Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  Knopf looked at him in surprise. It was a cruel thing to say, even for Fisher. But what did Fisher know, anyway? He was too young to remember a world before the zombies. All his adult life had been spent in the army. Fisher knew soldiering and little else. It may have made him an impressive man, commanding and resourceful beyond his years, but it hadn’t taught him compassion.

  Knopf, though, remembered the world as it had been. He remembered eating a meal without having to glance over his shoulder. He remembered not having to sleep in shifts, a weapon always at the ready. He remembered his wife, and his little boy. Knopf remembered being human, something he doubted Fisher could lay any claim to.

  But perhaps more important, Fisher wasn’t a father. He couldn’t speak to the world of a child. Sure, he had been a child, but he hadn’t also been a parent. What did he know of the pain, the fear, the joy that came with raising a child? As a soldier he claimed to be fighting the most important war humanity had ever fought, a war for the survival of the species. And yet, he had no direct emotional stake in its survival. It was just an academic proposition for him. Human lives were simply numbers for him, pieces to be moved around a game board, little different from the robots under his command.

  Knopf had essentially raised Jimmy. The boy had been handed off to him less than a month after Knopf’s own son had died at the hands of the zombie horde, and Knopf, wounded to his core, had at first held the screaming toddler at a disdainful and resentful distance. He had looked at the scrawny, screaming brat, and all he’d been able to think about was himself, standing in the middle of a road at the crest of a hill, looking down on the base housing where he’d lived with his wife and child, zombies streaming out of the bungalow, blood covering their faces and chests like bibs, and the resentment had grown to an intense hatred.

  But that hatred softened by degrees.

  For several years, Jimmy had been unable to do anything but cower in a corner, screaming and yelling anytime anybody got remotely close to him. Only gradually, through repeated effort and a thousand small acts of kindness, had Knopf managed to lure the boy out of the shadows. It was longer still before the boy would sleep anywhere but under the cot in Knopf’s office. And across the gulf of those years, the two of them had healed each other. They’d learn to trust one another. Neither was emotionally seaworthy, not yet anyway, but together, they were getting close.

  And now this. The boy missing . . .

  6

  Jimmy stopped at the top of a rickety metal staircase, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Farther on ahead he could see what looked like a glowing blue slime coating the handrails and parts of the walls. The glow was faint, but it provided enough light to give him a sense of the curved, tiled tunnel around him.

  The stairs shook and groaned beneath his weight, moving with every step, and he was almost to the bottom when the metal suddenly snapped and gave way, dropping him into the muck on the bottom level.

  He barely managed to roll out of the way as the structure crashed down around him.

  Afterwards, surrounded by tangled pieces of rusting metal, he sat there blinking up at the ruined staircase, looking like the exoskeleton of some giant, malformed insect up there.

  Grunting, he sat up.

  The room in which he found himself was a horror. There were rotting bodies everywhere. Arms and legs and ropes of intestines hung from rusted piles of equipment, and the place smelled powerfully bad, worse even than the zombies Dr. Knopf occasionally brought into the lab for Jimmy to practice with.

  Something moved beside him, and Jimmy turned, only to find himself nose to nose with a zombie. Its face was dripping with blood and sewage, eyes opaque, like cataracts, yet at the same time intensely alive with hunger and violence. The skin around its mouth was ripped and shredded, exposing its blood-blackened teeth so that it almost seemed to be grinning at him.

  Jimmy screamed, backpedaling as fast as he could go.

  The zombie stayed where it was. It sniffed the air. It opened its mouth, almost as though to taste what it smelled, but instead let out an aching moan.

  The next instant it scrambled after him.

  Still scrambling, Jimmy tripped and landed in a mass of arms and legs. He jumped to his feet, only to realize a moment later that the arms wrapping around him belonged to a Docbot, the cord tightening around his knees the shoulder sling from the Docbot’s medpac.

