The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  “Jacob, they’re close!”

  “On it,” he said. He pulled his pistol, put it up to the back of the zombie’s head, and fired. The dead man’s head turned to muck, and Jacob pulled the headless corpse out of the way.

  He grabbed hold of the frame and used his leg to push on the fence until one of the clasps holding it to the frame snapped.

  It was an opening, but not big enough.

  “Jacob!”

  He spun around. Kelly and Chelsea were backing toward him. Three zombies were closing on them from the right, and two more on the left. Jacob slipped around Kelly’s shoulder and shot the dead woman standing there. He looked left, then right, and shot at the woman coming up on his right. She was moving faster than the others, though, and his shot went low and to the right, hitting the dead woman in the shoulder. It separated her and spun her around, but she didn’t fall. He fired again and this time landed a head shot.

  But he had wasted seconds he didn’t have, and by the time he turned on the two zombies coming out of the lab passageway, the first one was on top of him.

  The dead man swiped at Jacob’s face.

  He ducked away from the zombie’s hand, but it put him off balance and he nearly fell over backward. The zombie lunged for him again, carrying him further off balance. Jacob was bent over all the way now, forced to crab-walk away from the zombie with only one hand. He took the only shot he had. He hit the zombie in the left knee. The leg was blasted in half by the impact and the zombie pitched over. The dead man landed facedown on the tile and immediately tried to pull himself back up.

  Jacob circled around the dead man, grabbed him by his hair, and pulled him to his feet. The zombies from the stairwell were closing on them, and Jacob hurled the one-legged man at their feet. It didn’t knock them over, but it slowed them just enough. He turned and rushed back to where Kelly and Chelsea had backed up to the fence. Another man in soiled hospital scrubs was bearing down on them. Jacob ran at the man, got into kill range, and raised his weapon. But before he could fire, the dead man’s head exploded.

  As the body fell, he saw Kelly standing there, holding the gun in both hands. She was shaking, her eyes wide open and unblinking. The gun pointed directly at Jacob’s face.

  “Hey!” he said. “Whoa, hold up! It’s me.”

  Only upon hearing his voice did Kelly catch herself. She gasped, and lowered the gun. “Oh God, Jacob. I almost shot you.”

  He smiled. “That sure would have sucked.”

  He rushed to the fence and kicked at it until another clasp snapped. From there it was easy to bend it over.

  “Come on,” he said.

  He held the fence down as the women crawled through, then he climbed through himself. A dead woman tried to dive for him through the hole. Rather than risk catching her fingernails in his face while pushing her back through, he grabbed her hair and pulled her through. She landed facedown and he popped her in the back of the head. He grabbed the curved-over section of the fence and pushed it back in place. It wouldn’t hold against even a single zombie, but if they couldn’t see the hole, it might slow them down a second or two until they found it.

  He raced after Kelly and Chelsea, and caught up with them at the end of the passageway. In the pale red glow of the emergency lights, he could see they’d reached another of the metal pull-down doors. Coming up beside them he saw that the door was rusted and dented all over, but it wasn’t a weak link like the one they’d found back at the platform. This one would hold.

  “Shit,” he said. “Okay, okay, let me see what I can do here.”

  “This one’s easy,” Chelsea said. There was a large metal plate in the wall next to the door with a flat, square-shaped button in the center labeled EMERGENCY DOORS. Chelsea hit it with the palm of her hand and immediately a woman’s voice came over the intercom. “Warning: Surface door breach. Warning: Surface door breach.”

  At their feet, an internal lock in the door let go with a loud click, and the door raised up an inch or two.

  Jacob grabbed the handle and yanked the door open.

  The bright light and the heat of the late afternoon desert sun hit them square in the face. After spending hours underground, Jacob walked into the street nearly blind. It took several long moments for his eyes to adjust. A dry breeze carried thick clouds of dust down the street. He could feel the grit adhering to the sweat on his neck and his face. And on the breeze he could smell something rotten.

  All the buildings around them were made of red brick. They were small, not a one of them taller than six stories, and shaped like squares. Halfway down the block to his left he saw movement in the dust clouds. Shadowy figures stepped through the blowing dust. Looking around, he counted twenty-four zombies. Some looked like the techs and hospital staff he’d encountered down below, while others were badly decayed, hardly a stitch of clothes left on their withered bodies.

  From behind him came the sound of Chelsea pulling the metal down into place.

  “It locks automatically,” she said.

  Jacob pointed down the street. “See that? Those are zombies from the Great Texas Herd. Looks like they broke through the automated defenses.”

  “Oh no,” Chelsea said. “That’s bad. That’s real bad.”

  “Yeah, that’s one word for it. Just tell me which way we need to go. Which building is your aunt in?”

  “I don’t see it here,” she said. “It’s red brick like these, but it has white balconies in front of each of the windows.”

  Jacob glanced to his right, where the buildings started to give way to houses. The dust clouds were thicker that way, and he thought he had a pretty good idea why. He pointed toward the houses and said, “We can’t go that way. The herd’s coming from there.”

  “Okay, then,” Chelsea said, turning to the left. “This way. It has to be around here somewhere with all the other buildings.”

