Plague of the Undead (22 page)

part five

THE EMPTY TOWNS

The next morning Jacob sat astride a stolen horse, looking at a moldering one-story home waist deep in the weeds, and asked himself if he really wanted to know the truth.

He looked up and down the empty street, taking in the skeletal remains of the houses, some of them with trees growing through the windows, some of them with roofs long since gone, and it occurred to him that he could simply throw the locket into the tall grass and go inside.

He could keep silent.

He could set his mouth in a smile of grim determination and pretend that out here in the wasteland, things were different.

After all, hadn’t he himself become a thief? Hadn’t he killed his fellow man in abominable ways? Hadn’t he even thrilled at the brutal, soul-destroying torture and murder of an old woman who desperately deserved it? Hadn’t he done all these things and claimed that the end of his own survival somehow justified the means?

That was really the question that needed answering.

What was justice? Was it a pure Aristotelian form, a thing that existed unto itself as an absolute standard somehow removed from the muddy particulars of day-to-day life?

Or was it a bendable thing?

Could a man believe in a thing, in the Code that was at the heart of who he had been raised to be, and yet somehow shuffle off that coil for the mere convenience of survival?

Was such a bargain possible?

And if those sins—be they sins—be forgiven, what other sins might he set aside?

Jacob looked at the locket in his hand and just didn’t know. He couldn’t answer the questions that plagued him. They seemed to form a knot so large and so dense he had no power to untie them. When he looked inward and tried to figure out the answer, the best he could come up with was a vague sort of emptiness where his certainty had once been.

Feeling sick to his stomach, he climbed down from the saddle and trudged up the porch, the steps creaking beneath his weight.

The voices he heard inside the little home went suddenly silent.

He knocked twice on the door, then twice more.

“It’s me,” he said. “It’s Jacob.”

Kelly opened the door, and the fear and worry on her face blossomed into joy. She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him hard. “Oh, Jacob,” she said. “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re here.”

She held the hug for a long moment, and then leaned back to arm’s length and studied his face.

“Jacob, are you okay?”

He nodded, and stepped past her.

“Jacob?”

The house was deep in shadow, but he could see all right. Much of the ceiling plaster had fallen to the floor and turned to mud with the rainwater that had gotten in over the years. Tree limbs grew in through the empty windows. Everywhere he looked there were signs of animals encroaching on the remains of human habitation. Owl pellets crowded one corner. Birds and raccoons had pulled the couch cushions apart and repurposed the stuffing. And everywhere he turned he smelled the odor of rotting wood.

But the really important things, many of them anyway, were still there.

The photos on the walls.

The handwritten notes on yellowed, curling paper tacked to the remains of a bulletin board. Even among the ruins, signs of everyday life remained. Jacob saw those things, and walked farther into the house.

“Hey, Jake, you okay, man?” Nick said. “You had us worried.”

Jacob turned. His old friend was sitting at the kitchen table, Chelsea behind him with her hand on his shoulder. Nick’s rifle was on the table. Ever since they were kids Nick had been able to pull off that effortless smile. He could look so cool, so totally relaxed, even here at the end of the world.

Jacob crossed to the table and picked up the rifle. He examined it, thinking about the lifetime they’d shared together, and then handed it to Kelly, who took it with a stunned and frightened look on her face.

“Jacob . . . ?” she said.

Nick stood. “Hey, man, what’s up?”

“Sit down,” Jacob said. The bark of command filled his voice.

Nick looked around the room. “You talking to me, Jake?”

“Yes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Sit down,” he said.

“All right,” Nick said. With a glance back at Chelsea, he sat at the table. “What’s up, Jake? Come on, man, you’re scaring me.” He tried the grin again.

Jacob took out the locket and showed it to Kelly.

Before she could ask what it was, he threw it on the table next to Nick.

Nick stiffened. He reached for the locket, and then pulled his hand away like the thing was a venomous snake. He glanced at Kelly, and then at Jacob. But he said nothing.

“What is that?” Jacob asked.

Nick looked at him and, for a moment, his face was a mask, inscrutable. But then the old confidence that had for so long, and so quietly, reminded Jacob of the ass kicking he’d taken at Nick’s hand all those years ago, suddenly cracked. Jacob saw through it all in an instant. He knew, absolutely knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Nick was the man Jasmine Simmons had seen in the dark in the corner of her bedroom.

Nick seemed to know it, too.

“What do you want me to say, Jake?”

Jacob said nothing. He raised his rifle and pointed it at Nick’s forehead.

“Whoa, hold on!” Kelly said. “Jacob, what are you doing?”

