by Joe McKinney
Three rounds, three head shots. The man was a squirrely little dickhead, but he was a good shot. Jacob filed that away as something to keep in mind later.
“Jacob,” Chelsea said, “can we please leave here?”
All the talking and running had really drawn a crowd. They had zombies coming out of the woodwork now, and all of them had zeroed in on Jacob and the others. Most were slow moving, but he spotted a few making their way toward them with a little more haste.
“Yep,” he said. “Doing that now. Let’s get moving.”
The building with the fire escape was still a good four hundred meters away, and most of that across open ground. They were seeing denser concentrations of zombies, too. To Jacob it looked like the main body of the herd had entered the area, for they were seeing stronger and faster zombies, less decayed. He could tell the men from the women now.
With the faster zombies starting to appear, Jacob had to move around a lot more. He found himself having to sprint from to the head of the group to the rear and back again, over and over, in order to intercept some fast mover that had stepped out of the crowd. He was getting tired fast, and his ribs were starting to burn again.
Brooks and Anson had fallen back a bit. Anson was helping the much older Brooks along, and letting Jacob do most of the running around and shooting.
Jacob couldn’t help but wonder if that was deliberate.
He didn’t trust Anson any more than he trusted Brooks, Anson maybe even less so, but he was running out of juice and he needed the help.
He ran toward Kelly, set up in a shooter’s stance, and dropped yet another fast mover that had gotten too close. Then he grabbed Kelly’s arm and guided her back to where Brooks and Anson were slowly making their way along.
“Jacob, what are you doing?” Kelly asked. “Let go of my arm.”
“I need to even the odds a little here,” he said. “Just trust me, okay?”
As he and Kelly approached, Anson stopped and raised his weapon.
“Let her help him,” Jacob said. “I need another gun out here.”
“I got him,” Anson said. “You’re doing fine.”
“Jordan, no,” Brooks said. He was wheezing with every breath now. “Go and help him. Let her help me.”
Anson looked like he wanted very badly to say no. Brooks was the senior man, though, and for however deficient he may have been in other aspects of his character, he still respected the older man’s authority.
He helped Brooks shift his weight to Kelly without saying another word about it.
“I got him,” Kelly said with a nod to Jacob.
“Thanks, Kelly.” To Anson, Jacob said, “I’ll take point. You bring up the rear?”
“Whatever you say.” There was a menace in his tone that gave Jacob pause. He didn’t really relish the idea of turning his back on this man.
But there wasn’t a lot he could do about it. The herd was pressing in, and one of them had gotten too close to Chelsea. It folded its arms around her and she screamed. She thrashed at it, slapped at it. Jacob couldn’t get a shot, though. He couldn’t risk hitting her.
And then Chelsea surprised him. Her screams turned to a grunt, and she shoved the zombie to one side. It landed off balance and rocked back on its heels.
“Get off me!” she said, and ran at the dead man and shoved him again, this time sending him sprawling backward into the grass.
Jacob took a step toward the zombie and blew its head off before it could get back up.
“Nice move,” he said to Chelsea.
“Just get us out of here,” she said.
They crossed the remaining stretch of road with Jacob out in front, constantly scanning to the left and right, picking off zombies as they got too close. He also kept a weather eye on the rear. Kelly was doing okay, struggling under the larger man’s weight, but still keeping up. Anson was keeping up, as well, and still protecting the rear like he was supposed to, but not firing nearly as much as Jacob.
Not moving around as much, either.
But they did make it, and though they didn’t lose anybody, success had cost an awful lot in terms of ammunition. Of the six magazines he’d taken off of Brooks, he only had one left, and that one was down to about thirty rounds.
By the time they made it to the fire escape, they’d put a bit of distance between them and the herd. The fast movers were still coming on strong, but they’d bought a good forty-five seconds before they’d have to start shooting again.
“Dr. Brooks will go first,” Anson said.
