by Joe McKinney
“Yeah.”
“They’re about a third of meter long, maybe about as big around as your thigh.”
“Are the ends bright red, and maybe look like they’re wet?”
“Yes!” Stu said.
Jacob looked at the stash of twelve cylinders in front of him and thought they looked an awful lot like the capsules he remembered seeing in the tubes at the ruins of drive-through banks back in his salvage team days. Each one was mounted in a special cradle with a switch labeled LOCK/RELEASE next to each one.
Jacob hit one of the release buttons and the metal arms that held one of the cells in its cradle sighed open.
He picked it up, but even with the mechanical assists of his suit, the cell felt incredibly heavy. He turned it over and tried to read the yellow label on the outside of the thing, but the letters were too small.
“So I think I found those cells,” he said.
There was a long silence on the other end before Stu finally answered. “Jacob,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“Listen—avoid handling those things, okay? They are highly explosive.”
“Uh, like how explosive?”
“One of those things will level a good part of this base. Probably half of the city.”
“So, don’t pick it up?”
“No. Don’t do that.”
“Okay. Uh, what if I already did?”
“You have . . . you have one of the cells?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit,” said Stu. “Okay, um, okay. Just stay there. We will come to you, okay?”
“How long’s that gonna take? I thought you were going to need all day to charge.”
“Yeah, damn it. Jacob, I don’t know what to tell you. You’re basically holding the equivalent of an atomic bomb in your hands. If that thing gets punctured . . . you’d need to be underground to survive the blast.”
“Okay, so don’t puncture it. Got it.”
“Listen, it’s going to take us a full day at least to get to you. Can you secure that thing back where you found it? Maybe we can come to you.”
“Okay, I’ll try.”
Jacob turned the cell in the same direction he remembered it being when he pulled it out of the case and was about to lower it back down when he saw a group of zombies staggering across through the tall grass, their hands up in the familiar groping gesture of zombies reaching for a meal.
They only did that when a living person was present.
Jacob looked down and realized that he’d missed the big white elephant in the room. If this car was here, if the power cells were here, it had to be because Jordan Anson’s henchmen were still here.
And the zombies were, as usual, a good indication of where they were.
“Stand by,” Jacob said into his mic. “I may need to come up with another solution.”
“What?” Stu said. “Jacob, talk to me. What’s going on?”
But Jacob said nothing. He moved as quickly as the suit would allow, each foot feeling incredibly heavy, yet striking the earth with terrible power. This was what Frankenstein’s creature must have felt with each step, Jacob thought. Such force, such ponderous, yet controlled force.
He made his way around the side of the flight line commander’s building, toward the buildings south of the hangar, when he heard the sound of fully automatic gunfire.
He’d fired many such weapons himself. He knew the sound. And he knew the range such weapons had. Turning and looking back, he saw a large cluster of zombies closing in on the far side of the building, exactly where he’d been. He hadn’t made it that far, maybe fifty or sixty meters. He still had five hundred meters to go at least before he reached the Squadron Training Center Building, where he and the others had taken shelter before. And the other structures were even farther away than that.
He saw the next few moments play out in slow motion in his mind. Anson had no doubt hired whoever was shooting those weapons. That meant they were pros. Mercenaries. They would return to their vehicle and see that it had been broken into. They would figure, rightly, that Jacob or one of the others was here, and that they had taken one of the power cells. They would figure that same person would make a break for it, and they knew that the APV was back around the Squadron Training Center. They would logically turn south toward that building and, because the suit compromised speed for power, they’d see Jacob plodding along out in the middle of nowhere, no cover, no place to hide. And, of course, their weapons would have no trouble taking him down at that distance. He really would be a sitting duck.
He heard the clatter of gunfire once again and knew what he had to do. He had to get to cover, and the only cover anywhere around here was back in the direction from which he’d come.
There was a shallow drainage ditch not far from him. He put the power cell down in it, and then ran for the hangar.
Or, rather, he tried to run. The suit wouldn’t let him. The best he could manage was a hurried walk, each step pounding the earth with a mechanical-sounding clank clank clank.
By the time he reached the hangar, there were zombies everywhere.
Jacob knocked one down as he made his way to the structure. There were more up ahead, but they turned away from Jacob and started down one of the corridors. They were met with gunfire.
And then, just as Jacob reached the edge of the flight line commander’s building, he saw two figures in black battle suits emerge from one of the corridors. Jacob realized in an instant that he was outgunned. Both figures had large rotary mini guns mounted on their arms, and while they still moved with the same plodding motion he managed in his suit, they were noticeably faster.
They saw him at the same time he saw them. One of the figures raised his mini gun and began to fire just as Jacob ducked into one of the corridors.
Jacob wasn’t fast enough, though. A round caught the shoulder of his suit and penetrated the armor. He felt the round bite into his arm as he spun out of the way, but the damage was done. Jacob fell back against one of the corrugated tin walls and knew that the left arm of his suit was filling up with blood.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit!” he said.
“Jacob!” It was Stu’s voice, frantic with alarm. “What is it? Talk to me. I’m showing your suit’s been ruptured. Pulse is climbing.”
