The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  “Let go of me!” she screamed. “We have to run.”

  Jacob looked down at the dead men at his feet. All around them, people were looking their way and pointing.

  “What’s going on?” Jacob asked. “Who were those guys?”

  Chelsea finally managed to break free from Kelly’s grip. She ran to one of the dead men and rifled through his clothes until she found his pistol.

  “What are you doing?” Jacob asked. “What’s going on?”

  “We have to get out of here. Right now.”

  Chelsea ran into the street, right in front of a car, forcing it to a stop. She raised the pistol at the driver and motioned for the driver to get out.

  A man climbed out, hands raised high.

  “Let’s go!” Chelsea yelled at them. “We have to go.”

  Jacob looked down at the men he’d just killed, then to Kelly.

  A crowd was starting to gather.

  “Jacob . . . ?”

  He reached down for her hand. “I think she’s right. Let’s get out of here.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Chelsea sped away as fast as the car could go. In the front passenger seat, Jacob held on to the dashboard with both hands as they slid around a corner, the tires shrieking against the pavement, terrified pedestrians jumping away from the curb. The car’s back end fishtailed from side to side as Chelsea struggled to get it back under control. In the backseat, Kelly was screaming. She was getting thrown around back there, trying desperately to find something to hold on to. They went through four more turns before Jacob finally started to yell, “Chelsea, slow down! You’re gonna get us killed.”

  But Chelsea was too terrified to back off. Her eyes were wide and she was panting. She kept saying, “No, no, no!” over and over again, completely out of control.

  Jacob grabbed for the wheel. “Chelsea, stop!” He yelled in her ear. “Chelsea!”

  She looked at him then, and he could see the light of clarity coming back into her eyes. “Jacob?”

  “Yeah, now slow it down. That’s it, that’s good.”

  Chelsea eased the car down and steered through the streets.

  “Where are we going?” Jacob asked.

  Chelsea shook her head. “I don’t know.” The look of panic flooded back into her face and Jacob felt the car tremble as she dug deeper into the throttle.

  “Easy,” Jacob said. “Chelsea, easy. Pull over, okay?”

  “We have to get out of here.”

  “I know,” Jacob said. “But for right now, just pull over.”

  Chelsea eased the car to the curb. She looked like she was about to say something, but then the stress and fear and panic all caught up with her and she collapsed, her chin sagging to her chest, making her look like a balloon going flat. She put her face in her hands and cried.

  Jacob glanced at Kelly in the backseat and shrugged. Kelly leaned forward and put a hand on Chelsea’s shoulder. “Chelsea, baby, what is going on? Who were those men?”

  Chelsea just shook her head.

  “Why were they after you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Jacob picked up the pistol he’d taken from Chelsea’s attackers and tried to find a brand name on it someplace. There was none. “This weapon . . . I’ve never seen anything like it. Where were they taking you?”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. She was starting to whine. “Stop asking me.”

  Kelly squeezed the younger woman’s shoulder again and said, “Chelsea, please, you have to tell us what’s going on. We’re caught up in this, too, now.”

  Chelsea took a few deep breaths. Her face was shiny with tears and her eyes bloodshot. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then took the pistol she’d taken off her attackers and handed it to Jacob. “You keep that,” she said. “I . . . I can’t.”

  “Chelsea,” Kelly said, “those men. What do you mean, they are enemies of your father? You told us your parents both died when the Darwin crashed.”

  “They did.”

  “I don’t understand. If your father’s dead, why would those men be after you?”

  “Do you remember the notebooks I showed you, back on the Darwin?”

  “Yes, of course. Your father’s work on morphic field theory.”

  “I took them. Those men want them back.”

  Kelly frowned. “Chelsea, I read those notebooks. Your father had pretty much figured out how morphic fields could be used to control zombie behavior. That’s a huge discovery. Why would anyone want to kill you for that? Wouldn’t they want the world to see it? A lot of lives could be saved.”

