“Clear a path to the back, c’mon,” Lilly says.
“We need fuel!” Abby yells.
I look at her like she’s crazy, like I’ve never even heard of fuel.
“What was all this for?” she says. “We can’t leave empty-handed. We just need a couple of drums. That’ll get us to Ohio.”
It’s the last thing on my mind right now, but she’s right. My arm around her, we stumble out into the main drag. There’s an overturned shopping cart by where I got into the scuffle with the lumberjack and the hyena.
I hand Abby off to Lilly, who puts her arm around her. “Go on,” I say. “Get out of here. I’ll handle the fuel.”
Lilly nods. They turn and head for the backdoor.
I don’t watch them go because I have to act fast. The flames are spreading.
This side of the warehouse hasn’t been touched yet; that’s good, but it’s only a matter of time. I grab the cart and flip it upright, bring it back on all fours, push it toward the pallets. One wheel squeaks and drags.
I’m thinking, That’s about right.
I’ve never found a shopping cart that didn’t do that. Back in the day, on my trips to the grocery store, I was always the guy with the janky cart. I could be heard coming from about a mile away.
In the now, when I turn the cart toward the pallet, I almost tip it over. Have to lift it partway. There’s a huge pool of blood, and the crumpled body of the lumberjack. I’m not surprised to see he’s dead; I messed him up pretty bad. Don’t feel too bad about it, either. But the other guy isn’t here. The hyena.
Where the hell did he go?
I realize the flames have spread to the walls now, climbed up to the ceiling. I feel their blazing heat all around me. My stomach drops, does this thing where I feel like I’m in a car and have lost control of the wheel, start swerving into oncoming traffic. Helpless to stop.
I shake the feeling off, thinking, That’s the old Jack Jupiter. The new Jack Jupiter is ready, is prepared for anything life throws his way.
I bend down and try to pick up one of the drums on the lower level. Grunt. Nearly throw my back out.
Screw this getting old thing. I can’t do it. It’s too heavy. Dammit.
I’m sweating now, it’s so hot in here. There’s a sound like a hissing somewhere, louder than the roaring flames. Then—
Something explodes near the body of the guy whose eye Abby pried out. The whole damn warehouse shakes.
Or at least, I think it does. Maybe it’s the explosion that has just thrown me off-balance.
I stumble and knock into one of the drums pretty hard. It tips back, but doesn’t fall.
This gives me an idea.
As soon as my head stops ringing, I push the shopping cart with the rubber mat in its basket as close as I can to the pallet, and grab a hold of one of the drums on the middle level. I begin rocking it back and forth, back and forth, until it tips. I do my best to guide it down into the cart gently, but that’s a pretty futile gesture. The drum hits the cart and bends the wires until they’re almost bulging. The wheels stay on, though, thank God.
Just as I’m about to go for the second drum, I hear, “Die, you piece of shit!” and I whirl around to see Hyena staring me down from behind the barrel of a gun.
4
He’s smarter than most bad guys. Gotta give credit where credit is due, right? He doesn’t talk to me or goad me or tell me his master plan. He doesn’t give two shits about that. I think all he cares about is watching me bleed, watching me suffer, putting a few new holes in my body.
He pulls the trigger.
The problem he has is this: he’s pretty beat up. It looks like it pains him greatly just to hold the pistol, which is heavy, but certainly not that heavy.
So his first shot misses. Ricochets somewhere near my feet.
This, of course, frees me up for my own shot.
I’m usually quick on the trigger. When it comes to gunfights, you really only get one shot. And you’d better not miss, because if you do—
Before I can pull the trigger, there’s another explosion. This one is much closer than the first, and it sends a hellish wave of heat in our direction. The force of its energy tips a whole pallet to my left.
Unfortunately for Hyena, he’s in the pallet’s fall zone. Barrels of gasoline and oil hit him, crush him into oblivion.