“Radio silence,” Jacob said through clenched teeth. “Be quiet for a bit.”
Jacob tried to move his left arm, but the gunshot wound had penetrated deep. Jacob could feel the suit closing around the wound, forming a tourniquet and cutting off the pain. He couldn’t move his arm.
He groaned to himself, and then made his way down the corridor.
He reached a crossroads. A zombie was standing in the corridor to his left, uncertain of where to go. The way in front of him and to his right was wide open. He could go right, he figured, and end up underneath the rickety staircase that led up to the crow’s nest, but he’d have nowhere to go from there.
No, he had to take the fight to the enemy.
He had no weapons, and he couldn’t move his left arm, but he had to attack. He knew no other way.
He turned left, toward the zombie.
Jacob figured the only reason it couldn’t figure out which way to go was because it had multiple targets to choose from. He could have crushed the zombie with a single blow, but instead he grabbed it by the gray remnant of its shirt and pushed it toward the next intersection.
One of the men in the black battle suits was standing there, trying to decide which way to go. Jacob pushed the zombie into the man and moved to the other side of the corridor, so he could get his right hand into the fight.
The man in the black battle suit knocked the zombie into the wall with a hard swipe of its hand. He watched the zombie crash into the wall and fall to the ground, and that was the break Jacob was looking for. He had no weapons, but he did have the foam spray that Stu had told him about. He raised his right arm and squeezed his ring and pinkie fingers into his palm, activating the foam. It
jetted out like water from a fire hose. He could barely believe how much of it there was. It hit the man in the suit and immediately started to harden, locking his gun to his hip like he’d been caught in amber.
The man twitched and twisted like a zombie, but he couldn’t break the foam’s hold.
The second battle-suited man entered the intersection a moment later. Like his partner, he was armed with a mini gun on his arm. He turned it toward Jacob and began to fire just as Jacob hustled for the next intersection.
Jacob reached the corner and threw himself to the ground.
The suit was incredibly bulky, not at all meant for ground fighting, but the dive got him out of the way of the bullets. They laced up the metal wall behind him, chewing the tin to bits.
Jacob ended up on his belly, just around the corner. He struggled like a bug to roll over, fighting to get to his feet.
He finally had to put his right hand on the ground and drag his knees forward to find his balance, but eventually he managed to get his legs under him and rock his weight back to the point he could stand up again.
His attention immediately turned to the second battle-suited figure. Jacob sensed the man would press his advantage. If the roles were reversed, that’s what he would do. Jacob decided not to run. He knew if he was going to survive he’d have to take the fight to the attacker, so he moved to the corner and waited for the man to show himself.
Even though he was wearing one of the oldest models of the battle suit, Jacob had already sensed the confidence the suit gave the wearer. The second mercenary would no doubt recognize how old Jacob’s suit was, and figure he had the advantage.
Jacob was counting on that.
He waited just around the corner for the man to present himself. As soon as he did, Jacob lunged forward. He hooked his right arm under the man’s outstretched weapon arm, hooked it over, and wrenched down. He wasn’t sure whether he broke the man’s arm or not, but even through the suit he could sense the man’s alarm and pain.
Jacob didn’t give him time to get back on his feet. He stepped in front of the man, who was still on his back, struggling to get back on his feet, and used the last of the foam to hose down the man’s faceplate.
The man was struggling frantically to scrape it off as Jacob turned away.
He lumbered down the corridor until he found a way out. He saw the aerofluyts off in the distance and that helped to orient him. He turned right. He also saw that the other eleven power cells were still back in the trailer he’d ransacked. They were maybe forty meters away.
Time for a decision, he told himself.
He could try to make a run for it, though that would no doubt leave him just as out of luck as before. The men in the black battle suits were professionals. They would break the bonds the foam had put them in, and they’d come after him with real guns. It would only be a few seconds before they found their way out of the corridors and filled him with gunfire. He’d be dead in minutes.
But he wasn’t out of options. Jacob believed that to his core. As long as he was on his feet, he had options. He had choices to make.
He looked around.
Off to his right lay the city of El Paso. Stu and the others were working their way up from that direction. It would only be a matter of time before they made it to the Einstein.
Off to his left was basically nothing but desert. He had the hangar, and the flight line commanders’ station, but little else.
And then he stopped.
That wasn’t exactly true, was it? He had the car the two mercenaries in the battle suits had driven in on.
And their trailer was loaded down with the most dangerous explosive on the planet, wasn’t it?
The answer to that question made up Jacob’s mind. He raced forward and grabbed the first zombie he found, a woman of about twenty, wearing the remnants of a lacy top and a short miniskirt.
He couldn’t move his left arm, but he did manage to throw his shoulder into the dead woman’s back and press her face-first into a nearby wall. Holding her with the help of the suit, he removed the two remaining grenades he’d taken from Jordan Anson, stuck them into the crook of his dead left arm, and twisted the top of the cylinder all the way to the end.
Jacob wasn’t positive, but he was guessing that was a minute.
The grenades set, he shoved them down into her underwear and pushed her toward the car.
