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Authors: Joe McKinney

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BOOK: Plague of the Undead

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Russell pulled his backpack tight against his chest. “I’m not giving her my food.”

“Russell, you have to. She needs it.”

“Well, I need it, too. We’re gonna run out of food soon, and what am I gonna do then?”

“Russell,” Brad said, “this is for the good of the group. You have a lot and she doesn’t have any. You need to give her some of yours.”

“Bullshit,” he said. “It’s not my fault she didn’t bring what she needed. I have food in my bag because I had the foresight to put it there. If she didn’t do the same, why is that my problem?”

“Because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Give her some of yours, then.”

“Russell, that’s not helpful.”

Then Brad motioned to Billy. “Get his food. Distribute it around.”

“Don’t,” Russell said, pleading with Billy. “Please don’t.”

“Give me the bag, Russell,” Billy said.

Russell shook his head, and Billy, wearing a look of grim determination, moved in to take it from him.

Over the next four days, we lost six people. Tynice and Gustavo both went into diabetic shock and died. The other four, weakened by a lack of food and no water, gradually shut down, and when we woke to the sunrise on the morning of the fifth day, they were dead. Once again Billy had to crush their heads to keep them from coming back, and then pushed the bodies out the window. Again we all looked away as the ever-growing crowd of zombies outside ate their corpses.

It rained later that day and we were able to get more water, but the food shortage was becoming critical. We were down to a dozen people, all of whom were starving, and a small package of beef jerky to go around.

“Well, we need to divide this up,” said Jim. “Here, I’ll do it.”

“No, you won’t,” said Brad. “We decide together.”

“Oh, that’s great,” said the girl from SMU. “And while the two of you argue about it, the rest of us starve. Just hand a piece to everybody.”

Brad and Jim and Sandra went off to another corner of the train car and talked about it. When they came back, they each had a big piece of jerky. They handed some of the smaller pieces around and told us to divide it up.

“But there’s not enough here for any of us,” said Billy.

“Times are hard,” Brad said. “I know. I understand. But we’ll just have to tighten our belts.”

I got a piece and went off to one side to eat it. I hadn’t had anything in more than a day, and tore into it eagerly.

A moment later, Brad and Jim and Sandra went over to Billy and whispered to him. He looked upset, but he didn’t yell. He just took his piece of jerky and tore it into three parts and gave each of them a piece. Then he went over to the far side of the car and sat down. He looked utterly exhausted and used up, but he didn’t protest.

Then they came to me. Brad asked me to give up what I had left for them.

He said as the leaders they needed to stay sharp.

They couldn’t afford to go hungry.

“Can’t do it,” I said. “I’m the press. I’m an observer. You can’t do anything that keeps me from that role.”

They reluctantly agreed and went off to get what was left of the jerky from the others.

The next morning, Billy was dead.

None of us had the energy to move. We were all starving, most of us were sick. And—always—there was the constant roar of the moaning crowd just outside, reminding us that we were not long for this world.

“What are we gonna do?” asked the girl from SMU.

“I think it’s plain what we have to do,” said Brad. He looked at Jim and Sandra, and though they didn’t want to agree with a Democrat just out of principle, they still nodded their heads in assent.

“I don’t understand,” the girl said. “What? What are we gonna do?”

“We have to eat,” Brad said.

The girl looked at him, dumbfounded, not understanding.

“Eat what?”

Brad, with his mouth set in a harsh, grimacing frown, pointed at the body of the soldier who had done so much for all of us.

Two weeks later, there were only four of us left—Brad, Jim, Sandra, and myself.

Sandra was not doing well.

Actually, none of us were doing well, but she was feeling really bad. We hadn’t been able to cook any of the friends we’d eaten, and the shock of consuming all that raw human flesh was doing terrible things to our systems.

Sandra was doubled over on her side, holding her gut with both hands and moaning like one of the zombies outside.

Jim was sitting next to her, stroking her hair.

“I’m dying,” she said.

“You’re not going to die,” Jim said. “You’re just sick. This’ll pass.”

She looked up at him, and there was pain and fear in her eyes, but also acceptance. That acceptance was the hardest thing for me to see, for I had seen it before, on the others that we’d already eaten. And when people started to get that look in their eyes, it was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It was only a matter of time.

“I’m dying, Jim. I know it.”

