The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  One of the soldiers stepped away from the truck and started to scan the alleyway. His partner hit the button to open the metal screen and, as it came up, pulled his pistol.

  Jacob braced himself for the fight he knew was coming. He started to mentally rehearse drawing his gun, getting it on target.

  The soldier poked at the mound of towels with the barrel of his gun, and even lifted a few of the towels out of the way. Beside Jacob, Chelsea felt like she was about to rattle herself to pieces. Jacob breathed in shallowly through his mouth, so as not to make a noise, the way Sheriff Taylor had taught him when he was first learning how to be a deputy and they were trying to sneak up on somebody who didn’t want to be caught. He figured, if he had to, he could kick the gun away, which might buy him enough time to pull his own weapon.

  He could probably squeeze off a shot on this guy, but after that, he’d be fucked.

  The other soldier would blast him into a muddy red crater before he could even climb out of the truck.

  “You got something in there?”

  The soldier standing at the back of the truck poked the barrel of his weapon into the mound of towels again, then turned away. “No, nothing.”

  “Alright, secure the back door of the restaurant. I’ll get us some more eyes out here.”

  The two soldiers split up, leaving the restaurant employee standing there by the back door of the truck. The man glanced from one soldier to the next, gave a barely noticeable shrug, and walked around to the front of the truck.

  The next instant, the truck lurched forward, picking up speed. As the truck rumbled away from the restaurant, Jacob leaned forward just enough to watch the soldiers continuing their search.

  For the first time, he thought they might actually be able to pull this off.

  Beside him, Kelly sat up. “Are we clear?”

  “For now,” Jacob said. “But we need a plan.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Two hours later the laundry truck lurched to a stop. It shook a little as something latched on to the front end, and then it settled with a pneumatic sigh. The vehicle had made four other stops after leaving the restaurant, with more linen heaped on them at every drop, so that now Jacob and the others were buried under a mountain of damp towels and tablecloths.

  They waited for someone to come along, but after ten minutes, they were still waiting.

  “I think we’ve made it to the laundry,” Chelsea said. “That must have been what that jolt was. The truck settling into its charging station.”

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Kelly asked.

  So much laundry had been piled on top of them that Jacob could no longer see the back door. “Hold on, I’ll check,” he said, and pulled himself free. He crawled over to the back door. He scanned as much of the loading dock as he could through the metal screen, then pushed it open and stuck his head out.

  He didn’t see any workers.

  Any human workers, anyway.

  He did see several unmanned wagons trundling around the larger trucks, though. As he watched, one of the wagons slid underneath a truck, clicked into place, and waited for the larger vehicle to empty its cargo through a chute at the bottom. That done, the wagon pulled out, made its way up a concrete ramp, and continued on and out of sight through a hallway. There were four other trucks nestled into docking stations next to theirs, and robot wagons came and went with the regularity of the figurines in a cuckoo clock.

  “Wow,” Jacob muttered.

  “What is it? Are we okay?” Kelly asked.

  “I think so. I don’t see anybody.”

  “Good,” Chelsea said. “Let’s get out of here. This smells gross.”

  “Beats being dead,” he said.

  He climbed out of the truck, then helped Kelly and Chelsea out. Kelly started to ask Chelsea which way they were supposed to go, but stopped when she caught sight of another unmanned wagon collecting its payload. Her mouth fell open, and she watched the automated operation in stunned silence. Once again Jacob had to suppress a smile. Even as a horny kid, who at sixteen hadn’t thought much beyond talking Kelly out of her bikini, Jacob had known she was something special. Smart as a whip. That was what his momma always used to say about her. But she was born in the wrong place. A woman like her, smart as she was, should have been born here, in Temple, where her mind could swim in wonders like this.

  “I can’t believe this,” she said. “How is this even . . . Chelsea, how did your people do all this? How did this kind of technology survive? It’s incredible.”

  “It’s a laundry,” Chelsea said.

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  “Seriously, it’s a laundry.”

