The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  “Okay,” Miriam said. “Done! And look, we’re here!”

  Ahead of them was a flight of stairs leading up to metal door. Jacob trotted up to it and gave it a push. “It’s locked,” he said. “We’ll have to pry it open.”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” Miriam said. “This is one of the technology-sensitive parts of the base. Let Juliette try it.”

  Juliette climbed up the stairs. In the blue light of Brooks’s torch, her pasty white skin took on an unnatural glow. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped around Jacob. She pressed on the door handle and it clicked open.

  Jacob caught the door in surprise. “How did you do that?”

  Juliette tapped a small metal disk clipped to her belt. “It codes my access privileges to the door so I can get in wherever I need to go. It’s like a key, basically.”

  Then she stepped through the door.

  When they were all inside, Jacob turned and closed the door. He found Miriam and said, “How many of the technicians and hospital staff we saw earlier would have a coding key like that?”

  Miriam shrugged. “I don’t know. It would depend on their rank, I guess. Or perhaps the nature of their duties.”

  “But some of them?”

  “Yes, probably.”

  “Okay, we need to barricade this door. Most of the zombies I saw over at the machine shop were part of the herd, but we can’t take a chance that some of the technicians will be among the ones pounding on this door in a few minutes.”

  “Yeah, he’s right about that,” Stu said. “They’ll be down that hall any minute now.”

  “Fine,” Brooks said. “Go ahead. Do whatever you need to do.”

  Jacob didn’t like Brooks’s tone, but that was no problem. He’d only known Brooks for a few weeks, but that was long enough for him to form an opinion of the man. He was intelligent and charismatic, of that there was no question, but he was also arrogant. Jacob suspected that the man lacked any real sense of empathy, and that whatever lip service he paid to that, as he’d done in Jacob’s hospital room the day he tried to prep him for the hearing, was an act. His real motivation, like that of most politicians, was nothing more than self-aggrandizement. It made Jacob wonder if Temple wouldn’t have been better off banning politicians rather than policemen.

  But it didn’t matter, for Brooks was a politician. Tactics were not his thing. He stood off to one side, his pistol pointed toward the ceiling, looking bored.

  He didn’t even flinch when Jacob found a heavy metal bar and picked it up to test the heft of it.

  “This’ll do,” Jacob said. “I think we can Katy bar the door with this.”

  Jacob stepped a little to Brooks’s right. The man was still letting his boredom get the best of him, and Jacob had to telegraph his next move to get Brooks to engage.

  Jacob raised the bar over his head in an unmistakably hostile gesture. Only then did Brooks react. He took a step back and tried to bring the gun up to Jacob, but he was too slow. Jacob sidestepped again and brought the metal bar down on Brooks’s wrist, sending the gun clattering to the floor.

  Brooks went down, too, groaning in pain as he clamped his other hand on his injured wrist.

  “What are you doing?” Miriam yelled. “Stop!”

  Jacob threw the metal pole over near the door. “Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to kill him.”

  He reached down and picked up Brooks’s gun. Then fished through the man’s pockets and came up with five more magazines, Jacob’s almost empty pistol, and a pocketknife.

  He looked up at Miriam and smiled. “I just don’t like being the one without the gun.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “Alright,” Jacob said, pointing the weapon at Brooks. “Everybody up. Let’s get what we came for.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with you,” Brooks said, still holding his wrist. “Go ahead, shoot me. Prove to everybody here that you’re nothing but a killer.”

  “I don’t want to shoot you,” Jacob said. “I just want to—”

  “Now who’s lying?” Brooks said. “I can see it in your eyes. It’s what you live for, isn’t it? Does it help if you think of me as that innocent man you killed back in your hometown? No? How about Nick? That was his name, right? Your friend whom you murdered in the name of justice?”

  “Just get up,” Jacob said. “You’re not worth arguing with.”

  “Why? Am I an ugly reminder of your hypocrisy?”

  “You have no right to call anybody a hypocrite.”

  “But I’m doing it, Jacob. I’m calling you out. I’m calling you—”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, will you two stop it!” Miriam roared. “Stop it! Enough already. Look at him, Jacob. You broke his arm.”

  “Okay,” Jacob said. “Help him, then. We need to locate those armored personnel carriers and get out of here.”

  Miriam helped Brooks to his feet, and in that moment, Jacob saw exactly what he already suspected to be true. The two of them had shared something in the past. Exactly what he wasn’t sure, but it was pretty clear there were strong feelings there. She held Brooks’s hand like one long-accustomed to his tenderness, like a lover. He had no idea what sort of past they’d had since then. Some kind of breakup or separation, probably. After all, they worked in different parts of the world. But he had come back for her. Whatever other motivations he had had, he’d been very clear on that point. He’d come back to get her. Would Jacob have done any different for Kelly?

  He didn’t answer the question because there was no need.

  He knew the answer in his heart.

  And so they moved out, making their way through the arsenal building with Stu and Juliette in the lead. Jacob had hoped that a building called an arsenal would include all the weapons he would ever need, but after moving through just a few rooms, he started to have his doubts.

  The place looked more like a laboratory than a weapons cache.

  Every door he passed led to an office.

