by Joe McKinney
“You guys need to hurry in there!” he said.
He looked across the yard at the zombies closing in around him. The yard between the corral and the house was flat, but overgrown, coming up to the hips of the approaching zombies. Beyond the house he could see the skeletal remnants of a barn, starlight shining through its Swiss cheese roof. In between the buildings were large clusters of elms and ash trees that broke up his view of the field.
He’d have to make do.
Off to his left a zombie was climbing over the top rail of the wooden fence that enclosed the corral. The top rail gave way under the zombie’s weight and the thing collapsed onto the next rail, bent over at the waist. The breaking wood made Jacob jump, and he fired off a bad shot that hit the zombie in its lower back. The thing fell face-first into the corral, rolled over, and stood up, completely unperturbed by the shot.
“Steady,” Jacob told himself. “Easy.”
He took a deep breath, steadied his front sights on the zombie’s nose, and squeezed the trigger.
The thing’s head snapped back and it fell to the ground.
He turned around, keeping his head on a swivel to cover every angle, and saw two dead women climbing the fence. A third zombie was a few feet to the left of them, but it was too badly decomposed for Jacob to tell what gender it was. It took two shots to put the first of the two women down, but he found his mark cleanly on the other one and dropped her with a single shot. The third zombie was having trouble climbing the fence, so Jacob turned his back on that one and focused on the others already on their way over.
“How’s it coming in there?” Jacob yelled.
“Two more to go,” Kelly answered.
“It’s getting deep out here. Make it fast!”
Jacob fired two more shots, both direct hits. Had he fired six or seven shots? He wasn’t sure; he’d lost count. Either way, he was running out of options. Four more zombies were climbing the fence, and dozens more were behind them.
“Come on, guys, hurry it up!”
“Almost there.”
“Crap.”
Jacob put down two of the zombies, but wasted his last two rounds on reckless, over-the-shoulder running shots. He missed both completely and was forced to turn the rifle around and use it like a club.
He swung at one of the zombies and succeeded in knocking it down, but failed to crush its skull. It got up, half its head caved in, just as more dropped into the corral. He was surrounded now and they were closing in on him. One of them groped at his face with fingers that were nearly fleshless. Jacob grabbed the dead man’s arm and felt it break in several places as he wrestled the zombie around in a circle. The thing was frail, but wouldn’t go down, no matter how he tried to throw it off balance.
Realizing he couldn’t make it fall, he twisted the thing’s arm until he was behind it. He moved the zombie around the corral, using it as a shield as he ran it into other zombies, knocking them down or at least out of the way.
He was about to holler out again when the doors suddenly burst open and Kelly and the others came charging out. Nick was in front, a white metal bar in his hand. Behind him, Kelly held the reins to three horses, hers and Chelsea’s in one hand and Jacob’s horse in the other. Jacob ran for the empty horse while Nick swung his metal bar like a battle-axe, cutting his way through the crowd.
He reached the gate to the corral and kicked it open.
“Come on,” he yelled.
Kelly and Nick spurred their horses as they crashed through the zombies, bounding for the gate. Zombies grabbed at their legs and hips, but they were already moving fast, and the dead fingers did little more than clutch at empty air.
Seconds later, they were through the crowd and galloping hard toward the road. The sun was coming up, and to the east the blacktop remnants of the highway were brushed with molten copper. Arbella was that way, Jacob thought, and for a moment, let himself dream.
Just fifty miles. So close.
But it might as well have been halfway round the planet. For coming up the road, and spreading out to form a line in the fields on either side of the road, were riders.
Riders they knew.
And Mother Jane and Casey were right out front.
35
They caught sight of each other at almost exactly the same instant, and for a moment, neither man moved. Jacob stared at Casey and Casey back at him, over a distance of perhaps a hundred yards.
And then Casey let out an earsplitting rebel yell and charged.
“Ah, Jacob,” Nick said.