Much to Jacob’s satisfaction, the zombie behaved exactly as she was supposed to do. She plodded forward without any sense of direction, without any objective other than to eat the living.
That meant he wasn’t safe here. He turned and ran as fast as the suit would let him for the culvert he’d seeded with the power cell just a little while earlier.
Zombies clustered around him, but Jacob didn’t worry about it. The ones he could knock down, he did. The ones he couldn’t avoid, he just ran over. They’d all be erased from the planet in less than a minute anyway.
He ran through a corridor until he emerged on the empty plain south of the hangar. From there he ran due south, looking for the drainage ditch where he’d hidden the power cell.
He found it just seconds later. Turning, he was surprised to see that he’d covered so much ground in such a short period of time. Even still, he barely had time to jump into the ditch and press himself into the pipe in its base.
A moment later, the zombie carrying the grenades detonated.
And right after that, the real explosion went off.
CHAPTER 26
“Jacob!”
He opened his eyes. Tried to anyway. He blacked out again.
“Jacob, come on, answer me, baby. Come on, please.”
He stirred once more, and managed a groan.
“Jacob? Is that you? Come on, Jacob, it’s Kelly. Speak to me. Let me know you’re okay.”
“Can’t move,” he managed to say.
“Jacob, where are you? We’ll come get you.”
“In a ditch,” he said. “Inside a pipe. South of the . . . south of the hangar.”
“Okay, baby, you hold on. We are on the way.”
The grenades he’d detonated outside the Squadron Training Center had left his ears ringing, but that was nothing compared to the tornado alert siren that was currently blaring in his ears. He had barely heard Kelly, even though he had little doubt they’d cranked the gain up on his headset all the way. He blinked until his vision came back into focus. Or at least as close as it was going to get. He was still seeing double, and everything seemed to be floating around him. He focused on the medical diagnostic report screen at the bottom left corner of his faceplate. Blood pressure was 131/84. Pulse was 74. Breathing rate was normal. Temperature was 99.4. So he was fine.
Except that he felt like shit.
He might have blacked out again. He wasn’t sure. But he did finally come around sometime later when he felt hands on his boots, tugging him out of the pipe.
He was too shell-shocked to resist, or even to call out. They tugged on his legs and, gradually, he started to slide into the daylight. They rolled him over and faces hovered above him, but he couldn’t see them through all the cracks in the faceplate.
Instead he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness, and as he did, memories floated up to the surface of his mind like soap bubbles. He remembered Kelly at sixteen, giggling at his lame-ass jokes. He remembered the first time she got drunk and tried to sing but only managed to sound like somebody was strangling a cat. And the sight of her in a black bikini, sitting on a wooden rail above the dunking booth at the Arbella Summer Harvest Fair. He’d nearly thrown his arm out just to get a glimpse of her coming out of that water barrel all soaking wet. She’d taunted him the entire time, too, knowing exactly what he was there for.
While his mind was doping him with memory, Kelly and Stu had flipped him over and started working the buckles loose on his suit. When they cracked it open, he was hit with a wall of heat and the stench of a burning city.
“What . . . ?
” he said, as they pulled him out.
He separated from the suit, and though they tried to hold him, he fell onto a black carpet of burned grass. It crunched against his cheek and stained his hands with ash.
“Let’s get him up,” Kelly said.
They raised him to his feet and Jacob felt such a head rush that he nearly vomited.
And then he looked around at what was left of the city and nearly vomited again.
The land was scorched all around him. The Squadron Training Center was fully engulfed in flame. The bricks of its face glowed red. Its windows were bright orange with fire. Everywhere he turned, he saw the charred bodies of zombies. Thousands and thousands of them. Columns of smoke rose from the ground. The hangar where he’d fought the two mercenaries in battle suits wasn’t even there anymore. And farther away, the two nearest aerofluyts were also fully engulfed in flames.
“Did I do all that?” Jacob said.
“Yeah, baby,” said Kelly, laughing despite her tears. “Yeah, you did.”
“They’re not gonna bill me for that, are they?”
“Just shut up, Jacob. God, you had me so worried. The explosion nearly flipped the APV. I thought for sure you were dead.”
“Hey,” he said. “It’s me. I did get shot, though. God, I could use a nap.”
They carried him across the scorched desert and set him up on the medical couch next to Brooks. The man had regained consciousness. He was clearly in a lot of pain, but he seemed alert and dealing with it.
“Was that you?” he asked Jacob.
“Afraid so. I just destroyed a lot of your expensive toys, I think.”
Brooks tried to laugh, but it turned into a grimace of pain.
“You alright?” Jacob asked.
“No,” Brooks said. “Well, better than you, but no.”
Kelly appeared at his side. Her cheek was bruised and there was still ash in her hair and on her eyelashes, but she was smiling. “All your vital signs look good,” she said. “I can’t believe you do the things you do.”
“Yeah, well, you know. All in a day’s work, right?”
Beside her, Stu laughed. To Kelly, he said, “Your boyfriend is a tank. Four broken ribs, a concussion, multiple gunshot wounds. Good grief.” He looked Jacob square in the face. “By any rights, you should be dead.”