Plague of the Undead (27 page)

The ground shook beneath the Warbot’s weight. To Knopf it looked like some grossly deformed Tyrannosaurus Rex, a tank on two monstrously thick mechanical legs. It advanced down the rubble-strewn ruins of Oak Street and stopped in front of Fisher, bowing its enormous head down to eye level with the captain in a whir of servos and pneumatic sighs.

“We have searched the town, sir. The sensors do not register the boy or his ankle monitor.”

“Yeah, well, he didn’t go somewhere else. He’s here.”

A pause.

“What are your orders, sir?”

“Find him.”

“We have scanned everywhere, sir.”

“You haven’t scanned where he’s at. Scan again. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Warbot left to resume its search.

“Trouble?” Knopf asked to the young captain’s back.

“It’s all the lead dust,” Fisher said, turning on him. The captain adjusted the surgical mask he wore, clearly frustrated with it. Mill Valley’s smelting factory had been destroyed during the fight to retake the town and it scattered lead particulates and aerosolized bits of brick all over everything. The masks
were
uncomfortable, tending as they did to trap sweat at the corners of the mouth, making the wearer feel like they were constantly drooling, but they were absolutely necessary. No one wanted to breathe in that stuff. Especially because the robots kicked so much of it up into the air. “It’s playing havoc with the robots, everything from their sensors to their servos. It’s no wonder we lost so many robots in the fight.”

“Or that you misstated the presence of zombies here.”

“You have no basis to support that comment, doctor.”

Fair enough, Knopf thought, and nodded.

They had already looked over a good part of the town, and even now, the Troopbots were sifting through buildings and overgrown lots, continuing the search. But even with the robots tirelessly performing their duties, Knopf couldn’t help but feel frustrated. He’d grown used to Jimmy’s precise directions, his ability to describe exactly where a zombie was hidden, and the waiting and the uncertainty of doing it the military’s way was maddening.

Before Jimmy, everyone believed the zombies were nothing more than dead-meat husks. Beyond a few weak electrical impulses in the reptilian core of their brains, which generated the morphic fields that allowed them to find each other and to move around, searching for living brains, the zombies were thought to have no neurological function whatsoever. Certainly they retained no sense of self, no memories, no desires. They possessed only an insatiable need to feed on living tissue. Most scientists stopped short, however, of accepting Knopf’s ideas of morphic fields. That was, until Jimmy came along.

Knopf remembered asking him once how he did it, what it felt like to sense a dead man’s mind.

“It hurts,” Jimmy had said. “Beyond that, it’s hard to describe.”

But then, several months later, on a foggy morning in early May, the two of them had taken a walk outside the lab, and through the dense screen of fog they’d seen sentries up on the walls, picking their way with flashlights, the beams muted but distinct in the sodden air.

Jimmy had stopped and stared.

Knopf continued walking for a few steps, and then turned back to see what was wrong.

“That right there,” Jimmy said, pointing at the flashlight beams bobbing on the wall. “That’s what it looks like in my head.”

“When you sense the zombies, you mean?”

“Yeah. It looks like that. Like flashlight beams in the fog. Only the light feels like a current, you know? Like the way you can feel water moving over your skin. Or how you can sense static electricity when it makes the hairs stand up on your arms.”

The description had impressed Knopf. Little moments like that had brought them closer together, and if he wasn’t exactly a father to Jimmy, he imagined he at least qualified as a benevolent uncle.

“If the boy’s around here, we’ll find him,” Fisher said.

Knopf realized he’d been drifting. He glanced at Fisher, a vacant look on his face.

“Doctor? Did you hear me? I said we’ll find him.”

Knopf nodded.

“Why do you suppose he ran off?”

“I don’t know,” Knopf answered truthfully. “It hurts his head terribly to be out of the laboratory like this. There’s so much mind-noise.”

The captain rolled his eyes. “Well, if he can’t handle the heat, sounds like he needs to get out of the kitchen.”

