Plague of the Undead (15 page)

“Hey, wake up.”

Rough hands were shaking him. Jacob jumped to his feet, still half asleep but ready to fight. There was a time, not too long ago, when he would have grunted and rolled over in his bed, telling whoever it was to go away and let him sleep. But not now. Two weeks in the wasteland didn’t seem like much, but it had changed him.

“Easy,” said the man who’d woken him. It was one of the riders. In the dark it took Jacob a moment to recognize Casey.

Jacob sat up uneasily, waiting for a hammer to hit from somewhere out of sight.

“What do you want?” Jacob said, lowering his fists. Aggression toward a member of the Family was an easy way to get killed.

On the ground beneath him, Kelly, Nick, and Chelsea stirred.

“We need a doctor,” Casey said.

“None of us are doctors,” Jacob answered back.

“It’s for Linda, my wife. The birthing is going hard for her. Momma says if any of you knows anything about doctoring, you’re needed real bad.”

“We’re not doctors,” Jacob repeated.

“Look,” Casey said. “I know you been treated hard. That’s our way. I can’t help that. But Linda, she’s got the diabetes, and it makes the baby real hard to get out. Our midwives don’t know what else to do. Momma thinks they’re both gonna die if she don’t get some real help.”

“The woman you raped and murdered could have helped you,” Kelly said, rising to her feet. “But I guess it’s too late for that now, isn’t it?”

To his credit, Casey didn’t become enraged.

He hung his head low and looked every bit like a man with his hat in his hand.

“The woman and baby that’s dying back there, they didn’t do nothing to you people. They didn’t hurt you. They didn’t do nothing. Please, if you know how to help, we could really use your help.”

Jacob didn’t hesitate. And he didn’t bother looking to the others for confirmation.

“We can’t help you,” he said. “You murdered the only doctor we had.”

“What about that Code you told me about? Everybody watches each other’s back. Isn’t that what you said?”

“Yep, that’s what we said.”

“She’s dying,” Casey said. In the dark it was hard to tell if there were tears on his face, but his cheeks did seem to shine in the starlight. “She needs help.”

“That might have been possible before you raped and killed our medic. But now, you got nothing but us, and there ain’t a one of us that knows the first thing about birthing a baby. What was it your mother said? This is a missed opportunity?”

Jacob waited for the man to lash out at him, to beat him senseless.

But that didn’t happen.

Instead, Casey simply rose to his feet and turned back toward the darkness. “I’ll remember this,” he said over his shoulder. “I promise you that. I’ll remember this.”

Jacob had already caught on to the routine.

At sunup a free woman would come to the slaves—it still rankled him that he could saddle himself with that word—with a large box full of scrapers. She would select a handful of slaves, generally the new ones, like Jacob and the others, and those she didn’t like or thought lazy, like Chelsea, give them the scrapers, and send them off to clean. Other slaves were sent off to do other tasks.

When they were done scraping, they would return the scrapers and then get used for other mundane jobs around the encampment, everything from wood gathering to cleaning out the toilets to hauling around supplies or fixing broken things.

It was hard work and it was demeaning in the worst way. To get past it, you could turn off your mind and give in to the soul-sucking boredom of it all, or you could hold the indignation and rage inside you like a flame, letting it burn you.

Jacob wanted to believe he’d always have that flame inside him, but as he watched the other slaves waking up and waiting for the day to start, he wondered how long he could keep it burning.

What would ten months of a life like this do to a man?

What about ten years?

It scared him, the things that might happen, the life he might learn to accept.

But the free woman with the box of scrapers didn’t come when she normally did. Instead, Chris Walker, the former slave who’d stopped their escape two nights earlier, rode up on his new horse. He’d taken a bath and changed his slave rags for some real clothes, and with it put on an air of arrogance that was almost palpable.

He rode right through the middle of the slave encampment, his horse’s hooves stabbing at the grass as he told them all that there were to be no fires after noon. If they had any reason for a fire, they needed to get it done before then.

His message delivered, he turned his horse to get out of there as fast as he could, but was forced to stop when he came face to face with his little sister. Chelsea was standing next to Nick, staring up at her older brother.

A long, cold moment of silence passed between them.

“You look like you’re feeling better,” he said.

“A little, yes.”

