Jason Frost - Warlord 05 - Terminal Island (2 page)

That was then.

This was now.

And now Annie and Jenny were dead. Murdered.

Tim kidnapped.

All by the same man. Colonel Dirk Fallows, Eric’s ex-commanding officer from Vietnam. The one Eric had testified against and put in jail. The one they were now trailing. Just Eric and a skinny teenager hunting the Albert Einstein of killers. Eric shook his head at the absurdity.

He stepped over an open grave, his foot crunching down on something hard, brittle. He bent closer for a look. It was a severed hand, chopped off at the wrist. Most of the gray flesh had decomposed or been eaten away. The thin bones of the fingers showed through white as teeth.

“Where’s the rest of him?” D.B. asked, examining the hand.

“Probably dragged off by animals.”

“Or people?”

Eric shrugged. They’d seen some cannibalism up around Santa Barbara, some out in the desert. But it was still rare. So far. “Looks like a clean cut at the wrist. Could be from the shovel that dug her up.”

“Graverobbers?”

“Maybe.” Eric rested against a nearby gravestone. He wasn’t tired but he could tell D.B. was shaken and needed a minute to compose herself. The hard stone felt cool against his shoulder. Thick as grief. Even in the dark he could read some of the chiseled words.
Beloved. Maria Theresa. Loving child
. Whoever Maria Theresa was, the graverobbers had gotten her too. Nothing was left of the loving child but a deep empty hole.

D.B. sat on the overturned gravestone, tucked her knees under her chin. “This place looks like some gopher city. They must’ve dug up every damn grave here.”

“Just about.”

“Shit man.” She lobbed a pebble into the dark. It clicked against an unseen gravestone. “Think that’s what happened to my dad? Think some scavengers came along and rooted through the ground just so they could strip him of his clothing or jewelry or any goddamn thing they could find?”

“I don’t know.”

An angry sob caught in her throat. “Think that’s what happened to your family?”

“No,” Eric said.

“How can you be so damn sure?”

Eric looked her in the eyes. “I burned the bodies.”

D.B. paused, thinking that over. “That was smart, Doc Rock. Yeah. That way there’s nothing for you to go back to. Nothing they can take away. That’s what it’s all about these days, isn’t it?”

Eric stood up. She was right, of course, but it saddened him that she understood such a grim lesson so well at her age. But that’s what California had become since the quakes had cut it off from the rest of the world and sealed it under the deadly poisonous dome of the Long Beach Halo. It had become one giant grave. And the survivors were all robbers, looting the dead and dying, burying the ideals that no longer worked in this world.

Eric walked off into the dark. He’d done his share of looting. Burying too. “Let’s go.”

“I second that emotion,” D.B. said, hopping to her feet. She was shifting into her peppy mode, trying to fight her fear through chatter. “It’s weird, man. We’ve seen a lot worse stuff than this, but something about all these open graves gives me the creeps. Even the words. Grave. Tomb. Jesus, tooooomb. Sounds like a dark tunnel with a giant hairy spider in it.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, “or the place under your bed when you were a kid.”

She nodded. “That knocks me out the way you think of things at your age.”

Eric stepped carefully around an open grave. At 35, he didn’t consider himself ancient. But he knew what she meant and merely smiled. Talking seemed to calm her down, so he kept the patter up while he hurried her through the cemetery. “A tomb used to be nothing more than the house the deceased had lived in.”

“You mean when you died they just stuck you in your own house to rot?”

“Yup. Sealed you up and left you. They even stocked it with clothes and utensils so the dead would have everything they needed in the next world.”

“Like a Walkman and some Hall and Oates tapes.”

“Something like that.”

She thought that over. “What would you take? I mean, what would you want buried with you for the next world?”

That’s easy, he thought. Annie. That’s all he wanted in this world or the next. “That’s easy,” he said. “A copy of
Moby Dick
. The Beatles’
White Album
. A carton of Thomas’s English muffins. Love those nooks and crannies.”

D.B. laughed. “You’re weird.”

“Me? Some of the royal dead had their servants put to death and buried with them to serve in the next life. Queen Shub-Ad of Ur in Mesopotamia had sixty servants killed so they could serve her for eternity.”

“Talk about job security.”

“Most of what we know about ancient civilizations comes from what we found in those tombs.”

D.B. stopped walking, surveyed the acres of rutted graves. She sighed sadly. “This place is sure gonna tell future people a lot about us, huh?”

Eric didn’t answer. He had seen worse in Vietnam. The bodies of dead GIs stripped naked and plowed into the fields for fertilizer. Their blood soaking into the soil. Later whenever he had eaten mango or jackfruit, he had wondered if it had been nourished by the blood of his dead buddies. After a while, he’d stopped wondering and just ate.

That was a lesson he hadn’t taught his students at the University back when he was Dr. Ravensmith, associate professor of history. Back when he bicycled across a green campus, not hiked through open graves.

That was a different world.

It was hard to believe that on the other side of the Long Beach Halo, people still lived as he once had. Watched television, went to movies, ate at restaurants, flirted, worried about their skin, their hemlines, their ties being straight, shoes polished. Their weight.

