by Joe McKinney
“The tunnels?”
Chelsea stepped off the stairs. “Really? I told you, there’s a whole network of tunnels underneath El Paso. The city was chosen as our construction yards because of that. Anytime there’s a lockdown, everybody goes underground. It happens all the time.”
“And you know this how?” Jacob asked.
“My aunt Miriam,” Chelsea said. “She’s like an expert on it or something.”
Jacob grunted. “What do you mean, or something?”
“I mean, it’s like her hobby. She told me all about it last time I was here.”
“That was seven years ago,” Jacob said. “You were ten.”
“I remember it just fine.”
“You remember this place well enough to get us to her lab? Is that really what you’re telling us?”
“There’ll be signs. There’s a whole rail system. It’ll take us anywhere we need to go. Honestly, what is the big deal?”
“The big deal is, I don’t want to get killed,” Jacob said. He hooked his thumb at Kelly. “I don’t want her to get killed. We’ve been with you for less than a day, Chelsea, and so far we’ve almost been killed twice. Now, I’m sorry if this upsets you, but we need a fucking plan.”
“I have a plan,” Chelsea said.
“Which is exactly what?”
Chelsea looked from Jacob to Kelly. Her anger seemed to ebb, replaced by uncertainty. “There are maps at all the rail stations,” she said. “We just follow the maps.”
Jacob waved her off and turned away in frustration.
Kelly let him go. She climbed the stairs and took Chelsea’s hands in hers. “Look, Chelsea, you haven’t thought this through, and that scares the hell out of us. We need to have a plan.”
“You want a plan?” Jacob said. “We have to figure out a way to get back home. We can’t stay here. Staying here is stupid. She’s going to get us all killed.”
“I will not!” Chelsea said. “I know the way.”
“Bullshit,” Jacob said, wheeling around to face her. “You don’t know shit. I’ve followed you halfway across the fucking continent because I didn’t have any choice, but now I’ve got a choice. You hear me? I have a fucking choice. And I say you’re full of shit. You’re a goddamn ignorant teenager without the common sense God put in the ass end of a goat, and I for one have no intention of getting myself killed because your people are fucking lunatics.”
“My people?”
“You heard me. Your fucking people.”
“My fucking people don’t kill their best friends,” Chelsea said.
That stopped Jacob cold. “Who the fuck do you think you are? Nick was my best friend. He was my friend!”
“And you fucking shot him in the face, you bastard!”
Chelsea turned away. He could hear her sobbing.
“He was my friend,” Jacob said to Kelly. “She has no right.”
“Jacob,” she said, whispering. “Please. This isn’t helping.”
“But what fucking right does she have? Look, you can coddle her all you want, but this dumb kid is going to get us killed, and Kelly, I can’t do that again. I can’t bear that kind of responsibility again. I already hurt enough.”
“You’re not the only one hurting.”
“I know that,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that? I just can’t be the one who leads us into death. Not again.”
“No one is asking you to lead, Jacob.”
Kelly turned away before he could answer her, which was probably just as well. He was totally lost, and he always managed to say the stupidest things when he was lost. It was what had ended what they had seventeen years earlier, and he couldn’t go through that again, either.
“Chelsea,” Kelly said, “can you come down here, sweetie? We need to figure this out.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” Chelsea said. She charged down the stairs. “Why can’t you two hear what I’m saying? There’s nothing to figure out. I’m going to take these notebooks to my aunt Miriam, and she’s going to figure out how to save my father’s name.”
“But you don’t even know whether your aunt will help you,” Kelly said.
“She has to. She has to, don’t you see? She has to.”
“Chelsea, please, don’t shriek at me.”
“I’m not shrieking!”
Chelsea stopped there. Kelly tried to put a hand on her arm, but Chelsea pushed her away.
“Don’t you see? She has to help. If she doesn’t, I’ve got nowhere else to go. I’ll be ruined. She has to help.”
Kelly frowned. “What do you mean, you’ll be ruined? I thought you said you had your father’s fortune to fall back on.”
Chelsea was crying, not even trying to hold back the tears. “I lied, okay? Are you happy with that? I lied. They’ve locked up my father’s accounts and seized the money. I got a few thousand BCs out of the bank before it happened, but not enough to live on. They destroyed my father’s name, and now they’ve left me with nothing.”
Kelly looked confused. “But, Chelsea, why would you lie about something like that?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d help me otherwise.”
Kelly glanced back at Jacob for just a second, and in that moment he saw so much of the girl he’d known way back in their younger years. He saw her kindness, and her ability to adapt, to forgive, to make bridges out of blasted roads. It was strange, he thought, how he’d been forced to travel halfway across the continent, and across two decades, to see that girl again. But that was the way of things, wasn’t it? You had to go far afield to remember where you lived.
Kelly went after Chelsea. “Oh sweetie,” she said. “Come here.”
But Jacob had had enough of the touchy-feely crap, and he didn’t trust himself to speak again. Not without starting up the screaming match all over again. He went to the rear of the compartment and sulked. Let the two of them work their shit out, if they could.
He doubted it, though.
