Plague of the Undead (20 page)

“To the coast?” Jacob said. The thought of going that far, all the way across Arkansas, and then across Texas, it seemed impossible. “I don’t know, you guys.”

“Jacob, please,” Kelly said. “Please say yes. We can change this world we live in. We can. I believe that. Please say you believe it, too.”

Jacob looked at her, and for just a moment let himself see the seventeen-year-old girl she’d once been, the girl he had known and thought he’d spend the rest of his life with. It was crazy, what she was asking of him. But in the end he knew he could never tell her no, and finally, he nodded.

She leaned forward and kissed him. “Thank you, Jacob! Thank you so much.”

He nodded again. “Just take me to the bridge first.”

“All right,” she said. “It’s this way.”

Most everything still worked, but the rest of the ship certainly hadn’t faired very well. There was trash everywhere they stepped. Some of the debris Jacob could recognize, or at least guess its purpose, but some of it was so strange he had absolutely no clue as to what it was for. As he stepped over it, he found himself imagining what it must have been like during the impact. Everything that wasn’t nailed down must have surged forward in a wave, crashing to the deck as metal groaned and snapped. It must have happened suddenly, too, for there were bodies trapped in some of the debris. None of them appeared to be moving, though, and he wondered if they’d been so badly crushed by the impact that they’d been unable to come back, or if perhaps they had come back, and since expired for lack of food. Hard to say, because they all looked badly decomposed. Some, in fact, were little more than skeletons, and he found himself wishing that it had been quick for them. The idea of dying like that, trapped under a flood of debris, over a period of days, was horrible.

He forced himself to focus instead on the ship’s construction. The hallways were long and narrow, and their footsteps echoed into the depths. The walls were bare metal, painted an industrial white in most places, but peeling and rusting wherever water had managed to collect. The rust and the trash were the only signs of weakness, though. Everywhere he looked he saw indications of just how well the ship was made, even beneath the rubble. Everything looked designed for where it was. There’d been no cobbling together of odds and ends, no cannibalization that he could see. The level of advancement was simply awe-inspiring, like something from the world that had once been, only cleaner, and even more advanced.

They passed open areas and closed-off laboratories with long names, most of which Jacob could only guess at pronouncing. He could see why Kelly loved it here so much. She was born to the wrong people, no doubt about it.

They reached the bridge a few minutes later. It was a large, rectangular room with the workstations sunken below the main deck and divided into four sections by an elevated walkway. The walkway also ran around the edges of the bridge, near the windows, which offered a full three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the surrounding countryside.

He went to the main windows that looked out over the front of the aerofluyt. Birds had started to nest at the base of the window, but they didn’t seem at all interested in him as he stepped up to the glass. He was high above the top of the wreck, which itself was a good twenty stories above the ground. It was dizzying, and he discovered, much to his displeasure, that he was afraid of heights.

But he forced himself to look.

Below him, stretching out to a line of trees far in the distance, was empty farmland. He scanned it in every direction, but there was very little to see. Just a lot of empty land, gone to riot, and a dark and broken skyline to the south.

“Nick, do you have any idea where we are?”

“You mean like on the map?”

“Yeah.”

“About midway between Jacksonville and North Little Rock would be my guess. Those buildings to the south are downtown Little Rock.”

“Jacob,” Kelly said. “Why did you want to come up here so bad? What were you hoping to find?”

“I’m hoping this thing can be our eyes and ears,” he said. “Chelsea, you told us your brother used the morphic field generator to lure all the zombies inside the ship down to the lower decks.”

“That’s right.”

“And after that you guys used the ship’s sensors to make sure all the zombies were belowdecks?”

She nodded. “We had to so that we would know when to power down the morphic field generator. I remember Chris saying that if it overloaded it would blow up the ship.”

“Do those sensors just scan the inside of the ship, or can they be used to scan the outside as well?”

“I would imagine they could do both. I wouldn’t know how to work them, though. Chris did all that.”