He didn’t say anything, for I think he knew it, too.

“Promise me,” she said. Her voice was weak, raspy.

“Anything,” he said, still stroking her hair.

For a moment, as she strained to look toward Brad Owens, who was sitting against the opposite wall, the acceptance and fear in her eyes changed to hatred.

“Don’t let him eat me. I don’t want some liberal bastard eating me. I can’t die knowing some liberal sack of shit lived another day because of me.”

She wanted to say more, but another wave of pain shot through her gut and she let out a choked scream.

“She’s delirious,” Jim said to me.

But when he put his hand back on her face and pushed the hair out of her face, she was dead.

“Sandra?” Brad said. “Sandra, no, baby, no!”

He lifted her head and cradled it in his lap, rocking her corpse gently, like a child he was trying to put to sleep.

An hour or so later, Brad came over to him with the piece of metal from one of the seats that we’d been using to carve meat off of our friends.

“It’s time,” he said.

“Fuck off,” Jim said. “You’re not touching her.”

“Jim,” Brad said. “Please don’t do this. We have to survive.”

“She didn’t want a sorry sack of shit like you touching her. No worthless Democrat is going to touch her.”

“I’ve as much right to her corpse as you do.”

“Like hell.”

I knew what was going to happen even before they lunged at each other. Jim knocked the blade from Brad’s hand and the next instant they were rolling around on the ground, their hands at each other’s throats.

I took complete notes of what happened during the fight, but I guess that really doesn’t matter now. The end result was that they strangled each other. Democrat and Republican, neither would quit until they’d snuffed the life out of the other, and now they were both dead.

So I sat there, the only member of the Young Americans left alive.

And a short while later, I picked up the blade and started eating.

I was rescued by the Chinese Army a week later.

They hadn’t planned on finding me there. They hadn’t planned on finding anyone alive, I don’t think. Someone told me they were looking for the train, that they had spotted it from the air and went in to retrieve it because they needed it to deliver troops across the country. The zombie apocalypse, they told me, had been contained. For the most part. A few pockets of zombies remained, but those were being taken care of. I was lucky to be alive, they told me, but I could tell they didn’t think much of me for it. The first soldiers to board the train had taken one look at me, and at the pile of bones surrounding me, and had turned their heads to vomit.

News of what had happened went ahead of me.

The Chinese Army put me on a cargo ship and sent me back to the States. The ship’s crew seemed to already know everything about me, and that made mealtimes rough. As soon as I would enter the mess hall, the others would get up to leave. No one, it seemed, could stomach watching me eat.

No one, it seemed, even back in the States, could watch me eat.

Live with that long enough, and it hardens you.

That’s why I live here, on this farm in Georgia, where I grow my own food and raise my own livestock.

I live alone, and I like it just fine.

That way, there’s nobody to turn up their nose if I like to eat the occasional steak raw. Besides, it’s nobody’s business but mine.

This is still the goddamned U.S. of A., for Christ’s sake.

Jimmy Finder and the Rise of the Templenauts

“Is that your experiment?” Captain Fisher asked.

The infantry captain gestured toward the boy on the other side of the one-way glass. From the look on Fisher’s face, it was obvious he didn’t think much of the kid. He certainly didn’t see humanity’s greatest hope in the war against the zombies. What he saw was a mop-haired runt, too skinny, too short, too awkward, about as far from a soldier as one could hope to find.

“His name is Jimmy Finder,” Dr. David Knopf replied. “I try not to refer to him as my experiment.”

“Finder? You’re kidding. That can’t be his real name, can it?”

Knopf smiled amiably enough, but inside he was holding on to his patience with both hands. It was always the same with these military men, their smug condescending abuse and smirks of disdain whenever they were confronted with something that challenged the conventional wisdom of the battlefield.

“James is all we were able to learn from him,” Knopf admitted. “We started calling him Finder after his abilities became apparent.”

Fisher shook his head. “Frankly, doctor, I think this is all a load of crap. You should probably know that from the start.”

Knopf’s expression carefully masked his frustration. It wouldn’t do any good to alienate the military now that they’d finally agreed to let him demonstrate Jimmy’s talents in the field. It had only taken twelve long years.

“That’s all right, captain. I’m used to skepticism.”

“It’s a wonder you still bother trying.”