“Ride!” Jacob said, and they wheeled their horses as one and charged toward the dead town of Malden.
In the early morning light, shadows still pooled between the trees and the low one-story buildings. Jacob could see forms moving toward the road, but they were too far away for him to tell whether they were zombies or animals or more of the Family closing the net around them.
He chanced a look behind him and saw Casey closing fast. They were out of options. In another minute he’d be on them, and he’d be the only one with a loaded weapon.
“That way!” Jacob said, motioning to Kelly toward a low line of houses off to the right.
“Where?” she asked.
“Find us a hole,” he said. “Anywhere.”
With Chelsea’s horse by the reins, she turned sharply to the right and went between the ruined shells of two homes. The vegetation was thick and it sliced into them as they charged into it. Jacob felt it pulling at his clothes, at his arms, at his face, but he urged them forward. It was their only chance to evade the riders on their tails.
“Hold on,” Kelly said.
Jacob glanced forward just as Kelly and Chelsea jumped a leaning metal fence. Chelsea screamed and nearly flew out of her saddle, but Kelly was there to catch her. It was a bad landing, but Kelly got them under control and pointed the horses to the left, through a gap in the underbrush.
Jacob and Nick followed close on their heels.
They emerged onto the next street and found it just as overgrown as the last. Behind them they could hear Casey yelling for the other riders to close in, but they were having a hard time of it because of the underbrush. Kelly had done well threading a course through it. Now she was pointing down the lane, which was little more than a shallow area between two walls of encroaching trees, and motioning for Jacob to look. Six zombies, so badly decomposed they could barely walk, were staggering out of a house halfway down the block.
Can’t go that way, she signed to him.
No, wait, he signed back. He motioned toward a gap in the vegetation that led over to the next street.
She rode up close to him, still holding Chelsea’s mare by the reins. The young girl looked scared, but alert, and Jacob saw she was squeezing her knees to the horse’s sides. She was learning.
“What is it?” Kelly whispered.
“Through there,” he said.
She shook her head. “Too obvious.”
“I know. That’s what I’m counting on.” He glanced over his shoulder. Casey and the other riders had split up into small groups, perhaps realizing that their prey had used up all their ammunition, and were closing in on their position. “We need a distraction. Let’s go.”
She frowned, but he knew she trusted him enough not to ask questions.
She turned her horse and Chelsea’s toward the gap and Jacob and Nick followed. When they emerged on the other side, Jacob asked Nick for the metal pipe he carried in his saddlebags.
“For what?” Nick said. “You already took my gun. What am I supposed to use?”
“Really? Come on, give me the pipe.” He gestured toward a thick growth of trees to the west. “You guys go over there. Wait for me. Stay out of sight.”
Reluctantly, Nick handed over the last weapon he had. He, Kelly, and Chelsea rode over to the place Jacob had pointed out and were instantly lost in shadow.
Good, Jacob thought. At least they’ll be out of sight.
He guided his horse into a well in the veg
etation and waited. Casey was a hard driver. There was no other way he and the other survivors from the Family could have gotten away from the herd and still managed to drive this far south unless they rode long and hard. And he clearly had some strategic sense, or at least some intuition, for he’d read Jacob and the others right in their intent to use Malden as their turning east point. But despite all that, he was brash. He believed absolutely in his own superiority, and he certainly thought he had Jacob on the run, unarmed and easy pickings. It was why he’d allowed his riders to split up into one-and two-man groups.
He dismounted from his horse and lashed the reins around a stout, low-hanging branch.
The saddlebags he’d inherited along with the horse had a set of wire cutters and some duct tape in them. He slid those into his back pocket, shifted the metal pipe to his right hand, and crept into position right at the opening to the gap. He heard twigs snapping in the underbrush and he clutched the pipe tighter, praying that he’d read Casey and the other riders correctly.
Thomas, one of Casey’s brothers Jacob had seen around the caravan, emerged a moment later, ducking his head down next to his horse’s neck to avoid the brush.
