The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  It didn’t even fit flush with the floor.

  Jacob motioned for the women to stand aside and went back to the platform. At the far end of the platform was a custodial station, and he rummaged through that until he found a broom. He brought it back to the roll-down door, then wedged the handle under the opening at the floor. He used his knee as a fulcrum and pushed down with everything he had.

  The first push didn’t work.

  He tried again.

  “Jacob, what are you doing?” Kelly asked.

  He glanced up at her through his bruised and swollen eyelids. “What did Archimedes say about a lever?”

  Kelly frowned. “I thought you slept through physics.”

  “I paid attention during the important parts. You’re the smart one, so you tell me.”

  “He said that if he had a lever, he could lift the world,” Chelsea said. “Jacob, can you get us out of here?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he bent his back into the broom handle and pushed.

  The door gave way a moment later.

  Jacob threw it open. “There we go,” he said.

  Kelly shook her head. “You’re good,” she said, and hurried through the door.

  Chelsea followed right after her. Jacob came through right after Chelsea and pulled the door down.

  “Can you seal that back up?” Kelly asked.

  “On it already,” Jacob said.

  Jacob grabbed the bottom of the door and gave it a good hard tug, then slid the broom handle through the lock on the door and a groove on the wall. He pulled at the bottom of the door, but it didn’t budge. “I think this is good,” he said, and motioned them through the short corridor to the main concourse beyond.

  He followed them through the hallway, and stopped.

  The women stopped, too.

  Ahead of them was a narrow, hangar-shaped concourse, with a pair of ramps leading up to a higher level. Midway down the concourse, Jacob could see a pair of metal staircases leading out of sight. But his attention was focused much closer than the stairs. On the far left staircase, he saw five dead bodies. On the right were two more.

  There was no doubt they were dead.

  Most were lying in dried puddles of their own blood, their faces and the backs of their heads ghastly open wounds.

  “Oh God,” Kelly said, covering her mouth.

  Jacob walked to the nearest body and knelt by the woman’s side. She was dressed in a blood-spattered white jumpsuit. She hadn’t been dead long, though—maybe a few hours at most. Her face had started to go pale, and even yellow in a few places, a sure sign that most of her blood had pooled down at her feet. She was wearing black boots under her white jumpsuit, and he knew what he’d see if he pulled those boots off. Her feet would be swollen and purple from the pooled blood, filled to the point they might even pop. A bunch of times over the years he’d seen a fresh zombie like this leaving a thick trail of blood slime from ruptured feet.

  But it wasn’t that she had been a zombie that really bothered him.

  The bullet holes in the woman’s forehead were a much bigger deal.

  And they were bullet holes.

  The weapons he’d taken off the hired hit squads back in Temple didn’t fire rounds like this. On the train ride up here, after the last of the passengers disembarked and they had the ride to themselves, he pulled the pistols and studied them. They worked much like the weapons he’d been firing all his life. The sights were the same, the trigger, the magazine that slid in and out of the receiver. It was all very familiar.

  The real difference was the ammunition. Rather than a traditional bullet pressed into a cartridge, the Temple gun held about fifty very small rounds made of some sort of plastic. They looked a lot like the .22-caliber rifle rounds his mother had taught him to shoot back when he was seven.

  But they weren’t the same.

  Chelsea had caught him studying the round and told him they were fired by compressed air. “That’s why they’re so quiet,” she said.

  “Why do they explode?” he asked. “That man’s head back in Temple. It just blew up.”

  “Compressed air again. It explodes on impact.”

  He studied the round anew after hearing that, and his awe for the technology that went into developing such a weapon ratcheted up another notch.

  It was the perfect zombie-killing weapon, he thought. The fired rounds were completely silent, and the weapon could carry an enormous quantity of ammunition in a normal-sized magazine. It was limited in its range, that was true, kill-capable to only a maximum of maybe ten meters, maybe twenty at best, but it was able to thoroughly devastate anything it hit within that range. Even a glancing blow, especially one to the legs, would cause so much damage that a zombie would be unable to pursue the human firing the weapon.