  “That’s not it,” Chelsea said, shaking her head. “Morphic field theory is the technological basis of our society. It runs our aerofluyts and powers our cities. It’s even powering this car. But there’s a downside, and it’s a big one. My father’s work showed that morphic fields were doing more harm than good. They’re cooking us from the inside out and changing the structure of our brains. My father predicted we’d have the collective thinking power of a turnip within two generations. A lot of people make a lot of money off of morphic field power. My father’s work was going to blow all that apart.”

  “Oh,” said Kelly. She sat back in her seat and traded a worried look with Jacob.

  “What did you do with your father’s work?” Jacob asked. “Did you try to show it to anybody? One of your father’s friends, maybe?”

  “Friends of my father’s are hard to come by these days,” Chelsea said. “The same people who want my father’s research have been smearing his name all over the place. They’re blaming him and his research for the wreck of the Darwin.”

  “Oh God,” Kelly said. “Baby, I’m so sorry.”

  “And so that’s it?” Jacob asked. “There’s nobody you can turn to?”

  “When they caught me, I was at the Terminal. I was going to see my aunt Miriam. She works in the shipyards in El Paso, where they make the aerofluyts.”

  “What did you do with your father’s research?” Kelly asked.

  “I wedged the notebooks behind a toilet in the women’s bathroom.”

  Kelly raised an eyebrow.

  “It was the only choice I had.”

  “We’ll make it work,” Jacob said. “We get the notebooks back and get them to your aunt Miriam. Is that the plan?”

  “I can’t ask you guys to help me,” Chelsea said. “These people are trying to kill me.”

  “And they just tried to kill us, too,” said Jacob. “The way I look at it, we don’t have any other choice but to help you. Kelly—what’s wrong?”

  In the backseat, Kelly suddenly looked ill.

  “What is it?”

  “We have to ditch this car,” Kelly said.

  “But why?”

  “Jacob, look around you,” Kelly said. “Don’t you think they can track this car? I bet they’re on the way here right now.”

  She was right, of course. Jacob had learned that about Kelly over the years. She usually was right, and she never failed to remind him of that.

  He patted Chelsea’s shoulder and pointed toward a narrow lane behind some nearby houses. “Pull the car into that alley over there. We’ll leave it behind all those bushes.”

  “But she can’t walk to the Terminal,” Chelsea said. “It’s on the opposite end of the island from here.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” he said. “Now hurry. Let’s hide this thing.”

  Chelsea drove into the alley. It was dense with brush and swallowed the car almost immediately. Jacob moved a few branches around to cover the back end, and together they headed back for the main road.

  No one seemed to notice them. The street was quiet. There were a few pedestrians walking the sidewalks, but they all seemed absorbed in their conversations. A few cars went by, but nobody stopped, or even slowed, to check them out.

  “Where to?” Jacob asked.

  Kelly pointed to a restaurant halfway down the block. A hand-painted sign hanging above the door s
aid SEAWALL COFFEE HOUSE. “There, I guess? We can get out of sight, at least.”

  “If they’re really looking for us, they’ll go door to door,” Jacob said. “A public place like that will be one of the first places they look.”

  Jacob pulled his shirt over the pistols as best he could, hoping the bulges wouldn’t show. The last thing he wanted to do right now was attract attention.

  “Probably. But they’ll definitely see us if we wait out here.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “That’s true.”

  The restaurant, which must have been built to be someone’s house many years earlier, was now a coffee shop and bakery, with tables and chairs crammed together in the front rooms and black-and-white pictures of Old Galveston hanging on the walls. A long, low counter stood off to their left, and Jacob could see loaves of artisanal bread and cookies and muffins in the glass cabinets. One of Jacob’s favorite memories from growing up in Arbella was riding his bike through the streets just after dawn and smelling the odor of fresh-baked bread in the air. The same odor hung in the air here, as well, but it was faint, as though all the baking had ended hours earlier.

