Dead Judgment

by Flint Maxwell

  Gee, thanks.

  “It’s going to be dangerous. We’ve put you through enough danger as it is,” Lilly continues. “The rest of this journey is ours and ours alone.”

  Funny, I think. Not too long ago, I was telling you the same thing.

  I had tried to make Lilly go back the way she came because it wasn’t safe, because I knew that the only thing lying in front of me was death, and there was no reason to bring anyone else down with me. That’s how I feel: those who walk with me only die. From Kevin, to my own wife and son.

  But Lilly is hardheaded. There’s no convincing her otherwise, no telling her no. She’s like Abby in that way.

  “But we want to help. We want to take down the District,” Roland says.

  “Si! Si!” Nacho says. “It is the reason we are here.”

  “Yeah!” Mandy adds.

  “No,” I say. I make sure my voice is heavy with finality. They seem to buy it by the way they shrink down before me. “This is our fight. There may be a time for you to make your stand, but it is not now.” I step forward. “Get out. Get out while you still can.”

  Roland steps to meet me. “Okay, Jack,” he says. “I’ll go. Godspeed.”

  “Roland,” Mandy says. “You can’t be serious.”

  Roland looks back at the tall woman, who somehow looks smaller than she has ever looked. “Can’t you tell? He doesn’t want our help. He saved our lives, and for that, I’m grateful. You should be, too. The least we can do is grant his wish.”

  Nacho sidles up next to Roland. “Si,” he says, somberly.

  Now they’re both looking back at Mandy.

  I glance at Abby. She averts her gaze from mine as if to tell me I’m on my own here. That’s okay. She’s right.

  Mandy throws up her hands. “Fine!”

  I stick my hand out for Roland. He takes it in his own.

  “It’s been great knowing you,” I say.

  “Great knowing you, too. Be careful, Meat.”

  I grin.

  Nacho salutes me.

  Then they are off, headed in the same direction as Cameron, toward the bridge and hopefully to safety beyond it in the west.

  “Well, that was…interesting,” Abby says.

  “You could’ve backed me up a little,” I say.

  Abby points to Lilly. “That’s what she’s for,” she says. “I do the shooting, and Lilly does the talking.”

  “I guess,” I say. “Whatever the case, I’m glad you’re both here for me.”

  Lilly elbows me in the arm. “Don’t go getting sentimental on me, Jack Jupiter.”

  “He’s actually pretty good at that. You should’ve seen him the first time I met him, back during one of the first zombie outbreaks. His fiancé, Darlene, was locked away in the Woodhaven Motel with that creepy guy that owned the place…and Norm.” She snaps her fingers. “I can’t remember his name. Anyway, every step Jack took, he couldn’t help but bitch and moan about getting to Darlene. He’s come a long way since those days, that’s for sure.”

  Lilly is staring at Abby with shock.

  Abby looks back. “What?” she says.

  That’s when she realizes her blunder. Darlene is dead, and it’s safe to assume I’m not over her. Because I’m not.

  “Oh, Jack…I’m sorry,” she says.

  I raise a hand. “It’s not a big deal.”

  “I didn’t mean to bring her up. I just thought that story was funny—no, I don’t know what I thought. I’m sorry. I know how much she meant to you. She meant so much to me, too. She was like the sister I never had. I don’t know where I would be without her.”

  I shake my head. “Seriously, Abby, don’t worry about it. I was young and scared back then. That’s all. It is a funny story, considering all the other crap we’ve gone through.”

  Abby smiles, but she doesn’t believe me; that much is evident in the way she won’t meet my eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Jack. Just know that.”

  “Actions speak louder than words. The Overlord killed my wife, he killed my son. Let’s make sure his empire can’t spread. Let’s make sure he can’t take anyone else’s wife and child from them,” I say.