  Nothing but computers and books.

  “Where are the personnel carriers?” Jacob finally said.

  “There’s a bay at the other end of the building,” Stu said. “There should be four or five of them there. We can take our pick.”

  “Should be?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck,” Jacob muttered. If there was one thing he’d learned to hate, it was the phrase “should be.”

  Stu led them straight to the observation deck overlooking the vehicle bay.

  Which was completely empty.

  “Uh, Stu . . . ?”

  “I don’t understand,” Stu said. “They should be here. This is where we keep them. I don’t get it.”

  “That’s because you build aerofluyts,” Brooks said. “You don’t fly them. Look out that window. Can you see them?”

  Stu went to the windows on the far wall. North El Paso was dark, lit only by starlight. But there was enough ambient light from the giant hangars off to the west to illuminate the three aerofluyts out on the flight line.

  “Yes,” Stu said.

  “Which ones are they?”

  “There’s three,” Stu said. “The one closest to us is the Einstein. It’s being scrapped right now. Next to that is the Maxwell. It’s still eighteen months from completion. The far one is the Archimedes. That’s the one that’s getting ready for its maiden voyage.”

  “Then that’s where you’ll find the armored personnel carriers. Last on, last off, that’s the procedure.”

  Jacob took a step forward. “You knew that, and you let us come here anyway?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Why do you need to know?”

  “Because I have every intention of getting out of this alive. And if some knuckleheaded motherfucker is trying to keep me from doing that, I need to know who he is. Now, what’s your malfunction, asshole? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  Brooks sighed, then reached into one of the folds of his body armor and came up with a small
black rectangular device about the size of a matchbook. “I called for extraction before we left the machine shop. This area is too hot right now for that, but I have a crew standing by to get us out of here. They should be here in sixteen hours.”

  “Are these the same crew that tried to kill us earlier?” Jacob said.

  Brooks just stared at him.

  “Why so long?” Jacob said. “It only took us forty-five minutes on a freighter to get here.”

  “Yes, before the lockdown went critical. El Paso is currently dead center for the Great Texas Herd. We have the largest concentration of zombies in the entire world surrounding us as we speak. Nothing’s going to happen until the herd passes us by.”

  “Great. So we’re fucked.”

  “No, we’re in one of the most secure facilities in El Paso. We have help on the way, and the herd has absolutely no idea that we’re in here. As long as we keep our heads down and the noise low, we have no reason to worry. We simply wait for my crews to extract us.”

  “And haul us before another sham of a hearing for crimes we didn’t commit?” Jacob asked.

  “Tell me your plan,” Brooks said. “I’d love to hear it.”

  CHAPTER 18

  They weren’t going anywhere anytime soon.

  As much as Jacob hated to admit it, he knew it was true. There were no tunnels leading to the aerofluyt yards. No safe passage. That left surface-level travel, which wasn’t an option. It galled Jacob, but Brooks was right. They were dead in the middle of the greatest concentration of zombies on the entire planet. Going outside, even though the zombies didn’t know they were there, would be suicide.

  Here in the arsenal, they were safe. At least for the time being. The zombies had no way of knowing they were in here, and as long as they didn’t make a whole bunch of noise or flick the lights on and off, that wouldn’t change.

  Zombies were creatures of opportunity. They attacked only when prey made itself available. If they didn’t know it was there, they didn’t go out of their way to investigate. That was why the hurricane fences that were so prevalent in El Paso were so effective. Without a reason, zombies didn’t press defenses. The trick was to stay out of sight.

  And they were out of sight.

  “I think you guys should get some sleep,” Jacob said to Kelly.

  “What? Are you kidding? Now?”

  “Yeah.” He motioned toward a lab behind her. “They’ve got cots back there.”

  “Jacob, those are autopsy tables.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, they’re better than sleeping on the floor, right?”

  She curled her lips in disgust. “Uh, no, not really.”

  “Okay, well, it’s the best I got. Look,” he said, “I need you to help me with this. I don’t trust Brooks as far as I can throw him, but his extraction team is the best bet we’ve got right now.”

  “What about the personnel transports? I thought that was the whole reason we came here.”

  “It was. But can we really make it all the way to the Archimedes? Did you see how far away it was? That’s like two kilometers, easy. And that across open country. The herd would swarm us in no time.”

  “Jacob, we can’t trust him.”

  “I know that. The man’s a snake. He’s a liar and a hypocrite. But for right now, his extraction team is the only way I see us getting out of here alive.”

  Kelly didn’t look at all convinced. “So, what’s your plan?”

  “For right now? I watch Brooks while you guys get some sleep.”

  “You need it more than we do. My God, Jacob, you’ve nearly passed out twice in the last two hours. You’re exhausted.”

  “And hungry, too. But right now, I’m the only one that Brooks fears enough to not take a gun from. I can hold him at bay. Take the six hours. Get some sleep. See if you can get Chelsea and Miriam to join you. Brooks is probably as tired as we are. He can’t watch us forever. By the time he falls asleep, I’ll be ready to hand the watch over to you. We’ll be rested; he won’t be.”

  Kelly took a long time to think about it, but she finally nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Alright, that makes sense. You’ll wake me up in six hours?”