When he straightened up again, Jacob darted out of hiding and swung the pipe, meaning to catch the rider under the chin but instead only managing a glancing blow off his shoulder.
Thomas grunted and twisted in the saddle, but didn’t fall.
Before he had a chance to recover, Jacob spun back around the other way and swung for Thomas’s ribs. He connected with a solid blow that caused the rider to sag to one side.
The horse tried to bolt, but Jacob caught its reins and steadied it.
Thomas was trying to right himself in the saddle. Jacob didn’t give him the chance. Before the rider could sit up straight, Jacob swung again for his chin, and that time connected with the solid crack of metal on bone.
Thomas twisted off the saddle, landing heavily in the grass. The horse ran into the middle of what had once been the street, leaving Jacob face to face with Casey’s brother. He advanced on the man and quickly stripped the rider’s revolver from his holster. Jacob jammed it into the waistband at the small of his back, pulled the wire cutters from his back pocket, and flipped Thomas over onto his stomach.
The rider muttered something—a threat, a plea, Jacob didn’t know and didn’t care at this point—and tried to pull away, but Jacob held him firm. Jacob grabbed the man’s right wrist and pulled it up. Then he grabbed one of Thomas’s fingers, pried it apart from the others, and lopped it off with the wire cutters.
Thomas began to scream. The noise was horrible, such pain, such terrible, terrible pain.
Jacob backed away, horrified at what he’d just done. Thomas was rolling around in the grass, holding his bleeding hand, wailing uncontrollably in pain. At first the noise scared Jacob. A lifetime of conditioning had taught him that noise equaled death, especially out here in the wasteland, but as he looked around and saw moldering corpses lumbering out of one hiding spot after another, he realized he’d gotten exactly what he wanted.
He ran to Thomas’s horse, removed the saddlebags and the rifle he found there, and then mounted his own horse and took off at a gallop.
He met up with Kelly and the others a few blocks away.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked.
Jacob looked back. He could see a few of Casey’s riders in complete disarray, men shouting and twisting their horses around as more and more zombies flooded into the area. There’d been more riders than he suspected.
More zombies, too.
“Jacob,” Kelly said. “What the hell is going on?”
“A distraction,” he said. He nodded to the west. “Let’s get out of here.”
36
They rode hard across open fields and more slowly through densely wooded countryside until they reached a wide, slow-moving river.
The trip took them most of the day, and for Jacob it had been an exhausting ride. The others had moved out in front to survey the river and started discussing something, but Jacob couldn’t hear them. He felt cold, even though he was wet with sweat. It was hard to focus. His head was a soupy mess. He tried to focus on what the others were doing, but found it hard even to stay upright in the saddle.
The world started to swirl around him and he blacked out.
The next thing he knew Kelly was next to him, her hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” she said. “How you doing?”
“Huh?”
“Jacob, it’s those dog bites on your arms. I don’t think you’re doing so good.”
He looked down and saw the bandages on his arms were red and hanging loose from his wrists. The cuts all over his forearms were red and black and oozing white pus in places. His arms had started to swell. The undergrowth they’d traveled through back in Malden, he thought. It had stripped the bandages from his arms, exposing wounds that smelled like decay. That and all the fighting back at the ranch house.
“You need some real medical attention, Jake,” Nick said.
“What river is this?” he asked.
They said something, but he didn’t catch it. He fought against it, but couldn’t keep his eyes open.
He blacked out again.
37
When he woke next they were riding under a hot sun across an open field. He looked around and saw green trees crowding the horizon and an enormous flock of what looked like ducks flying off a nearby pond.
In his head, he meant to say: Where are we?
All that he could manage though was a feeble groan and a hoarse-sounding cough.
Somebody—Nick or Kelly he couldn’t tell—put a hand on his arm and said something he didn’t quite catch.