“Where are they at? The controls, I mean.”

Before she could show him, Nick spoke up from the window. “Hey, Jake, I don’t think you’re gonna have to worry about those scanners.”

Jacob, Kelly, and Chelsea ran to the window and looked out. Nick pointed to a line of riders emerging from the trees at the far edge of the field. One by one the riders came to a stop and looked up. They were too far away for Jacob to see their faces, but he knew the awe they must be experiencing upon seeing the wreck for the first time.

“Looks like you were right, Jake.”

Jacob shook his head. “I hate being right.”

Jacob watched the riders coming on and felt empty inside. Out there on the plain, leading his riders, was Casey, son of Mother Jane and a latter-day Ahab hell-bent on revenge. There’s no reasoning with him, Jacob thought, no bargaining. He was going to have his revenge on Jacob, even if he had to chase him into the midst of the Great Texas Herd to get it.

What could you do with an enemy like that?

Could you even hope to turn his wrath?

“Anybody got any ideas?” Nick asked. “They’re gonna be here in about ten minutes.”

“We’ve got rifles now,” Kelly said. “Plenty of ammunition, too. I don’t see but like seventy riders. Maybe we can shoot them as they try to come through the loading bay. The entrance is only about ten feet wide. They’d only be able to come in one or two at a time.”

Nick considered that. He looked at the guns he’d found, a whole armory full of Ruger 10/22 tactical rifles. Beautiful guns passed down from a bygone age.

“Jacob,” he said, “what do you think?”

Jacob turned away from the window. “A standup fight will never work. There’s too many of them.”

“Too many of them?” Nick said. “But we can funnel them. They’d walk into a meat grinder.”

“The first few, maybe. After that, Casey will regroup. He’ll find another way in.”

“So what do we do?” Kelly asked. “Run away?”

“There isn’t time,” Jacob said.

“Jake,” Nick said. “I hate that look you get. You’re scaring me.”

“We need to level the playing field,” Jacob answered, ignoring Nick. “Chelsea, where are the controls to the morphic field generator?”

“Jacob . . .” Kelly said.

“Jake,” Nick said. “What are you doing?”

“The controls,” he said again, more firmly. “Where are they?”

Chelsea took them to a workstation near the front of the bridge. She went down the line until she found the right one and pointed. “That one,” she said.

Jacob looked over the control board. It was mind-numbingly complex. So many dials, so many buttons and levers and gauges.

He turned to Chelsea and said, “What are we supposed to do here?”

She looked as lost as he was. “I don’t know,” she said. “I only watched Chris do it that one time, and that was years ago.”

“Well, think, damn it. What did he do? Remember it. Walk yourself through it.”

Chelsea studied the controls.

She reached out for a button that read
INITIATE STARTUP SEQUENCE
and pushed it down.

The workstation lit up like a ball field at night.

Alert signals beeped at her.

“I . . . I don’t remember that,” she said.

“Keep on,” Jacob said. “Keep going.”

Chelsea pushed a few more buttons, and at last the familiar, deep bass hum of the morphic field generator began to rattle in their chests.

Kelly turned and had to catch herself. “That’s it,” she said. “It’s working. I can feel it.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Nick said.

“Looks like you did it, Chelsea,” Jacob said. “Is there anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so. From what I remember if it’s allowed to overload it’ll explode.”

“How long will that take to happen?”

“I don’t know. A day, maybe two. It all depends on how good of a shape the components are in.”

“Hey,” Nick said. “What kind of explosion are we talking about? I mean, is it just gonna sparkle and fizz out, or are we talking about something more?”

“Most of this ship is built around the morphic field generator,” Kelly said. “I think it’s safe to say we’re talking about something pretty big.”

“Hopefully,” Jacob said. “Either way, I want to slip out of here as quickly as we can. With any luck, Casey and his Family will be in here looking for us when this thing blows.”