Jacob took his hand off the trigger and pointed at the locket on the table. “Look at that, Kelly.”

“What?”

“Look at it!” he shouted.

“Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll look at it.”

She picked it up from the table and opened it. At first she seemed ready to glance at it and dismiss it and turn her attention back to Jacob, but then spotted the cameo inside the locket, and a horrible knowledge passed over her face.

“This is the locket Jasmine Simmons lost,” she said.

Jacob put his finger back on the trigger.

“Nick?” she said. She held out the locket. “What is this? What’s he talking about?”

Nick didn’t answer. Calm as could be, he stared up the length of the rifle barrel at Jacob, waiting for him to speak.

“Oh, my God,” Chelsea said. “What are you doing? Put the gun down.”

“Do you want to tell her about it, Nick?” Jacob said. “Do you want to tell her about the young girls? There’s a dozen just like her back at Arbella. Maybe more than that? Some that didn’t respond the way you wanted. Wouldn’t pose for your drawings. But you had a way around that, didn’t you? Burglary was incidental, wasn’t it? The real reason you did it was to get that little peek you desperately wanted. That’s it, isn’t it, Nick? You’re a fucking predator, aren’t you?”

Nick didn’t say a word.

“Put the gun down!” Chelsea said. “Holy hell, what is this?”

“He’s a thief,” Jacob said.

“So what?” Chelsea said. “So are you. So am I. So is everyone in this room. You’re holding a stolen gun, for God’s sake. Put the gun down. Come on, everybody. Show a little common sense.”

Jacob took a deep breath. “We have a law,” he said. “It’s called the Code. It is the moral fabric that we live by. It is who we are.”

“Is it?” Nick said. “Is it really? Look at us. We are on the edge of the map here. We have traveled outside of our moral sphere. The Code teaches us that we have survived because we support each other, no matter what. Isn’t that true? Didn’t I lift you out of the herd? Didn’t I carry you when you couldn’t even walk? Haven’t I earned the right to say I support my brother?”

“Yes,” Jacob said. “And that’s what makes it worse. We had a contract, you and I. We took an oath. We swore to each other that we’d always have one another’s back.” He kept his weapon trained on Nick’s face. “But the locket is still right there. The truth is still right there.”

“What truth?” Chelsea said. “Good God, put that gun down.”

“Our Code is who we are,” Jacob said. “It doesn’t exist only in Arbella. It is who we are. Our word to each other follows us around wherever we go. It is woven into the truth of who we are. Wherever we go, we carry Arbella with us.”

“Platitudes,” Nick said. “This is the fucking wasteland. Out here, we make our own laws. We decide what is right and what is wrong. We live by our wits, and by our fists. Haven’t you been paying attention, Jacob? This is the Wild West. The law here is what we make it.”

It was his first misstep. Even up to that point, Jacob had doubted his ability to carry through with the punishment the Code meted out for all thieves, but upon hearing Mother Jane’s words spoken from his best friend’s mouth, his self-doubt thawed and resolved itself into conviction. Jacob glanced back at Kelly, and saw her face, tear-stained, but just as resolute as his. She nodded yes to the question that hung unspoken between them.

He turned back to Nick and adjusted his grip on the trigger.

“Wait!” Chelsea screamed. “What are you doing?”

Kelly moved forward and pulled the young girl away. Chelsea put up a hard fight, but Kelly pulled her to the side and squeezed her arms over her chest, holding her down and muttering in her ear to calm her.

It didn’t work.

Chelsea screamed at him the whole time, and as she railed, Jacob heard not her, but Amanda Grieder screaming for her husband’s innocence.

He leveled the rifle at point-blank range.

“Nick, you violated the Code.”

“Bullshit,” Nick said.

“You committed burglary in the night.”

“And what have you done? What right do you have to exact justice on me? How fucking dare you exact anything on me?”

“You stood by and watched me put an innocent man to death.”

To that, Nick had nothing to say.

“You even congratulated me on a job well done. You fucking bastard.” Jacob couldn’t hold it back any longer. The tears were rolling down his face. “How could you do this to me? Nick, Goddamn it, I loved you like a brother. How could you do this?”

“I love you, too, man,” Nick said. He was holding back the tears by a mighty effort. “Justice shouldn’t ever be personal. They told us that. Remember that? You can’t do this if it’s personal. The Code tells you that.”

Jacob could barely hold the rifle steady.

Kelly was crying, too. She stared at Nick, tears streaming down her face, and she shook her head in bitter pain.

“You bastard,” she said. “Goddamn you.”