  I turn toward the city. Looking at that diseased skyline, the rotten buildings, the memory of civilization, I feel, for the first time in a long time, fear. Pure fear. It courses through my veins, slows the pumping of my blood. Looking at that diseased skyline, I think there is a chance I’ll never look at another skyline again. We are talking nuclear weapons here. Nothing as small as guns and knives, but nukes. Yes, I’ve stopped the world from being reset before, when Doc Klein tried blowing the us all to hell, but even those bombs were far away. All that was in front of me was the big red button you’re not supposed to press.

  Tonight, I’ll be directly in the blast zone, whether I like it or not. Suddenly, I’m not so sure I’m prepared for that. Prepared to die.

  Still, I can’t let the others know how I’m feeling.

  Sparing one last look toward the bridge as the silhouettes of Mandy, Nacho, and Roland grow smaller and smaller in the distance, I turn back and face the city. Then I’m putting one foot in front of the other. I’m holding the gun out in front of me, keeping my finger close to the trigger. Ready for war. No less than a few steps later, I hear Abby and Lilly following me, and I think, if I’m going to die today, I’m glad I’m not going to die alone.

  36

  The farther into the city we get, the more the place crawls with District soldiers: men, women, and even boys and girls that look like they should be roaming the halls of a high school instead of carrying assault rifles nearly as big as they are.

  We stick to the shadows for most of the way. That proves an easy task. Inside the city, without most of the grid being back on, shadows are everywhere. There are lookouts built high above the streets, and each one has a spotlight, like the towers found on prison grounds in those old black and white movies, but the guards up there aren’t moving the lamp back and forth like they’re probably supposed to. With the bridge probably being the only relatively safe entryway into the city, I don’t think they’re too worried about guerrilla rebels infiltrating the place.

  “Up ahead,” Abby says. We are hidden behind the husk of an old Dodge—probably a minivan, I think, but who knows? It’s barely recognizable as a vehicle; if it wasn’t for the melted steering wheel, jutting up from somewhere in the front with its ram logo embossed in the middle of it, I’d probably never know it was a car, let alone a Dodge. “About a hundred feet up the road, we take a right, and we’ll be at a stadium.”

  “Like the one in Eden?” I ask, referring back to Spike and Butch Hazard’s place of torture, where we’d found ourselves all those years ago, back when we were whole.

  Abby shudders. “I’d forgotten about that place. Thanks, Jack.”

  I shrug.

  “But no, not like Eden. Mandy told me that this place is where college football games were played. Remember football?” Abby says.

  Lilly shakes her head. “Blah. Something I tried to forget.”

  “Such a girly girl,” Abby says.

  The spotlight atop the nearest guard tower sweeps the street. Lilly grabs us and yanks us down.

  The light doesn’t linger over the wrecked Dodge; it continues on up the road, makes another pass, then stops as it illuminates an equally wrecked storefront. The inside of the building is scattered with loose papers. A bookstore, probably.

  “I wonder how much longer they’ll think we’re imprisoned,” Lilly says.

  “Not much longer, if they haven’t discovered our absence already,” Abby says. She’s right.

  “We’ll have to take out the guard up there,” I say. “No way we’re getting past the tower without him seeing us.”

  “I know,” Abby says. “You got a plan, Jack?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, there’s a first time for everything, right?” Abby snickers, sarcastically.

  “What about you?” I
ask.

  She picks up a rock and steps out from the cover of the Dodge.

  “Abby!” Lilly hisses, reaching for her, but she can’t catch her sleeve before she’s fully visible in the street.

  I pull Lilly back and shake my head, telling her that we just have to let Abby do what she wants. That there’s no stopping her. Sometimes, her stunts work. Sometimes, they don’t. But most of the time they do, and Lilly will learn that truth soon enough. Let’s just hope whatever she’s doing works out this time.

  37

  Abby cocks the rock back over her ear and launches it up toward the guard tower. As the rock flies through the air, I think how genius Abby is. She’s going to break the spotlight and shroud the whole street in darkness—

  Nope. I’m wrong.