It was slow going down to the loading bay. The deeper they went into the bowels of the aerofluyt, the more damage they saw. In some places the decks were so badly crushed as to be impassable. The architecture that had been so impressive abovedecks was horribly twisted down here and choked with debris.

“How did you guys even get through here the first time?” Jacob asked, throwing aside a section of bent and twisted handrail that had come from the stairs somewhere above them.

“It wasn’t easy,” Kelly said.

“Yeah, especially since I had to carry your fat ass all the way,” Nick said.

Jacob smiled and gave him a nod of thanks.

“It gets easier as we get closer to the loading bay,” Kelly said. “I’m guessing the ship crashed at an angle like this.” She held her arm out straight and then angled her hand down about ten degrees. Then she pointed to the bottom of her arm, about midway between her wrist and elbow. “We’re trying to get here.”

“Great,” Jacob said. “Half an arm to go.”

But it did get a little easier the farther back they went, and by the time they reached the loading bay, there was little more than clutter to deal with.

They emerged onto an observation deck about twenty feet above the main floor of the loading bay. They got down on their bellies and crept up to the edge of the platform, looking down at the cavernous compartment. It was a jumbled mess of big armored vehicles with ten wheels and smaller, light trucks. There was a great profusion of parts and barrels and forklifts and even a few vehicles that looked like they might be flying shuttles. And of course there were a handful of Casey’s riders leading their horses outside, where another fifteen riders were standing watch over the Family’s contingent of horses.

“Those are our horses, Jacob,” Kelly said.

“Yeah.” Jacob frowned, wondering what to do next. He should have anticipated this. He’d been foolish to think Casey and his riders wouldn’t immediately find their horses and seize them. They were a bunch of ignorant, debased rednecks, but that didn’t mean they were stupid. Casey had already proven that to him back at Malden. He should have known better.

“So what do we do now?” Chelsea asked.

“We have to get outside,” Jacob said.

“But Casey’s men are out there,” she said.

“Not all of them. I saw maybe twenty riders. When we saw them from the bridge, they had closer to seventy.”

“That means most of them are probably already inside, looking for us,” Nick said.

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “My thoughts exactly.”

“So where do we go?” Kelly asked.

“We need another way out. Did you guys see anything on the way in?”

“I didn’t see anything,” Kelly said. “There’s bound to be other ways out, though.”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “And other ways in.”

He was about to push back from the edge of the platform when he noticed movement on one of the platforms below them. It was an observation deck, similar to the one they were on, only one floor down. One rider was advancing down the hallway that led to the platform, a rifle at the ready, like he was expecting to take somebody by surprise there.

Jacob watched the man swing his rifle around the corner, sweeping the platform.

When he didn’t see anything, he motioned at someone behind him in the hall.

“This is a trap,” Jacob said.

Kelly looked at him in surprise.

“Nick,” he said. “Weapons up. We’re on the clock.”

He jumped to his feet and moved to the wall behind them, his rifle held at port arms across his chest. He motioned for the others to line up behind Nick on the opposite side of the entrance to the hallway that led back into the ship.

“What’s going on?” Nick said.

Jacob went to sign language.
They’ll send a single man out to clear the platform. More will be behind him, in the hallway. I’ll get the man out here; you fire at the ones in the hallway.

Nick nodded. He gripped his rifle, ready to move.

Just a few moments later, they heard footsteps coming down the hallway. Jacob gripped his rifle and glanced over at Nick.

“Ready?” he mouthed.

Nick nodded back.

When the rider stepped into view, Jacob grabbed him by the shirt and heaved him over the railing. The man never even saw it coming. Behind him, Nick leaned around the corner and fired three rounds. Jacob raised his own rifle and caught a glimpse of a man ducking back behind a corner. A second man writhed on the floor, dying from Nick’s rifle fire. Jacob didn’t give the first man a chance to regroup and fire back. He charged into the hallway, jumping over the dying man, and fired around the corner, hitting the rider hiding there in the gut.