Nick had seemed on the edge of a rally, but with that, he sagged. He looked at Jacob, and the effortless courage he’d always shown, the cool, calm confidence that defined him, was gone. He looked up at Jacob and all that was left was a pitiful man in the depths of shame and empty words.

“You don’t have to do this,” Nick said. “You don’t.”

Jacob raised the rifle. “I do. I will. I’m sorry, Nick.”

He pulled the trigger, and Nick’s head snapped back on his shoulders like his wires had been cut. Jacob watched him for a long moment, his mind utterly empty, until finally he let the barrel fall to the floor.

Only later, and then only dimly, did he become aware of Chelsea’s sobs filling the room.

It was Kelly who ended up doing the hard work.

Jacob took the body into the backyard and dug a grave. Then he put his friend in it and filled the hole back up with earth. Afterwards, he took one of the chairs from the kitchen and sat on the porch and watched the sunset come and go.

Meanwhile, Kelly was inside with Chelsea, trying to explain it all to her. Jacob listened for a time, nodding to himself as she recited the lessons they’d first received as children about the Code. Every word she said was right. She told Chelsea about how the Code was a contract that one simply didn’t slough off because it made life hard, or because it required you to make hard choices. The Code sustained them, and it made life in a world that wanted to sink its teeth into your throat possible.

Jacob listened to her, the same words he’d heard all his life, and he wondered how he could believe in something that demanded he kill the best friend he’d ever had. How could something that was meant to hold him together tear him up so badly inside?

He thought about that for a long time.

And he was still thinking about it later that night when the aerofluyt’s morphic field generator finally went critical, and a dark gray mushroom cloud rose into the sky above the ruins of North Little Rock, Arkansas.

“Are we in danger?” Jacob asked.

They’d gone to the front porch to watch the sky. The horizon was bleeding orange across the roofs of the buildings to the north, and the mushroom cloud was still rising.

“Is there gonna be like fallout or something?”

“We’re fine here,” Kelly said. “The morphic field generator utilizes non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation. No fallout, but it’ll give anybody anywhere close to the blast site a nasty sunburn.”

“Like how close?” Jacob asked.

Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know. The hot zone is probably something like ten miles. Anything inside of that range is probably toast. There’s probably going to be a warm zone outside of that, say another fifteen miles.”

“We’re about forty miles away, I think,” Jacob said.

“Yeah, about that. We’re probably okay.”

“Probably?”

She grunted in frustration. “Like I would know? Jacob, I have no idea. I’m just guessing.”

He nodded.

Over at the far corner of the porch Chelsea had a blanket wrapped over her shoulders. The night air was damp and chilly, but Jacob suspected she wasn’t using it for warmth. She’d stopped crying a while ago, but her face was still red and puffy and her eyes rheumy. She hadn’t spoken since her talk with Kelly earlier that evening, and Jacob got a strong feeling they weren’t going to be hearing anything out of her for a while. He’d underestimated her feelings for Nick. He could see that plain as day. Eventually, they’d have to come to an understanding about what had happened. But right now, watching her, Jacob had no idea how that was going to happen. He was no closer to sorting it out in his own head, much less being able to put it into words so that she could understand. He felt lost.

And then Kelly put a hand on his arm and squeezed so tightly he cried out.

“Shhh, Jacob.”

She was staring across the street, where a zombie had just limped out of the weeds. The dead woman was dragging a ruined leg behind her, making slow but steady progress to the north, toward the explosion still glowing on the horizon.

She hadn’t seen them, but they weren’t out of danger. Jacob scanned the rest of the street. In the dark it was difficult to discern substance from shadow, but there was movement all around them.

“More of them over there,” Kelly said, pointing to Jacob’s right.

“Crap,” he muttered. Now that he was looking for them, he could see dozens of zombies threading their way through the abandoned cars and strewn rubble of the dead city. “Where are they all coming from?”

“You ran the morphic field generator for nearly two days,” Chelsea said bitterly. She wasn’t even trying to keep her voice down. “What did you think would happen? You’ve probably drawn every zombie for five hundred miles.”

Jacob and Kelly traded a worried glance. She was right, of course. In the back of his mind Jacob knew he was courting disaster by overloading the morphic field generator, but he hadn’t anticipated it taking so long to go critical. Based on what Kelly had told him, he’d thought five or six hours at the most. But Chelsea was right. With the home fires burning for two days straight, they might as well have sent a personal invitation to every zombie within five hundred miles. Things were about to get hot.

“We need to get inside,” Jacob said.

“Yeah,” Kelly said. She crossed the porch and put a hand on Chelsea’s shoulder. “Come on. Come with me.”

But before any of them could get inside there was a loud crash from the backyard.

“The horses,” Jacob said. “Shit, the horses.”