  The zombie was coming closer, clawing its way over the wreckage of robots and dead bodies. Jimmy looked around for a way out, but there was none. He was standing at the apex of a curving tunnel, both directions extending off into darkness that could hide anything.

  But he did have the medpac. Those things were heavy. Jimmy had seen them used back at the lab. Carrying one was like lugging around a bag of bricks, and they’d make a good weapon.

  He tugged at the shoulder strap until the pack came loose from the muck.

  By that point the zombie was almost on him. Jimmy stumbled backwards, and at the same time swung the pack with both hands, smashing it against the zombie’s jaw with the satisfying crunch of broken bone.

  The zombie went sprawling backwards into the sewage and rotting bodies, landing in a twisted heap.

  Jimmy didn’t wait to see if it would get back up. He turned to run.

  No!

  Jimmy slowed, but didn’t stop. That was Comm Six’s voice.

  I have to get out of here.

  No! There is no time to run. Hide. Right now.

  Where?

  Under the robot. Now. Before the zombie gets up.

  Jimmy dropped to the floor, crawling under the wrecked bodies and robots, and pulled the Docbot whose medpac he had just used over on top of him.

  Be very still.

  It was good advice. During the many experiments Dr. Knopf had put him through, Jimmy had learned that the zombies’ morphic field acuity was imperfect at best. Certainly not as strong or as finely tuned as his. If a person remained very still, and was able to clear his thoughts, a passing zombie would think them no different from a lamp post, or a mailbox, or any of the other inanimate objects that populated the world.

  Through a hole in the Docbot’s damaged skull, Jimmy watched the zombie slowly scan the ruined figures at its feet. Flies swarmed around its head. Filthy water dripped from its beard. It turned its mangled face left, then right, and then walked off down the darkness of the receding tunnel.

  Jimmy listened as the sounds of its splashing grew faint, then he slowly climbed out from under the Docbot.

  You must find a way out. There are many zombies down here. You must leave.

  Jimmy shook his head.

  I can’t. My father’s down here.

  You will not leave?

  I can’t.

  Your decision is unwise. But if you must stay, you should have a weapon.

  Jimmy huffed at that one. Thanks, that’s great advice. I’ll remember to bring one next time I’m crawling through a zombie-infested sewer.

  I can lead you to a weapon.

  Jimmy stopped. You can?

  One hundred and sixteen feet to your left you will find a small room. One of the soldiers who died retaking this town is still there. He is a zombie now, but his corpse still carries a weapon. Go now. Move quickly.

  He made his way down to the room Comm Six had told him about, noticing as he went how the luminescent scum on the walls seemed to be thickest at the waterline.

  Where’s this light coming from?

  When the army realized they would have to fight down here they seeded the sewer water with bioluminescent algae. It cleans the water and glows with the light you see. Eventually, the water in these sewers will be clean enough for human use.

  Oh. That’s kind of cool.

  The room you need is on your left. Careful now. The zombie will attack when he sees you.

  Jimmy stepped into the room. There were several pieces of metal tubing at his feet, old rusted pipes that had fallen from the ceiling. He picked one of
them up, tested its heft, and decided it would work.

  The zombie Comm Six had warned him about was on the far side of the room.

  As Jimmy watched, it pawed at the wall, scratching uselessly at the mold-covered stone wall, its fingernails long since ripped from the tips of its fingers.

  Then Jimmy noticed that the thing had no legs.

  From the waist down there was nothing but ropes of viscera and blackened shards of bone protruding from the torso.

  His stomach rose into his throat, and he coughed.

  The sound got the zombie’s attention. It turned its head sharply, and an urgent, hungry moan rose up from its rotting throat.

  Move quickly. Do not let it make noise.

  The zombie pulled itself toward Jimmy with its ruined fingers, its moaning growing more insistent, more desperate.

  “Right,” Jimmy muttered.

  He stepped into the room with the metal pipe in both hands, raised high above his head. The zombie held its broken fingers up toward him, trying to grab him.

  But Jimmy was quicker.

  He sidestepped the zombie’s hand and brought the pipe down as hard as he could.