You bastard, Knopf thought. Fisher was really trying to bait him. “I believe in what we’re doing here, captain. I wouldn’t have put twelve years of my life into this project if I didn’t. That boy in there is going to save lives and help us turn the corner on this war.”

Knopf, afraid he was about to say something he’d regret, turned his attention on Jimmy, and a familiar mix of pity and pride rose up in him. Twelve years earlier, a contingent of Warbots discovered the boy wandering the hills above the nearby town of Mill Valley, Ohio. The provisional government gave him to Knopf’s Weapons Research Team with orders that they find out how a two-year-old toddler had managed to survive an entire summer right under the noses of ten thousand zombies. It had taken Knopf three years to discover the answer. It took another nine before anybody in the military’s High Command would take him seriously enough to let him prove it. But he did find the truth.

“You really believe that kid in there has psychic powers?”

“That’s not exactly what he does,” Knopf said. “He’s not a psychic. He doesn’t predict the future or read minds, none of that gypsy fortune-teller stuff. Think of him as a sort of bloodhound that we’ve trained to sniff out zombies.” Fisher was staring at him, his expression inscrutable. “Look,” Knopf went on, “you’re familiar with the morphic field theory, right? The idea that zombies move in large groups because their brains are linked by a neuro-electric field in the reptilian core of their brains. Jimmy can pick up on that morphic field.”

“I’ve heard the theory, doctor. I’ve also heard a lot of respectable scientists say that it’s a bunch of rubbish.”

“It’s not rubbish, captain. You’ve probably experienced it yourself. Ever felt somebody staring at you from across the room? Or have you ever thought of somebody completely out of the blue, and then moments later they call you on the phone? Ever watched a large flock of birds change direction without running into each other? How about watched a school of fish? Same thing. It’s not rubbish. It’s a documented fact. And it’s what allows Jimmy to do what he does. Think of how helpful that would be on the battlefield. Think of the tactical advantage you’d have if you knew where your enemy was all the time.”

“Anybody can find a zombie, doctor. Just go outside the walls and make a lot of noise. You’ll find plenty in no time.”

The military, Knopf thought. Such fools. They couldn’t even come up with new jokes, much less open their minds to new possibilities. It was no wonder they were getting their butts handed to them on the battlefield. And if Captain Fisher was any indication of the kind of officer the High Command was turning out, the future looked bleak indeed.

“Yes,” Knopf said, “but the trick, as I’m sure they taught you in your officer training school, is to find the enemy before they find you. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“We already have sensors, doctor. The robots can detect zombies with an eighty-six percent accuracy rate. In my opinion, that’s—”

“Hardly an acceptable margin of error,” Knopf said, shaking his head. “Not when lives are on the line. And eighty-six percent is nothing compared to what Jimmy’s capable of. Wait until we arrive in Mill Valley, captain. Your robots claim to have cleared the town of every last zombie. What will happen if that boy in there is able to lead us to even one zombie? What will you say then?”

“It’ll never happen.”

“All I ask is for you to keep an open mind, captain,” Knopf said.

“You’re asking me to believe in mumbo jumbo, doctor. I prefer to put my faith in robots and bullets.”

Knopf glanced over at Jimmy. The boy was tossing in his sleep. Nerves, probably. Or bad dreams. Poor kid. Sleep was usually the only time his mind got any rest, the only time he could turn off his gift.

“Just you wait, captain. Tomorrow, that boy’s going to make a believer out of you.”

“All stop!” Fisher shouted.

The expedition ground to a halt. They’d been walking for hours, and the clattering and clanking and whirring of a full company of robots had made a tremendous racket that even now, in the sudden silence that followed the captain’s command, continued to ring in Jimmy Finder’s ears.

But the ringing only lasted a moment. Once the racket faded, the pulsing images of the dead flooded back into his brain. The town was definitely not clear. He could sense hundreds of pulses going off all around him, like he was standing in the middle of a huge orchestra made of nothing but big bass drums, all of them pounding out a violent and relentless and tuneless rhythm.

He groaned in misery, wanting only to curl up in his hammock and fall asleep. Going outside like this, with nothing to shield him from all those morphic pulses, was crippling. Dr. Knopf had tried to teach him a few tricks to get rid of the pain, like focusing on a single thought-presence and letting everything else fall away, but most of the tricks were too hard to do outside of the lab. And right now, he could barely open his eyes his head hurt so badly.