  Jacob looked over at a digital clock on the wall.

  It read 3:43 a.m.

  Jacob did the math in his head and calculated the time to sunrise. Things would change after sunrise. They’d be able to see the field outside their windows. They’d be able to see how bad things really were.

  But Jacob found it hard to concentrate on that. Looking at Kelly’s face, he remembered why he’d found her so beautiful all those years ago. There had come a dawn, in their teens, when he’d woken on a bed of cool grass on the banks of the Mississippi with Kelly’s bare breast cupped in his hand. Things had been so easy in those days, so centered around the natural gravity of two teenagers in love.

  He laughed to himself. God, they’d fucked like rabbits that summer.

  But now, even something as simple as calculating the time to wake up seemed complicated by the jealousy and the anger and the rest of the emotional baggage that had built up since then.

  “At nine forty-three,” he said. “That’ll give me time to watch the sunrise before I go to sleep.”

  “And what will you be thinking?” she said.

  “What?”

  “During sunrise,” she said. “What will you be thinking?”

  He knew the answer without hesitation. He’d be thinking of that morning, a June morning on the banks of the Mississippi, after their first time together.

  The first time for both of them.

  It was the first time in twenty years that she’d acknowledged the memory, that she’d called him out on it.

  “I’ll be thinking of the river,” he said.

  She smiled, but said nothing.

  She went over to Chelsea and Miriam and the three women talked for a few moments, then went off to sleep on the autopsy tables.

  Brooks had been half-listening to the conversation, and he looked disgusted. With a shake of his head and an angry huff, he walked to the far side of the lab, took a small tablet from one of the pockets of his body armor, and sat down to read.

  Jacob watched him go, careful to keep an eye on him.

  He’d met men he disliked before, but he couldn’t remember ever hating a man the way he hated Brooks. He was ashamed to say it, but he kind of wished he’d smashed the man’s head back when he disarmed him. It had certainly taken effort to hold back.

  He turned to Stu and Juliette. “You two could get some sleep, too, if you wanted.”

  The couple glanced at each other, then Stu shook his. He had a conspiratorial look on his face that made Jacob lower his voice to a whisper. “What’s going on?”

  Stu looked over at Brooks, then nodded toward a corner of the lab and indicated for Jacob to follow.

  “We’ve been talking about what you said, about the people getting gassed down in the concourse.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You really did see bullet wounds on those corpses down there? You’re sure about that?”

  A sudden memory of Jerry Greider’s execution played in his mind, how he’d been trembling so badly he flubbed the kill shot and put a black, muddy hole where the man’s eye had been. He remembered it all, right down to the burn ring that had replaced the man’s eyebrow.

  Right down to the gentle sobbing of the man’s widow.

  “I’m sure,” he said.

  Stu glanced over at Brooks and sighed, like he was committing himself to treason.

  He let out a deep breath.

  “Alright,” he said. “We talked this over, and we don’t think there’s any way that this will end well if we let Brooks’s people extract us. Brooks is a powerful man, and he’s built a fortune off of morphic field technology. I don’t . . . entirely buy the Triune stuff that Dr. Sayer’s brother preached, but—”

  “Don’t say ‘preached,’ ” Juliette said. “It’s dismissive.”

  Stu took a
nother deep breath. Evidently, for the first time, his inner you’re being a jackass filter was working.

  He started again. “I think there are problems with the Triune Theory, but I looked at a few pages of Dr. Walker’s notebooks, and there is some compelling evidence there.”

  “I knew it!” Juliette said.

  “Stop . . .” Stu bit his lip. “At least,” he said, starting yet again, “there are some things there that I can’t refute without proper testing. That’s not possible under the present circumstances, though, and I think that his theories deserve serious consideration. That won’t happen if his theories are squashed by the Council.”

  “Okay,” Jacob said. He glanced back over his shoulder at Brooks. The man was lost in whatever he was reading. “So, what does that mean?”

  “We have to find another way out of here. If we leave with his extraction team, we can pretty much count on any evidence supporting Dr. Walker’s theories being lost.” Stu shook his head angrily. “The man should have put his findings on the servers. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation.”

  “That’s not the way he worked,” Juliette said. “Miriam told us that a dozen times.”

  “I know,” he said. “It’s just frustrating.”

  “Okay,” Jacob said. These two frustrated the hell out of him with their back-and-forth, but he liked the direction they were headed. “So, do you have a plan?”

  “Yes,” Stu said. “We want to go get one of the personnel transports from the Einstein. They’re still aboard. They’re awaiting refit and retooling, but they can at least get us over to the Archimedes. From there, we can take one of the new ones. It could get us through anything.”

  “And how are you going to do that?”

  “What?”

  “Get over to the Einstein. You’ve seen what it looks like out there. There are zombies everywhere.”

  Stu nodded like he’d already considered that. “They’ll be clustered around the machine shop.”

  “All hundred million of them?”

  “No, of course not. But the ones we saw were only the first wave. They saw us around the machine shop, and that’s where they’ll focus.”

  “You’re betting your lives on that?” Jacob said. “I thought you people were supposed to be smart and shit.”