  Together, they rounded the far corner and scanned a new set of buildings.

  “Is that it?” Jacob said. He pointed at a building down the block from them.

  “No, hers has white balconies.”

  “Not that one,” he said. “Behind that one. See it there? You can just see the top level. Those are balconies, aren’t they?”

  “Yes!” Chelsea said. “Yes, that’s it!”

  Chelsea started to run for it, but Jacob grabbed her shoulder and held her back. “Wait,” he said. He nodded to the right. “Look over there.”

  There were several large vehicles parked on the street near a construction zone less than a block away. A few grotesquely broken and decayed bodies came limping through the gaps between the vehicles. More followed close behind.

  A moment later, they began to moan.

  “Oh God,” Kelly said. “Why can’t we catch a break? Jacob, why?”

  “We’ll make our own break,” he said. He pointed to the left of the building directly in front of them. “We need to do a dead sprint around that side of the building. Everybody up for that?”

  “Do we have any other choice?” Kelly said.

  “Not really.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Let’s do it.”

  Jacob holstered his weapon and chased after the women. The three of them ate up the first hundred meters or so, but after that, all three had to slow way down. They were breathing hard and the bruised ribs Jacob got from the fight back in Temple earlier that day started to burn. By the time they came around the far side of the building, they were all slogging along at little more than a trot, all three of them breathing hard.

  But the dead didn’t know exhaustion. They were a relentless, unwavering, unending swarm that knew only the need to feed. Streams of zombies filled the streets like a flood, coming closer and closer to them.

  Jacob was about to direct them around the back side of the building so they could find a way to climb up to a balcony, but then he noticed that a metal screen that was meant to protect one of the building’s main entrances had only been pulled part of the way down.<
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  “There!” he said. “Let’s go through there.”

  Jacob tried to lift the metal screen, but it wouldn’t budge.

  He turned to face the crowd gathering around them. They were a mixture of recently turned techs and medical personnel from El Paso, and older, rotting corpses, the vanguard of the Great Texas Herd.

  And they were getting too close.

  “Chelsea,” he said. “Can you roll under there and try the door?”

  The girl dropped to the ground and rolled under the metal screen without effort. On the other side of the screen was a short passageway that led to a metal door. Chelsea pushed at the door and it swung open on groaning hinges.

  “Jacob,” Kelly said. “I don’t like this. Why would those people get gassed? Why would these doors be left open?”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said. “Just get inside. Both of you. Find someplace to hide. I’ll catch up with you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Buy you some time. Now go!”

  “Oh God, Jacob.”

  A zombie in a gray, knee-length skirt and a red blouse darted out of the crowd and charged for Jacob. He saw her coming out of the corner of his eye and dropped her before she could get to him.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Just go.”

  Three more zombies stepped over the fallen zombie and onto the sidewalk. Jacob raised his pistol and took deliberate aim before squeezing the trigger. Rushed shooting is sloppy shooting, he remembered his firing range instructor telling him back in grade school. You get in a hurry, you get dead. Take your time. Find your shot. Squeeze the trigger.

  “Jacob, this is stupid. Come with us. While there’s time.”

  “I know what I’m doing. Just get inside.”

  “God, you’re a stupid man, you know that?”

  “That’s what you always told me. Go on. Get inside. Be right behind you.”

  Kelly crawled under the screen. With one last look back at Jacob, she went inside. Jacob watched her go, then wiped the sweat from his hands and got ready to fight. The faster zombies had broken out ahead of the main group and were bearing down on him. Behind them, swelling into the streets, were thousands more. Their moans bounced off the sides of the buildings, like echoes in a canyon, and for a moment, Jacob felt his courage waver.

  He put his back to the metal screen, took a deep breath, and let the fast ones get in close. As soon as they stepped onto the sidewalk, they were his. He dropped five in rapid order, perfect head shots each. That left a gap between him and the leading edge of the coming herd.

  Exactly what he was looking for.

  He holstered his weapon, grabbed the nearest headless corpse, and pulled it toward the opening at the bottom of the metal screen. He did that again and again until finally he had nearly the entire gap blocked. Then he crawled through, turned, reached back through the hole until he found a dead woman’s ankle, and pulled her body into the hole, plugging it.

  He stood up just as the herd reached him.

  A dark-haired woman in a red shirt lunged at him through the diamond holes in the screen, and he jumped back just in time to avoid getting a face full of fingernails. More zombies rushed his position, smashing the woman in the red shirt into the screen. For a hideous moment, he could see the metal wires cutting into her cheeks, but soon the weight of the herd behind her forced her down.

  Jacob backed up to the door as more faces pressed against the metal screen. Their combined weight seemed to shake the entire building and he didn’t know how much longer the screen would hold. He pushed the door open and was about to rush inside when he heard a snarling growl rise over the collective moans of the herd.

  He turned toward to the screen, and to his horror saw the first who had been smashed against the screen digging at the barricade of bodies he’d used to block the entrance. She grabbed one of the bodies and pulled it free. Once the first one was out of the way, the others came loose easily.

  The next thing he knew she was crawling under the screen.

