplattered woman toting two rifles and an axe on my doorstep. I must have looked thoroughly disreputable. “How can I help you?”

  Hello sir. We’re going to blow up your house.

  Well, there went my speech.

  “We’re evacuating this street,” I said.

  He blinked rapidly at me. “Oh…oh dear.”

  I realized I had absolutely no form of identification on me, and had zero proof to show these people if they asked me for any…but fuck it. I was here. “Yes. You need to clear out immediately. The dead have broken through the checkpoint and Durkee needs this place cleared out so he can…um…stop them.”

  He pushed his glasses high up on his nose. “Durkee is dead.”

  I pointed at the fatigue-clad figure clinging to the overpass some fifty feet away. “Misunderstanding.”

  The man nodded. “Well, I’ll head along then.”

  This seemed a little too easy. “You don’t need anything?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “My wife die
d last year, and my children are on the East Coast. Everything else is just material, isn’t it?” He lifted his cane. “And if any of those goddamn zombies try anything, I’m going to leave their brains all over the sidewalk.”

  I liked this dude.“That’s the spirit, sir.”

  He started walking up the street. I watched him go, then went to the next house.

  The woman who answered the door was not quite as placid-looking as the old gent. I set my axe down so I didn’t look as threatening, although I’m sure my general appearance didn’t exactly fill her with confidence. She grew considerably more hostile when I made my Zombies-Are-Coming-You-Need-to-Evacuate speech.

  She jammed a finger into my face. “Evacuate? I have three kids. Where am I supposed to evacuate to?”

  “The front gate. The Army will take care of you.” At least, I assumed they would. Durkee had just said to get them out. He hadn’t said to where.

  “Because the Army has done such a stupendous job so far?”

  “Ma’am, I’m just passing on the word.”

  She grabbed my left arm. “Don’t call me ma’am. And you can’t just come in here and tell me I’m evacuating and—”

  I reached behind me and clasped my right hand around the STG. It came forward effortlessly, and before she or I knew what was going on I had it propped up and pressed against her chin. I had no easy way of firing the thing this way, but she didn’t know that.

  She stopped talking immediately, her eyes widening. “If you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to Mr. Sturmagawher.”

  I was ninety-nine percent sure I hadn’t pronounced the gun’s name correctly. It came out sounding like sturmguh.

  She began to shake. “I have children…”

  “Then take them to the front gate. The Army is there. There are thousands of fucking undead coming right for this neighborhood. We’re going to detonate that overpass and try to stop them, and that means you need to not be here.”

  “Mommy?” someone called behind her. A small child stood in the hallway about ten feet away. She took in the scene before her and her lower lip began trembling. “Mommy?”

  I lowered the gun immediately.

  The woman glared at me. Beads of sweat broke out on her forehead, and she sagged against the front door.

  “Take your kids and go,” I said. “Trust me. You don’t want to be caught when they get here.”

  She nodded, and stepped away from me.

  “Sorry,” I added.

  The front door slammed as I headed up the street. Was she going to do it? Would she leave? Or would she stay there and watch the revenants swarm? She has kids, she has to leave. But everyone here was so sheltered, so unbearably stupid—they saw the ghouls as an inconvenience, something that happened Outside.

  You always think it’s going to be easy until you actually have to face it. Then you realize how hard that shit really is.

  I went down the row of houses and continued issuing warnings. To their credit, most people listened—maybe I looked scary enough to persuade them not all was well. Soon enough, a number of residents—some carrying nothing, some clutching kids, pets, or belongings—streamed down the street, turning left on Chapman and heading west to the safer part of the city. As they hurried, the dull roar of the dead crept over the neighborhood, more distinct to me because I knew what I was listening to. To everyone else, all these people who had never seen a zombie try to crash a dinner buffet, it was probably the same as hearing a plane pass overhead. Indistinct, easily ignored, just something else to get used to.

  I moved from house to house, condensing my speech as I went. Pretty soon, “Zombies are coming. Get out” sufficed, and people were glad to leave.

  Or stay. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t up to me to save them once I told them what was coming.

  What was it like to just go, to leave your home and know you’d never come back to it? When I left my house in Ellisport the day of the meteors, I knew I’d be working late that night, but it had never once crossed my mind that I wouldn’t go home at all.

  So many of these folks seemed to take it in stride. They moved along on the sidewalk and in the streets, dodging around each other, helping one another out, mumbling about what was going on. Some of them even shouted up to Durkee as they moved beneath the overpass.

  “Glad you’re alive, Captain,” one man called out.

  Durkee saluted him and said, “You and me both!”

  Above the soft chatter of those on the move, there were also the rising, sweeping voices of the dead.

  I could swear the people began moving slower as the voices of the dead grew more distinct. These civilians had never seen revenants close, never heard them singing, never been the victims of a long hunt.