  The trouble was, those amazing compressed air rounds hadn’t killed these people.

  These folks were slaughtered by good old-fashioned gunfire.

  Jacob rocked back on his heels and glanced up and down the concourse. There were signs at the far end, but over the last few years his vision had kind of gone to the dogs. The signs were just blurred garble to him.

  “They were zombies, weren’t they?” Kelly said.

  “Yeah,” Jacob said absently. “They probably were.”

  “Somebody killed them,” Chelsea said. “Whoever did this obviously walked away from the fight, right? I wonder why they didn’t use the call boxes to report an intrusion.”

  Jacob said nothing. He went back to studying the concourse.

  “Well, those zombies obviously came from someplace,” Kelly said. “We already saw how flimsy that one door panel was. Maybe there’s a surface entrance somewhere around here that they were able to penetrate.”

  “Those aren’t members of the Great Texas Herd,” Chelsea said. “Look at the way they’re dressed. They didn’t come from the surface.”

  “She’s right,” Jacob said. “Their clothes. These wounds. Everything’s too fresh.”

  “So where did they come from?” Kelly asked.

  “From here, I guess.”

  It took Kelly a long moment to process that. Longer still to finally speak. “But that’s not what’s got you spooked, is it? What’s wrong, Jacob?”

  Jacob used the barrel of his pistol to turn the woman’s face so Kelly could see. He held up the gun and said, “A weapon like this didn’t do this. This is rifle fire. A .223 or 5.56, probably. Old-fashioned, pre–First Days military hardware. It would have to be something that big to cause this kind of damage.”

  “I don’t understand. They were shot. What difference does the bullet make?”

  “A whole lot,” Jacob said. “Chelsea, didn’t you tell me there were no guns in Temple?”

  The girl nodded. “Just the ones like you’ve got, which are used by the surface teams assigned to the aerofluyts. Guns of every kind were outlawed when my people left Mill Valley.”

  “Well,” Jacob said, letting the dead woman’s head slump back to the tiled floor, “looks like somebody’s not playing by your rules.”

  Jacob wiped the barrel of his gun off on a clean section of the dead woman’s clothes and stood up. He pulled the other weapon from the small of his back and handed it to Kelly.

  “I don’t want that, Jacob. I can’t . . . I can’t kill again.”

  “Take it,” he said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You’re gonna have to,” he said. “Look at these zombies. They all had to have turned in order to get these head shots, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So how did they die?” Jacob extended the gun to her. “Somebody had to kill them first in order for them to turn, right?”

  With a darkly worried expression, Kelly took the gun. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Halfway down the concourse they came to a wide stairwell. Signs hanging from the ceiling indicated that they led to the main tunnel network, two levels above them. At the
far end of the concourse, tunnels branched off in three different directions. Another set of signs above those tunnels directed them to surface access, the airfields, and a series of research labs with long, confusing titles that Jacob didn’t even try to figure out.

  Jacob walked a little farther down the concourse and squinted at the signs. “Chelsea, what’s your aunt’s lab called?”

  “Morphic Field Studies and Application.”

  Jacob shrugged. “I need somebody with better eyes than me. I can’t read those signs.”

  But behind Chelsea, Kelly looked terrified. She was staring up the escalators, wide-eyed, shaking her head.

  She turned to Jacob, held up her fist, and clenched it four times.

  The nonverbal sign everybody in Arbella was taught to give to the rest of their party when there were zombies close by.

  Jacob advanced on her position.

  Sure enough, coming down the stairs were three zombies in tech uniforms.

  A fourth appeared at the top of the stairs and started down after the first three. They had only recently turned, and like the dead bodies Jacob and the others had come across, they showed no signs of injury. That meant they moved fast, and they were still strong. Running from them wasn’t an option. He had to engage them right now. If he didn’t, they’d start to moan and their hue and cry would bring every other zombie within the sound of their voices over to them immediately.