He looked down, and saw a yellow nylon rope looped around his waist. Tracing it, he saw it came up around his shoulders and back down to the saddle, holding him in place.
They tied me down, he thought, his head lolling on his shoulders. Sweet Christ, they had to tie me to the saddle.
38
He was in and out for a long time. At least two days, maybe longer. He would wake only long enough to see some strange highway sign or empty field or railroad bridge going by, and then he was out again.
But then at last he opened his eyes and he was staring right into a horse’s ass.
He blinked and looked around. He was at the bottom of a short but steep hill with shaggy thorn bushes and short trees all around him. Kelly was at the top of the hill, framed by a window of vegetation, staring dumbfounded at something beyond Jacob’s view. Nick and Chelsea were halfway up the hill. It was Nick’s horse giving him the view.
“What’s wrong?” Nick asked. “Why’d we stop?”
She was shaking her head. “You guys have got to see this.”
“What is it?”
All she could do was shake her head.
Nick helped Chelsea to the top of the hill and together they stood abreast with Kelly, all of them in awe.
“What is it?” Jacob managed to say.
Kelly glanced back, then turned her horse and came down to meet him.
“Jacob,” she said. “How are you?”
He shook his head. It was hard to focus. Nothing seemed to work quite right. He glanced down at his arms and tried to see what was going on with his wounds, but he couldn’t even make those out.
“Come with me,” she said. “You have to see this.”
He started to protest, but she was already leading him up the hill. Jacob leaned forward to keep his balance in the saddle, and nearly blacked out from the pain.
“Look,” Kelly said. “Look at that.”
Jacob opened his eyes. It took a moment for the blur to recede to the edges of his vision, but once they did he understood the amazement that had come over the others. Even with his brain addled by fever, he understood. Below them, in the midst of a vast plain of what had once been farmland, was the wrecked remains of a gigantic aerofluyt, looking like a skyscraper fallen on its side. A huge gash had bee
n torn in its roof, and there were holes in the sides where birds flew in lazy circles. A debris field a thousand feet in diameter surrounded it, and vines and shrubs had started to grow where the hull met the ground, but even in its wrecked form, Jacob could still see the majesty of it.
At least until he blacked out again.
39
When he woke next, he was in a bed with sparkling white sheets. He sat up blearily and looked around. Fresh bandages dressed his arms. He touched them. The wounds still hurt, but not as much. His skin was cool, too. The swelling seemed to have gone down quite a bit. And when the sheets fell away from his chest he realized his skin was clean and he was clad in a fresh pair of light blue boxer shorts.
“What the hell?” he said.
His head was clearer now. He could still feel a residual hangover from the fever, but at least he could think straight.
Or at least he thought he could.
He was in a small, but clean room, lined with bookshelves and a dresser and an open closet on the far wall. Next to him on the bedside table was a picture of a man and woman in strange clothes, and in front of them a young boy of perhaps six and a baby girl of perhaps a year.
He studied the picture a second, and then climbed out of bed.
“Hello?” he called.
Nick appeared in the doorway a moment later. “Hey, buddy, how you feeling?”
“Better. A lot better.”
“Thank God. That’s good to hear. Chelsea’s showing Kelly around right now, but when she gets back . . . Man, Jake, we were so worried about you.”
“How long have I been out?”
“About three days. I thought you’d be out a whole lot longer, but Kelly was able to patch you right up with the steroids and antibiotics they found in the sick bay. You look about a million times better than when we brought you inside.”
Jacob nodded. “What is this place?”
“This is the aerofluyt,” Nick answered. “Can you believe it? Four days ago we were still headed south along US 167 and we see this field of wild soybeans growing up around all these junked cars. Chelsea asks us to stop. She says she recognizes the area. We thought she meant from being carried around with the caravans, but it turns out she remembered it from when she and her older brother were wandering around after this thing crashed. It took a little bit, but she was able to lead us pretty much right to this place.”