Plague of the Undead (30 page)

A bullet skipped off the pavement at Dr. Knopf’s feet, hitting the wall behind him. He ducked, and with his hands over his head, turned in every direction, trying to find someplace to run. The air was full of dust, the noise deafening. He felt disoriented, and in his confusion, stepped right into the middle of the fighting.

After their first successful skirmish in front of the movie theater, some of the Troopbots had surrounded another water authority access point to the sewers, their weapons at the ready, and opened the door. It had been like knocking the top off an ant pile. One minute they were expecting a simple mop-up operation of a few remaining zombies, and the next, they were getting overrun, trampled underfoot, ripped to pieces. Knopf had been standing less than thirty feet from one of their Docbots when a wave of zombies knocked it to the ground and pulled it apart like a man being drawn and quartered. They’d been overrun so quickly there was hardly a chance for Knopf to question the strangeness of what he saw. But Captain Fisher was a good soldier, a capable leader. He regrouped his forces, pulling his troops back in ordered rows while at the same time bringing his Warbots forward, where the bigger guns could do some damage. But the battle was decided almost from the beginning. Fisher’s expeditionary force was small, intended more for light escort duty than a stand-up fight, and the best he could hope for at this point was to keep his escape route to the rear open. By keeping his lines moving, they at least stood a chance of escaping to a better defensive position.

That was how it looked to Knopf, anyway.

But there was something else, something disturbing. Knopf had spent years studying the zombies in every way possible. Know thy enemy, as Sun Tzu had said. He’d used that knowledge to design and perfect the weapons systems his shop built for the military. But in all his studies, all his observations, he’d always worked under the philosophy that the zombie was a mindless, relentless opponent with no sense of strategy and no skills. Their only strengths were their numbers, a complete lack of fear, and the ability to fight without sleep, without pain, and without ever quitting. They advanced headlong, regardless of the odds, with no sense of winning or losing.

That didn’t seem to be the case here, though. Knopf had accidentally wandered into the middle of the fighting, and while he was ducking and dodging bullets like some kind of fool, he watched a large number of zombies break away from the main horde and circle around the ruins of a hardware store, so that they could come up from behind their robot opponents in a fairly well-executed flanking maneuver.

Knopf was shocked. Doing something like that took strategy, it took forethought, it took goal-oriented behavior. None of the game theory equations he’d put into the robots’ programming could deal with behavior like that. It wasn’t playing by the rules. And yet the action was undeniable. It was a wide street, with a park off to his left. There had been plenty of room for all those zombies to continue their advance. By all rights, they should have massed into the open areas, where Fisher’s strategy would have turned the street into a meat grinder.

But they had deliberately turned off. They had taken themselves out of the fight in a clearly premeditated way, almost as though . . .

Another bullet hit the pavement at his feet and glanced off with a loud, high-pitched whine. Knopf blinked at the little white cloud of dust that drifted away from the impact point.

“What are you doing?” someone yelled. “Get out of the street!”

Knopf looked up. Zombies and robots were swarming all around him. The ordered lines had broken down, and everywhere he turned Troopbots were being ripped apart.

“Knopf, you idiot, get out of the street!”

Captain Fisher was running at him, a pistol in his hand. He looked angry, white flecks of spit flying from his lips, the white scar across his chin almost completely obscured by the dirt and mud and blood on his face.

“Get out of the street!”

The next instant Fisher was on him, grabbing him by the sleeve, pulling him towards the corner of a red brick building. Then he slammed him against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing?” he demanded.

“Those zombies are using strategy, captain. Something’s guiding them—”

But Fisher wasn’t listening. His attention was already back on the street, eyes darting from one corner of the battle to the other.

“We’re pulling out,” he yelled. “I’m ordering us out of this town. Get yourself ready to move out.”

“Wait,” Knopf said. “What? No, you can’t.”

“I can, doctor, and I am. We are leaving!”

“But Jimmy . . . he’s still out there somewhere. We have to find him.”

