by Joe McKinney
“Hold it,” Jacob said, leveling his rifle at Chris. The gun was useless, but the other man didn’t know it. “Put the gun down.”
Chris’s surprise slowly melted into anger, but he tossed the weapon aside.
“That’s it. Now step away from it.”
Chris raised his hands and backed toward the edge of the building.
“Kelly,” Jacob said. “Grab that please.”
“You bet.” She picked up the weapon and trained it on Chris. “Where’s Casey?”
“Back there,” Jacob said. “In the weeds by that shed over there.”
“Did you kill him?” Chris asked.
“Yep.”
Jacob wasn’t sure how to describe the look that passed over Chris Walker’s face. Relief, anger, resentment: a little of all those things, maybe. He lowered his hands a little and the air seemed to bleed out of him. He looked down at his feet, completely dejected and broken.
Chelsea had been watching him since they’d disarmed him, and Jacob could see the anger swelling up in the girl. The brother who should have protected her had betrayed her instead and, looking at him now, it all seemed to boil up in her at once. Jacob could see her hands shaking, her teeth digging into her bottom lip. He watched her rage mount, and he could see her coiling.
“You bastard!” she shouted, running at him. Before he could make a move to avoid her, she shoved him over the side. Chris went flying into a pack of zombies. They fell on him in a mad rush, ripping him apart with their teeth and their fingernails, lashing out at each other like wild dogs as they fought for pieces of him.
Chelsea was leaning over the side, watching them feed. Jacob stood next to her, watching the sobs hitch in her chest.
“Jacob,” said Kelly from behind him.
From her tone he knew something was wrong even before he turned around.
Casey was standing there by the ladder.
His face was blackened and blistered from the burn he’d taken when the aerofluyt exploded, and most of his hair was missing. He’d been shot in the leg and twice in the left arm, and yet it didn’t seem to slow him down. He had Sheriff Taylor’s gun pointed at Kelly. He advanced on her and took the weapon from her hand.
“Get on your knees,” he said.
“Kiss my ass,” Jacob shot back.
Casey tossed Kelly’s gun behind him, then quickly stripped the magazine from the M4 and slammed in a new one. Jacob could see the white smiley face on the bottom of the magazine as Casey charged the bolt and brought up the rifle to center it on Jacob’s head.
Taylor’s little surprise, Jacob thought, remembering what he’d said about the magazine with the smiley face. Good God, please work. Please, please, please.
“Get on your knees,” Casey repeated.
“No way,” Jacob told him. “Shoot, if you’re gonna do it. But I won’t die on my knees.”
“You’ll go to your knees one way or the other,” Casey said. He lowered the muzzle so that it was pointed at Jacob’s legs and pulled the trigger. The weapon exploded in his face. Screaming in rage and pain, Casey threw the gun to the ground. He lurched to one side, holding his bleeding face in his hands.
Jacob saw the gun Casey had taken from Kelly and ran toward it. He almost had it when Casey tackled him.
Both men went over the side of the building, and Jacob landed hard on his left arm. He felt it break and the pain was so intense he nearly blacked out. Casey was already on his feet. The man was a tank. He roared and lashed out, half-blind, but still managed to land a crushing haymaker across Jacob’s chin. Jacob’s legs wobbled beneath him, but he didn’t fall. He took a few steps back and turned his hurt arm away from Casey.
Still bellowing in rage, Casey charged him again, wrapping his arms around him as he dragged him to the ground. Attracted by the noise, more zombies closed in around them. Casey got on top of Jacob and twisted his broken arm. Jacob screamed and his vision went purple. When he opened his eyes again, Casey had flipped him over. He was holding Jacob by the hair and he had his legs pinned so he couldn’t move. There were three zombies coming toward them, and Casey was holding him still for them.
“Which one of them do you think will take the first bite?” Casey whispered in Jacob’s ear.
Jacob thrashed, but couldn’t break Casey’s hold. He tried to lash out with his right arm, but Casey was just out of reach.
