Plague of the Undead (4 page)

Jacob waited.

Jerry lifted his gaze to Jacob. There was no recognition in his bloodshot eyes, just panic and fear and misery. Then he looked past Jacob and scanned the assembled crowd until he found Amanda.

Then, much to Jacob’s surprise, Jerry managed a faint smile. “I love you, baby,” he said. “With all my heart.”

Several people were crying.

Amanda shouted, “You can’t do this to him. It isn’t right!”

A few people agreed with her and they yelled for mercy. But nobody else picked up the cry, and soon the square fell silent again.

Jacob stepped closer to Jerry, barely more than an arm’s length away. He thought again how horrible it was that Jerry wasn’t blindfolded. It certainly would have been easier on him to fire if he didn’t have to look the man in the eyes while he pulled the trigger. But that was the point, wasn’t it? The law was cold and absolute, but men mustn’t be. Men make laws to live by, and they should be man enough to face the consequences of those laws when the hard choices have to be made. It was an awful act, and an incredibly tragic one, which was why, Jacob figured, that more of the town hadn’t turned out for the execution.

Jacob raised his pistol and adjusted his grip.

From somewhere behind him Amanda screamed, “Oh, God, Jerry, I love you!”

Jacob told himself to do it. Wait any longer and he’d lose his nerve completely. His hands were slippery with sweat, and he had to adjust his grip on the weapon yet again. Then he squeezed the trigger, and the gun jumped in his hand.

He saw the flash. Jerry’s head snapped back, and he crumpled to the wet grass, his face turned to the sky, a nasty red hole where his right eye had been. Jacob swore silently. He’d been aiming for Jerry’s forehead. He’d intended something clean and quick. Not a horror show.

There was a sudden stench as Jerry’s bowels and bladder released. The grass beneath Jerry’s head turned dark.

A few people moaned, but the sound of their grief soon died away and the quiet crowd was left with nothing but the echo of the shot and the ragged sobbing of Amanda Grieder, now a widow.

Steve put a hand on his shoulder. “Lower your weapon,” he whispered.

Jacob did as the older deputy instructed, then holstered the gun. Dr. Gary Williams, the town’s only remaining properly trained doctor from the First Generation, stepped from the crowd and knelt next to the body. He checked for a pulse, and then pried open Jerry’s one remaining eye so he could study the pupil for any signs of dilation. If Jerry were going to rise, the first sign of it would be there, in the pupils.

To Jacob’s great relief, the doctor motioned for two of his apprentices to bring a blanket. They draped it over Jerry’s ruined face and then Dr. Williams went over to talk with Sheriff Taylor. As the two men conferred in low tones, somebody led Amanda Grieder away.

They had two men and a horse-drawn cart standing by to remove the body to the crematorium, but Jacob didn’t stick around to watch that part of the process. He walked back to the constabulary office with his head wrapped in a haze. He was barely aware of his steps, and saw nothing but the scrap of ground directly in front of his feet. He went straight to the bathroom, collapsed to his knees in front of the toilet, and vomited.

It was almost dark when Sheriff Taylor finally came for him.

Randall Taylor was a legend around town. He had led the First Generation out of Arkansas and into Arbella, had rallied them at the barricades, and fought like a lion to beat back the tide of the dead. He was one of the authors of the Code, and the sentinel on the wall that kept the rest of the world at bay. Like his old friend Steve Harrigan, Taylor was a tall, slender man. But where Harrigan was known for his affable smile and endless parade of jokes, Taylor was a far more serious man. He said little when he didn’t have to, and looked on everything and everyone with a quiet intensity.

He had been, according to Jacob’s mother, quite good looking back in the day. Gray hair, wrinkles, and liver spots had erased some of that former glory, and his sharp, handsome features seemed more gaunt than rugged these days, but he was still obviously a powerful man, one who carried himself with a confidence that was immediately apparent to all who met him.

He leaned against the doorway of the bathroom, a matchstick tucked into the corner of his mouth. He pulled it out and held it up for Jacob to see. “Steve said you promised to talk to Frank Hartwell about getting more of these next time he’s outside the walls.”

Jacob looked at him, confused. The words made no sense to him.

He was still hugging the toilet, though he hadn’t thrown up again after that first time hours earlier. He stood up, lowered the lid, and sat down.

Taylor pointed to the sink. “Wash your face off first. I want to talk with you.”

Jacob ran water into his hands and splashed it into his face, scrubbing his mouth and cheeks with the heels of his hands. He took the towel down from the ring and dried his face. Then he put the towel back and looked at his reflection in the mirror. He didn’t recognize the face staring back at him.

“You did well today.”

Jacob turned to face his boss. “I killed a man.”

“And you saved twenty more.” Taylor put the matchstick back in his mouth and rolled it over to one corner. “I’m proud of you.”

“I feel sick.”