“Like hell we do. He ran off. He’s dead.”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know this experiment of yours has failed, doctor,” Fisher said. He emphasized his point by jamming a finger into Knopf’s chest. “You’re done. You and this whole ridiculous experiment—you’re done! This is over. My only concern right now is to salvage what’s left of my command. Now get yourself ready. We are leaving.”

And with that he stormed off, yelling for his human soldiers to fall back.

Jimmy hit the street running.

Behind him, the front of the building he’d just escaped exploded, the force of it knocking him onto his hands and knees. He glanced back in time to see the Warbot erupting into the street, crouching like a bird, furniture and bits of rubble tumbling out all around its feet.

From atop the thing’s shoulders, with the cold, hard light of insanity in his eyes, Jimmy’s father leered at him.

“Oh, God,” Jimmy said.

He pulled to his feet and started to run again.

But he only made it a few feet before he stopped. Ahead of him, zombies staggered out of alleyways and out of buildings. At first there were only five, then eight, then more. He turned to his left and saw the side street there filling up with more of the living dead.

It dawned on him then what was happening. The zombies closing in on him . . . the things his father had said down in the sewers . . . the fact that all the town’s zombies had retreated into the sewers, as though waiting for something . . . his father was controlling them, steering them towards this spot. Jimmy could feel the force of his father’s thoughts moving around him like the current in a river, but gaining in strength. Now that he was out of the sewers he was growing more powerful every second.

Jimmy stretched his thoughts, trying to connect with the Combot.

And then, a connection.

Jimmy turned. The building was made of red brick, the windows empty and dark. He sprinted towards it just as the Warbot reached for him, its enormous machine-gun arms missing him by inches. Jimmy jumped through one of the empty display windows and hurried through the shop toward the back.

Jimmy did as he was told. The shop was crowded with trash and bits of the tile and insulation where the roof had collapsed, but he threaded his way through it and out the back door.

He found himself in a narrow alley between low buildings. Looking to his left he saw zombies turning the corner. To his right, the way looked clear.

His father’s Warbot had already started smashing its way through the shop and Jimmy knew he only had a few precious seconds. He ran for the end of the alleyway, rounded the corner, and kept on running.

Jimmy rounded the corner onto Tanner Street. He could hear his father’s Warbot back there, wrecking everything in sight.

Focusing his mind, he tried to picture Dr. Knopf, to remember the sound of his voice, the shape of his face.

Something clicked for Jimmy then. He could feel the connection when it happened, like toy blocks snapping together. Dr. Knopf was confused and frightened by the contact. Jimmy could sense his fear, and feel him trying to pull his mind back and break the contact. He could picture Knopf standing perfectly still, his back rigid, Adam’s apple pumping up and down like a cylinder, much as Jimmy had done when his father first made contact with him.

There was no time to explain. Instead, Jimmy pushed his thoughts into Dr. Knopf’s mind, showing him everything he had seen and heard since coming to Mill Valley. He wasn’t even sure if it would work, but he sensed it would, and so he pushed.

Silence.

Zombies were moving through the smoke ahead of him. Now that he was free of the sewers he could sense them.

They were facing away from him, and Jimmy sprinted right for them. With luck, he’d get past them before they knew he was there.

But then, all at once, the dead stopped their attack on the retreating Troopbots and turned to face Jimmy. Several of them lunged forward, reaching for him.

It happened so fast Jimmy barely had time to adjust.

He veered to his left, shooting a gap between them just as his father’s Warbot reached down to scoop him up. Instead of pinning Jimmy, it flattened one of the zombies.

Jimmy didn’t slow down. He ran right into the thick of where the battle had been. He was in no-man’s-land now, midway between the retreating Troopbots on the one side and the zombies and his father’s Warbot on the other.

Jimmy looked back just as the Warbot crashed through the zombie horde, trampling some and throwing others out of the way. Still carrying his father atop its shoulders, the Warbot stepped slowly into the intersection. They were close now, less than twenty feet between them, the Warbot towering over Jimmy. His father’s badly decomposed face was incapable of expression, but Jimmy could still sense the madness, the betrayal, the rage emanating from the man’s mind.