He jumped up and grabbed the fire escape ladder, letting his body weight pull it down. Jacob had seen several different types of fire escapes during his time with the salvage teams, and he was hoping this one would be the staircase variety, the kind that could accommodate two people at a time. It was instead a single ladder surrounded by a metal tube. That meant taking turns, one at a time, and of course Anson didn’t wait for discussion. He took Brooks from Kelly, shoved her out of the way, and then helped the older man onto the rungs.
When Brooks had climbed up a few rungs, Anson went second, again without waiting for discussion.
For a moment, just for a moment, Jacob thought of walking up behind the younger man and painting the wall with his brains. But he held back. Jacob had a dark side, but not an evil one.
Getting just the two of them onto the ladder seemed to take forever. Jacob kept glancing back and forth between the progress they’d made—he could have sworn Anson was taking his sweet time about it, just to be spiteful—and the advancing herd. Things were too hot there. He had to take action.
“Kelly, you and Chelsea get up there as soon as you can. I’ll hold these guys off.”
It would probably cost him the rest of his ammunition, but it had to be done. The first zombies rushed in, and Jacob began to pick them off with smooth, measured shots. He couldn’t afford to waste anything.
He’d dropped a dozen of them by the time Kelly and Chelsea were far enough up the ladder for him to take his turn. He jammed the weapon into the back of his pants and pulled himself up the ladder. Zombie hands grabbed at his legs before he’d managed to ascend two rungs. He kicked and twisted to free his legs, driving his heel down into bloody and ruined faces with all the energy he had left.
And when that didn’t work, he pulled his pistol and started blasting away.
Eight zombies went down before he could lift his legs out of reach. He threw his right hand, still holding the pistol, around the ladder, and with his left reached down and pulled the bottom rungs up. They couldn’t climb ladders, at least he’d never seen anything like that, but their weight was considerable, and it took everything he had to finally get the thing into the upright position.
Only then did he allow himself to catch his breath.
He glanced down at the huge crowd that had gathered at the foot of the ladder. Turning, he saw a sea of the undead that stretched all the way to the horizon. El Paso was now carpeted with the dead.
Then he looked up.
Kelly was watching him. She offered a weak smile, and he returned it. But his attention was focused one floor above her, where Anson was climbing through a window.
That right there was going to be a problem.
He just knew it.
CHAPTER 21
Jacob reached the window he’d seen the others go through and stopped just below it. He pulled his weapon and carefully moved to the left side of the ladder, so that he could climb around the window without showing himself to whoever might be standing just inside. He was surprised that Anson hadn’t already leaned out the window with his gun in his hand and put a round into the top of Jacob’s skull.
Still, smart tactics tended to keep one alive, and Jacob had every intention of staying alive.
He eased around to the edge of the window and positioned himself so that he could go through it in a rush, feetfirst, clearing it as fast as possible.
With a deep breath, he swung inside, pistol at the ready.
He
landed in what looked to be a classroom. Or maybe a roll call room. There were rows upon rows of chairs with built-in desks, all of them covered in dust, not used in years. On the walls, he saw pictures of groups of men in strange uniforms and fancy insignia that he guessed were Old World military.
Kelly and Chelsea were standing at one end of the room, waiting for him.
Brooks and Anson were at the other end of the room, talking in a quiet huddle. Both men looked up as he rushed the room, but neither showed any reaction, just went back to their conversation.
Jacob turned to Kelly. “What is this place?”
She answered with a shrug.
“Brooks,” he said, calling across the room, “what is this place?”
“I have no idea,” Brooks answered. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his broken nose. “My guess, from the stuff on the walls, is that it was once the training center for the various squadrons assigned here.”
Jacob nodded. He crossed to the only doorway leading out of the room and stepped into the hallway. He looked left, looked right, and saw nothing but offices and more rooms like the one he’d just left. He did see some stairs at the end of the hallway to his right, though, and he wondered, if this place really was a training center for military personnel, whether they had a kitchen somewhere. He was so hungry he’d kill for a can of tomato puree.