  Jacob ran up the stairs, got just out of arm’s reach of the nearest zombie, and fired right in its face.

  The woman’s head burst open in thick clumps of hair and bone and blood that oozed down her shoulders before her body even got the message to fall to the ground.

  Jacob sidestepped the corpse and bumped into the metal handrail that ran down the middle of the stairs. He’d wanted to get above the man in the yellow flight suit in order to put him off balance, but the zombie was faster than Jacob expected, and it closed the distance between them with a few quick steps.

  It lunged for Jacob, like it was trying to tackle him to the ground.

  Jacob ducked under the man’s hand, grabbed the front of his flight suit, and pulled the zombie down so that it ended up bent over the railing.

  Off balance, Jacob went for the shot anyway. He couldn’t afford to let this one stand back up. It was too fast. He fired and landed a glancing blow across the back of the zombie’s shoulders. Bits of the back of the man’s head splashed onto the stairs below him, along with part of his left shoulder.

  He turned to face Jacob, his dead eyes showing no pain, no surprise. The zombie collapsed the next instant and rolled down the stairs, landing in a heap on the tiled floor below.

  The other two zombies were caught on the opposite side of the railing. They charged Jacob, only to run right into the handrail. They reached for him, tore at the air. They snarled and snapped at him like rabid dogs.

  But they couldn’t reach him.

  Before they had a chance to figure out how to get to him, Jacob took a step back, leveled his weapon, and fired two quick head shots. Both zombies collapsed onto the handrail and then slid harmlessly to the floor.

  Jacob glanced toward the foot of the stairs and saw Kelly staring at the second zombie he’d killed. She and Chelsea were okay. Moving quietly and staying low, he climbed the stairs to see where the zombies had come from. Near the top of the stairs he got down on his belly and poked just enough of his head above the top step to see the large junction beyond. It was a huge circular room, probably a hundred meters across, with eight passageways leading off in different directions. A few zombies were milling around the right side of the room, exploring, hunting for noise. Beyond them, filing out of most of the passageways, were more zombies. Too many to count. More than a hundred, though, certainly.

  “Shit,” he muttered.

  He slid away from the top stair, then rose to a crouch and hustled down the stairs. Kelly was kneeling next to the zombie he’d killed, studying the dead man’s face.

  “We need to get out of here pretty damn fast,” he whispered. He hooked his thumb toward the stairs. “We’re about to have a whole lot of company from up there.”

  “How many?” Chelsea asked.

  “No idea,” he said. “I saw maybe a hundred, but there’s probably more. And if we make any noise we’re probably going to get a whole lot more.”

  “Jacob,” Kelly said.

  He knew that tone. She was worried.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  She turned the dead man’s face toward him. “Look at that. There, around the mouth.”

  There was a faded, uneven blue ring around the man’s mouth, like he dove face-first into a blueberry pie and hadn’t done a very good job cleaning up after himself. “What is that?” Jacob asked. “Some kind of bruise?”

  “Cyanosis,” Kelly said. “That’s one of the leading indicators of death by asphyxia.”

  “You mean somebody strangled him?”

  “More like poisoned him with some kind of nerve agent, like a poisonous gas.”

  “Gas?” Jacob grabbed his shirt collar, ready to pull it over his mouth. “Are we in danger?”

  Kelly shook her head. “These people look like they’ve been dead several hours. That would be enough time for it to dissipate. And we probably would have felt something by now if it was still a danger.”

  “I don’t understand,” Chelsea said. “You’re saying somebody gassed all these people? Why?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was done intentionally. Maybe there was a massive carbon monoxide leak somewhere and these people just got trapped down here with it.”

  “But you don’t sound convinced,” Chelsea said.