  The trucks came and went on a driveway that curved around the edge of the loading dock. Chelsea made her way around the driveway without waiting on the others. Jacob watched her go and marveled at how easily the girl seemed to have adjusted to coming back home. When he’d met her in the Slaver caravan, she was so sick she couldn’t even stand. Nick had been forced to carry her as the Slavers drove them from one campsite to the next. She’d been a mangy-looking wreck then, so downtrodden and beaten that he’d mistakenly thought she’d been born into slavery. But now, barely a month back in civilization, she’d put on enough weight to look healthy and she seemed in control, in her element. She was taking on the world, fighting the power.

  Of course, she was only seventeen.

  Jacob still remembered being seventeen. He’d been bulletproof at that age. He could go weeks at a time out in the Zone, working with the salvage teams, dodging zombies and wild animals, sleeping on the ground and carrying a hundred pounds of scrap on his back, and then come back to one of his mother’s home-cooked meals in Arbella. Nothing got to him back then. He could work all day and play all night and never miss a beat. He’d been so rock-solid back then he’d even thrown away the love of his life, and laughed about it with his friends.

  With Nick.

  Yeah, back then he’d been bulletproof.

  He touched Kelly’s shoulder. “We need to go,” he said.

  She nodded.

  Together, they walked up the driveway and into the bright glare of the afternoon sun. Stretched out before them was Scholes Field, the air travel hub of Chelsea’s world. The rest of Temple, at least the parts he’d seen, had embraced the look and feel of Old World Galveston. He’d seen street after street of wooden houses painted in pastels, vibrant as Easter eggs, and big, blocky government buildings made of dust-colored Texas granite, all relics of a distant, more glamorous time. But he’d seen nothing on the island like the Scholes Field Terminal. It looked like a giant stone octopus rising from a field of coastal grass. Huge, curvy arms, tentacle-like, radiated out from a central building five stories high. Docked up and down the length of the various arms were small aircraft the size of railroad boxcars. Scanning the field, Jacob saw dozens of different designs and configurations. Some looked sleek and fast, their hulls shaped like teardrops and glistening in the afternoon sun, while others looked boxy and powerful, obvious workhorses. And above them, thick as noodles in places, gleaming white trains hissed quietly along monorail tracks.

  But the thing that dominated his attention was an aerofluyt half a mile away, just beginning to lift off. It was magnificent in the sunshine, as huge as the ruined skyscrapers he’d seen in Little Rock. It rose from the field on a shimmering cushion of air. Bright lights shone down its thousand-foot-long flanks, glowing, even in the glare of midday. Just days out of Arbella, back before the Slaver caravan had taken his friends, back when he still held on to the hope that he could do great things, Jacob had seen an aerofluyt like this one glide overhead. It hadn’t made a sound, and yet, every piece of metal, from the window frames of the gas station where he and his party had taken shelter for the night, to the forks and spoons on their plates, to the old-fashioned metal signs on the wall, had started to dance and shake and rise into the air. His teeth shook in their sockets. His stomach had turned queasy, like he was looking down from a
great height. He felt small and helpless and terrified.

  He didn’t feel that way now, though.

  Now, watching the behemoth rise from the grassy field, he felt only awe, and wondered how such things could possibly be.

  “It’s your turn,” Kelly said.

  “What?” Jacob said. He was surprised to find that he’d been holding his breath.

  “To be amazed,” she said. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? How is it that we still have to wash our clothes in buckets, while they can make something like that fly?”

  “It is incredible,” he agreed. He turned back to the aerofluyt and shook his head. “Chelsea, where do you think that thing’s headed?”

  The younger woman was twenty yards ahead of them. At the sound of her name she stopped and turned impatiently. “Who knows?” she said. “They go all over the world. They can stay aloft for twenty years at a time, if they need to. The only reason they ever land is to load and off-load passengers.”

  “All over the world . . . you mean . . .”

