by Joe McKinney
Jacob stopped in the doorway long enough to watch Brooks drop four more zombies. Then the older man turned and ran for the shuttle.
Jacob hustled inside. There was very little light, but enough that he could see Kelly strapping herself into a couch along the far wall.
“Jacob,” she called out. “Over here!”
He dropped onto the couch beside her and she helped him get strapped in.
Brooks scrambled aboard a moment later, and in the seconds it took for the door to draw up and close, Jacob saw the roof filling with the undead.
They ran at the shuttle and tried to climb its hull, looking for a way in. Through the small port windows above the couch on the opposite wall, Jacob could see dead men and women beating against the hull.
“Got everybody,” Brooks yelled toward the front of the shuttle.
The pilot, the only one of the goon squad to survive the retreat to the roof, gave Brooks a big thumbs-up. Then he turned to the controls and powered up the shuttle’s massive engines. The shuttle’s engines strained loudly as it fought to gain the air, but the zombies piling on made the craft rock and shudder. Whether to try to shake off the zombies, or simply to regain control of the rising aircraft, Jacob couldn’t tell, but the pilot rotated the shuttle, swinging one wing over the edge of the roof.
Jacob found himself looking out the window, six stories down, with zombies slipping off the craft and tumbling to the street far below. A terrible sense of vertigo overwhelmed him, and all he wanted to do was shrink into himself and hold on for dear life.
The next instant the aircraft rotated back the other way, carrying them over the roof. The view was no better there. Hundreds of zombies crowded the roof, all of them rushing toward the shuttle. As Jacob watched, the huge engine on the opposite wing swept through the crowd. It swept through the zombie masses like a giant maw, scooping up bodies until the sheer mass of the dead clogged the engine. It shuddered and smoked, coughing so violently that it shook the aircraft.
The next instant, it exploded. The window Jacob had been looking through disappeared in a fireball, and when the flames cleared, nothing was left but a hole in the side of the ship and tangled, smoking metal.
Beyond, burnt and broken bodies littered the rooftop. A few were still moving, even as their hair and clothes were engulfed in fire.
From the front of the aircraft, Jacob heard Brooks yelling at the pilot. “Put us back down on the roof!”
“I can’t,” the pilot screamed. “I can’t stop the rotation.”
The spinning craft rocked again over the side of the roof, and Jacob felt his stomach rise into his throat.
“We’re going over!” Kelly screamed. “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”
Jacob could see the ground rushing up at them through the hole in the fuselage. But the craft continued to spin. Things were happening so fast he could barely process it all. The view outside the hole turned to brick and cement as they spun into the side of the building, smashing into it with so much force it took his breath away.
Amid the screams of the passengers, the aircraft continued to spiral down to the ground, hitting hard as it slid across the street in a chorus of shrieking and moaning metal.
The whole world seemed to roll. Jacob felt like a piece of driftwood caught in the waves, completely out of control, unable to hold on to anything.
He was jerked so violently against his restraints that he blacked out.
When he came to, dizzy and disoriented, he was choking on smoke.
From somewhere, an angry Klaxon whined.
CHAPTER 13
Kelly was gone. During the crash, a huge strut had collapsed and impaled itself through the seat where Kelly had been just moments before. Jacob couldn’t hold back the panic.
“Kelly?” Jacob said. He tried to see through the smoke, but it was too thick. He could barely breathe. He hacked and coughed as his eyes filled with burning tears. “Kelly? Where are you?”
“Jacob, here!”
“Where are you? I can’t see you.”
Suddenly she was there, stepping out of the smoke, ducking under the strut that would have killed her had she still been in her seat. “I’m here,” she said. “Are you okay? Is anything broken?”
“I don’t know. I can’t feel my arms.”
“Damn,” she said. “It’s those cuffs they put you in.” She looked to the front of the shuttle, where the smoke was starting to clear. The front of the ship looked to have taken most of the hit of the impact. There was little ahead of them but twisted metal and the broken body of the pilot leaning out of his seat.
Kelly took a few steps that way.
“Where are you going?” he asked her.
“Stay still.”
Jacob shook against his restraints. “Is that a joke?”
“I’m going to try to get you out of those cuffs.”
She pulled her way through the wreckage, toward the pilot. She pushed his body out of the chair and ran her hands over his gun belt. A moment later she held up a silver disk about the size of a coin.
“Got it!” she said.
“Get his gun, too.”
“Oh, right.”
Kelly turned the pilot’s corpse over and wrestled with the built-in retention safeties in the holster, but eventually managed to pull the weapon. She held it up for Jacob to see.
“Kelly! Heads up!”
She glanced down at the pilot’s corpse. The man’s face had been burned away. There was smoke coming from under his helmet. But he was still moving. He pulled himself from the chair and somehow got to his feet. His head rocked back and lolled on his shoulders. But then he saw Kelly and he staggered toward her.
“Shoot him!” Jacob yelled.
Kelly was terrified. She backed away from the dead pilot, shaking her head in disbelief.
“Kelly, shoot him!”
She raised the gun in both hands, just like she’d been taught, and fired.