“I listened to all that bullshit you said about your Code, and you know what? For a little bit there, I was impressed. But it’s all bullshit, isn’t it? Every word. What kind of code allows you to let a pregnant woman die? Can you answer me that?”
The zombies were just a few feet away, closing fast. Jacob struggled, but couldn’t get free.
“You ain’t got an answer? You gonna go to your death without an answer?”
Jacob lashed out. He tried to push his way to his feet, but Casey leaned forward and held him down.
“I’m gonna watch you die, Jacob.”
A gun went off somewhere to Jacob’s right. Casey lurched to one side with a loud grunt. Jacob jumped to his feet, ducked his shoulder, and ran into the zombies that were closing on him. Before any of them could react, he knocked them to the ground, then wheeled around and found Casey climbing to his feet.
Jacob swung at his chin. Casey’s head snapped back. Jacob swung again and again. Casey tried to raise his arms to block the hail of punches Jacob threw at him, but Jacob overpowered him, and eventually Casey sank to his knees.
“Look who’s on their knees now, motherfucker,” he said.
Casey looked up at him. His face was a ruined mess, his eyes nearly swollen shut. Jacob glanced up at Kelly and nodded.
She fired twice, hitting Casey in the chest.
The man shook with the impact, and then collapsed to the ground. Jacob stared down at the dead man, and he could feel the anger and the hate and all the rest of it draining away, leaving only emptiness in its place.
“Jacob,” Kelly shouted. “Behind you!”
The zombies had regrouped. They circled around him, fifty of them at least. “Throw me the gun,” he said.
She tossed it at his feet.
Jacob scooped it up and started firing, trying to clear a hole to get to the ladder, but every time he hit one of the zombies three more took its place. He couldn’t move his left arm. He was forced to fire the rifle one-handed, and he wasn’t doing very well with it. Jacob was only landing head shots every third or fourth shot, and he was almost out of ammunition.
“Behind you!” Kelly shouted.
Jacob wheeled around just in time to see a zombie’s head get blasted into a red mist. When the body fell to the ground Jacob saw three of the gray space suits he’d seen back in the aerofluyt’s cargo bay. The three figures made the same hydraulic whirring as they moved, yet they were far more coordinated than the one he’d faced on the aerofluyt. These moved with purpose, their movements powerful, but precisely controlled.
The figures spread out, their suits clanking and sighing as they brought up strange-looking weapons. They fired at the zombies, but their weapons made no noise. They pointed, shot, and another head would explode. In a few quick seconds, they’d cleared most of the field, leaving dozens of headless corpses on the ground at Jacob’s feet.
One of the figures advanced on Jacob and he raised his rifle to fire at the figure.
“Jacob, no!” he heard Chelsea shout.
The suited man caught the rifle and turned it away. There was so much power in his grip, and he pulled the gun out of Jacob’s hand as easily as if Jacob had given it to him.
The figure seemed to study Jacob’s clothes. He examined the shirt and shoes Jacob had gotten from Chelsea’s father’s closet, and then raised what looked like a white microphone with two little wings up near the head. He ran the device up and down Jacob’s right arm. A little green light blinked on it, but it didn’t make a sound.
“Wait!” Chelsea yelled.
Jacob glanced over his shoulder and saw Che
lsea and Kelly climbing down from the ladder. They ran toward Jacob.
The figure released him and turned to face the girls.
Kelly stopped short, but Chelsea walked right up to the figure in the space suit. “I’m Chelsea Walker,” she said. “I’m from Temple.”
The helmets and high protective collars made it hard to see the men inside the suits, but Jacob could recognize their surprise. The three suited figures glanced at one another. Chelsea stuck out her right arm. The figure with the microphone-type device ran it over Chelsea’s arm, and right away the thing beeped and the light began flashing faster.
The figures glanced at each other again, and the one with the microphone twisted his helmet off. He was an older black man with a gray beard and a dense network of lines at the corners of his eyes. He had earphones in his ears and some kind of flat, black electronic device secured to the side of his throat.