I can’t do this, he thought.

James.

Jimmy stiffened in alarm. He looked around, uncertain who was talking to him. He was surrounded by Troopbots. They had no faces, only curved, featureless metal plates that they turned toward their human masters whenever they needed to speak or were spoken to, but none of them were looking at him now. They stood like statues, tall and mute in the settling dust and gloom of evening.

And there were no humans anywhere around him. Dr. Knopf and the soldiers had moved to the shade of the portico of a deserted gas station, talking in hushed tones. Knopf wasn’t even looking in his direction.

It is you, isn’t it? My God, how long I’ve waited!

That time the voice was so strong it caused his eyes to fly open wide. The hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end, as though from static electricity. He could feel the blood rush to his head. He was dizzy, his cheeks flushed with an uncomfortable heat. It wasn’t just a voice, he realized, but a thought. A thought with weight, with force behind it.

The sensation didn’t last long, though. The dizziness faded. A cold sweat replaced the heat on his cheeks. He had a very real, almost tangible sense of the contact fading. The next instant, all trace of the link—yes, that was it; it had been a link he felt, like another mind wrapping its grip around his mind—echoed away, leaving him confused and feeling somehow vulnerable.

Again he looked around.

No one was paying him any attention.

He cocked his head to one side, trying to make sense of what he had just felt. Dr. Knopf had always said his power was of a class known as remote viewing. He could sense zombies, locate them with a degree of precision the machines couldn’t even begin to approach, but only that. He had never heard voices before. Thought-speech was out of the range of his abilities, much as people were unable to hear the high-pitched tones of a dog whistle. And for that Jimmy was supposed to be thankful. Dr. Knopf had told him so, and his own short excursions outside the lab had backed that up. It was hard enough holding on to his sanity while sensing the morphic fields that emanated from the dead. If he could hear the thoughts of the living as well . . .

But then, what was happening to him? Was this something new?

The expedition had stopped on a hill road above the little town of Mill Valley. Jimmy walked through the perfectly ordered rows of Troopbots and continued on until he was well out in front of the rest of the expedition. From here, he could look down on the whole expanse of the ruined town. The mind-voice was coming from somewhere down there, under the rubble.

Cautiously, one small bit at a time, he opened his mind and searched the ruins. This always hurt, even in the controlled circumstances of the laboratory, but he was curious.

Gritting his teeth, he sent out a thought:

Who are you? How do you know my name?

Jimmy waited, his mind open and unguarded.

Who are you?

But there was nothing. Not even the morphic pulsing of a zombie’s brain. The evening gloom settling over the town was like a burial shroud, silent and unfathomably deep. Was it any wonder it frightened him so?

Why won’t you answer me!

The mind-voice slashed like a knife through Jimmy’s sleep. He flinched awake, eyes shooting open in panic. His breaths were coming in fast, shallow gulps, his body soaked with sweat.

Please stop! Oh, God, please stop. You’re hurting me!

He sent the thought out in desperation. His head felt like it was about to split open, like there was a crazy little man inside there going to town with a hatchet on his brain.

I need help. I need help now!

Jimmy gasped. The pain was coming in waves now. He gritted his teeth against it, tensing the muscles in his temples, and surprisingly, that helped a little. The pain started to ebb away.

Who are you?

But there was no need to ask the question, for now that the pain was no longer tearing him apart, Jimmy knew.

The mind-voice belonged to his father.

Yes, James! It’s me! Oh, thank God you’ve come!

They told me you were dead.

Jimmy dropped out of the hammock he’d slung between the gas pumps of the abandoned gas station and staggered numbly toward the moonlit road, where the robots stood in silent, perfectly ordered rows.

They told me you were dead.

Do I sound dead to you? James, come to me. I need help.
Nodding slowly, transfixed by the mind-voice pulling him toward the town, Jimmy began to walk.

The silence hanging over the town was massive. Jimmy could feel it like a presence, vast and powerful, full of menace.

Many people had died here. In the four days since the army retook the town the birds and the rats had descended on the corpses that were still heaped in the gutters and had begun to feast. The carrion feeders watched him silently as he passed, their eyes gleaming yellow and full of hate, their bodies wet with gore. So many dead, Jimmy thought. Such a terrible waste. Instinctively, he found himself emptying his mind, measuring his breathing, the way Dr. Knopf had taught him, so that he could stay calm when facing the horror of a badly decomposed zombie.

