Plague of the Undead (29 page)

As he went over the edge, Jimmy saw a crowd of zombies lunging for him. Their ruined faces and bloody hands loomed large in his sight, and for a terrifying moment he thought he was going to be shredded alive before he hit the water. But when he landed in the sewer channel he kept his head under the water and started thrashing for the far side of the channel.

The water was black as ink and he couldn’t see where he was going. He pushed and pulled his way through a forest of legs even as their hands groped at his back.

One of them managed to get a grip on the collar of his shirt.

Jimmy twisted away, breaking the zombie’s fingers, but still it held on. He swatted at their hands and kicked whenever he could, and somehow managed to reach the stone ledge on the far side of the channel.

They stayed on him, though.

He saw a rotten wooden pallet leaning against the wall under the ledge and climbed on top of it. The ledge was another five feet or so above that, and he jumped for it, hooking his elbows over the edge so he had enough support to pull himself up. He kicked at the smooth cement wall below him, his toes sliding on the algae that grew there while hands groped at his shoes.

“Get away!” he yelled, pumping his legs with everything he had. “Get . . . away!”

And then he was up and over the edge, his full weight resting on the ledge. Jimmy rolled over onto his back and sobbed, his chest heaving.

What was he going to do? There was no place to go.

He rolled over on his side and stared down at the hungry crowd. Their hands were just a few inches below the ledge, their moans reaching a frenzied intensity. He knew he should keep moving, but the panic and adrenaline that had helped him climb had left him numb, and all he could do now was stare with glassy eyes at the hands clutching for him.

Jimmy blinked. The Combot again.

With a strange disconnected feeling, almost like he was dreaming this, Jimmy rose to his feet. The ceiling was arched and this close to the wall he had to bend over slightly to keep from banging his head. It made him feel like a diver looking over the edge of a cliff. Staring straight down into the ravenous horde brought a wave of nausea over him, and he groaned.

The Combot wasn’t kidding, Jimmy thought. One of the zombies in the front had fallen against the wall, pushed down by the weight of the horde behind it, and its fellows were now ramping up its back. A zombie in some kind of uniform was pulling itself up onto the ledge. The zombie’s lower jaw was almost completely gone, like it had been torn off. Or shot off. Maggots swarmed in the rotting flesh where its chin and cheeks had been.

“No,” Jimmy muttered, shaking his head.

Slowly, inching carefully along the narrow concrete ledge, hands grasping at his feet, Jimmy made his way to a corner up ahead. The zombies matched him step for step, their moans echoing horribly off the walls and quickening his pulse.

And when he reached the corner, he did see. Immediately below him was a railing that went across the channel. It wasn’t high enough to keep the zombies at bay forever, but it was high enough to give him a chance at escape.

Yes, he thought, that’s how I’m gonna do it.

He jumped into the water.

The zombies stuck their hands through the railing, but he was already out of reach and running for the platform.

Jimmy looked back over his shoulder and saw, once again, that the Combot was correct. Already the zombies had tipped the railing forward and were scrambling over it. He had maybe a thirty-foot lead on them.

He closed the last few feet to the platform and rounded the corner. A sudden, intensely white light flooded his vision, momentarily blinding him.

“You are human,” a robotic voice said.

It took a moment for the purple blotches to clear from Jimmy’s sight. When they did, he saw a badly damaged Warbot trying to stand on its Tyrannosaurus legs—but something was wrong. One of its legs wouldn’t work. Its status lights blinked and flickered. It stumbled forward, and then sagged to the ground, the spotlight on its shoulder lighting up the carnage at its feet.

The ground was covered with rotting corpses.

Fear gripped him anew. He had gambled on the Combot’s instructions, and this was where it had led him. To an abandoned sewer platform, and no way out.

“Zombies,” the Warbot said, raising a .50 caliber machine gun. “Human, you must take cover at the rear of the platform. Move quickly.”

Jimmy heard moaning behind him. That was all it took. He ran forward, scrambling over badly decomposed bodies, too frightened to allow the gore into which his fingers were sinking to slow him down.

The shooting started a moment later.

Jimmy reached the back wall, turned, and saw a zombie’s head and shoulders atomized by a three-round burst from the Warbot’s guns. But every zombie shot as it rounded the corner was replaced by more, and soon the Warbot’s gun was blazing in one continuous stream.

But it wasn’t enough. The dead kept coming, pouring around the corner faster than the Warbot’s gun could put them down. Jimmy, who was so exhausted he could barely move, pushed himself up against the back wall of the platform. There was some kind of vehicle abandoned there, like a rail truck, only on rubber wheels. Its windshield had come loose and broken into two pieces. Jimmy pulled the bigger of the two over him and tried to shrink into the gore of ruined bodies below him.

But it was only a matter of time.

There were just too many of them.

Jimmy’s gaze found one zombie that was staring straight at him as it climbed over the pile of torn-up corpses. Its gaze never wavered. It had zeroed in on him and meant to have him.

Jimmy braced himself for the attack.