  Very few of the tables were occupied, and no one seemed to pay them any mind as they walked inside. One table, though, with an older Asian couple, glanced at Chelsea with a worried frown.

  Jacob followed their gaze and instantly understood why. Chelsea’s face was still wet and red from the tears she’d shed in the car. That was going to be a problem.

  But before he could say as much to the girl, a very skinny, but still quite pretty dark-haired woman in a green apron approached them. It looked like she was about to ask them if they’d like to sit down, but then she saw Chelsea. “Is there a problem?” the woman asked.

  Kelly put a hand on Jacob’s arm. “I got it,” she said.

  She leaned in close to the woman in the green apron and whispered something in her ear that Jacob couldn’t quite make out.

  “Oh,” the woman said. She turned and pointed down the hallway that led to the back of the restaurant. “Sure, yeah, of course. It’s straight back through there, second door on the left.”

  “Thank you,” Kelly said.

  “If you look in the cabinet under the sink you should find some complimentary ones, if you don’t have what you need.”

  “Perfect,” Kelly said. “Jacob, will you find us a seat?”

  “Uh, sure,” Jacob said.

  Kelly put her arm around Chelsea and led her away.

  The hostess motioned toward a table in the corner. “Will that work for you guys?”

  The table was right next to a window. At a glance, Jacob could see a wide section of the street to the west of them, and the mouth of the alley where they’d hid the car to the east. “Yeah,” he said, forcing a smile. He was anxious, his nerves a wreck as he started to come down off the adrenaline dump he’d experienced during the gunfight and their escape. But he knew he had to hold it together. “Sure. This is lovely. Thank you.”

  “Can I get you a drink?”

  He ordered a glass of sweet tea with some lemonade in it. After the hostess left him, he sighed heavily and sank into himself. He closed his eyes and let go of as much of the built-up fear and confusion as he could. It helped a little, but not much. He still felt like a live wire had been wrapped around his skin.

  He ran a finger across the clean, white tablecloth, over the shiny silverware, watched the sun sparkle in the empty glasses. Everything was so clean and fancy here in Temple. This was a rich and powerful society, and the truth was, they had him by the balls. Jacob and Kelly were completely lost here. Kelly hardly knew her way around at all, and Jacob certainly didn’t. Chelsea had no doubt spent some of her time since returning to Temple getting reacquainted with her old home, but even her knowledge of the place couldn’t get them far, and he began to wonder what a culture that despised police officers did with murderers like him.

  Outside, a large shadow crossed the street.

  Jacob craned his neck forward, so he could see the sky. A large black, wasp-looking aircraft was circling overhead. Gooseflesh suddenly broke out all over Jacob’s skin. His hands went numb. They’d caught up with them already.

  As he watched the sky, two more of the wasp-like aircraft appeared. The three of them circled above the alley near where they’d ditched the car, and Jacob realized to his horror that Kelly had been exactly right. She’d no doubt saved their lives.

  Now it was up to him to get them the rest of the way.

  He rose from his chair, and as he did, two of the aircraft veered off and started making slow circles of the surrounding area.

  A fourth aircraft, larger and boxier than the first three, its engines roaring, touched down near the entrance to the alley. A door opened on one side of the aircraft and a dozen men climbed out. Jacob had seen their like before, all of them tall and lean, highly focused, like soldiers. They disembarked, scanned the surrounding street, then began to fan out in groups of twos. Jacob didn’t see any weapons on the men, but he knew they were there.

  He reached around and adjusted the pair of pistols he’d secreted away into the waistband of his pants. If he had to take the fight to them, he probably wouldn’t last long. After seeing what these strange pistols could do, he had no doubt that a group of well-trained men could make short work of him. And those wasp-like aircraft, whatever they were, looked like military hardware. If the soldiers didn’t get him, the aircraft certainly would.

  He had to find another way.

  He went to the back of the restaurant and found the door the hostess had pointed out to Kelly a few minutes earlier. He knocked on the door.