The shot was low.
It hit the man in the chest and exploded harmlessly off his body armor.
The zombie didn’t even notice the shot. He staggered forward again, hands outstretched and grabbing for her.
“Kelly, shoot him in the head!”
“I’m trying,” she said.
The zombie fell forward, its mangled hands falling on her shoulders.
Kelly screamed and fell back, but the touch of those dead hands on her skin clicked something inside her. She steadied herself, aimed the pistol at the man’s chin, the only part visible through his cracked helmet, and shot him.
The resulting blast tore the man’s neck in two, and his helmeted head slid off his body and clanked to the floor.
“I did it!” she said.
“Yes, you did. Now get me out of these cuffs.”
She made her way back to him, undid his harness, and then pushed him forward so she could see his hands. “I don’t know what this stuff is,” she said. “It looks like wax, or melted plastic.”
“Just get it off me.”
“Okay, okay.”
Kelly took the metal disk from her pocket and leaned over Jacob’s back.
“Stop!” Brooks yelled from the other side of the shuttle. He’d been caught up in the explosion that damaged that side of the shuttle, and was trapped beneath a tangle of wires and metal pipes. But he was pulling himself loose, bit by bit. “Don’t you touch him. That man is under arrest.”
He got an arm free and pulled his pistol. He pointed it right at Kelly’s head.
“I mean it. Do not release him.”
Kelly stared at the pistol, but she didn’t flinch. “You’re not going to shoot me,” she said. “And there are zombies closing in on us. I will not leave him defenseless.”
The next thing Jacob knew, she’d leaned over his back and touched the metal disk to the handcuffs. In seconds, they turned to a warm liquid and ran off his skin, leaving his hands free to move. He stood up, rubbing his wrists.
“Stop where you’re at!” B
rooks said. He turned his pistol to cover Jacob.
Jacob took the pistol from Kelly and slid it into the back of his pants. Then he reached down and grabbed a flat piece of sheet metal that the explosion had ripped from the wall. He held it up in front of him and rushed toward Brooks.
Brooks popped off three rounds, but they didn’t penetrate the sheet metal. They just exploded harmlessly off of it.
Jacob pressed the sheet metal into Brooks’s face, pinning him and his weapon hand against the debris. He reached around the sheet metal shield and found Brooks’s gun. He twisted it and bent the man’s hand backward until Brooks couldn’t hold it anymore and released the weapon.
Jacob got back to his feet and held up the weapon for Brooks to see. “You won’t be needing this anymore.”
Only then did Jacob throw away the sheet metal.
“You’ve got him,” Chelsea said. She and her aunt and Stu and Juliette came forward from the rear of the aircraft. They were covered in dust, and Stu’s forehead had a nasty cut on it. Seven or eight stitches easy to put that together, Jacob thought.
Chelsea gave Jacob a shove.
“What are you waiting for?” she said. “Kill the son of a bitch.”
“Jacob, no!” Miriam shouted. “For God’s sake, no.”
“Relax,” Jacob said. “I’m not going to be killing anybody.” He motioned to Stu and Juliette. “Can you two help him out of there, please?”
“I won’t be anybody’s hostage,” Brooks said. “If that’s what you have in mind, you can just kill me now, because if not, I’ll kill you as soon as I can.”
“You know,” Jacob said, “for a doctor you’re pretty fucking stupid. I’m not interested in hostages. I’m interested in getting out of here.”
“Then give me back my weapon.”
“That’s not gonna happen, either,” Jacob said. “You’ve already shown me you can’t be trusted.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t a hostage.”
“You’re not.”
Jacob walked to the jagged hole in the side of the aircraft. It was big enough they could all just walk right out into the El Paso night. The streetlights were on. In their glow, Jacob could see hundreds of bodies scattered around the wreckage. A man nearest them was missing everything from his waist up. Still another was as crispy and black as a burned sheet of paper. But farther off, in the distance, he could see thicker crowds of zombies gathering, coming closer. He gauged their rate of progress down the street and figured he and the others had a minute, maybe forty-five seconds, before things got hot again. Jacob got Brooks’s attention and nodded toward the oncoming ground.
“You’re not a hostage,” Jacob said, turning back to Brooks. “You’re free to go. In fact, I recommend you go that way.”
Brooks just stared at him.
“Wait a minute,” Kelly said. “Where’s his friend, the white guy with the attitude?”
“I think he’s dead,” Stu said. “Right after the crash, I saw him outside on the road. A zombie was trying to dig into his body armor.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “So where do we go from here? We’re about to have a whole lot of company. Miriam, can you get us out here?”
The older woman nodded. “I think so. There’s a machine shop not far from here. If we can get there, we can take a tunnel over to the armory.”
“That’s no good,” Jacob said. “The tunnels are compromised.”
“Not this one,” Miriam answered. “It’s a dedicated tunnel, dating back to when the U.S. military ran this place. It connects the machine shop to the armory without any other access points.”
“And what’s in the armory?”
“We need a way out of here, right?”
“Yeah.”