  “Vibeke!”

  Captain Durkee had apparently decided to get in on this mission—he was jogging up the driveway of a home across the street. “They’re coming,” he called out to me. “Move faster!”

  Fucking shit. I was coldly rebuffed at the next house, and the one after that; even pointing at Durkee making the rounds across the street did nothing.

  I decided to try a new tactic—that of hardened fighter—and used the STG to knock on the next door I approached.

  It opened, revealing a group of teenagers.

  “Hi,” I said.

  They stared at me, evidently nonplussed by the sight of the gun.

  I was so surprised by their youth that it took me a moment to gather my thoughts. “Where are your parents?” I finally asked.

  “They were in Harkin,” the eldest of the bunch spat. He strode out onto the front porch and tried to knock the STG’s barrel aside. I held the gun firm.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he demanded.

  Oh, fuck this. I leveled the gun at his nose. “I’m here under orders. This street is being evacuated. Grab what you can and go to the main gates.”

  “Why?”

  I gaped at him for a good few seconds. “Because the zombies are coming?”

  “Really?” The glee in his voice was unmistakable. He turned around to face his group, a broad smile slashing its way across his face. “Shit, boys, this is what we’ve been waiting for! Get your guns!”

  “You have guns?” I thought Keller had cleared them all out.

  His smile vanished, a scathing expression coming over his face. “Not all of us kowtowed to that shitsucking captain. We knew this day would come. And Clan Dragonhawk is ready for it. The dead are rising, and so are we!”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m not sure that sounds the way you want it to…”

  “I’ve got the AR!” someone chirped behind him. “Get me my binoculars!”

  “Leave the safety on!” the kid in front of me barked. “This isn’t a fucking raid!”

  Oh. I’d found gamers.

  “You ever seen the undead?” I asked. “I mean, besides on a computer screen.”

  He was clearly trying for a cold, battle-hardened stare, but the darkness of his expression was ruined by the clear glee bubbling up inside him. Here was a kid who had trained his entire life for this day. Granted, he had done most of his training with a video game console, but at last his moment was upon him.

  “You know it’s not like a video game,” I said.

  “Didn’t ask you.”

  He shut the door in my face.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I hope you get eaten.”

  Gunfire bounced down the street, accompanied by Tony shouting. I forgot the other houses on my row and sprinted several houses down to the cul-de-sac at the end of the block, shoving through groups of migrating people and dodging around those who had just stepped out onto the sidewalk to see what was happening.

  Tony was standing on the front porch of a pretty blue house. He knocked a zombie down the stairs and shot it in the back of the head. He did the same to another that came rolling out the door. Then another.

  “It’s like a fucking clown car,” he said when I stepped over the bodies to join
him. He stepped into the house, then put up his gun as another figure lurched out of the darkness. He twisted around, knocking the zombie to the ground, and then slammed the butt of his rifle into its forehead over and over again. Something cracked, and brain spilled outward.

  A foul smell and thin wails broiled out of the house. My spine prickled, and I had to fight to make my feet move forward. “Holy shit.”

  He stuck his head inside the house, then jerked it back out just as quickly. “There’s half-eaten bodies all over.”

  “What happened?”

  “You want me to make something up? Probably some sort of cult. You want realism? One guy got sick, they didn’t lock him up, and he turned on the rest of the house.” He pulled the door shut behind him, cutting off the worst of the smell. Something heavy crashed against it an instant later, rattling the entire frame.

  A handful of people we hadn’t reached yet, no doubt attracted by the shooting and shouting, tentatively approached us. “Why are we being evacuated?” one of them asked.

  I sighed. I’m of the opinion that if you are being evacuated in a place where zombies exist, it’s a good bet the zombies caused the evacuation…but we needed to be gentle with these folks.

  I held a hand up, and the mutterings ceased. “Hear that?” I asked. The low undertones of the dead rumbled through the neighborhood.

  They heard it. They just didn’t get it.

  “Let me try,” Tony said. He handed me his gun and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Citizens of the Garnet Cloisters! The dead are walking and they want to eat you!”

  I gotta hand it to him, the man could really project his voice when he needed to.

  “We are detonating the overpass your tax dollars paid for to create a blockade and keep them from devouring you and everyone you know! If you have any sense left in your bleached-out brains, you will grab what you can and get the fuck out of the neighborhood!”

  “You can’t just destroy our homes!” a man shouted back.

  Tony sighed. “Sir…”

  The door splintered outward. I whirled around, bringing the STG up to block my face. The zombie landed on top of me and knocked me down the steps, and I landed heavily on my upper back. Its weight pushed me down, and the stench of it nearly overpowered me as it leaned down, snapping its jaws toward my nose.