Plague of the Undead (28 page)

With only the faint blue light from the algae growing on the walls to guide him, Jimmy headed deeper into the sewers. The water was up to his knees and every step made a splash that echoed a long way down the tunnels. He tried to reach out with his mind and sense the zombies that Comm Six had told him were down here, but in his mind he saw nothing but a gray depthless fog. For the first time in his life, he realized, his mind was a quiet place.

It might have felt good, if he wasn’t so scared. And so unsure of himself. What are you doing down here? he asked himself. Dr. Knopf had told him bunches of times that his parents were dead. He’d accepted that a long time ago. And didn’t he have his own memories from the night the dead overran this town? They were vague, cloudy memories, but they were there.

He remembered a room with dark-colored carpet and walls of wood paneling. He remembered a striped couch and a big chair that his infantile mind understood as DADDY’S CHAIR.

He remembered his mom, the source of kindness and nourishment and safety. She smelled like comfort, like goodness. At least, that was the way she smelled in his memories. But the next instant, she’d gone wild with fear.

And he remembered his father, not his father’s face, but the anger in the man’s voice. Daddy, the protector, the violent one, driving his shoulder into the door, yelling at his mother to take the boy and
go, go, go!

The room filled with smoke, seeping under the door, crawling in through the windows.

The memory broke apart with the first tinges of smoke. From there, all he remembered were broken images, crazy things. More screaming, and zombies reaching for him everywhere he turned. He remembered getting separated from his parents, his mother’s cries echoing away into nothingness in the smoke that was filling the house where they lived.

And then, when he realized he was alone, that his parents were gone, some kind of light had turned on inside his head.

Through the smoke, through the screams, he could sort of see the bad people trying to hurt him. They glowed in the smoke, shimmering like flashlight beams, except that the light carried with it a bad . . . was it a smell? That was the only way his mind had been able to frame the sensation. Their minds smelled bad. The light that came from them was bad. They wanted to hurt him. He’d taken that knowledge and he had . . .

What?

He didn’t know what he’d done from there.

He had gone walking, he supposed.

The next thing he could remember for sure was sleeping on the cot in Dr. Knopf’s office, crying himself to sleep. Sometimes, Dr. Knopf would read from a book about a big rabbit and a little rabbit and the big rabbit saying this is how much I love you. He remembered sometimes Dr. Knopf would cry when he read the book, and how the man’s tears and the choking sob in his voice had scared him for some reason he couldn’t quite understand. And he remembered grabbing Dr. Knopf’s leg in a stranglehold whenever the military men came by to ask questions and laugh at the answers they got.

Ah, yes, Dr. Knopf.

There was the other problem of Jimmy’s life.

For several years now he’d understood what he meant to the High Command. He was an experiment, an asset. They talked about him the same way they talked about programming groups for Warbots. Or pallets of ammunition. Or the shifting lines in the sand that divided the living from the dead.

Only Dr. Knopf thought of him as Jimmy.

And that was what made things so hard.

Dr. Knopf was as close to a parent as Jimmy had ever really known, but he wasn’t the ideal parent that Jimmy always imagined his real parents would have been. He was distant. He could be cold. Sometimes, he could be harsh, even cruel when Jimmy failed to cooperate. Dr. Knopf was the one who made the rules, and Jimmy hated him for that. He had many memories of the two of them screaming at each other, Jimmy calling Knopf the meanest man he’d ever met, and Knopf, so angry his fists trembled with rage, making harsh, declarative statements that made Jimmy shrink into himself. Things like, “I don’t care what you think. I just care that you do what I say.” Or, “Nobody asked your opinion. Just do what I tell you. Why can’t you get that through your head?” Or, “I’m sorry. I love . . . I just want you to be happy, Jimmy. Please, do this for me. This one last test. Finish this, and we can get some dinner. I’ll do the macaroni and cheese you like so much. . . .”

It was the occasional kindness that made things so confusing. There were times when Knopf actually felt like a father to him. And he was sure Knopf felt the same. Why then did they always pull away from each other in the end? Why did the rare moments of closeness always end with the look of love fading from Knopf’s face, and a terribly remote sadness invariably taking its place? The man was haunted by his memories. Jimmy knew that. But why did memory have to make things so hard?

There were so many questions, and so few answers.

Jimmy stopped.

“Daddy?”

Jimmy shook his head, unable to articulate the thought aloud.

“Yes,” Jimmy said, breathlessly.
Turned on
was exactly how he had come to think of that night, like somebody had just flipped a light switch inside his head.

But Jimmy didn’t move. Ahead of him was some kind of catwalk, another metal platform like the kind that had collapsed under his weight back at the entrance to the sewers.

Jimmy turned and looked behind him. The blue light from the algae didn’t carry far. Twenty or thirty feet down and his visibility was gone, swallowed by the darkness. But something was down there. He could hear it splashing, and moaning.

He could see silhouettes down there now, bunches of them, coming toward him.

Jimmy pulled his pistol just as the first zombie lumbered into view.

As she came closer, the faint blue glow from the algae lit her ghastly features. It was a woman, or had been once. Her shoulder-length hair was matted now with blood and clods of mud. Her neck seemed unable to hold up the weight of her head, making her hair hang like a curtain in front of her face. The skin on her arms and neck was oozing with abscesses and open cuts that no longer bled. The clothes had been torn from her chest, and when she moved, black ribs showed where the flesh had been eaten away. She raised her gnarled hands and began to moan.

There were more behind her.

A lot more.

Jimmy raised the huge pistol, holding it with the two-handed grip all children inside the walls were taught. He squeezed off a round, and the blast clapped over his ears like an enormous pair of hands, leaving him momentarily deaf, and stunned.