He nodded. Perhaps he wanted to say that he was glad, but something held him back. He lifted his chin and said, “Good. At least we can finally get a little work out of you. Now stand aside.”

“Wait,” Nick asked. “Why can’t we have any fires after noon. What’s going on?”

Walker looked down his nose at Nick, and seemed to debate with himself for a moment whether it was beneath him to answer a slave’s question or not.

His horse pawed at the ground impatiently.

Finally, he said, “The herd is coming back. Our scouts think they could be here as early as this evening, but probably sometime in the morning.”

“The herd?” Nick said. He looked over at Jacob and Kelly, the alarm plain on his face. “Why aren’t we moving then? We should be getting out of here.”

Again, Walker seemed to debate with himself about how to handle this slave and his questions. His new mantle of authority wasn’t fitting well.

“That ain’t for you to decide,” he finally said.

Studying him more closely now, Jacob noticed the discomfort in the man’s voice as he forced himself to say
ain’t
’t instead of
is not
, like he was wearing shoes that were too small. It was a reminder to Jacob that Walker had received the same education Chelsea had. There was a civilized man on top of that horse, and he was teaching himself to be a barbarian, to survive even if it meant letting his own family be damned.

To Jacob, it was disgusting.

“Stand aside,” he ordered Chelsea and Nick. “There’s a free man coming through.”

Jacob watched him ride back to the far side of the encampment, and it amazed him that Walker and Chelsea could be so different.

It had taken Chelsea much coaxing and their repeated assurance that her secrets were safe with them for her to finally open up about the home she’d known before becoming a slave.

She told them her home was on Galveston Island, though her people called it Temple, and not Galveston. That made sense to him, coming from Arbella. You can’t build a new world without new names, because naming is building the world anew. Even the Bible taught that. Hadn’t Adam been called upon to name all the things in his world?

But there was more than new names for old places. What Jacob’s people commonly referred to as the First Days, Chelsea’s people simply called the War. Jacob and the others, especially Kelly, peppered her with questions about where her people came from and how they’d managed to become so advanced as to create airships like the ones they’d seen, but her answers were frustrating. For as clearly amazing as her education had been, she was only eleven when the aerofluyt she’d sailed on crashed, and her memories were that of a seventeen-year-old girl looking back on a world she knew only as a child.

To Kelly’s questions of “But how do they work? What powers them?” and “How come they don’t make any noise?” Chelsea could only shrug.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Chris took some engineering courses. I remember him saying how much he hated those. He could probably tell you more. But the aerofluyts aren’t the thing I miss the most. I remember we also had these really pretty clipper ships that would sail around the Gulf. My parents were both scientists—well, everyone that lives in Temple is some kind of scientist—and I remember my dad telling me that those clipper ships sailed all over the world. I thought they were so beautiful. Sometimes, when my classes let out for our morning break, I would see them out on the water, unfurling their sails. It was gorgeous.”

Everything she said generated more questions, but it was Kelly who was the first to ask them.

“How did they lead the zombies away from us?” Kelly asked. “The, what did you call it, the aerofluyt? How did it lead the herd away from us? That was amazing.”

“Oh,” Chelsea said, “I know that one. Basic morphic field theory is one of the first things they taught us about zombies.”

“Morphic field theory?” Kelly said.

She’d made it into a question, but Jacob had known Kelly a long time. He recognized when the snarkiness in her was about to surface.

Chelsea nodded eagerly. “Mm-hmm. The idea that a neuro-electric field in the reptilian core of the brain links all sentient organisms is the basis of all zombie research. Once the higher brain functions are destroyed, all that’s left is that reptilian brain core. The zombie becomes little more than a pawn, open and receptive and completely dependent upon the morphic field that connects it with every other zombie out there. Control that morphic field and you control the zombie.”

“I . . .” Kelly trailed off.

She was chewing on her lip and bouncing like a kid who has to go to the bathroom.

Jacob couldn’t help but smile. Knowing her as well as he did, he saw that she was log jammed. There was so much in her that she wanted to spill out it was getting caught up in her throat.

He decided to play her straight man.

“I was under the impression that morphic field theory was junk science,” he said. “Like astral projection and astrology.”

Kelly, still trying desperately to bring herself under control, managed to nod.