  When she stood up, her face was a bloody mess.

  Jacob stepped forward, put his gun in her face, and fired, blowing her brains and blood all over the herd behind her.

  He backed up again as her body fell to the floor.

  Another zombie crawled through the gap, then two more behind it. Jacob shot all three, but he knew he had to get out of there. More and more of them were figuring out how to get through, and within seconds there would be far more than he could shoot.

  And he’d long since lost count of how many rounds he’d fired.

  He ran through the metal door and slammed it shut, but when he tried to lock it, he found the lock had been pried out of the door. The tool marks were fresh, too. No rust. It was at that moment that it hit him. He stood looking at the hole in the door where the lock had once been, and knew that Kelly was right. Something was going on here. The people in the tunnels deliberately gassed. The bodies with the bullet holes in their heads. So many defensive systems showing signs of tampering.

  He tried to make sense of it, but at that moment bodies crashed against the other side of the door and he had to throw his shoulder into it just to keep it closed.

  It was a losing battle, though.

  There were too many of them. His feet started to slide across the hardwood floors as the zombies forced the door inward.

  He glanced up the stairs to his left and saw Kelly poking her head around the corner. “Come on!” she said.

  Jacob took a deep breath, then ran for the stairs.

  A small crowd of zombies fell through the doorway while others scrambled over them. Jacob leveled the weapon at the first one to clear the tangle of bodies and shot her. The dead began to stand up all around him, even as more pressed through the narrow doorway. He climbed the first few steps and fired again and again.

  He’d dropped eight more zombies by the time the weapon clicked empty.

  “Jacob, come—”

  Kelly’s plea was cut off by a scream. It sounded like Chelsea.

  Jacob raced to the first landing, expecting more zombies, but instead saw a figure in one of the big gray, armored space suits coming down the stairs. Its steps clanged against the floor, the servos that allowed its legs and arms to bend making pneumatic sighs. In its right hand the figure held a massive weapon, like a mini gun, of which he’d only seen pictures.

  But it wasn’t a mini gun. Rather than run separate, rotary barrels, like the mini guns he’d seen pictures of in Arbella’s library, it had six small muzzle holes contained inside a single housing.

  The figure raised the weapon, and Jacob threw his hands into the air. He twisted out of the thing’s way and pressed his back against the wall.

  The figure moved by him, and when the first zombies appeared at the foot of the stairs, the strange-looking mini gun jumped to life. In less than a second, six zombies were blown to bits against the wall. Another zombie rushed up behind the first six and tried to slash at the figure’s copper faceplate.

  Whoever was inside the space suit didn’t even bother to shoot it.

  With its left hand, the figure grabbed the zombie’s face and pushed it to the floor, its augmented strength snapping the dead man’s neck like a chicken bone. Jacob heard the dead man’s neck break even over the moaning of the herd. The zombie landed on its back, unable to stand, unable to do anything but growl and snarl at the wall. It couldn’t even turn over.

  But the figure didn’t pause to deliver the coup de grâce. Instead it raised its weapon and began mowing down the crowd pressing through the door.

  Heads exploded.

  Zombies dropped like wheat before a sickle.

  And all the while, the figure advanced toward the door, crushing the dead beneath its lumbering stride.

  Jacob stood in rapt fascination. He’d never seen anything like it. Once, when he was maybe eight or nine, and had begun to show some aptitude for building things out of scrap, his mother had told him about th
e robot armies the military had developed during the First Days, and how they had plowed through the zombie herds. After seeing Lester Brooks inside a similar suit just weeks before, he’d assumed the suits were merely suits.

  A person inside.

  But now, seeing this figure move with such precision, such complete and utter purpose, he wondered if he wasn’t seeing some robot relic of the First Days.

  The figure certainly moved that way.

  Killed that way.

  Chewed through the dead like a house on fire.

  As the bodies fell, the figure continued to advance. And when they didn’t fall fast enough, they were thrown against the wall like rag dolls. If he hadn’t been so amazed, Jacob would have felt nothing but disgust for the violence of it. He’d seen bodies torn apart. Lots of them, in fact. But nothing like this.

  The figure pushed through the doorway and into the passageway beyond.

  Still firing, it cut through the crowd like a zipper, and when it reached the metal screen security door, it simply grabbed the bottom part of the frame and slammed it down to the ground, severing the fingers of one zombie that was trying to reach for the figure’s feet.

  Then it knelt to the floor, grabbed the latch that locked the screen in place, and wrenched it over into the closed position.

  All the while, the herd was gathering at the gate.

  The figure didn’t seem to notice.

  At least until it stood from locking the screen and fired another long burst from its mini gun. The firing went on for a long time. Jacob had no way of knowing exactly how long, but it felt like two minutes, easily.

  And when the firing stopped, all that was left was a mound of the dead piled up in front of the metal screen.

  That’s how you do it, Jacob thought.

  His plan had been to use a few zombies to plug the gap beneath the screen.

  But whoever was inside that space suit had clearly intended something bigger, for the mound of dead men and women that now surrounded the main doorway was tall enough that it blocked his view of the main herd surrounding their building.