“Yep. Just pray you feel that way every time you have to do it.”

“I never want to do that again.”

“I can’t promise you that.”

Jacob nodded. “Yeah, I know.”

“You know, I’m not the only one you impressed today. I’ve been talking for the last few hours with the town council about you.”

Jacob didn’t say anything to that. All he wanted to do was drown himself in some of Kelly Banis’s infamous bathtub gin.

“Folks have got questions, though.”

“What kind of questions?”

“What you did today, out there in the square, was reaffirm the Code that’s kept us alive all these years.”

“I know that,” Jacob said. He sighed. The Code had been on his mind all day, and he’d already covered this ground many times. The whole sound of it was turning sour.

“Now hold on. Give me a chance to speak. People want to know why a man who so ably filled the Code’s hardest task is so keen on leaving.”

“Leaving? What . . . who said anything about leaving?”

“Well, ain’t that what you and some of the others been talking about the last ten years? You and Kelly Banis and Nick Carroll.”

“You mean the Expansionists? What . . . I don’t understand. You want to talk about this now?”

“Why not?”

Jacob started to speak, but he didn’t know what to say. He felt blindsided. “Sheriff, with all due respect, sir, I don’t really feel like a political discussion right now.”

“And why is that?”

Jacob stared at his boss. Where to begin? “Oh, I don’t know. Because I just put a man to death. Talking politics with that hanging over my head, it feels obscene somehow.”

Taylor chewed on his matchstick a moment before taking it out and looking at it like a bad habit he couldn’t shake. He flicked it into the waste can with a practiced motion. Why he even bothered to throw them away anymore Jacob could hardly say. There’d be another in his mouth five minutes from now. Was it any wonder they were running out? Again?

So he wanted to talk politics. Jacob shook his head. Fine. So be it. The expansionist question was endlessly complex, but really it boiled down to one simple truth. Arbella had survived the zombie apocalypse. They’d done well for themselves. They’d turned a deserted town into a new home, and there, they’d not only survived, but thrived. They’d walled up the town and turned every available resource toward the maintenance and the prosperity of their community. The Code was the formal statement of that purpose, its manifesto and its constitution, for lack of a better analogy. And the program had worked.

Now, thirty years later, they had become so successful that Arbella’s old walls couldn’t hold them anymore. Jacob and quite a few of his friends, nearly all of them of the younger generation, now of age, believed that the answer to the problem was expansion. They were living in a Malthusian pressure cooker. It hadn’t exploded yet, but it was only a matter of time. The First Generation had already admitted the necessity of expansion. Jacob’s fight down by the river that very morning was the result of a small expansionist program organized by the town council, though of course you’d never hear any of them saying that the purpose of the work had been to expand Arbella’s borders. The work was an improvement, they’d say, nothing more.

The First Generation, Jacob’s mother included, invariably came back with some version of the same tired old truism.
Our strategy saved our lives, and it has worked brilliantly since then. The world out there wants to kill us. No good can come from pushing into that world. You are safe here. You have a good and a happy home here. Outside those walls you’ll find only death.

Jacob and his friends had argued till they were blue in the face, but the First Generation refused to budge.

“You get mad real easy, Jacob,” Taylor said. “I want you to work on that. Being quick to anger never did a cop a bit of good, believe me. I’ve seen plenty of good cops throw their jobs on the old compost heap because they couldn’t control their temper.”

“Look, Randall—”

“Are we on a first-name basis now?”

Jacob stared at him, trying to gauge the man’s motives. Jacob had once heard Bill Christie boast at a Christmas party that he had fought next to Randall Taylor during the Battle of the Gates. He’d stood there shoulder to shoulder with Sheriff Taylor, gunning down zombies as they climbed over the barricades in an endless wave. “Me and him,” Christie had boasted, thumping his chest, “we’re tight.”

“Then go and slap him on the back,” someone from the crowd had challenged.

“Yeah, do it!” someone else said.

Like a drunken blimp on a crooked course, Christie had wandered over to where Taylor was talking with a few of the town leaders and slapped the sheriff merrily on the back, nearly causing Taylor to spill his tea all over Wanda Shane, head nurse of Arbella’s hospital.

Taylor had turned on the man and leveled such a withering stare at him that Christie immediately dropped his hand. He muttered some sort of incoherent apology and then shrank away, utterly embarrassed.

But Jacob wasn’t a drunk, and he wasn’t some minor hero of the First Generation.

He said, “If this is an on-the-job talk, forgive me, it’ll be Sheriff Taylor from here on out. But if you’re going to come in here while I’m feeling like a warmed-over dog turd and ambush me with questions about Expansionism, then, yeah, it’s gonna be on a first-name basis. So you tell me, sir, what’s it gonna be?”

Randall Taylor looked at him for a long moment. When Jacob didn’t crack, he nodded, pulled another matchstick from his shirt pocket, and jammed it into his mouth.