Hell, even for one of those ketchup packets he used to find on the floor in the ruins of fast food restaurants and gas stations.
“Did you guys look around at all?” he said. “Check the access points?”
Anson ignored him. Brooks glanced at him, shook his head, then went back to listening to Anson. The two men looked like they were discussing resources Jacob couldn’t even begin to deal with. While he was watching them, the mood between them seemed to get heated, though they kept their voices at a whisper. Anson took off his gloves and threw them onto one of the desks.
Jacob went to the window he’d just jumped through and looked down. Now that it was daylight, he had a fairly good view of just how badly they were screwed. Zombies as far as he could see, crowding into every corner, searching every doorway.
But what he wanted to see was straight below him.
He watched the zombies pressing against the walls of his building, and noticed a subtle, but unmistakable pancaking of bodies as they pressed against the walls.
That was good, he thought. Very good.
Years ago, one of his instructors in survival school had described this very moment. He was the first one Jacob had ever heard use the term pancaking to describe zombie behavior.
“We used to see this a lot on freeways,” the man had said. His name was Steve Beckwith. He had a big belly and big red arms and a big gray mustache like a walrus, but he knew his shit about zombies. There was a section of the west wall, back in Arbella, named Beckwith Corner, after the action he took during the First Days to secure the town. He was one of Arbella’s heroes. “Imagine you’re in a car, and all of a sudden, traffic slows to a crawl in your lane, but nobody else’s. What do you guess is going on?”
Silence from the class.
“An accident up ahead, right? Well, most of the time, it was nothing. You’d get to the spot where the accident should have been, and there was nothing there. You ended up accelerating back up to speed wondering what in the hell had happened. But you never found out.
“Well, I’m here to tell you what happened. It’s called pancaking. Traffic will be going along like normal, and then something’ll happen that causes somebody to tap their brakes. Some asshole changes lanes in front of him or some lady gets on the on ramp still putting on her makeup or whatever the hell it is. So the guy behind that guy taps his brakes. And the guy behind him, and the guy behind him, and on and on until the initial tap exponentially grows into a full-blown stoppage somewhere down the line. It may be hard for you kids to visualize, seeing as none of you ever drove on Little Rock’s freeways in rush hour, but trust me. Pancaking. It happens.”
Jacob remembered the way the old man had looked across his class of Arbella’s toughest customers, supposedly the best and brightest of Arbella’s next generation (though Jacob was still convinced they’d made a terrible mistake by letting him in the club), and sighed tiredly.
“Let me put it to you numbskulls this way,” Beckwith had said. “Let’s say you get trapped on the roof of some building someplace, and you look over the side at this huge herd of zombies trying their hardest to get inside and turn you into a buffet. If you see pancaking, like I just described, bodies stacking up at the wall like that, that means you’re okay. The zombies haven’t found a way inside.
“But if you see movement toward a choke point, like a door—it’ll look like sand moving inside an hourglass—then you know you’re fucked. They’ve found a way inside and they’re coming to eat your ass. Is that dumbed-down enough for you jackasses?”
“Yes, sir!” the class had answered in unison.
“Outstanding,” Beckwith had said. “Might be hope for you ass cracks yet.”
Outstanding, indeed, Jacob thought, looking down at the zombies pancaking against the walls of his building. They might just be okay.
He turned back to the room and tried to take it all in. He’d seen other buildings like this. Multipurpose, he’d heard them called. The wall behind Brooks and Anson was only paper-thin. It was an accordion-style faux wood wall designed to divide the room or enlarge it, depending on the need at hand. He walked over to it, ignored the curious looks he got from Brooks and Anson as he passed them, and opened it up, pressing it into its contracted position along the hallway wall.
“What are you doing?” Anson said.
“Expanding our options. Look at that next wall. It’s the same as this one. I think we can open up this entire floor, create one giant room.”