He stepped forward and knocked the rifle from the man’s hands. The man rolled over, holding his gut in agony. Jacob shot him in the nose, the man’s face swelling and distorting as the gases from such a close-range rifle shot expanded inside his shattered skull.

He scanned the rest of the hallway, but it looked empty.

For now.

He motioned for the others to follow him. The stairs leading down to the main floor of the loading bay were just to his left, and he could hear the Family gathering at the ground level. It was a trap, just as Jacob had feared.

From where he stood, he could see a thin slice of the ground level, right at the base of the stairs. Casey was there, motioning for the others to hurry up the stairs. One of the riders spotted him and trained his rifle in Jacob’s direction.

Jacob ducked back behind a corner just as a shot rang out.

“So much for silent running,” he said as the shot zinged off the metal walls just around the corner. “We need to hustle.”

“But where?” Kelly asked. “I don’t know where to go.”

He motioned toward the front of the ship. “Back that way,” he said.

“But all the debris . . .”

“Maybe it’ll make it easier to lose them,” he said. “Hurry.”

Casey and his men were already coming up the stairs. Jacob motioned for the others to keep going, while he stayed back to cover their retreat. As soon as he saw the first of the riders coming up the stairs, he fired, emptying his entire magazine. He thought he saw one of the men go down, but couldn’t be sure.

Besides, there were more coming up the stairs every second.

He ran after Kelly and the others. Ahead of them the hallway met another flight of stairs. Kelly and the others stopped at the head of the stairs and motioned for him to indicate which way they needed to go.

There were more hallways leading to the left and to the right. The one to the right looked like a short one, leading to three rooms, all with the doors closed. To the left, the hallway seemed to go on a long ways. He could see a number of other hallways leading off from the main one, but where they led was anybody’s guess.

“Jake, they’re coming up from here, too,” Nick said.

Jacob leaned over the railing, expecting to see more of the Family scrambling up the stairs, but instead saw a flood of slow-moving dead things staggering up the stairs.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“What is it?” Kelly said. She looked over the railing, and her eyes went wide. “But how?”

“I guess all those alarms we heard when we turned on the morphic field generator.”

“You mean we opened the doorways to the lower decks?” He nodded.

She looked ill. “Oh, God.”

“Okay,” Jacob said. “We know they’re going to be coming up and heading to the rear of the ship, right? Toward the morphic field generator?”

“Yes,” Chelsea said. “That’s right.”

“So we go up and forward.”

“But how will we get off this ship?” Kelly asked.

“We have to get away from Casey and the Family first. We do that, then we’ll worry about getting off—”

Something whistled by his ear and zinged off the wall behind him.

“What the . . . ?”

Another thud against the wall.

He turned and saw Casey running toward him, a half-dozen riders coming up behind him. He had Sheriff Taylor’s suppressed M4, and he was firing as he charged.

“That way!” Jacob said, and pushed them down the left side corridor.

They turned right at the first intersecting hallway, and then left at the next one after that. Jacob stopped them just around the corner and listened. He could hear gunfire and men shouting.

So they had run into the zombies from belowdecks, he thought.

Good to know.

“Listen,” he said. “I think our only chance is going to be that loading bay. That’s the only definite way out we know.” He pointed deeper into the ship. “Let’s go that way, and then turn left. We’ll start making our way to the rear as soon as we can.”

The ship was a maddening network of intersecting hallways that offered lots of chances to change direction, but nowhere to hide. As soon as they rounded a corner and stepped into a new hallway they walked into a new line of sight that extended almost the entire length of the ship. Their only chance was to move fast.

They were running at a quick trot when three dead men lumbered into the hallway ahead of them. “Whoa!” Jacob said. He pointed to the right. “That way. Go!”

One of the zombies lurched forward. He was wearing bloodstained blue overalls, his face torn away in strips, as though another zombie had ripped his cheeks and lips away with its teeth. One eye bulged from a lidless socket, a chalky white orb against a field of decaying flesh. And it was fast, much faster than the other two. Jacob barely had time to register just how fast before the thing was on him, its gnarled hands groping at his face.