“I don’t know what astral projection is,” Chelsea said, “but morphic field theory isn’t junk science. It’s a proven fact, same as geologic stratigraphy and geometry and evolution. Calling it a theory simply means we’re continuing to define our understanding of how it works, not that its truth is in doubt.”

“Yes, but what facts are there to support morphic field theory?” Kelly said. “That idea’s come up before and there’s nothing to support it.”

“Of course, there is,” Chelsea said. “You’ve seen the zombies form into herds. That’s why. It’s also the reason why head shots kill them. Knock out the reptilian core and you knock out the source of the morphic field that connects an individual zombie with all the rest.”

“But there’s lots of reasons why—”

“And you’ve felt it yourself,” Chelsea said. “Remember when the aerofluyt went over us? You heard that deep humming sound it made. You felt the way it pulled you? That’s morphic field theory at work.”

Once she got talking, she couldn’t stop. She looked around the circle of new friends and beamed a radiant smile at them.

“All of those aerofluyts are equipped with morphic field generators,” she went on. “That’s how they manage to control the great herds. I remember my mom telling me that they steered herds away from human settlements whenever they could. I always liked that. It’s a lot like what you said, about how you always watch the other guy’s back.”

Jacob had nodded to that, even as Kelly dug in with more questions.

Remembering what she said made him think of Chris Walker’s warning that the herd was coming back. It was possibly an opportunity to escape, and he said as much to the others.

“How?” Kelly asked. “Won’t they just send out a rider to shepherd the herd around us, like they did in Sikeston?”

“Probably,” he said. “We’ll just have to find a way to bring them to us.”

“You’re saying bring the herd down on this caravan?”

He nodded.

“That’d be suicide,” Nick said.

“Or a way out,” Jacob countered.

“But how?” Kelly asked. “Make a loudspeaker or something? I wouldn’t know how to do that. And even if we did, the Family would shut us down before we could do any damage.”

“I was thinking a smoke grenade.”

“A what?” Kelly said.

“Remember when I used to cheat off your tests in chemistry,” he said. “You’re the smart one. Figure it out. What do you get when you mix potassium nitrate and sugar together?”

She thought for a second. “I don’t know, low-grade gunpowder?”

“Which sends up a lot of smoke, right?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I guess so. But where would we get potassium nitrate?”

He pointed at the bird shit. “Mother Jane’s flock makes plenty of it right here.”

“Yeah,” she said, suddenly excited, “that’s right! It would make really weak gunpowder, but that’s exactly what we’d need. It would make lots of smoke, but no bang.” He could see the wheels turning in her head. She was already running through the procedure. “The only thing is the sugar. Where are we going to get that?”

“I don’t know.”

Jacob turned to Chelsea.

“Any idea where we can get some sugar around here?”

“Maybe. How much do you need?”

Jacob considered that for a moment. “Possibly, what, five pounds?”

“Not even that,” Kelly said. “You don’t want too much sugar, or the mixture won’t set. I’d say less than a pound.”

“Oh, well, that’s easy then. I thought you’d want like fifty pounds.”

“They have that much around here?” Kelly asked.

“Sure. The slaves aren’t allowed to have any, but they’ve got a whole trailer devoted to stuff like that. They’ve got sugar, baking soda, cornstarch, flour, whatever they need to cook with.”

“Any chance they have a cast-iron skillet?”

“I don’t know, but I can check.”

“You can get in?”

“Sure. They’re supposed to keep it locked, I guess, because there’s a padlock on the door most of the time, but nobody ever fastens the lock. I guess they’re in and out too much to worry about it.”

Kelly glanced at Jacob, a huge smile on her face. “We just might be able to make this work,” she said.

Before Jacob could answer, they heard a man’s screams of rage coming from the far side of the caravan. Then the screams gave way to fists beating on the sides of an RV.

Jacob and the others started to head that way, their curiosity baiting them.

Though the dividing line between slave and free man was sharply drawn, it was a small community, and gossip spread quickly across social lines. They’d made it maybe halfway to the far side of the caravan, where Mother Jane and her Boys had their quarters, before they started to hear whispers that neither Casey’s wife nor their unborn son made it through childbirth. Mother Jane’s eldest son had just lost everything, and he was in a rage to beat the devil.

“I don’t think we should get much closer,” Kelly said.

“Agreed,” Jacob said. “And I think now’s a pretty good time to leave this place.”