I just stand and stare at the twisted remains of this guy for a moment—a moment I don’t really have to spare. But it’s just so gruesome, so unfortunate for him, I can’t really do anything else. He’s all smashed and bloody; half of his head is caved in, blood leaking out of his ears and dripping down his eyes like red, running mascara.
He’s not dead, either. He’s just lying there, howling in pain. From one of the barrels, gasoline leaks and spreads to the left, toward the flames. With a whoosh, this new trail of fuel ignites, and the fire eats the guy up. I hear him scream louder and louder until the heat pops his voice box, and the only sound he makes is a bloody, ragged gargling.
Poor bastard. My way would’ve been a lot more humane. One shot to the head, and boom, you’re dead. Guess that wasn’t in his cards tonight.
As I stare at this dead guy, I realize I’m going to be next if I don’t hurry the hell up. I pivot, grab the handle of the shopping cart—which has turned pretty warm, along with the overall temperature of the warehouse—and push as hard as I can in the direction of the backdoor. It’s not easy, either. I’m grunting, driving as hard as I can, using muscles I’ve forgotten existed; the drum of gasoline has to weigh a few hundred pounds, no joke.
But then, somehow, I’m out the backdoor and sucking in cool, night air. Tears are running down my cheeks from the smoke. There’s blood and soot on my clothes. My gun feels like it’s about a million degrees. I take a deep breath, telling myself I’ll never take this rot-tinged air for granted ever again.
Another explosion behind me. Glass flies from one of the ceiling windows, rains down like hail. I’m trying to move the cart a few more feet away from the building before the structure blows and takes me with it, but it’s not easy. I’m weak, and the adrenaline that was once coursing through my veins has tapered off, replaced with a mild amount of fear.
Of course, as I get farther away from the warehouse, dreading my trek around the opposite side of the building, back to Abby’s truck, a zombie stumbles across my path. His old shirt is soaked with blood, allowing the contours of his emaciated body to stand out sickly. Jagged ribs, jagged collar bone.
“Fuck me,” I say. “Never ends, does it?”
I raise my rifle, not in the mood to bash the thing’s head in.
Just as I do this, just before I can pull the trigger, the roaring of an engine reaches my ears. The truck drifts around the corner, and takes the zombie out. Smashes it flat against the ground. Blood and guts spurt from its sides, an arm twists and cracks, the head explodes.
Lilly is behind the wheel. She honks the horn, and rolls down the window.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” she yells.
“A little help,” I say, motioning to the barrel of gasoline.
A smile crosses her face. “Oh, what’s that? Big, bad Jack Jupiter needs help from a girl?”
“Can it and help me,” I say.
She’s still smiling as she climbs out of the driver’s side door, offering me a view of Abby in the front seat. She’s slumped over. Not hurt or anything—at least I hope not—just exhausted. I know how she feels. This wasn’t as easy as I thought it was going to be.
Lilly and I navigate the cart toward the back of the truck. She opens the tailgate, and together, we heave the drum out. It’s not easy, but we get it into the truck bed, push it with a grunt. Momentum does the rest for us, and it rolls down.
“I’ll strap it in,” I say. “Get back inside. We gotta get the hell out of here.”
I climb into the truck bed and grab a bungee cord to secure the drum in place. The bungee cord almost isn’t big enough, but I’m
able to use my brute strength to stretch it to the max.
The truck lurches forward. I almost fall on my ass, but right myself at the last moment.
Lilly whips the truck around the corner of the warehouse. We pass hordes of feasting undead, but only a few of them look up at me with their sickly yellow eyes.
Out through the broken gate we go.
We’re about a quarter mile away when the rest of the warehouse explodes in a flaming fury, painting the night sky in fire.
5
“He’s not gonna like that,” Abby says.
I’m leaning through the open back window, my side pressed against the gas drum as it wobbles and tries to escape the bungee cord confines I’ve strapped it into.
“Who?” Lilly says.
We’re on a bumpy stretch of dirt road. I’m getting tossed and thrown all over the place, bumping my face on the sides of the open window.
“Who do you think?” Abby asks. “Santa Clause.”