Knopf looked at him in surprise. It was a cruel thing to say, even for Fisher. But what did Fisher know, anyway? He was too young to remember a world before the zombies. All his adult life had been spent in the army. Fisher knew soldiering and little else. It may have made him an impressive man, commanding and resourceful beyond his years, but it hadn’t taught him compassion.

Knopf, though, remembered the world as it had been. He remembered eating a meal without having to glance over his shoulder. He remembered not having to sleep in shifts, a weapon always at the ready. He remembered his wife, and his little boy. Knopf remembered being human, something he doubted Fisher could lay any claim to.

But perhaps more important, Fisher wasn’t a father. He couldn’t speak to the world of a child. Sure, he had been a child, but he hadn’t also been a parent. What did he know of the pain, the fear, the joy that came with raising a child? As a soldier he claimed to be fighting the most important war humanity had ever fought, a war for the survival of the species. And yet, he had no direct emotional stake in its survival. It was just an academic proposition for him. Human lives were simply numbers for him, pieces to be moved around a game board, little different from the robots under his command.

Knopf had essentially raised Jimmy. The boy had been handed off to him less than a month after Knopf’s own son had died at the hands of the zombie horde, and Knopf, wounded to his core, had at first held the screaming toddler at a disdainful and resentful distance. He had looked at the scrawny, screaming brat, and all he’d been able to think about was himself, standing in the middle of a road at the crest of a hill, looking down on the base housing where he’d lived with his wife and child, zombies streaming out of the bungalow, blood covering their faces and chests like bibs, and the resentment had grown to an intense hatred.

But that hatred softened by degrees.

For several years, Jimmy had been unable to do anything but cower in a corner, screaming and yelling anytime anybody got remotely close to him. Only gradually, through repeated effort and a thousand small acts of kindness, had Knopf managed to lure the boy out of the shadows. It was longer still before the boy would sleep anywhere but under the cot in Knopf’s office. And across the gulf of those years, the two of them had healed each other. They’d learn to trust one another. Neither was emotionally seaworthy, not yet anyway, but together, they were getting close.

And now this. The boy missing . . .

Jimmy stopped at the top of a rickety metal staircase, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Farther on ahead he could see what looked like a glowing blue slime coating the handrails and parts of the walls. The glow was faint, but it provided enough light to give him a sense of the curved, tiled tunnel around him.

The stairs shook and groaned beneath his weight, moving with every step, and he was almost to the bottom when the metal suddenly snapped and gave way, dropping him into the muck on the bottom level.

He barely managed to roll out of the way as the structure crashed down around him.

Afterwards, surrounded by tangled pieces of rusting metal, he sat there blinking up at the ruined staircase, looking like the exoskeleton of some giant, malformed insect up there.

Grunting, he sat up.

The room in which he found himself was a horror. There were rotting bodies everywhere. Arms and legs and ropes of intestines hung from rusted piles of equipment, and the place smelled powerfully bad, worse even than the zombies Dr. Knopf occasionally brought into the lab for Jimmy to practice with.

Something moved beside him, and Jimmy turned, only to find himself nose to nose with a zombie. Its face was dripping with blood and sewage, eyes opaque, like cataracts, yet at the same time intensely alive with hunger and violence. The skin around its mouth was ripped and shredded, exposing its blood-blackened teeth so that it almost seemed to be grinning at him.

Jimmy screamed, backpedaling as fast as he could go.

The zombie stayed where it was. It sniffed the air. It opened its mouth, almost as though to taste what it smelled, but instead let out an aching moan.

The next instant it scrambled after him.

Still scrambling, Jimmy tripped and landed in a mass of arms and legs. He jumped to his feet, only to realize a moment later that the arms wrapping around him belonged to a Docbot, the cord tightening around his knees the shoulder sling from the Docbot’s medpac.

The zombie was coming closer, clawing its way over the wreckage of robots and dead bodies. Jimmy looked around for a way out, but there was none. He was standing at the apex of a curving tunnel, both directions extending off into darkness that could hide anything.