“We store the armored personnel carriers that go into the aerofluyts there. If we can make it to one of those, we drive our way out of here.”
“She’s right,” Brooks said. “We could do that.”
“Okay,” Jacob said. “Alright, that sounds good. Which way do we go to get to this machine shop?”
Miriam ducked under the tangled debris hanging from the ceiling and looked out to the street. “Oh my,” she said. “They’re so close.” She pointed toward the front of the aircraft. “It’s that way, about four blocks.”
“Alright, then,” Jacob said. He looked around the wreckage. “Everybody ready to move?”
The others nodded.
“Okay, then. Let’s do this.”
CHAPTER 14
Jacob took the lead running out into the street.
The others filed out behind him, moving toward the front of the downed aircraft. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he said. “Miriam, show us the way.”
Several of the faster zombies had already closed the distance between them, and Jacob ran out to intercept. Any of them that got too close, he popped with a head shot, dropping them to the street to lie among the dead left behind from the aircraft’s swirling crash. They were easy when they came by ones and twos. He could let them come to him, putting them down with carefully aimed head shots. But beyond the fast movers there were thousands more. The army of the undead was so vast their feet made his teeth vibrate.
“Let’s go,” he said again. “Come on, everybody, move it!”
Kelly and Chelsea; Stu, Juliette, and Miriam; and finally Brooks: The group filed out of the downed aircraft and ran toward the machine shop at the end of the street.
Glancing ahead, Jacob’s confidence wavered.
Miriam had said it was only four blocks down the road. He could see now that it was much farther. Ten blocks at least.
Still, he waved them on, directing them down the street.
Turning to his right, he could see huge masses of zombies coming their way. They weren’t seeing the techs and hospital staff anymore. The zombies they were dealing with now were from the main body of the Great Texas Herd. They were filthy and starved-looking, most of them so rotten and deteriorated that they seemed ready to fall apart.
And yet their moaning filled up the night. It echoed off the buildings like voices down a canyon, so loud it seemed to shake the guts inside him.
The two pistols that he carried would never be enough for that.
Jacob glanced over his shoulder and saw Lester Brooks staring at him. Jacob had developed a hatred for the man over the last few days, what with his talk of how great the world would be without cops, and those feelings of disgust were only augmented by the betrayal he’d seen from the man during the Council meeting. Brooks was, in his mind, the kind of man who wouldn’t hesitate to stab a friend in the back.
But in that moment he could not deny the strength within the man. A backstabbing asshole though he may be, he was no coward. His gaze moved from Jacob, to the approaching herd, and back to Jacob with a fierce intensity that seemed earned, rather than affected.
“Behind you,” Brooks said.
Jacob turned, and sure enough, four dead things were close enough to touch him. He landed head shots on each, but when he turned back to thank Brooks, he was already trotting away behind the others.
Jacob took a moment to study the street. He and the others had a straight shot to the machine shop. It was a low, decrepit two-story building with boarded-up windows and graffiti scrawled all across its ground floor. At the jogging pace they were setting, he bet they could make it in ten minutes.
Looking to the west, he saw the main body of the Great Texas Herd zeroing in on their location, attracted no doubt by the noise of the crash. They’d certainly scarred the side of the building. Even at a glance, Jacob could track the course their aircraft had taken as it rotated down the side of the building. The face of the building was ruined.
And that was no doubt going to get worse as the main body of the herd advanced into town. Jacob had never seen a zombie herd so large. They kicked up enough dust to blot out the stars, and their moaning really did shake him to the core.
“Jacob!”
It was Kelly. Jacob tur
ned back to the main street. Kelly and the others were running toward the machine shop, but there were fast-moving zombies filtering through the buildings ahead of them.
Jacob had thought the herd would be homogenous within its main body. There would be fast movers, the more recently turned, among the leading numbers, but they would be few and far between. The main portion, the overriding majority, would be slow-moving zombies in an advanced state of decay.
He saw now that he was wrong.
A few fast movers had already made their way into El Paso. They’d managed to charge into Miriam Sayers’s lab and kill three of Lester Brooks’s hired goons. They’d even managed to wreck an aircraft.
But Jacob had thought he’d seen the last of them.
He told himself they could do this because he’d wanted to believe they could make it. But he saw now that he had misjudged the herd. They were anything but homogenous. They were pouring around the sides of the buildings ahead of him in droves, some of them even sprinting toward Kelly and the others.
Jacob picked Kelly out of the crowd. She was close to the machine shop’s main entrance, with Chelsea and the others coming up fast behind her. As the group reached the main entranceway, they started to work on the wooden boards that had been put in place over the doors and windows, peeling them away with their bare hands.
Jacob sprinted their way, turning on every bit of speed he had.
His ribs were burning again as he reached the machine shop, but he couldn’t help that. The fast movers were pouring into the street, surrounding Kelly and the others faster than he could count their numbers.
Glancing back over his shoulder, he saw Kelly and the others running down a short alleyway to the entrance of the machine shop. There were several openings down the length of the alley, but they were sealed with hurricane fencing. Kelly reached the main entrance to the shop and turned to Jacob.