He didn’t even realize the lead zombie had closed the distance between them until she put her filthy hands on him.

But that was enough to get him moving.

He ran for the platform he’d seen a few moments before, but stopped at the railing. The stairs leading down to the aqueduct must have collapsed during the fighting, for they lay in a broken, rusted heap twenty feet below him.

Where more zombies had gathered, attracted by his gunshot.

The dead went into a frenzy when he appeared on the landing.

The woman with the black ribs was clutching the air between them. He could smell the rotten-meat stench she carried with her. Even over the open sewage he could smell her. Another three steps and she’d be on him.

“No,” he said, kicking at her. His heart was pounding painfully in his chest. “Stay back!”

But zombies, of course, don’t ever stay back, and Jimmy was forced to back up until he was pressed against the railing.

It was then he knew what he had to do.

He jumped.

Dr. Knopf stood in front of what was left of the Huntington Movie Theater, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck. Not even ten o’clock yet and already the sun was punishing him. He had never handled fieldwork well, and now that he was getting on into middle age, he had even less patience for it.

But he had to deal with it. At least this one last time. Jimmy was out here, somewhere, and he had to find him.

But which way?

To his left, the street was piled high with the rubble of collapsed buildings. To his right, the street was a silent canyon between windowless buildings. It would be easier to go that way, but just because it was easy was no guarantee that Jimmy had gone that way. The boy had survived here as a toddler because of his gift, going not where the going was easiest, but where his senses told him it was safest. Avoid the zombies. That would have been his only concern.

So which way was that?

“Well, how about it, Dr. Knopf? Any ideas?”

Knopf shifted his attention away from the crumbling buildings and looked at the young captain. Fisher’s uniform was still crisp, his tie knot still regulation perfect. Despite all the walking they’d done in this godawful heat, his gig line was straight as an arrow. The man didn’t seem to know how to sweat.

“He could be anywhere,” Knopf said. “I suggest doing another sensor sweep.”

“We’ve done eight sensor sweeps already, doctor. Are you sure the boy even went into town? Perhaps he ran back to the compound.”

God save me from idiots in uniform, Knopf thought. Yes, they’d done their sensor sweeps, but Fisher himself had admitted that the high concentrations of lead in the ground were playing havoc with their equipment. It was probably doing the same thing to Jimmy, though to what degree there was no way of knowing. He’d have to do further research. The only remedy was to keep running the sensor sweeps, keep tracking over the same ground. Eventually, they’d hit pay dirt.

“He’s here, captain. I’m sure of that.”

“Hmm,” Fisher said. “You have a special bond with the boy, I suppose.”

Knopf looked at him sharply. He didn’t like the way that sounded, the nasty implication in the captain’s tone. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, captain?”

Fisher raised his eyebrows, as though to feign ignorance.

“Only that you raised him. It would be natural, I suppose, for you to learn how he thinks.”

Knopf didn’t answer that.

“You were given charge of the boy shortly after your own wife and son were killed. Isn’t that right, doctor? It would make sense that you’d invest extra effort to keep the boy close. Perhaps he filled some psychological hole in your head?”

“That’s pretty damn bold of you, captain.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. You forget, doctor, that I have an assignment as well. You are trying to get me to believe in magic. My job, if you’ll pardon my French, is to make sure you aren’t full of shit.”

And then it hit Knopf what was really going on here, what the captain was actually accusing him of.

“Captain, are you suggesting that I faked more than a decade’s worth of research just so that child could take the place of my own son? Is that really what you’re suggesting?”

Fisher shrugged. “You tell me,” he said.

“You’re a bastard, captain. A certifiable bastard.”

“Maybe. But that still doesn’t answer my question.”

Knopf nearly hit him in the nose. He might have, too, if at that moment the street to his right hadn’t erupted with yelling and gunfire.

Knopf ducked his head, backing away from the commotion.

“What the . . . ?” Fisher said. He was standing with arms akimbo, peering into the clouds of dust pouring down the street.

The next instant two troopers hurried out of the fog. A steadily retreating line of Troopbots was right behind them, firing into the dust.

One of the troopers, a soldier named Collins, hurried toward Fisher. “Zombies, sir! A whole mess of ’em!”

“What the hell happened?”

“We were going building to building, searching the rubble. A couple of our Troopbots found a door down to the sewer system and when they opened it, they uncovered a whole nest of them things.”

“How many?”

“Hard to tell, sir. Forty, maybe fifty. They overran our Troopbots.”

They could hear moaning now. A few of the approaching zombies were visible through the screen of dust, but from the volume of the moans it was obvious there were many more behind them.

“So much for the eighty-six percent accuracy of your sensors, captain?” said Knopf. “Guess you can never trust a zombie to play fair.”

“Don’t start with me, doctor.”

The next instant he was on the radio, calling for the Warbots to converge on his location.

Knopf felt their approach before he heard them, the tread of their Tyrannosaurus-size legs sending shudders through the pavement.

When the Warbots entered the intersection, they turned immediately to the advancing horde of zombies. Their limited AI capability allowed them to process the scene and reach immediate conclusions about what had to be done. Without waiting for orders, they strode to the leading edge of the street, took up side-by-side positions, and opened fire into the approaching horde, mowing down the zombies beneath a hail of automatic weapons fire.

To Knopf, it seemed the shooting went on forever, and when the dust finally settled, the rattle of the guns still rang in his ears.

But the street was still. Nothing moved.

One of the Warbots turned to Captain Fisher. “What are your orders, sir?”

Fisher looked mad enough to spit. He glared at Knopf before turning back to his robots.

“Another sensor sweep,” he growled. “Find that kid.”