But not even Dr. Knopf’s calming lessons prepared him for the horror of this place. The fighting here must have been intense. Besides the bodies and the carrion feeders, hardly a wall was free of bullet holes. A few of the buildings had been reduced to rubble. Many more were burned to blackened skeletons.

And no matter where he looked, no matter what road he took, the silence was everywhere.

Daddy, which way?

Daddy.

That word stopped him, and he couldn’t help but smile. It sounded funny to him. He’d spent his entire life an orphan, the subject of countless stupid tests, trying to justify what he did for people who seemed only interested in mocking him and treating him like a freak—and now here he was calling for his daddy

The military men already thought of him as a runt, he knew that. What would they think of him now? They’d call him pathetic. Or worse. But what did they know? They weren’t orphans. They hadn’t walked in his shoes, cried his tears, felt the kind of heartsick loneliness that carried him off to sleep each night. Screw them. So what if he walked around the world calling for his daddy? What did they know about it?

Feeling mean, feeling bitter, Jimmy wandered the ruins, searching for a way down under the town. He sent out his mind-voice constantly, trying to get his father to answer. But he never felt anything more than a curious tickling sensation at the base of his skull. Even as he opened up more and more, out of desperation, there was nothing but the town’s foreboding silence.

And then, he found it. A way down.

He had turned down an alleyway because he sensed it was the right way to go, and that same feeling had led him to a half-hidden flight of stairs. They terminated in a rusted metal doorway marked:

MILL VALLEY WATER AUTHORITY
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

This was it.

The hint of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. Trust your instincts, Knopf had told him. Well, he had trusted his instincts, and they led right where he wanted to go.

Then Jimmy wriggled the knob.

Locked, damn it.

He rammed it with his shoulder and only managed to hurt himself.

Out of frustration, he picked up a piece of rebar from the sidewalk and banged on the knob until it snapped off.

The hinges groaned as the door fell open.

Leaning forward, he peered into the darkness, gagging on the noisome stench of sewage coming up from the levels below. Jimmy opened his mind, intending to find his father’s mind-voice, but instead was hit by something else.

Do not go down there.

“What?” Jimmy said. As before, he looked around, because this voice was different from his father’s. It seemed to be someone talking to him. But he was alone. A sheet of newspaper, carried by a breeze, drifted down the empty street. Nothing else moved.

“Who’s talking?” Jimmy asked.

If you go down there you will die.

“Tell me who you are,” Jimmy insisted.

This is Comm Six. State your designation.

“My designation? What the . . . I’m Jimmy.”

He shook his head, trying to make sense of the sensation the voice was causing in his ears. It wasn’t a voice. Not exactly. It was a mind-voice, like his father’s, but very different. Where his father’s voice was a spike trying to hammer its way into his brain, this voice was like insects buzzing around in his head. And yet it was just as clear, just as insistent, as his father’s. Only it was . . . soothing somehow. Not at all harsh.

What’s a Comm Six?

I am Comm Six.

Yeah, but what does that mean? Who are you? How come you can talk to me?

I am a Combot. I directed the robots that fought to retake this town. I was damaged. I was left behind.

I’ve never heard of a Combot. And you don’t sound like any robot I’ve ever heard of.

I am not like other robots. I am a Combot. I am sentient.

Sentient? What’s that mean?

It means that I am aware of my own presence. I know there is a me and a you and that we are different from each other. I can think.

Can’t other robots do that, like Warbots?

Not like I do. Warbots have adaptive programming. They have built-in algorithms that allow them to interpret their environment within a narrow variety of preprogrammed ways. I do not have those limitations. My thinking is based on nonlinear models, more like your own.

I’ve never heard of robots being able to do stuff like that.

I was an experiment.

Jimmy laughed. “Uh-huh. You and me both.”

Why do you laugh? You are in danger. Do not go into the sewers. There are many zombies down there still.

I don’t sense any. Usually I can sense the zombies. That’s what I do.

Perhaps the lead residue is blocking you.

I don’t get blocked. My sensors aren’t like yours. And besides, my dad’s down there.

A pause.

There are only zombies down below.

Yeah?

Yes.

Well, I guess we’ll see about that, won’t we?