“I know Santa Clause isn’t real, asshole,” Lilly responds. She whips the truck onto the pavement; it’s not much better than the dirt road. The city workers haven’t responded to a pot hole complaint in better than fifteen years.
We’re on a stretch of country road. Overgrown fields on our left, thick forests on the right. The forest has been trying to reclaim the path of the road. You can see it in the cracks, where long blades of grass and weeds jut up to the sky. You can see it in the overhanging tree branches that stretch out, creating half a tunnel around us.
“The Overlord,” I say. “That’s who. The one-eyed man.”
“I knew that. Obviously.” Lilly glares at me in the rearview. “And why should we care what that asshole thinks?”
“We shouldn’t,” I answer.
“No, we shouldn’t,” Abby says.
She looks relaxed, too relaxed. I don’t know how she could feel that way after ripping some guy’s eye out of its socket with her hook—which is still dripping blood, I might add. Whether it’s his or not, I can’t say.
“But he’s not gonna like it,” she repeated. “He’s gonna think we’re waging a war.”
“We are,” I say.
“No.” Abby turns to me. “We’re not waging a war. We’re doing a hit job. We take him down, that’s all. If the District crumbles because of his death, then so be it. If it doesn’t…”
“You can’t be serious,” Lilly says.
She hits the brakes, and I’m thrown forward. If the window was any bigger I’d be up in the front seat.
“I am serious,” Abby says. “Now get to driving. We got a long way to go before we’re in Woodhaven.”
But Lilly isn’t listening. She throws the gearshift into park. “You’re joking.”
“What part of ‘I am serious’ don’t you understand?” Abby says.
“Apparently all of it,” Lilly says. “I know we don’t know each other very well, but I’d think that you of all people would understand why we have to shut down the District. You were there. You saw everything.”
“I participated, too,” Abby says in a soft voice.
Her eyes are distant. There’s a budding look of horror on her face, and I notice she looks older…much older, though she’s not even middle-aged.
“Abby,” I say. Lilly turns the car off to save fuel, so my voice is loud when it’s not meant to be. “You can’t blame yourself for that. You were just doing what you had to do to survive.”
She turns on me, her eyes wide. “You blame yourself for what happened at Haven, don’t you?”
I don’t answer. Instead, I look away from her. The horrors of what happened to our little safe haven in San Francisco come to me in a terrible blur.
“Yeah, I know,” Abby continues. “We carry these heavy things. We carry them in our hearts, and there’s nothing we can do about it. We can’t build a time machine. We can’t get the years back and try to do things the right way. We have to live with them. You have to live with your mistakes, just like I do.”
I’m still quiet because I don’t know what to say. What could I say?
Abby puts her hand on me. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t mean it. My—it’s just my adrenaline. That didn’t go as planned.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
I mean it, too. It is okay. I understand. And she’s right, we do have to live with our mistakes. As much as I wish I could bring Darlene and Junior back, and all those I lost in the process of my life, I cannot.
“What did we end up with, anyway?” Abby asks. It’s the first time she’s asked about what we got from the warehouse.
“Besides a bunch of bruises and bloodstains?” I say. “Not much.”
“How much?” Abby asks.
“One,” Lilly answers.
Abby’s jaw drops like she doesn’t believe her. She must’ve been really out of it when Lilly and I were loading the barrel into the truck bed.
“See for yourself,” I say.
She leans to the side, peers into the bed at the one measly gas drum.
“It’s all I could manage. I got attacked again on the way out,” I say. “Those are heavy as hell, too; I’m not as young as I once was.”
She snorts, reaches out and pats me with the side of her hook, making a show of wiping the dead guy’s eye juice on my sleeve. “Please, Jack. Even if you were young, you wouldn’t have grabbed any more than one.”
I shrug; she’s not wrong.
But then she’s saying, “You know I’m just joking around.”
“No, you’re not,” I reply.
Then we both laugh. God, I missed her.