In the meantime, he’d sit in the dark and figure out how in the hell they were going to get back home. Texas was eight hundred miles across from border to border. That meant eight hundred miles, on foot, while fighting their way through the Great Texas Herd.
Wasn’t going to happen.
And they couldn’t just go to the authorities. The authorities were the ones looking to kill them.
Which left—
The door at the top of the stairs hissed open, breaking his thoughts off clean. A man appeared there, wearing yellow overalls with blue sleeves and a blue hard hat. He was holding a wrench in his hand, and looking like he had every intention of using it to bash somebody’s head in.
“What’s going on in here?” he demanded.
Kelly and Chelsea put their hands up and started backing down the stairs.
“What are you doing in here?” the man said. “Who are you people?”
Goddammit, Jacob thought. Was this really how it was going to be? Was this really how his luck was going to run?
He pulled one of the pistols from behind his back and hustled toward the stairs. The man was still coming down the stairs, the wrench held low.
“Who the hell are—”
He didn’t finish the rest of his sentence. Jacob stepped between the two women and pointed the pistol right between the man’s eyes.
The man made a startled, strangled sound.
“You don’t have to die today,” Jacob said. “But I will kill you if you don’t cooperate.”
The man nodded.
“Good. Drop the wrench.”
The man tossed it away.
“Where are your keys?”
“Keys?” the man said. He looked genuinely confused.
“To get underground. This place is on lockdown. Where are your keys to get underground?”
Real terror had crept into the man’s voice now. “I don’t have any keys!”
Jacob pressed the barrel of the weapon right between the man’s eyes. “I am not playing with
you. Give me your keys now!”
“I don’t have any keys,” the man said again.
“Jacob, wait!”
It was Chelsea. “How do the doors open?” she asked. “Do they key off your Life Alert?”
The man nodded.
“Then take us to the doors.”
“Please,” the man said. “I have a family.”
Jacob pushed Chelsea out of the way and stuck his weapon back in the man’s face. “Then unless you want to be sent back to them in a bucket, I suggest you get your ass back out that door and take us underground.”
“Okay,” the man said. “It’s this way.”
They followed the man outside. Hot desert air hit them in the face, carrying with it the smell of dust and a faint, lingering reek of decay. The evening sun was low over the buildings of downtown, coloring them with shadows. In the far distance, a line of black mountains shouldered up against the sky.
“Lead on,” Jacob said.
“Okay,” the man said.
They were on the ground level of a large port. Their freighter had docked at what looked to Jacob to be a huge open-air hangar. There were a dozen more freighters like the one they’d just climbed out of sitting at stalls up and down the rows. He saw trucks and robots parked in stalls in the center of the hangar, but none of them were moving. Must be parked for lockdown, he thought. The zombies were attracted by movement, even that of machines.
“It’s this way,” the man said.
He led them up a flight of stairs, across a loading platform, and stopped in front of a doorway.
“This is it.”
“Open it,” Jacob said with a wave of the pistol. “Hurry it up.”
The man waved his left arm over a black plastic pad next to the door, causing it to crack open with a sigh. The man pushed the door open, stepped inside, and then wheeled around fast, shoving the door back in Chelsea’s face.
Jacob was ready for it, though. He jammed the barrel of his gun into the doorway and prevented it from closing. The man shoved even harder on the door, trying to keep them out. But when he realized he couldn’t close the door, he glanced to one side and slapped a big red button on the wall.
Right away, sirens started to sound.
“Crap,” Jacob said. He shoved Chelsea to one side. “Get out of the way.”
The girl stepped to one side, allowing Jacob an open shot on the door. He took a step back and slammed his heel into the edge of the door, knocking it into the man’s face. The dockworker fell onto his back as the door flew open. The man tried to scramble to his feet, but Jacob was faster. He pushed his way through the doorway and pointed the muzzle of his pistol right between the man’s eyes. The man stayed on his back, his breath wet and congested as he struggled to breathe through the blooming flower of blood that had been his nose only moments before.
Kelly put a hand on his wrist. “Jacob, no. Don’t kill him.”
Jacob looked at her, but didn’t take the pistol away. He was mad, and he was sick and tired of assholes.
“Please,” Kelly said. “Not unless we have to.”
Jacob turned back to the man on the floor. He met the man’s terrified gaze, and in that moment, he got a glimpse of himself. He realized he wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger. He was honestly hoping that the man would make some stupid move, do something that would give him the excuse to pull the trigger.
Jacob tried to take a step back from the horror of his self-realization, but he couldn’t.
He wanted to kill this man. He was so angry, he was willing to turn the man’s head into a muddy puddle of brains and blood on the floor.
And for what?
The man had hit an alarm button. Nothing more. Did he really deserve to die?
And wouldn’t Jacob have done the same thing?
Wouldn’t Nick have done the same thing?
“It’s this way,” Chelsea said.
Startled out of his thoughts, Jacob looked up. Chelsea had moved down a side hallway. She was waving for them to follow.
“Jacob?” Kelly said.
Jacob looked back down at the bleeding man and cocked his head to one side. “Looks like it’s your lucky day,” he said, and lowered the pistol.