  Jimmy had never killed a zombie before, and he was surprised, and sickened, by how easy it was. Three quick strokes and the back of the thing’s head was pulverized into a ruined mess of blood, hair, and bone.

  It took a moment for his mind to break through the adrenaline rush.

  I did it. Oh, God, I think I’m gonna puke.

  The weapon is against the far wall.

  “Huh?”

  The weapon. Take it now.

  Feeling dizzy, lightheaded, Jimmy scanned the far wall. The weapon was in a leather gun belt wrapped around the zombie’s severed hips and legs.

  You must move quickly. The zombies have heard you. They are approaching.

  He had to peel the gun belt off the corpse’s bloody hips. It made a sucking sound as he pulled it free.

  This is so gross. I don’t know if I can—

  Hurry.

  He worked the buckle open, then wrapped it around his own waist and pulled it as tight as it would go. Jimmy moved his hips back and forth. The gun belt was still loose, but it didn’t fall off, and that was something at least.

  Okay, I’ve got the gun. Which way do I go now?

  Nothing.

  Jimmy opened his mind a little more.

  Comm Six, you there? Which way do I go?

  But the Combot’s voice was gone. There was nothing but the echoes of water dripping from the ceiling somewhere down the tunnel. And from farther on, barely audible, came the faint moaning of the living dead.

  Well, he thought, pulling the pistol, here goes nothing.

  And he stepped out into the tunnel.

  7

  With only the faint blue light from the algae growing on the walls to guide him, Jimmy headed deeper into the sewers. The water was up to his knees and every step made a splash that echoed a long way down the tunnels. He tried to reach out with his mind and sense the zombies that Comm Six had told him were down here, but in his mind he saw nothing but a gray depthless fog. For the first time in his life, he realized, his mind was a quiet place.

  It might have felt good, if he wasn’t so scared. And so unsure of himself. What are you doing down here? he asked himself. Dr. Knopf had told him bunches of times that his parents were dead. He’d accepted that a long time ago. And didn’t he have his own memories from the night the dead overran this town? They were vague, cloudy memories, but they were there.

  He remembered a room with dark-colored carpet and walls of wood paneling. He remembered a striped couch and a big chair that his infantile mind understood as DADDY’S CHAIR.

  He remembered his mom, the source of kindness and nourishment and safety. She smelled like comfort, like goodness. At least, that was the way she smelled in his memories. But the next instant, she’d gone wild with fear.

  And he remembered his father, not his father’s face, but the anger in the man’s voice. Daddy, the protector, the violent one, driving his shoulder into the door, yelling at his mother to take the boy and go, go, go!

  The room filled with smoke, seeping under the door, crawling in through the windows.

  The memory broke apart with the first tinges of smoke. From there, all he remembered were broken images, crazy things. More screaming, and zombies reaching for him everywhere he turned. He remembered getting separated from his parents, his mother’s cries echoing away into nothingness in the smoke that was filling the house where they lived.

  And then, when he realized he was alone, that his parents were gone, some kind of light had turned on inside his head.

  Through the smoke, through the screams, he could sort of see the bad people trying to hurt him. They glowed in the smoke, shimmering like flashlight beams, except that the light carried with it a bad . . . was it a smell? That was the only way his mind had been able to frame the sensation. Their minds smelled bad. The light that came from them was bad. They wanted to hurt him. He’d taken that knowledge and he had . . .

  What?

  He didn’t know what he’d done from there.

  He had gone walking, he supposed.

  The next thing he could remember for sure was sleeping on the cot in Dr. Knopf’s office, crying himself to sleep. Sometimes, Dr. Knopf would read from a book about a big rabbit and a little rabbit and the big rabbit saying this is how much I love you. He remembered sometimes Dr. Knopf would cry when he read the book, and how the man’s tears and the choking sob in his voice had scared him for some reason he couldn’t quite understand. And he remembered grabbing Dr. Knopf’s leg in a stranglehold whenever the military men came by to ask questions and laugh at the answers they got.