  “Kelly,” he whispered.

  Kelly opened the door. Behind her, Jacob saw Chelsea drying her face over the sink. “What is it?” she asked.

  “We’ve got trouble,” he said. “A lot of it.”

  “They’re here already.”

  “Yeah. We can’t go out the front. They’re all over the street. We need another way out.”

  “I saw the back door was open,” Kelly said, and nodded toward another hallway.

  “What’s going on?” Chelsea said from behind Kelly.

  “We need to get moving,” Jacob said. “We’re going out the back.”

  He held the door open and waved them out. As he let it close, he happened to glance toward the front of the restaurant. Two of the soldiers were coming in through the doors.

  He watched one of the men signal for the hostess. The woman in the green apron nodded at whatever the man said and pointed toward the corner, where she’d seated Jacob.

  “Crap,” Jacob muttered. He ran after Kelly and Chelsea, catching up with them right as they reached the back door. “We have to clear out,” he said. “They’re gonna be coming back here any second.”

  “Where do we go?”

  The alley behind the restaurant was wide. Every building, every fence, every balcony, was festooned in vines thick with red and yellow flowers. The only thing out of place was a big, square-shaped truck. An employee of the restaurant was hauling a basket of towels and linens to the open back end of the truck. He hadn’t noticed them.

  “Jacob?” Kelly said.

  There was enough cover, Jacob thought, that he might be able to get the jump on the two soldiers about to rush through the restaurant. But that was no good. As soon as he took them out, provided he could even do that, he’d have to deal with the aircraft circling overhead. The pilots would see them for sure, and they’d be done with moments later.

  He wouldn’t even be able to set up a diversion that would allow the girls to escape.

  “That’s an Oppe Linens truck,” Chelsea said. “They converted the old Oppe Elementary School into a laundry. They’re right next to Scholes.”

  “Would the driver give us a ride?” Kelly asked.

  “There is no driver. All work trucks are automated. They do their rounds and eventually end up back at the laundry.” She pointed to the employee who was dumping linens i
nto the back end of the truck. “All we have to do is wait for him to finish and then go up front and pay the drop fee.”

  Jacob glanced back toward the front of the restaurant. “Let’s hope he hurries.”

  “He’s done now,” Chelsea said. “See, he’s going up front.”

  Jacob turned back to the alley just as the man was disappearing around the far side of the truck. “Okay,” he said. “Go!”

  The three of them ran for the back of the linen truck as quietly as they could. He could see the feet of the restaurant’s employee up near the front of the truck. It didn’t take him long to pay, and within moments he was walking back toward them.

  Chelsea was already inside, worming her way under the mounds of soiled linens.

  Jacob motioned to Kelly to hurry, and when she wasn’t fast enough, he grabbed her legs and hurled her inside, wincing at her grunt of surprise.

  He glanced again under the truck and saw the employee was almost to the back of the truck. Jacob threw himself into the back of the truck and landed hard right next to Kelly.

  “Get the towels on top of us,” he whispered. “Hurry!”

  They pulled dirty tablecloths and soaking wet hand towels over their bodies, covering up just as the employee rounded the corner and slapped the button to close the back. Jacob peeked at the man, who looked bored and far away, and prayed for a break.

  As the man pushed the button that raised the mesh screen over the back end, two of the soldiers came up on either side of him.

  Jacob had Chelsea on his left and Kelly on his right. Both women turned stiff with fear. Chelsea was breathing so fast and so hard, Jacob thought for sure the men would hear her.

  For a moment he thought of drawing his pistols. What harm could it do at this point anyway? They’d see the movement under the towels, but at least he had a chance of getting the jump on them.

  “I haven’t seen anybody,” the restaurant employee said.

  “How long have you been out here?”

  “I don’t know. Ten minutes, maybe.”

  “And you didn’t see anybody at all out here?”

  The man shrugged. “Nobody.”