6
Before Lilly restarts the truck, I climb into the cab, and slip in the backseat. It’s kind of cramped, especially with my long legs, but it beats riding out in the open in the bed. Though we’re in a rural part of Indiana, we’re still in District country. If a sniper on a lookout tower sees our wheels kicking up dust, and I’m out in the open, I might be sporting a fresh bullet wound pretty soon.
We drive in silence for a while. Traveling east.
It gets completely dark outside. And I mean totally.
Since the world ended, not too many places are running electricity. You can go just about anywhere, look up at the night sky, and see every last star up there. Even in New York City. Well, I don’t know about New York for sure, but I’d wager a good amount of cash (not that money matters any longer) that New York is as messed up as everywhere else.
Abby is looking over a map. I lean forward and try tracing the route with my eyes in the dim glow of the dashboard. We try not to turn on the overhead light, if we can help it. Same goes for the radio, the air conditioner, the heat, the windshield wipers. It’s Abby’s way of conserving fuel. It takes a lot of willpower for me not to say that if we wanted to conserve fuel, we should’ve traded the truck for a Prius.
I’d be joking, of course.
When we escaped Chicago, Abby only had the keys to her truck. At the time, breaking the window of a different car would’ve been impossible, would’ve drawn too much attention. That was exactly what we didn’t need after a shootout and a daring jump to a window washers’ scaffold outside of a skyscraper twenty stories above the pavement.
“We’re gonna come up on a town pretty soon,” Abby says. “If it’s empty, we’ll crash there tonight. Sound good?”
“Oh, God, yes,” Lilly says. “I don’t think I can look at the road much longer.”
“I’ll take the first shift,” I say.
“No, I will,” Abby says.
“No, really. You got pretty beat up—”
She glares at me. “I did not! I totally had that situation under control.”
“Uh…I think you’d be sporting a new hole in your head if Lilly and I hadn’t distracted that guy long enough for you to stab his eye out. Which, by the way, was pretty freaking gruesome,” I say. “And awesome.”
“Now, now, you two,” Lilly says. “No bickering. You’re family, so start acting like it.”
“Hilarious, Mom,” I say.
“I would’ve been fine,” Abby says. She folds up the map and pops the glovebox open, sticks it inside. “I know how to handle myself. I wanted that guy to take me hostage. It was all part of the plan.” She winks at us.
It was definitely not part of the plan.
Up ahead, the headlights shine on a sign covered in ivy and surrounded by weeds. I can’t make out the name, but Abby announces it as we drive by and enter the town limits. She had seen it on the map.
“Ridgewick,” she says.
“Sounds eerie,” Lilly says.
“It does,” I say. “But everything is eerie these days, isn’t it?”
They mumble their agreement.
Lilly speeds the truck around a curve. On the other side of the curve, where the road straightens, we can see the downtown area. It’s dark, and the buildings stand like gargoyles, backlit by the moon.
“Eerie,” Lilly says again.
7
Abby points ahead to a parking deck. “What about there? Just for tonight?”
“Can’t start a fire with concrete,” Lilly says.
“We don’t need a fire,” Abby replies.
“I agree,” I chime in. “As nice as one would be, we’re in unknown territory here. Don’t want to draw any unwanted attention, from zombies or otherwise.”
“Guess I’ll just freeze my balls off,” Lilly says.
She turns the wheel and guides the truck into the parking deck. It’s one of those spiraled jobs where you go round and round and feel like you’re getting nowhere and the walls are going to come down on you. It’s not a place I want to be when the dead come, trapped in there like that.
Then again, I know why Abby picked it: we can get up to the top and get a good look of the layout of the town. If there are any fires out there tonight, we’ll see them. I hope we do. Not because we’re out here looking for allies, or anything like that, but because if we see flames, we know we’re not dealing with the brightest of adversaries. Fire does draw a lot of unwanted attention, and if someone is out there, huddled around a campfire and enjoying the warmth, we know they’re not smart—at least, not as smart as us—because any zombies out here will be heading toward the brightness and the smell.
Dead Judgment Page 3