Jimmy met his stare without blinking, and at the same time realized he was feeling exactly the same thing, betrayal and rage. The thought scared him, and for a moment, Jimmy felt his resolve waver. This was his father, after all. The man had done nothing but hurt him. And yet, angry as Jimmy was, a part of him wanted to love the man . . . needed the man’s approbation. But the scariest thought of all, the one Jimmy couldn’t get around, was that maybe they weren’t so very different, father and son. Maybe there was nothing but a fine line between them. Maybe Jimmy was just a gentle shove away from being exactly like him.

“No,” Jimmy said suddenly. “I won’t join you. I won’t.”

Maybe there was just a fine line between them, but the line was there. He looked up at the horror that his father had become and he was suddenly, absolutely, irrevocably sure. That zombie up there was not what he wanted to be. Jimmy was more than that.

“Go on and do it, if you can,” he told his father.

The Warbot straightened then. Jimmy could see it gathering itself for the final, crushing blow, like stomping out a bug, and he tensed to leap out of the way. But as the Warbot’s leg rose in the air, Jimmy saw a flash of movement off to his left. A second Warbot, this one bearing the insignia of Fisher’s expeditionary force, smashed into his father’s Warbot and both robots went tumbling into the side of a building, knocking down the brick wall there.

The expeditionary robot stood up first. It backed away from the collapsed storefront, and right before it started firing, Jimmy caught a glimpse of his father’s Warbot inside, its enormous Tyrannosaurus legs bent up in front of it like a man who has fallen into a low, deep couch.

And then the shooting started.

The expeditionary Warbot fired both its .50 caliber machine guns, the bullets glancing off the other Warbot’s armor plating, but doing little harm. His father’s Warbot pulled itself loose from the wall and charged its opponent, and when they hit, it felt like the ground was splitting open beneath Jimmy’s feet.

Their great weight tore up the pavement. Every step sent bits of rock and vast quantities of dust into the air, and within moments, Jimmy couldn’t tell the difference between the two. He could only marvel at the destruction they caused. They threw each other into the air and into the sides of buildings. The zombies swarming around their legs were crushed like bugs. Both robots were firing their machine guns continuously now, and the noise grew so loud Jimmy fell to the ground behind a pile of rubble, his hands clapped over his ears.

Jimmy had no idea how long the fight went on, but gradually, the guns fell silent.

And when the sound stopped altogether, and Jimmy looked over the pile of rubble he’d hid behind, he saw one of the Warbots tangled up in a collapsed wall, wrapped in metal cables, one of its cannon arms missing. It tried to step out of the wall, but one of its legs wasn’t working, and all it managed to do was fall face-first onto the pavement.

The other Warbot was in two large pieces, electrical cables and wires oozing out of its severed parts like guts. Neither machine was going to be getting up again. Jimmy could see that plain enough. And when he searched them with his mind, he could tell the one was dead, and the other, the one facedown on the street, was shutting down.

But there was something else.

Jimmy turned. A lone figure was limping toward him through the dust and smoke.

“Don’t come any closer,” Jimmy said. “I’m done with you.”

His father’s face was dark with blood and dust, except for the eyes, which were milky white and vacant. He raised his one good hand to Jimmy, the fingers clutching, and inched his way forward.

Jimmy scooped up a heavy chunk of asphalt and threw it at his father. It hit him in the shoulder, but he showed no reaction.

He kept coming.

Just then Jimmy felt a hand on his back. He knew who it was without having to look around.

“Step away, Jimmy,” said Dr. Knopf. “I’ve got this.”

Dr. Knopf raised a pistol and pointed it at Jimmy’s father. But before he could pull the trigger, Jimmy touched his arm, guiding the weapon away.

“No,” Jimmy said. “It’s for me to do.”

Dr. Knopf looked at the pistol, and then at Jimmy.

“Let me have it.”

Knopf handed it to him without saying another word. Jimmy looked down at the pistol, so many things weighing on his mind, and then pointed it at his father.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re not the same. Not at all.”

And then he pulled the trigger.