  Kelly shrugged. “It’d take an awful lot of carbon monoxide to kill this many people. But a concentrated nerve agent, like sarin or mustard gas . . . it wouldn’t take much.”

  “Okay, well,” Jacob said, “let’s talk about it somewhere else.”

  “Which way?” Kelly asked.

  To Jacob, the choice was obvious. They couldn’t go back to the train. They’d be sitting ducks there. And they sure as hell couldn’t go up the stairs. There was only one other way to go.

  “That way,” Jacob said, pointing toward the sign for the various labs and offices at the end of the concourse. “We go through there and figure out where your aunt’s office is. Should just be a matter of following the signs, right?”

  “No,” Chelsea said. “I think we need to go topside.”

  “What?” Jacob said. “Are you crazy?”

  “No,” the girl said again. “Think about it. All these tunnels are connected. The same air circulates through all these vents. If these people really were gassed, the people through that corridor would have been gassed too. There are hundreds of people working in those labs. Maybe even thousands. We should go topside.”

  “But how will we get inside your aunt’s building? With everything on lockdown, won’t they be barricaded?”

  “Only on the ground floor. Zombies can’t climb the outside of buildings. My aunt’s building has balconies all over it. We can just climb up.”

  “Chelsea,” Kelly said. “I can’t . . . that sounds like suicide to me.”

  Just then three figures emerged at the top of the stairs. One of them let out a long, death rattle moan, and soon more joined them.

  “Shit,” Jacob said. He turned to Kelly. “You know what, I’m beginning to like her plan more and more. Chelsea, lead on.”

  They ran for the end of the concourse. Behind them, a large crowd of zombies spilled out of the stairwell, their death-rattle moans taking on the more urgent feeding call of a herd closing in for the kill. The three ran faster, charging toward an angry red sign that read: DO NOT ENTER—SURFACE TRAVEL PROHIBITED. Beyond the sign, the passageway that led topside was bathed in red light.

  And a hurricane fence blocked the way.

  “Jacob!” Kelly shouted.

  Jacob had been checking their position. The zombies mo
ved stiffly, awkwardly, yet a few of them were still fast enough to keep a running pace. They weren’t catching up, but they weren’t falling behind, either.

  At the sound of Kelly’s voice, Jacob turned. More zombies were emerging from the corridor that led to the research labs and offices. Chelsea was right.

  “Keep going!” he said. “I’ll cover you.”

  He veered off, putting himself between the women and the new herd of zombies coming at them from the labs. Two female zombies lumbered toward him. He stepped into the path of the nearest one and fired once at her face. The second one got on him before he could readjust. She put her hands on his shoulder and snapped her teeth at his face and his hands. He used her momentum to guide her to the ground, then stomped on her nose with his heel. Her head snapped back against the tile with a solid smack. If a living person had taken a blow like that, it would have put them out cold, but it didn’t have any effect on the zombie. She just tried to get back up again.

  Jacob broke away and put a little distance between himself and the fallen zombie. He raised his pistol, took aim, and turned her head into a puddle of dark red gore and bits of bone.

  “Jacob, the gate is locked!” Kelly said.

  He glanced her way. He’d seen lots of fences like that one in the little towns around Arbella, back when he was with the salvage teams. They were an effective visual deterrent for the zombies, who rarely tried to force their way through them unless they had their sights on a victim close at hand, yet they weren’t very solid. They could be knocked down.

  A large man in light blue medical scrubs staggered toward him. Jacob raised his weapon to the man’s head, but didn’t fire. Instead, he ran around the zombie and came up behind him before the dead man could turn around.

  Moving fast, Jacob shoved the man toward the fence. He didn’t let him fall, though. He caught the man’s shirt in his fists and half-carried, half-shoved the big man headlong into the side of the fence, where it looked weakest.

  The man’s head crashed into the fence like a battering ram and plowed through. Jacob tried to pull the dead man back out and maybe ram him through again to widen the hole, but man’s head was stuck.