CHAPTER 8
The alarms echoed off the walls.
Jacob had never heard anything like it.
It hurt. His head felt like it was going to cave in. Not even covering his ears helped.
But he couldn’t stop running. Despite the pain, he couldn’t even slow down. He was bringing up the rear, and falling farther and farther behind with every step.
Chelsea was running full speed ahead, tearing around corners and running down hallways, not even bothering to see whether Kelly and Jacob were still behind her. Kelly was keeping up, but only barely. Between the noise of the sirens and the ringing in his ears from the beating he’d taken earlier that day, Jacob’s head was swimming.
He yelled at them to slow down, but if Chelsea heard him over the shriek of the alarms, she made no sign of it.
“Chelsea, stop!”
Again, no response. The girl kept running. They were moving through some kind of warehouse. The walls, the floor, the metal office doors: Everything had a grungy, worn-down look to it, like it was decades old and used hard every day. They’d passed an opening that looked out onto a wide room, two stories high, with metal girders in the ceiling and row upon row of boxes and wooden crates. Heavy-loader machines sat motionless in the shadows, the only light coming from the red emergency lights flashing overhead. Every door, every opening off the warehouse floor was covered with a heavy metal mesh gate.
“Where are we going?” he yelled at her.
“This way,” she said, and turned another corner.
He reached the corner a moment later, rounded it, and froze.
A heavily armored figure was walking toward them. His armor was as bulky as a space suit, with a heavy nylon web bib in front that looked to be part body armor, part utility belt. Near the figure’s shoulders, the bib formed a high, stiff collar that protected the back and sides of his neck. He wore a thick helmet with a copper-colored glass plate that hid his face from view.
Every inch of him was bulletproof.
Jacob knew that from personal experience.
Back on the wreck of the Darwin, he’d emptied two full magazines of .22 long-range rifle ammunition into the face and chest of a zombie wearing a similar suit. The bullets bounced harmlessly away, and the zombie trudged forward, clumsily, but steadily, every step and every swing of its arms sounding the odd, hydraulic groan of mechanical assistance.
Those same servos in the arms and legs augmented the strength of the wearer.
He’d seen the same zombie rip an arm off of a full-grown man.
But even though he’d seen the gear before, the sight of the hulking figure bearing down on them terrified him. There was no way he could win this fight. He’d already seen the rounds his stolen gun fired bounce harmlessly off a car’s windshield. And he’d already seen what little good a .22 rifle did against a suit like that. He had little doubt the pistols he carried would be equally useless.
But then the armored figure surprised him.
“Who hit the alarm?” the man said, his voice, also augmented, sounded harsh, powerful, mechanical.
Jacob moved forward, his hand reaching back for one of his pistols even though he knew it would do no good.
But Chelsea was faster.
She stepped in front of the advancing figure, like she was the boss. “It was back there,” she said. “I heard a man screaming.”
“Okay,” the figure said. “Keep moving. Go underground.”
“Yes, sir.”
The armored man trundled forward on his servo-powered legs. He passed by Jacob, gave him a second, curious, and maybe worried glance, but pushed on, making his way down the tunnel to the main exit leading into the freighter yards.
Chelsea watched him until he was out of sight, then motioned for th
e others to follow. “If we’re gonna go,” she said, “looks like now is the time.”
“Agreed,” Kelly said. “Chelsea, that was incredible. You really kept it together there.”
The younger girl shrugged. “All you gotta do is make ’em think they’re looking for somebody else. It’s not that hard.”
“Well, yeah . . .”
But Chelsea had already started running again.
Jacob watched her go and could only shake his head in frustration. He wanted to strangle the girl for her recklessness.
“What do we do, Jacob?” Kelly asked.
“Follow her,” Jacob said. “We don’t have any other choice.”
“I hate this,” Kelly said. “I feel like we’re being sucked down into something we can’t control.”
“I know,” he said. He put a hand on her wrist, and when she didn’t pull away, he squeezed, gently, familiarly. “I feel the same way. But we don’t have any other choice. We either follow her, or take our chances on our own. And we don’t know the first thing about how these people run their business. We’d be lost here. What’s the saying, strangers in a strange land?”
She nodded. She didn’t say anything, but she did pull her wrist out of his hand.
It was enough.
Too soon.
Or maybe it would always be too late for them. He didn’t know anymore.
She followed after Chelsea. Jacob was right on their heels. They rounded a corner and found themselves facing a large, open terminal. Men and women in different-colored work uniforms hustled for the exits. A few paused long enough to give Jacob’s battered face a curious stare, but otherwise, nobody paid them any mind.
“Which way?” Jacob said.
There was an information desk on the opposite side of the room. Wide doorways opened up on both sides of the desk, and through those they could see workers hustling toward wide stairwells.
“There has to be a safe area or something through there,” she said. “Some place where all these people are supposed to go when the breach alarm sounds.”
“Is that where the train is?”
Chelsea shrugged. “I don’t know. Probably.”
“Probably?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I don’t know,” she said again. “Let’s go see. We can’t stay here.”