The zombie fell on top of him, moaning, pawing at the glass with its bloody hands. Jimmy screamed back at the thing, pushing back with everything he had.

And then the zombie’s head exploded. One moment it was pounding on the glass, smearing it with blood and sewage, and the next the glass was splashed with bits of bone and brain and clumps of bloody hair. The zombie’s headless corpse sagged against the glass as Jimmy gaped in shocked silence.

The sound of gunfire was gone.

So too were the moans.

“Human,” the Warbot said. “Human?”

Jimmy had to tilt the glass like a ramp to roll the corpse away, and once it was off him, he could see the gun smoke lingering in the foul sewer air.

“Human, they are gone. Please acknowledge.”

“I hear you,” Jimmy said.

He stood up and looked around. The far wall was dripping with fresh gore, and there were bodies piled high near the corner. How many? Forty? More than that?

Jimmy couldn’t tell.

He turned to the Warbot.

“Thanks,” he said, because it was the only thing that came close to how he was feeling at the moment.

“I cannot move. You must go. Gunfire will travel far in these tunnels. More zombies will come.”

“How many?”

“Unknown. You must go.”

He watched the Warbot as its status lights blinked and dimmed once again. The machine could not die, but if it had an equivalent, it was doing it now. Its lights were going out.

It was then that a thought occurred to Jimmy. Something he had overheard once in the weapons lab.

“Don’t Warbots usually work in teams?” he asked. “Where’s your partner?”

But the Warbot didn’t answer. Its status lights continued to fade, and as Jimmy watched, they went dark permanently.

There was nothing else to do but leave.

Jimmy found the second Warbot a few minutes later.

He had returned to the main channel and was following it farther into the sewer system. There were more platforms here, lots of them, and other channels leading off in other directions.

He had entered some kind of hub, he realized, the main part of the sewer system.

For once, his father’s mind-voice didn’t knife into his head. It was almost pleasant, in fact. Jimmy wasn’t sure if it was the tone of surprised gratitude that softened it, or if he was just getting used to their thoughts passing back and forth, but either way the pain was gone. Jimmy let his mind reach out to his father.

The fighting, Jimmy saw, must have been intense through here. He had seen plenty of rotting bodies along the way, and even more wrecked Troopbots, but the carnage was especially bad through here. In some places he actually had to climb over the twisted, severed limbs of dead people and the faceless heads of downed robots rusting in the sewer water. And everywhere he turned there were bullet holes in the walls and the ceiling.

Then he rounded the corner and the smell of rot nearly knocked him over.

What lay before him was a gallery of horrors. The room must have been some kind of staging area for large equipment before the fighting, for there were oversized sleds loaded down with machinery and portable pumps and generators scattered around the room. But those were only the backdrop for the carnage Jimmy saw. Corpses were piled three and four deep. Most were so badly decomposed they were unrecognizable, their bodies swollen and discolored and swarming with flies and writhing worms. Others had been eaten, and what remained of their faces was twisted by pain that was frozen there like a picture. One man lay on his back atop a generator, his arms hanging limply off either side, his mouth open in an eternal scream, his torso ripped apart and emptied of its viscera so that he looked like the gaping belly of a canoe. Jimmy saw a dismembered foot here, an upturned hand there, the fingers curled up and inward like the legs of a dying crab.

And standing in the middle of it all, a grotesque king presiding over his court, was his father.

Jimmy’s mouth fell open.

The man could barely stand. His right arm had been chewed off just below the elbow, stringy lengths of sinew and shredded flesh hanging from the blackened wound. His neck too was open. Worms fed on the ruins of his throat. The green T-shirt he wore was stained with dried blood, and all Jimmy could read was the word
Nationals
in what had once been white lettering. And his face! Bits of skull showed through the holes in his forehead. His lips were gone, revealing the full horror of his bloodstained teeth. He leered at Jimmy. Almost like he was grinning at him.

Jimmy turned his head, the bile rising in his throat.

Slowly, uncertain for a moment that he would even be able to keep his feet, Jimmy straightened up. He faced the train wreck that had once been his father and, running the back of his hand across his face, wiped the spit from his lips.

Jimmy backed away, shaking his head.

That was when Jimmy saw the other Warbot. At first it had blended in with the other machinery, one more piece of metal streaked with human gore.

Then it rose to its full height.

Eighteen feet of rusting metal on Tyrannosaurus legs.

It stood so tall it had to stoop to avoid scraping the ceiling. It had fully automatic machine-gun cannons for arms and it turned them in Jimmy’s direction.

“I am human,” Jimmy said, reciting the mantra that Dr. Knopf had taught him when dealing with robotic sentries. “Confirm my status as human.”

The Warbot’s status lights flickered wildly, but it made no sound. The guns remained trained on Jimmy.

“Confirm!” Jimmy said.

The Warbot stooped forward then and swung one of its machine-gun arms under his father. As Jimmy watched, his fear mounting, the robot raised the zombie version of his father into the air and placed him on its shoulders.