He swung his rifle at the bulging eye and managed to deflect the zombie, but didn’t do any damage.

The zombie fell a few steps to one side, then turned and lunged for him again. It was on him before he could back away. He managed to get his rifle up and used it to block the thing’s hands, but it kept coming. Jacob kicked it in the legs, making it stagger, but it wouldn’t fall. It kept coming for him, slashing at his face with blackened fingers. Then the zombie caught his fingers in Jacob’s hair and pulled him into the wall, pinning him there. It brought its face in close, teeth bared, breath putrid with rot. Jacob had no other option. It was now or never. He jammed the rifle up to the thing’s throat and fired. The bullet entered just below its chin and blasted a wet chunk of bone and scalp off the back of the zombie’s head and all over the ceiling.

It collapsed to the floor in a heap, but Jacob wasn’t off the hook yet. From somewhere down the hall he heard Casey and his men shouting, and running his way.

The other two zombies rounded the corner and lumbered after him. He didn’t waste the ammunition on them. Instead, he ran after Kelly and the others. He could hear the sound of a struggle up ahead. He went up to the next opening and turned the corner, rifle up and ready to fire. Two zombies were crossing the office space from the next hallway over. One had definitely been a woman. The other he couldn’t be sure of. He backed out of the opening and found himself face to face with a tall zombie in blue scrubs, like the ones he wore. The man was tall with slumping shoulders and black hair that was caked into stiff wires with blood. It reached for Jacob’s face, but it was slower than the first one he’d dealt with and he was able to grab its flabby arm and throw him into the room with the two other zombies.

He turned just as one of Casey’s riders fell into the main corridor ahead of him, a zombie all over him, tearing at his throat and scratching his face. Another zombie staggered into the corridor, right behind the first. Both fell on the man like rabid dogs, snarling and tearing, teeth snapping at the man’s face.

Jacob shot both zombies in quick order. They fell off the rider, leaving him on his back, bleeding and moaning, but still alive.

“Please . . .” the man said.

Jacob almost left the man to suffer until he died, but something inside him wouldn’t let that happen, even if he was part of the Family. Jacob got a bead on the man’s forehead. The rider let his hand drop. He closed his eyes and braced himself for the shot.

That’s when Jacob pulled the trigger.

In the silence that followed the shot Jacob heard the sound of shoes scraping across the floor. The first two zombies had come from there, and Jacob wasn’t about to get ambushed by more. He raised his rifle and rushed around the corner, leveling the sights on the man he saw there.

And almost fired.

He quickly moved the barrel away from Nick, his hand still in the air in front of him.

Jacob let out a sigh of relief. “Oh, God, I almost shot you.”

Nick looked as stunned as he was. “I’m glad you didn’t.”

Jacob laughed and put a hand on his shoulder. “You and me both, buddy.” Behind Nick, Kelly and Chelsea were both breathing hard, but hanging tough. “Everybody ready to head to the loading bay?”

“Do you know where it is?” Kelly said. “I got turned around.”

Nick pointed down one of the corridors. “The rider came from that way.”

“You sure?” Jacob said.

“It’s that way,” Nick said.

“All right.”

They moved out at a trot, Jacob in front, Nick bringing up the rear. They saw zombies in almost every corridor, but none of the riders. From the sound of the gunfire, Casey and his men were a good ways off. But then, sound did weird things inside structures like this. It was hard to gauge exactly where the sound was coming from.

The loading bay was empty. On the far side of the bay, a huge gash ran up the hull, as though a giant had come through with a can opener and torn it apart. Outside the crack, in a sliver of sunlight, they could make out a pair of riders standing guard over a field of restless horses.

Jacob went to one knee, hoping to see a little more of what was outside the ship, but when he did, he heard something ping off the metal wall behind him.