  “Mexico City. Wuchuan, China. Wellington, New Zealand. Salt Lake City. All over the world. Wherever my people have outposts.”

  Jacob shook his head. “Incredible.”

  “Yeah, I guess,” Chelsea said with a shrug. “You mind if we go now? We’ve still got to find a ride out of here.”

  Jacob nodded.

  “Okay. And listen, the two of you need to get your collective shit together, okay? All this, everything you see, it’s all normal. There’s nothing here that my people haven’t grown up with. If you gawk like idiots, you’re going to get us caught.”

  Jacob traded a glance with Kelly.

  She smiled back at him.

  “Yeah,” he said to Chelsea. “That sounds fair enough. Lead on. We promise not to behave like a bunch of slack-jawed yokels.”

  Chelsea frowned at that, not getting it, but evidently decided it wasn’t worth the effort. She started walking the long road that led to the airfield’s main terminal.

  “Jacob, is this safe?” Kelly asked. She looked around nervously. “Being out in the open like this?”

  Jacob looked around. A long line of cars slid silently by, but nobody seemed to be paying them any attention. He realized he’d been bracing himself for one of those cars to suddenly veer to the curb and for armed men to jump out. He had no idea what they’d do if that happened. Out in the open like this, there was no way for them to run.

  “I don’t like it, either,” he said. They weren’t far from the terminal now, and he nodded toward it, where large crowds of people were hurrying about their business. “Something goes wrong, I say we run that way, try to get lost in the crowds.”

  “You think that’ll work?”

  “I think we’ll be okay,” he said.

  She frowned at that. “Do you really, or are you just saying that?”

  He didn’t answer. He’d managed to break her heart, all those years ago, but he’d never been able to lie to her. She had a way of seeing right through him.

  He followed after Chelsea, and after a few steps, Kelly rushed forward to walk with him. Within a few moments they’d started to merge with the crowd. Jacob had lived in Arbella nearly his entire life. He was no stranger to crowds and markets, but back home the markets were noisy, happy places, with children running everywhere and vendors calling out to their friends and neighbors, trying to arrange trades of produce or chickens or whatever they had to barter with.

  The mood here was very different. All around him, the main hall bustled with travelers as they pressed impatiently through the crowd. Everybody seemed to be in such a hurry. Chelsea had said this was the hub for travelers from all over the world, and he no longer doubted that. Such wild clothes. So many unusual faces. They walked around him, speaking languages he couldn’t recognize. He turned and tried to take it all in, his smile growing wider.

  There were food booths all along the walls, and the smell of roasting meats and spices and fresh baked bread was overpowering. He saw chicken cooking on grills and meat being sliced from long sword-like skewers and huge shallow pans with a reddish-yellow rice dish piled high with chunks of seafood. He’d seen pictures of squid, back in school, but he’d never seen one in real life until now. He was simultaneously disgusted and intrigued. It smelled so good.

  The woman sitting on the far side of the shallow pot smiled at him. “You like paella?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Jacob admitted. “It smells amazing.”

  “You try,” the woman said. “Five BCs. I make you a big bowl.”

  “BCs?” Jacob said.

  Kelly touched his shoulder. “They use money here, Jacob.”

  “Oh,” he said. He turned to the paella woman. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any money.”

  The woman’s expression hardened for a moment. But when she turned to other passersby, her smile returned. Jacob stood there in surprise for a moment, a little taken aback by the transparency of the woman’s feigned friendliness.

  “Hey,” Kelly said in a whisper. She gave his arm a nudge. “We’re supposed to look like we do this every day, remember?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sorry, but that just made me realize something. How are we going to get a ride to El Paso without any money?”

  Chelsea had been over at a bank of video monitors, but she returned in time to hear Jacob’s question. “We have plenty of money,” she said. “From my dad.”

  “But I thought your dad didn’t have any friends left here,” Kelly said.