Jimmy took a step back.

Jimmy did. He stared up at his father, who rode the Warbot like some demented child playing horsey on his daddy’s shoulders, and he was frightened.

You
are
home, damn it!

The robot took three long strides forward and knelt down, bringing Jimmy’s father closer to eye level. Jimmy tried to back away, but his heel caught on a Troopbot’s severed arm and he pitched over backwards, landing on his butt.

But Jimmy wasn’t moving anymore. For the first time, he could see the wall behind the Warbot. There was a flight of stairs there, and on the wall at the back of the first landing was a red EXIT sign.

A way out.

Slowly, Jimmy stood up.

Glancing across the floor between where he stood and the stairs began, Jimmy picked out the route he was going to take. Dr. Knopf had tried to teach him a trick once to hone his psychic locator skills. Visualize each move, Knopf had told him, picture it in advance. See yourself making it. That way, when you make it for real—

Jimmy blocked the rest of it, slamming the door on his father’s mind-voice. He heard his father grunt in surprise, and Jimmy ran. He darted around the Warbot’s right side, ducking to miss the robot’s heavy cannon arm as it rotated toward him, and then he was past it, running for the stairs.

But he didn’t move so fast he missed his steps. He picked his way through bodies and machine parts carefully, planting his feet exactly as he had pictured them in his head. He couldn’t afford to miss a step. Not now. Not with his father and that Warbot behind him. If he tripped, slipped, they’d be on him. The heavy cannon would knock him to the floor and hold him there. And he had no idea what his father would do after that.

Jimmy was still blocking him with his mind. He had his teeth clenched so tightly his jaw was trembling, his breaths coming fast and noisily through his nose, but he didn’t dare let up. His father was no doubt screaming into his brain, and if one of those mind-voice screams got through, Jimmy knew it would be enough to cripple him with pain. He’d never be able to get up.

He hit the stairs at a full sprint and ran up them three at a time. When he reached the landing, he turned and saw his father astride the Warbot, the two of them crashing forward.

They were close, almost on him.

Jimmy kept running up the stairs. He had to scale three flights to reach the promised
EXIT
door. Once there, he grabbed the handle, and twisted.

It was locked.

“No,” he said.

Below him, the Warbot was trying to climb the stairs, even though it was far too big to fit into the narrow confines. But it could force its way up, and that it was doing, banging its huge cannon arms against the railing, smashing through the floor with its enormous metal shoulders. The ground beneath Jimmy’s feet was moving, trembling from the impacts.

He tried the door again, yanking on it with everything he had, and it still wouldn’t budge.

“Please, no,” he said, his voice almost a whimper.

He looked down. The Warbot was slowly crashing its way up through the floor, but that wasn’t the worst of it. Through a gap in the split-level stairs Jimmy caught a glimpse of his father’s zombified face. It was a hideous, dead face, yellowed with disease and dark with scabs and open, rotting wounds. The right side of his mouth had been damaged somehow, so that the corner of his lips hung slack in an ironic grin.

The eyes, though, those were most certainly not grinning. They were lit by a mad, malignant hatred. There was violence in those eyes that frightened Jimmy down to his bones.

But he still had to get through the door. How?

The Combot’s voice.

Jimmy looked down at his waistband. Sure enough, the pistol was still there, right where he’d stuck it after his narrow escape back at the ledge.

Jimmy took a step back. He drew the weapon and steadied its front sight on the knob. Below him, the Warbot was fast approaching. It was on the next landing down. Jimmy had a few seconds, maybe less. He swallowed hard as he tried to center the front sight on the knob and pulled the trigger.

The gun nearly jumped out of his hands as he staggered backwards, the sound of the shot deafening.

Shaking his head, he looked down at the lock. The knob was hanging at an odd angle from the plane of the door, a big gaping hole just to the left of it. He reached for it, and the knob came away in his hand.

The door fell open.

The Combot again.

He lunged through the doorway and into the lobby of a large, shabby building. This, he gathered, had been the home office of the water authority. There were desks everywhere, most of them pushed haphazardly out of the way. Trash lay thick on the floor. A few pieces of furniture had been jammed up against the front door of the building, which meant a few people must have made a final stand here.

But the furniture had been toppled, and the front door behind the pile was hanging from the bottom hinge.

Jimmy ran that way, scaling over the furniture. He was almost through the door when the ground shook and he lost his footing. He landed on top of a desk, facing the length of floor he’d just traversed.

A heaving mound formed in the middle of the floor, the cement there popping and groaning from the Warbot’s efforts to push itself upwards from the other side. There was a crash, and the mound cracked and popped. A second crash came immediately after, and the next thing Jimmy knew, the Warbot was busting through the floor, sending bits of tile and chairs and desks flying off in every direction.

The Warbot climbed out of the hole, Jimmy’s father still hanging on to its neck, still staring at him with those same hate-filled eyes.

“No,” Jimmy said.

But Jimmy didn’t need to be told. He was already sprinting into the street.