“What for?” Anson said. “Just sit down and shut up.”
“You haven’t secured the downstairs, have you?”
“You know I haven’t. But we saw that it’s—”
“First rule of dealing with zombies,” Jacob said. “If it can go wrong, it will go wrong. You always count on defenses failing.”
“These were made by people who knew what they were doing,” Anson said. “They won’t fail.”
“But if they do, the zombies will come up here. To right here.”
“Yes, and we’ll go upstairs to the next level. And the one after that. And if we need to, all the way to the roof.”
“But we can better our odds,” Jacob said. “We don’t need to just retreat. If we open up all these walls, we can create a floodplain.”
“What?” Anson said.
“A floodplain. Zombies behave like water,” Jacob said. “You’ve seen this, right? They go to the easiest areas, just like water seeks out the lowest point. When they move en masse, they flow like a river, finding the areas of least resistance, moving around buildings like they’re rocks in a stream.”
Anson waved his hand in the air as if to dismiss the whole thing. “Spare me the Zen Buddhist crap, will you please? Do you mind? We’re talking business here.”
“Yes, but we can do better. Look, if we open up all these walls, we create one large room. Should a breach occur, and the zombies get in, they’ll come here. If we don’t have a floodplain, they’ll move to the choke point, and that will be whatever pathway we’ve chosen to get to the next floor above us. All we’ll be doing is speeding them up. But if we open up a floodplain, they’ll spread out first. They’ll explore. That’s what they do. If we want to buy ourselves all the extra time we can, we have to play to their nature. And besides, what can it hurt?”
Anson dismissed him with a wave of his hand.
Brooks, though, leaned close to Anson and whispered something to him. The younger man looked angry at first, but then his expression softened, and by the time Brooks was done talking, the younger man was nodding right along with him.
Without explanation to Jacob, the two of them went down the
length of the building, opening up walls and creating space. By the time all was said and done, they were on the opposite sides of the building, but still plainly visible from where Jacob and the women stood.
“What do you suppose that was all about?” Kelly said.
“I bet I know,” Chelsea said. “They want to be as far away from us as possible so they could talk about how they are going to kill us.”
Her tone tripped something in Jacob he didn’t like. “Chelsea, come on. Don’t you think—”
“Think what? What are you trying to tell me?”
“Chelsea,” Kelly said, only without any of the sarcastic, passive-aggressive tone Jacob had used, “we’re only trying to say that things have gotten a little more personal than before. They’re in this, same as we are. I think they’re probably arguing about the extraction they keep talking about. That has to be the most important thing on their minds. Isn’t it the most important thing on ours?”
Jacob could see by the look on Kelly’s face that she had intended the question purely rhetorically, but to Chelsea it was anything but.
“No,” the girl said. “No, it’s not. I don’t give a fuck if I live or die, Kelly. And don’t even for a second try to buddy up to me. You have no idea what life is like. I saw you in that Slaver caravan. I know your husband died defending you. I watched the whole thing. But at least you had somebody. I lived there for seven fucking years, Kelly, and I had nobody. Do you have any idea how many times those motherfuckers raped me? Do you? Do you know how many times my older brother stood by and watched?”
“No,” Kelly said, lowering her head.
“Every goddamn night!”
“Chelsea, I . . .”
“You what?” Chelsea said. “What can you possibly say right now? You know what kept me from slashing my wrists every time somebody put a blade in my hand? It was the belief that I’d come home, back here, one day, and that everything would be fine. I wouldn’t have my parents, but I’d still be the daughter of Alfred and Suzanne Walker, two of the most distinguished scientists in my entire community. I wouldn’t have them to come home to, but I would have a community to come home to. They always said it took a village to raise a child. I wanted that village. I wanted people who welcomed me because they knew the pedigree I bore. They knew I was one of them. But when I finally did come back, I found people coming out of the woodwork to ruin my father’s reputation.”