  The rock doesn’t hit the spotlight, though it’s not because she missed her target. Instead, it hits the guard square in the back of the head. A hollow clonk fills our ears, then the clang of his gun hitting the metal railing as he stumbles forward and falls over. He screams on the way down, a short and sharp sound that is gruesomely cut off by the chorus of cracking bones we hear when he hits the pavement. He writhes there for a second, then the glow of the nearby spotlight illuminates the blood coming from his head.

  I don’t think he’s dead, but I also don’t think he’ll be getting up anytime soon.

  Abby looks back at us and shrugs. “I played a little softball in high school. Seems like I still got it.”

  Lilly and I look at each other, our faces masks of seriousness, then the seriousness crumbles, and we can’t help but smile.

  “Told ya,” I say to Lilly.

  We get more ammo off the guard, plus a handgun that we give to Abby, since she’s the one who knocked the guy out, and a hunting knife I strap to my leg beneath my pants because I gave my other one to the hobgoblin woman.

  The stadium stands at the end of a long road. There are two more guard towers in the distance, and their lights are on, but they’re not sweeping the perimeter. In front of the stadium, lit up by torches, are three guards.

  Our prospects are not looking good at the moment.

  “Plan?” Lilly asks. “I don’t think we can get close enough to hit them with rocks.”

  Abby grins as she rotates her arm in a circle. “Never say never.”

  I shake my head, pointing above us. A series of office buildings of nearly the same size surround the stadium and the watchtowers. We have weapons, now all we need is a vantage point.

  “Genius,” Abby says.

  I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not. Probably is, but I don’t know what else we have going for us. Surely we aren’t going to waltz up to the guards and throw rocks at them. They’d see us before we got within throwing distance.

  A gunfight might work, but we want the element of surprise—get them before they can get us. The less shots fired, the less chance that other guards will be notified of our attempted coup.

  Abby turns toward the door of the nearest building. She kicks it open in one go; the door practically blasts off of its hinges. The noise is loud enough to make Lilly jump.

  “A little warning next time would be great,” she says.

  Abby raises her eyebrows. “Sorry.”

  The inside of the building is dark and it stinks like corpses and dust. We don’t have any light aside from the moon and the stars that shine in from the outside through holes in the brick and the roof. By that light, we find the stairs. I estimate it’ll take about five minutes to get to the top if we hurry.

  On our way, we pass mutilated corpses. Businessmen and businesswomen twisted at odd, unnatural angles. Some of them no longer have faces; they’ve been smashed by falling ceiling beams and crumbling walls; an eye over here, an ear over there. Others, aside from the way their legs are bent beneath them, or the way their arms have snapped and now dangle by threads of frozen sinew, look like they could be sleepwalking or something.

  I pass a woman with brittle, blonde hair. The way she’s looking up at me, the stars gleaming in her eyes, makes me think of Darlene, and this terrible feeling clutches the pit of my stomach. I want to stop and fall down next to her, cradle her in my arms. I want her to wake up and tell me everything is going to be okay… But I know it’s all bullshit.

  Everything is not going to be okay.

  And that is not Darlene; Darlene had her throat slit by the one-eyed man, the Overlord. She died in San Francisco, just like Junior did, just like the rest of my family in Haven was taken from me.

  “Keep up, Jack,” Abby says.

  Lilly must see me staring at this woman. She comes down the few steps and puts her hand on my back, on the stinking cloth of my cloak. “It’s not her, Jack,” she says.

  “I know,” I say. “I know.”

  “She’s in a better place,” Abby adds. She’s looking at the woman’s corpse now, too, and a flicker of recognition flashes in her eyes.

  So I’m not crazy. This lady does look like Darlene.

  “Remember that. And remember she’s watching over you. Junior, too.” Abby turns away, but I catch a gleam in her eyes before she does. She’s tearing up.

  This hurts me more than I care to admit. Abby crying? I’m sure I’ve seen her cry before, but it takes a lot for her to do that. A lot.

  “Let’s go on,” Lilly says. She gracefully takes the role of leader for now.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  “For what?” she asks.

  “For everything,” I reply, and then we’re going back up the steps.