“You’re from the Darwin, aren’t you?” the man asked.
“Yes,” Chelsea said. “Yes, that’s right.”
“Are there any other survivors?” the man asked.
“No,” Chelsea said, after what seemed to Jacob to be a thoughtful, measured pause. “No, I’m the only one.”
“I’m Lester Brooks, from the Newton. We saw the explosion. We’ve been surveying this area ever since, trying to determine the degree of environmental impact. It’s lucky for you the wind was blowing south during the explosion. If it had been blowing north, we’d be up in Jacksonville instead of down here. We’d have never found you.”
“I’m glad you did,” she said.
“I bet. It’s been a long time, Chelsea. Are you ready to go home?”
“Yes,” she said. “More than you could ever imagine.”
“Who are your friends?”
Again, that thoughtful, measured pause before she answered. “That’s Kelly Banis, and that’s Jacob Carlton. They’re from Arbella.”
“Arbella?” Brooks asked. He looked to Kelly, and then to Jacob.
Jacob was in so much pain he could barely stand. He tried to speak, but managed only to mutter.
Kelly said, “It’s on the maps as New Madrid.”
“Ah,” Brooks said. “Yes. Yours is a very successful community. We’ve been watching you.”
“You have?”
“Yes, for several years now. Yours is one of about twenty successful outposts east of the Rocky Mountains, and one of the largest.”
“Twenty others?” Kelly asked, stunned.
“Twenty-two, actually,” Brooks said. “Most are smaller than Arbella.”
“You say you’ve been watching us? Why haven’t you made contact with us? With all the things you can do, we could have learned so much from you.”
“You still can, now that you’ve contacted us. That’s our way, Ms. Banis. Our law. We don’t force ourselves on others, but once another society reaches out to us, we offer what we know freely. If you and your friend want to come with us, we will share all we know with you.”
For Jacob, it was too much. His head had become a soupy mess, and the world around him started to swirl. He grew dizzy and fell over. He woke with his head in Kelly’s lap. Chelsea was next to her. Lester Brooks was pressing a series of white tabs onto his face and arms and chest. Jacob could feel electricity move over his skin, prickling at his hair.
Brooks was looking at a flat black device that looked like a small TV. “Left arm is broken in four places. Two broken ribs. Internal bleeding. Brain swelling. Massive infection from the injuries on his arms.” He put the device down. “Your friend is in some serious pain. We’ll need to get his fever down right away.”
“You can help him?” Kelly asked.
“Oh, yes. He’ll be in bed for a while, but we can patch him, no problem.” He touched the device on his throat. “Brooks 390, requesting extraction. We’ve picked up three packages. Have a medic and a quarantine team standing by for our arrival.”
A few moments later a dust cloud appeared on the road. Jacob rallied enough to sit up and stare in amazement at the gigantic ten-wheeled armored vehicle that rolled through the ruins, crushing the zombies in its path before finally pulling up next to them.
Brooks opened the back door to the vehicle and helped them inside one after another. When Jacob was seated and buckled in, Brooks said, “We’ll get that arm fixed up for you in a bit.”
Jacob nodded. “Thanks.”
“Hang on,” Brooks told them. “It gets a little bumpy out here.”
He closed the door and the vehicle took off.
Jacob leaned his head against the window and watched the ruins of Little Rock slip into the distance. The armored vehicle trundled through the abandoned city, causing Jacob to sway in his seat. In places, the streets were black rivers seething with bodies. In others, ivy climbed the sides of buildings, creating green canyons through the past glory of man.
And what of glory?
It made him think of Sheriff Taylor, the man who had meant so much to him, and so much to Arbella, gone now, dead and rotting in the sun on some nameless street in a small town a million miles away.
He thought, too, of Bree. She’d been so young and so devastatingly gorgeous, yet the only image of her he could hold in his mind was of her slipping to the grass under a hail of bullets. She had, in his memory at least, seemed almost grateful to receive them.
But mostly he thought of Nick.