  “He doesn’t. But he was a wealthy man. We have all the money we need. What we don’t have is a lot of time.” She nodded toward the black glass globes on the ceiling. “See those? Those are video cameras. This whole place is being watched. And if those men work for Lester Brooks, they’ll have access to facial recognition software. It’ll only be a matter of time before they show up here.”

  “How long?” Jacob asked.

  “How should I know?” Chelsea said. “Could be ten minutes from now, could be right now. But that’s not our only problem. Come over here and watch this.”

  She led them to the video monitors.

  Every screen played a news feed in some foreign language. He couldn’t understand any of them. But the images needed no translation. He saw teeming masses of ragged zombies, thousands of them, advancing through ruined suburban streets like rivers, devouring everything in their path. Aircraft, similar to the ones that had hunted them just a few hours earlier, circled overhead. The camera panned back, revealing a tide of living dead that stretched far off into the distance, and Jacob realized that what he was seeing was just the tip of some gigantic iceberg. He’d never seen so many zombies, even in the pictures they’d shown him back in school of the First Days.

  “Kelly,” he said, pointing at the monitor.

  She was looking at a different monitor, but it displayed an image much the same as what he was seeing. She nodded, too stricken to speak.

  To his left, two bearded men were pointing at the screens and talking loudly in yet another language he didn’t recognize. He could tell they were angry, though.

  A lot of people watching the monitors looked angry, in fact.

  “What’s going on?” he said to Chelsea. “What is this?”

  “That’s El Paso,” Chelsea said. “The outskirts of it, anyway. The Technology Yards are closer in to the center of town, behind the defenses. The city’s been put on lockdown. All travel in and out has been cancelled.”

  “So we’re stuck here?” Kelly said. She gestured at the crowd gathered around the monitors. “Is that what all these people are so angry about?”

  “With good reason,” Chelsea said. “Those zombies you see there, that’s just a satellite of the Great Texas Herd. My father used to say that was the biggest herd in the world. He said they were more than a hundred million strong.”

  “But I don’t understand,” Jacob said. “When we were being held by Mother Jane and her family, we saw one of those aerofl
uyts steer a giant herd away from the camp. Can’t they do that here?”

  “They tried that already.” Chelsea pointed at a pretty young Asian woman in a red suit, her image superimposed over an aerial image of a slowly advancing zombie horde. “That’s what this newswoman is saying. The Newton has already made multiple sweeps overhead. Ordinarily, an aerofluyt’s morphic field generator can be used to shepherd herds wherever you want them to go, but it’s not working.”

  Chelsea turned back to the monitor and listened for a moment.

  “Now she’s saying that El Paso has been attacked before, but always by satellite herds, never like this. Their automated defenses have held in the past, but they don’t think they can handle a herd this size. They’re directing all personnel into the tunnels beneath the city.”

  “They’ve got aircraft,” Jacob said. “Why don’t they just fire-bomb them from the air? With the technology you people have, you could wipe them out in minutes.”

  “Be quiet,” Chelsea said in a stage whisper. “People will hear you.”

  “So?”

  “So, we don’t have a military here in Temple. We don’t believe in guns.”

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Jacob said.

  “Keep your voice down,” Chelsea said.

  Kelly put a hand on his shoulder. “Jacob,” she said. “We need to work this out.”

  “No shit,” he said. He turned to Chelsea and shook his head. “Look, I’m sorry. But what the hell are we doing here? No guns. Really? Chelsea, we were chased by the same guys, right?”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t know who those men were. I don’t. I think they work for Lester Brooks, but I don’t know that for sure. Those weapons are only supposed to be available to exploration parties on the aerofluyts. They shouldn’t be here in Temple.”

  “Yeah, well, guess what. I don’t think they care about your fucking rules.”

  “But they shouldn’t be here.”

  “Okay, but they are here. Why are we arguing about this?”

  Chelsea looked away. “This shouldn’t be happening,” she said.

  Jacob was beyond frustration. “Okay, well, one thing is clear. We’re not going to El Paso. We need to figure something else out.”