  Ah, yes, Dr. Knopf.

  There was the other problem of Jimmy’s life.

  For several years now he’d understood what he meant to the High Command. He was an experiment, an asset. They talked about him the same way they talked about programming groups for Warbots. Or pallets of ammunition. Or the shifting lines in the sand that divided the living from the dead.

  Only Dr. Knopf thought of him as Jimmy.

  And that was what made things so hard.

  Dr. Knopf was as close to a parent as Jimmy had ever really known, but he wasn’t the ideal parent that Jimmy always imagined his real parents would have been. He was distant. He could be cold. Sometimes, he could be harsh, even cruel when Jimmy failed to cooperate. Dr. Knopf was the one who made the rules, and Jimmy hated him for that. He had many memories of the two of them screaming at each other, Jimmy calling Knopf the meanest man he’d ever met, and Knopf, so angry his fists trembled with rage, making harsh, declarative statements that made Jimmy shrink into himself. Things like, “I don’t care what you think. I just care that you do what I say.” Or, “Nobody asked your opinion. Just do what I tell you. Why can’t you get that through your head?” Or, “I’m sorry. I love . . . I just want you to be happy, Jimmy. Please, do this for me. This one last test. Finish this, and we can get some dinner. I’ll do the macaroni and cheese you like so much. . . .”

  It was the occasional kindness that made things so confusing. There were times when Knopf actually felt like a father to him. And he was sure Knopf felt the same. Why then did they always pull away from each other in the end? Why did the rare moments of closeness always end with the look of love fading from Knopf’s face, and a terribly remote sadness invariably taking its place? The man was haunted by his memories. Jimmy knew that. But why did memory have to make things so hard?

  There were so many questions, and so few answers.

  But still you haven’t asked the right question.

  Jimmy stopped.

  “Daddy?”

  Yes, James.

  What question? What did I forget to ask?

  How, James. How come you can sense the dead? Didn’t you ever think to ask? When the military men were laughing at you, didn’t it seem strange that you knew you were right?


  Yeah, I guess. Well, no, not really. I always felt like I was wrong.

  Because they weren’t inside your head. They didn’t know what you knew. But I do, James. And you know how I know?

  Jimmy shook his head, unable to articulate the thought aloud.

  I know because I have the power, too. It turned on the night the zombies came to Mill Valley, didn’t it?

  “Yes,” Jimmy said, breathlessly. Turned on was exactly how he had come to think of that night, like somebody had just flipped a light switch inside his head.

  The same thing happened for me, James. My power to sense the zombies, it flipped on that very night.

  You mean like a light switch.

  Yes, exactly like that.

  Daddy?

  Yes?

  Why isn’t it working now? The sight, I mean. Usually I can sense the zombies. I could sense them before I came down here.

  I don’t know. It doesn’t work down here for me, either. That’s how I got trapped. Now hurry, James. I need help.

  But Jimmy didn’t move. Ahead of him was some kind of catwalk, another metal platform like the kind that had collapsed under his weight back at the entrance to the sewers.

  What’s wrong? Why aren’t you coming to me?

  Jimmy turned and looked behind him. The blue light from the algae didn’t carry far. Twenty or thirty feet down and his visibility was gone, swallowed by the darkness. But something was down there. He could hear it splashing, and moaning.

  James?

  He could see silhouettes down there now, bunches of them, coming toward him.

  Daddy, I think I’m in trouble.

  8

  Jimmy pulled his pistol just as the first zombie lumbered into view.

  As she came closer, the faint blue glow from the algae lit her ghastly features. It was a woman, or had been once. Her shoulder-length hair was matted now with blood and clods of mud. Her neck seemed unable to hold up the weight of her head, making her hair hang like a curtain in front of her face. The skin on her arms and neck was oozing with abscesses and open cuts that no longer bled. The clothes had been torn from her chest, and when she moved, black ribs showed where the flesh had been eaten away. She raised her gnarled hands and began to moan.