He ran through the house, scooping up his rifle as he went out the back door. He jumped off the porch just as a zombie stepped into the yard. The wooden privacy fence that had once enclosed Maggie Hester’s backyard had long since fallen down. Tall shrubs and weeds had taken its place, and zombies were coming through it from every side. The horses were terrified. They reared and kicked and ran every which way. Jacob tried to secure them, but they wouldn’t calm.

One of the horses found a hole in the underbrush and dashed through. The others followed close behind, and within seconds they were gone and a tightening circle of the undead surrounded Jacob. A dead woman got too close and he punched her in the side of the head with his rifle. Another put her hand on his back. He spun around, grabbed her arm, and flung her to the ground.

“Get inside!” Chelsea said.

He took one last glance around the backyard. The dead were closing in from every side.

“Jacob!” Kelly yelled.

The dead were coming through the front door and through the windows. He ran up the steps and charged through the back door. He closed it just as four of the undead fell against it, but he knew it wouldn’t keep them out for long. Already they were coming through the back windows, the urgent moaning that Jacob thought of as their feeding call so loud now that he could feel it in his chest.

Chelsea had retreated to a back corner of the living room. She was trying to extract her rifle from her saddlebags but couldn’t seem to make it budge. A dead man whose clothes had nearly rotted off his body was an arm’s length from her. He slashed at her with a withered hand, but Chelsea didn’t panic. She lifted the saddle with both hands and shoved it in the zombie’s face. The man pitched over backwards, landing on his side at Jacob’s feet. Before the man could get up, Jacob jammed his heel into his face. A living man would have blacked out from the blow, but the zombie barely registered it. He reached for Jacob’s leg and tried to claw his way through Jacob’s pants.

There was no choice but to shoot.

Jacob spun his gun around and fired into the dead man’s face. The zombie’s head smacked into the wooden floor and he went still.

“We need to get out front,” Jacob said. “We need to run.”

Kelly had Jacob’s pistol in her hand, her head on a swivel as she watched the zombies pouring in through every window. “How?” she said. “They’re everywhere.”

He was only a few feet from the two empty windows that looked out on the backyard. Zombies were climbing through both of them. More were breaking in through the kitchen. Jacob could not have taken it all in, yet somehow he did. He watched Kelly turn her pistol on its side and fire at a woman clawing her way through the back door. He saw Chelsea punch at three zombies that were trying to pull her down, then fire her rifle for two perfect head shots. Both zombies folded to the ground. Something invisible sliced through the air in front of his face and he wheeled around. Kelly was there with his pistol, the muzzle trained on him. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that she’d landed a perfect kill shot on the zombie behind him.

“Thanks,” he said. There were zombies coming in from every direction. They needed to get out the front door and into the street. He shot three zombies near the front door and then grabbed Kelly by the shoulder.

“Go!” he said. “Go on, hurry!”

She ran out the front door, Chelsea right by her side. Jacob covered them, firing into a group of zombies that were right on their tails. Two of them went down. His third shot hit one of the zombies in the shoulder and knocked it to the ground. Watching it get back up again was all the motivation Jacob needed.

He ran after Kelly and Chelsea. Zombies were coming at them from both ends of the street. They’d been headed north, toward the explosion, but the sound of gunfire had turned their course and now they were closing in. They’d even pulled down one of the horses. A tight knot of them were feeding on the animal, tearing into it, elbow deep in its guts. But when they saw Jacob and the others, they slowly rose from the kill, teetered for a moment, then advanced.

“Where do we go?” Chelsea asked him.

They were three houses down from the end of the block. He’d come from that way and he remembered seeing businesses to the south, gas stations and a grocery store and a strip mall. They might be able to get on a roof somewhere, lay low and let the river of the dead pass them by.

“Go that way!” he said.

There were at least twenty zombies between them and the intersection, and more were coming into view with each passing moment. Jacob ejected his magazine and slapped in a new one. Six of the dead came around a rusting car and headed straight for them. He took aim and fired. He burned through half the magazine in just a few seconds. Four of the zombies went down, but more quickly took their place.

They wouldn’t stop coming. Everywhere he turned, there were more of them. They flooded the street, their moaning echoing off the houses.

When they reached the intersection, Jacob directed them south. The strip mall and gas stations he’d seen on the way in were four blocks away. In between were about thirty zombies, maybe more. Most of the ones farther off were heading toward the house they’d just fled, following the noise, but the ones closer by had already spotted them, and they were coming on, moaning at a fever pitch.

Jacob’s plan was to get to the gas station. Now that the sun was coming up, he could see a black metal ladder on the back of the building. If they made that, they could climb to the roof and lay low.