  The door to the roof is not easy to open, but through our combined efforts, we force it wide enough for us to slide through the crack. The sound the hinges make is akin to someone screaming bloody murder, like a banshee, but we are too high for anyone to notice it on the ground.

  I hope.

  This city is full of a screaming current. The air cuts through the buildings, finds the blown open spaces, and makes a sound like wind around old headstones.

  We take a spot on the east side of the building and peer down. Inside the stadium, lined up like cannons in a war, are nuclear missiles. They’re smaller than I expected, but then again, there’s the saying that dynamite comes in small packages. Nuclear weapons do, too, I guess.

  Not far from the arsenal, bisected by a length of chainlink fence, is a helicopter landing pad. The ‘H’ and the circle around it look to be written in bright white spray paint. There’s no helicopter parked on the pad, though.

  “I’ll take the three in front of the stadium. You take the watchtower,” Abby says.

  “What do I do?” Lilly asks.

  “You guard the door,” Abby answers.

  “But I’m a good shot,” Lilly argues. “Tell her, Jack.”

  I look at Abby and nod. “She is. Back before we came to you in Chicago, we had a shootout on a farm. She covered me from about a quarter mile away with no scope.”

  “And at the gas mine,” Lilly says.

  Abby says, “Fine,” and hands over her rifle.

  Lilly grins. “The student has become the master,” she says.

  “Enough bullshit,” Abby says. “Blast those guards to hell. We gotta get in and out before the Overlord lands. See anything moving in the stadium, you blast them, too.”

  But it seems Abby has doomed us. By speaking of the Overlord landing, she has made it come true.

  The air fills with the sound of whirring helicopter blades. We all look up and see, coming from the east—the same side of the building we’re currently standing on—bright lights against the dark, cloud-covered sky. On the helicopter’s tail, red flickers on and off, on and off.

  A rush of wind washes over us as Lilly is crying for us to get down, but it’s so dark up here, I doubt whoever’s in the helicopter has seen us. They swoop over the stadium and the bird rocks back and forth as it prepares for a landing. I peer over the edge.

  “What are you waiting for, dummies?” Abby shouts. “It’s now or never.”

&nb
sp; She’s right. The sound of the blades will mask our shooting.

  I take aim at the men in the guard tower as Lilly aims down at the men in front of the arena. We pull our triggers. The darkness is now alight with intermittent sparks of gunfire.

  I hit both of my targets. One is a clean headshot; I watch his skull explode like a watermelon dropped from twenty stories. The other guard is farther, so my aim isn’t as clean. I clip him in the shoulder, and he spins around viciously, exposing the back of his head. I aim and fire again, but I misjudge the angle and get him in the neck with two slugs. In the dusky brightness from the lamp on his tower, dark red sprays and splashes the glass, turning the light a crimson color.

  Lilly has no problem hitting her mark, though. As I turn to watch her mop up the last guy, I see he’s smart enough to make a run for it, except he doesn’t run into the cover of the stadium, but instead takes off down the road. He goes sharp right. Lilly—the epitome of concentration, with the gun’s barrel balanced firmly on the ledge, one eye closed, holding her breath—takes the shot.

  The man falls as soon as the thunderclap from the gun reaches our ears.

  “Geez,” Abby says loudly. The helicopter’s blades continue whirring. “You weren’t lying.”

  Lilly hands her the gun back. “Nope,” she says.

  I’m up and at the door, already on the first step. If that’s the Overlord in the stadium, it’s only a matter of time before he catches on to the attack and flees. I have to get him before he does.

  “Jack, wait up!” Abby yells.

  But I don’t. I’m sprinting down the steps, going around and around. I step over the woman who looks like Darlene without even sparing a second glance. A couple times on my descent, I consider sliding down the railing, but realize that probably won’t end well for me. I’ll slip, fall over the edge, and probably break my neck or bust my head open. Typical Jack Jupiter shit. So I’m as careful as I can be, going down these steps until I reach the door Abby busted down, then I burst through it the opposite way and onto the street.