“Do you know why I had you handle the execution today?”

“Because I’m chief deputy. It’s the job of the chief deputy to do all executions.”

“Is it?”

Jacob felt lost again. What, exactly, was he being asked?

“It’s part of the Code,” Jacob offered hesitantly.

“Is it? Where is that written?”

“It isn’t. It’s just always been that way.”

“Has it? I did the first three executions myself. Men that fought with me at the Battle of the Gates. Men I thought I trusted.”

“Yes, sir, I know that.”

“Then how can it be tradition?”

Jacob desperately searched his memory for some explanation, some light he could turn on this issue, but all he could manage was a shrug.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Did they teach you about John Adams when you were in school?”

“The American president?”

Taylor nodded. “Second president of the United States, yes.” He pulled the matchstick from his mouth and flicked it into the waste can. “Adams lived through the American Revolution, and then helped build a country out of what was left over, and when he reflected back on that, he gave what I think to be one of the most balanced takes on the importance of politics in everyday life ever put to paper. He said: ‘I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.’ It all comes down to politics, son. Get that wrong, and the best of intentions ain’t worth nothing.”

He pulled out the little box where he kept his matchsticks from his shirt pocket, opened it, looked at the contents ruefully, then slid it closed and put the box back.

“Jacob, I’m taking the long way around to say this, and that ain’t my style, but I don’t know any other way. I had you take care of Jerry Grieder because I needed to see for myself that you were ready. That you were prepared to be that second generation of leaders John Adams talked about. You proved today that the Code will survive to the next generation, which is why the town council approved my decision to name you as my successor.”

Jacob’s mouth opened. He said, “What?”

“You heard me right. You’re the obvious man for the job, and after all you did today, ain’t nobody gonna doubt the logic of it.”

“I . . . I don’t know what to say. You’re not ready to retire. You’re still—”

“I’m ready to retire, Jacob. I’ll be seventy come October. I’ve worn a badge nearly fifty years now. Trust me, that’s a long time.”

Jacob let out a long breath. “Craziest day ever,” he said.

“Well, not so fast. We still got this question about expansion that needs answering first. The town council all agreed you’re the man for the job, but they’re troubled by the fact that you want to leave so bad.”

“You said that before. Where’s that coming from? I don’t want to leave. Nobody said anything about leaving. All we want to do is explore what’s out there. It’s been thirty years. We don’t know anything about the world we live in. An expedition is all we want, a chance to look around and see how far we can expand our town.”

Taylor took the matchstick box out again and jammed one into his mouth. It was a practiced motion so casually done that Jacob wondered if the man even realized he was doing it.

“I saw those zombies you shot today, the really old ones. They had to be twelve or thirteen years old at least. The zombies are lasting a lot longer than we thought. Isn’t that proof enough that we don’t want to go beyond the walls?”

“No, exactly the opposite. Don’t you see? We have no idea what’s out there. Maybe it’s still as bad as it was. But maybe it isn’t. Either way, we have to know. We’re going to have to do it soon, too. The resources we’ve got won’t support our population for more than another few years. We could end up starving here. Or worse.”

Taylor nodded. “I know all that’s true. That may sound funny coming from me, but I do know it’s true. I suspect I’ve known it for years now, just haven’t wanted to admit it to myself. That’s why I learned that John Adams quote, so I could use it on the town council. Me, and all the others on the council, we studied politics and war so that we could give you the Code and this town. Now it’s your turn to study geography and navigation and all the rest of it. You get to be our Lewis and Clark, Jacob. We’re a long way from tapestry and porcelain still, but with you at the helm, I think we’ll get there.”

“I don’t understand. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying I got the council to agree to your expedition.”

“What? Are you kidding?”

“Nope.”

“Oh, my God.” Jacob laughed. He wanted to grab Taylor by the shoulders and shake him. Or hug him. God help him, even kiss him. He was suddenly so excited he could barely stay in his skin.

“Well, don’t go running off the reservation just yet,” Taylor said. “Council’s asked for a full report on what you expect to achieve, what resources you’ll need to make it happen, and who all will be going with you, and they want it to be delivered in session tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow?” That wiped the smile from Jacob’s face. “But how can I prepare a full report by tomorrow morning? I need time for that.”

“All you’ve done for the last ten years is talk about this, Jacob. How much more time do you need?”

“Yeah, but . . .” Jacob’s mind was racing. He was stunned, still unable to process his good fortune. There was so much to do, so many people to talk to. He laughed. “I can’t believe I’m finally gonna get to lead this expedition.”

“Well, not so fast on that, either.”

Jacob’s smile drained away. “What do you mean? You’re gonna let me go, aren’t you?”

“Of course. But you’re gonna be coleader.”

“Co . . . ?”

“Yep,” Taylor said. “I’m going with you.”