“You see that ladder up there?” Jacob called back to Kelly. “That’s where we’re going.”

“I see it,” she said.

They sprinted for the gas station, Jacob ranging out front to intercept any of the dead that crossed their path.

He put down two of them and was about to shoot a dead woman in a blue dress when he felt something hot stab him in the leg. He staggered and then fell. Rolling over he looked at his leg and saw a gash across his calf.

“What happened?” Kelly asked.

“I think I got shot,” he said.

She and Chelsea were about twenty yards away. They veered toward him but stopped almost immediately. Zombies were charging into the street from the west. They went straight for Kelly and Chelsea. The two women fired into the advancing crowd, but they failed to land any head shots and within seconds the zombies had effectively cut them off from Jacob.

He raised his rifle to fire at the zombies, but before he could pop off a shot, a small puff of dirt appeared in front of his feet.

Then another, just inches from his hip.

He looked up. Through the crowd of zombies he saw Kelly and Chelsea surrounded by zombies, and beyond them, riders.

Jacob’s blood went cold. It was Casey and Chris Walker and three other men, and they looked horrible, their faces burned and peeling. Caught by the blast, Jacob thought.

They were a hundred feet away, but riding their horses hard for Kelly and Chelsea. Casey had Sheriff Taylor’s M4 and he was firing it one-handed at Jacob. The shots were silent, and the zombies didn’t even know he was there until he was right on top of them. He and the other riders fired into the zombie herd, putting them down one after another, until they were looming over Kelly and Chelsea.

“Drop the guns,” he ordered them.

Chelsea, terrified by her former master, immediately threw her rifle to the ground.

Kelly dropped her pistol a moment later.

“Jacob,” Casey called out. “You best drop your rifle. It’s you I want. You and me, we got a score to settle.”

Zombies were closing in around them. He glanced behind him and saw three running—actually running—toward him from the gas station. He was still too far away. He’d never be able to make it there, not with Casey and the others on horseback. They’d run him down in seconds.

Unless he leveled the playing field.

He couldn’t get a clear shot of Casey. Kelly was in the way. But the horse Casey rode was a big target, and putting the man on the ground would change things.

“Jacob,” Casey said. “You put that gun down right now, you hear? I’ll kill ’em if you don’t.”

Jacob sighted in on Casey’s horse and fired.

The animal lurched under its rider, teetered, and then fell to the ground, dumping Casey into the weeds.

He jumped to his feet screaming. “Get that motherfucker!” he said to his riders. “Get him!”

The riders spurred their horses and charged.

Jacob sprayed bullets at them, firing the Ruger as fast as he could. He managed to hit two of the horses, sending their riders to the ground. The third rider circled around him, but the zombies were on top of the rider at that point and he was forced to fire at a dead woman who was clawing at his hip.

Jacob didn’t give him a chance to recover. He fired at the man, hitting him twice in the leg and once high up on his chest. The man reeled in his saddle, struggling to bring his mount under control, but his wounds were too severe and all he could manage was to sag across the back of his horse’s neck.

Meanwhile, Casey was trying to get back on a horse. The zombies had spooked them though, and all of the animals were rearing, eyes rolling wildly, kicking and bucking.

Casey grabbed Chris Walker by the arm and pulled him down. “Get off that horse!”

Chris went sprawling to the ground.

A zombie grabbed at Jacob. He caught the thing’s arm, twisted it behind the zombie’s back, and shoved it into one of the riders he’d grounded just moments before. The zombie bumbled into the man, confused at first, and then tore into him greedily.

More zombies surrounded the other rider Jacob had unhorsed. They clawed at his face, grabbed his clothes, and finally succeeded in pulling him to the ground.

Jacob jumped behind the carcass of one of the horses he’d shot and tried to find Casey amidst all the confusion. Casey was trying to get the horse under control, but he couldn’t manage the frightened animal and hold on to his rifle at the same time. The horse spun away from him, and for a moment Jacob had a clear shot.

He wasn’t fast enough though. Casey ran for Chris Walker and pushed him toward Kelly and Chelsea.

“Get them up on that roof!” he said.

Jacob emptied the rest of his magazine in a vain attempt to put a round in Casey’s head, but all he managed to hit were the zombies closing in around them. He scanned the scene, taking it all in. Chris Walker was pushing the girls toward the gas station, and it looked like they were going to make it. Zombies had already fallen on the other riders and were tearing them apart. Casey was standing in the open, swinging Sheriff Taylor’s rifle at every zombie who got within striking distance. And still more of the undead were pouring into the street, attracted by all the noise.