He watched a solitary zombie lumber down the road, reaching for their vehicle even though it was much too far away to put its hands on them, and he thought of the time he’d had with his dearest friend. He felt heartsick at all that had happened. He had loved Nick as a brother. For all the tension that had run under the surface of their friendship since that fight twenty years earlier, they had been the best of friends, and Jacob couldn’t shake the memory of the tears running down Nick’s face right before he pulled the trigger. What had he cried for? Was it out of remorse? Or for what had happened to their friendship? Or was it simply for his own life?
Jacob looked across the darkened cabin of the armored transport. Chelsea had her eyes closed, a blanket pulled up under her chin. It didn’t look to Jacob like she was sleeping, more like she was trying to forcibly push the memory of the last seven years from her mind.
Beyond her, Kelly was looking out the window, and the tears were rolling down her cheeks.
Jacob looked away. Though this journey of theirs was really just beginning, in so many ways, it marked the end of the man he’d thought himself to be.
Four Tales from the First Days of the Living Dead
State of the Union
I know when I’m being lied to. It’s not hard to figure out, even when you’re a stranger in a country halfway around the world and you don’t speak the language. Bullshit smells the same, no matter how it sounds. And that’s what our Chinese hosts were trying to shovel down our throats.
Bullshit.
Pure unadulterated bullshit.
Our group went down for dinner at eight p.m. We stepped off the elevator, but barely made it into the hotel’s lobby before a couple of blue-shirted cops started yelling at us to go back upstairs.
“What’s this all about?” asked Brad Owens. He was our leader, a Young Democrat from Columbia University. Tall, slender, and dignified, Brad stood an easy six inches taller than the cops, but it didn’t seem to impress them at all.
“You go back upstairs,” one of the cops said. “Go now.”
“But I want to know what’s going on,” Brad insisted. He pointed to the reception hall. “They’re supposed to be throwing us a party.”
“No party for you. Party over. You go now. Go upstairs.”
While Brad was busy arguing with the Chinese cops, I was looking through the glass doors of our hotel. Outside, Beijing was in the middle of a riot. I heard screams overlapping screams. I saw people running for their lives, others throwing rocks. A small crowd knocked down an injured man right outside the front doors and swarmed over top of him, l
ike they were trying to pull him apart.
“But why do we have to go upstairs?” Brad asked.
The concierge came over. He looked utterly frazzled, and more than a little distracted, but he kept his tone level and his smile bright when he talked to us.
“Please,” he said with a slight bow. His accent was good, even if the syntax was off. “Please, you and your friends to go upstairs please. We have the flu outside.”
“The flu?” Brad said.
I looked out across the Beijing skyline and saw buildings on fire in the distance.
“People don’t riot because of the flu,” said Jim Bowman, our Young Republican representative.
The concierge’s smile wavered for a moment. “You to go upstairs to your rooms now,” he said, and then muttered something to the cops in Chinese.
The next moment we were being hustled upstairs and forced back into our rooms.
I tried the door, but it was locked from the outside.
I beat on it with my fists and got no reply.
I looked out the peephole and saw the cops pacing the hallway. They looked scared and anxious and I didn’t like it. One of them kept swallowing, his Adam’s apple pumping up and down in his throat, looking to his partner for some clue as to what they were supposed to do.
I gave up on the door and sat down on the foot of the bed and tried to get online. Nothing worked. E-mail; Livejournal; Twitter; Facebook; even Google was down. I put my iPad down and tried my iPhone. Same thing. I had been sending e-mails all that day. I had even sent my latest article to my editor at The Crimson right before I took my shower and got dressed for dinner. But now, nothing. Just a network connection error message.
That’s when it really hit me. Not only was I a stranger in a strange land, but the Chinese government had somehow managed to shut down the Internet. My one umbilical cord back to the real world had just been cut.
It hadn’t seemed real, standing down in the lobby and watching Beijing tear itself apart, but once I found out the Internet was down . . . well, that was the clincher.
We were being lied to.
And like the old Bob Dylan song goes: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”