But he did have the medpac. Those things were heavy. Jimmy had seen them used back at the lab. Carrying one was like lugging around a bag of bricks, and they’d make a good weapon.

He tugged at the shoulder strap until the pack came loose from the muck.

By that point the zombie was almost on him. Jimmy stumbled backwards, and at the same time swung the pack with both hands, smashing it against the zombie’s jaw with the satisfying crunch of broken bone.

The zombie went sprawling backwards into the sewage and rotting bodies, landing in a twisted heap.

Jimmy didn’t wait to see if it would get back up. He turned to run.

Jimmy slowed, but didn’t stop. That was Comm Six’s voice.

Jimmy dropped to the floor, crawling under the wrecked bodies and robots, and pulled the Docbot whose medpac he had just used over on top of him.

It was good advice. During the many experiments Dr. Knopf had put him through, Jimmy had learned that the zombies’ morphic field acuity was imperfect at best. Certainly not as strong or as finely tuned as his. If a person remained very still, and was able to clear his thoughts, a passing zombie would think them no different from a lamp post, or a mailbox, or any of the other inanimate objects that populated the world.

Through a hole in the Docbot’s damaged skull, Jimmy watched the zombie slowly scan the ruined figures at its feet. Flies swarmed around its head. Filthy water dripped from its beard. It turned its mangled face left, then right, and then walked off down the darkness of the receding tunnel.

Jimmy listened as the sounds of its splashing grew faint, then he slowly climbed out from under the Docbot.

Jimmy shook his head.

Jimmy huffed at that one.
Thanks, that’s great advice. I’ll remember to bring one next time I’m crawling through a zombie-infested sewer.

Jimmy stopped.
You can?

He made his way down to the room Comm Six had told him about, noticing as he went how the luminescent scum on the walls seemed to be thickest at the waterline.

Jimmy stepped into the room. There were several pieces of metal tubing at his feet, old rusted pipes that had fallen from the ceiling. He picked one of them up, tested its heft, and decided it would work.

The zombie Comm Six had warned him about was on the far side of the room.

As Jimmy watched, it pawed at the wall, scratching uselessly at the mold-covered stone wall, its fingernails long since ripped from the tips of its fingers.

Then Jimmy noticed that the thing had no legs.

From the waist down there was nothing but ropes of viscera and blackened shards of bone protruding from the torso.

His stomach rose into his throat, and he coughed.

The sound got the zombie’s attention. It turned its head sharply, and an urgent, hungry moan rose up from its rotting throat.

The zombie pulled itself toward Jimmy with its ruined fingers, its moaning growing more insistent, more desperate.

“Right,” Jimmy muttered.

He stepped into the room with the metal pipe in both hands, raised high above his head. The zombie held its broken fingers up toward him, trying to grab him.

But Jimmy was quicker.

He sidestepped the zombie’s hand and brought the pipe down as hard as he could.

Jimmy had never killed a zombie before, and he was surprised, and sickened, by how easy it was. Three quick strokes and the back of the thing’s head was pulverized into a ruined mess of blood, hair, and bone.

It took a moment for his mind to break through the adrenaline rush.

“Huh?”

Feeling dizzy, lightheaded, Jimmy scanned the far wall. The weapon was in a leather gun belt wrapped around the zombie’s severed hips and legs.

He had to peel the gun belt off the corpse’s bloody hips. It made a sucking sound as he pulled it free.

He worked the buckle open, then wrapped it around his own waist and pulled it as tight as it would go. Jimmy moved his hips back and forth. The gun belt was still loose, but it didn’t fall off, and that was something at least.

Nothing.

Jimmy opened his mind a little more.

But the Combot’s voice was gone. There was nothing but the echoes of water dripping from the ceiling somewhere down the tunnel. And from farther on, barely audible, came the faint moaning of the living dead.

Well, he thought, pulling the pistol, here goes nothing.

And he stepped out into the tunnel.