Eric looked up. The thick smoky Halo that prevented them from leaving and others from entering, enclosed the island of California like a helmet. Passing through the Halo meant disfigurement or death. On the other side, U.S. gunships waited to turn back any who tried to escape the island. The outside world feared contamination, a modern-day plague. Eric didn’t blame them.

Still, from inside the Halo it looked eerily beautiful. The moon was a long splotch of white, like a wound, a rip in the gray flannel sky.

“There!” D.B. said excitedly. “Look!” She had her glasses on and was pointing across the cemetery.

Eric saw it immediately. The hole. The shovel handles stuck in the mound of dirt. An unlit lantern. He could smell the sweet cloying scent of freshly dug earth. He unslung his crossbow from his back, cocked it, and inserted a sharp bolt.

D.B. pulled out a huge 9mm Astra A-80, 36 ounces of steel with a 15-round magazine. She released the safety.

They crouched behind a gravestone.

“Graverobbers?” D.B. whispered.

“Looks like it. But where are they?”

“Maybe they left for the night. Even graverobbers gotta sleep. Though I don’t know how they can.”

Eric looked around for some sign of movement, listened for a sound. Nothing. Damn, why hadn’t he been more careful? The cemetery had seemed so picked over he didn’t think anyone would still be hanging around here. What was left to steal?

“Let’s take a look,” D.B. said, starting to rise.

“No.” Eric held her back.

“Why not?”

“It’s none of our business. We’ll skirt around the edges.”

She spun around, her eyes fierce, the dirt on her face streaked with tears. “That’s easy for you to say. You barbecued your family. We aren’t all so damn clever. I still have a mother somewhere. Maybe alive, maybe not. Maybe in that grave.” She bolted from him, running across the field, leaping open graves, zagging around fallen gravestones.

Eric ran after her.

He jumped over a smashed gravestone, but when his foot landed, it hit a chunk of broken granite. His foot turned under as the rest of his 175 pounds came crashing down on it. He felt the muscles stretch and the bones crackle as he tumbled to the ground. His crossbow slid out of his hand and over the edge of an open grave.

“Damn,” he muttered. He climbed to his feet, bounced a little on his ankle. Pain sizzled up the leg like a lit fuse. It wasn’t broken, probably not even sprained. Just twisted, which hurt even more. He limped over to the dark grave and looked in.

All black. Like a gaping mouth.

Eric felt an involuntary chill climb his spine as he knelt next to the grave. Slowly he reached into the hole, his hand patting blindly for his crossbow.

He touched only black air.

He reached deeper, flattening his body against the ground. More air. Hot fetid air, like the inside of an aluminum garbage can. He plunged his arm and shoulder further into the dark hole.

His hand bumped something solid.

He felt around, sensing its shape.

A body.

It was a chest, a man’s chest. The shirt was stiff with dried dirt, torn in places. Apparently they hadn’t yet stripped this corpse. The flesh was surprisingly warm, though the hot grave could act as an oven during the day. Eric’s hand tramped across the body, knocked into the cold metal of his crossbow. It was still cocked, the safety on. He felt relief as he wrapped his fingers around the stock.

Behind him, D.B.’s scream shredded the silence.

He turned his head, saw her standing in front of the distant open grave. Her gun dropped from her hands as she stumbled backward in terror.

Eric started to his feet, hauling the crossbow up with him.

Suddenly, from within the grave, a hand closed around Eric’s wrist. Another hand grabbed his forearm, long ragged nails digging into his skin.

A third hand clutched his crossbow.

All three hands yanked at once and Eric tumbled backward into the dark grave.

As he fell, he heard D.B. still screaming.

Eric fell backward into the grave.

As he dropped through the darkness, a fourth hand clamped onto his hair and jerked his head back. The long-nailed hand around his forearm let go and immediately punched him in the neck. Eric felt as if he were being chewed and swallowed by a starving reptile.

It was a short fall, barely five feet. But the groping hands, the sour smell, the black marble darkness recalled old childhood images of zombies. The Late Late Show with the living dead walking stiffly out of the swamps, slimy arms straight and reaching, hungry to enbrace those still alive.

Impact was sudden. Eric’s backpack cushioned him as he collided on top of one of the bodies fighting him. A loud “Ummph!” sounded in Eric’s ear. The body beneath him writhed, pushing at him. Suddenly sharp teeth sank into Eric’s shoulder, scraped against bone.

“Ow!” Eric winced, then snapped his elbow backward. A jaw bone cracked and the teeth released his shoulder.

“Bastard!” someone next to him cried.

Eric felt a large fist strike him in the cheek. It glanced off the cheekbone, but he could feel a tender knob rising under the skin. He pulled at his crossbow, trying to wrestle it from whoever was clutching it. No good.

There were two of them, that much he knew. And they felt pain like living men, not zombies.

The grave was dug like an overturned telephone booth. Long and narrow. Eric couldn’t turn without bumping them, without them grabbing at him. He felt a handful of fingers claw at his face, the stubby thumbs trying to gouge out his eyes. Eric swung his left knee around, felt the kneecap sink into the soft flesh of a stomach, graze a protruding rib cage. The fingers at his eyes fell away.