Plague of the Undead (7 page)

“What about this area here?” asked Andy, his finger on the open country north of Sikeston.

Frank nodded thoughtfully, as though considering how to answer. He stroked his beard and heaved his broad shoulders. “Well, that’s kind of the point of this whole expedition, isn’t it? This is Highway 60,” he said, and drew a line across the map. “Once we get out beyond that point, we’re in undiscovered country. Nobody I know has been beyond there.”

They all regarded the map with a newfound respect.

Jacob looked around the table and realized the full measure of what they were about to do was finally sinking in. “But we’re ready for that,” he said. “Everybody at this table has been trained to take care of themselves, and each other. That’s our Code.
Everybody works, everybody watches the other guy’s back.
Just remember that, and we’re gonna make this expedition as big a success as Arbella herself.”

Frank Hartwell nodded.

Max and Eli traded huge grins.

Even Bree seemed to relax a little.

“Well, I want another drink,” said Barry. “Anybody else want some?”

A few held out their glasses, including Jacob. Barry rose to collect them, but before he could leave the table, Owen Webb spoke for the first time.

“I have a question,” he said.

He seemed intensely serious, his frown in marked contrast to the rest of the room. Those few who were standing sat back down and listened. Owen was coming along as the expedition’s anthropologist. He had been a brand new anthropology professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock when the First Days happened, but since coming to Arbella he’d settled into teaching reading and candle making to the children over at the school. Out of the entire group he was the only one Jacob had not personally recruited. In fact, he came to Jacob, and over the course of one long discussion while he helped Jacob mop the floors in the constabulary’s jail cells he made a convincing case that he could offer a unique perspective on the world they were likely to find. Only two other members of the group, he reminded Jacob, were old enough to remember the world before the First Days. The younger members would undoubtedly have questions about the ruins they saw. Who better to answer those questions than a professor who taught about the way people used to live?

It was a convincing argument, and it had grabbed Jacob the same way Owen had grabbed the group at the table.

Once he had everyone’s attention Owen said, “What about first contact?”

“What do you mean, first contact?” asked Max. He looked around the table. “What’s that mean?”

“You know,” Owen said, “with other people. We can’t be the only Arbella out there. Surely others have survived, and thrived, just as we have. What happens when we make first contact with them?”

Jacob looked around the table. “That’s a good question,” he said. “Any thoughts?”

“Well,” said Frank, “we’ve never run into anybody, and my crews and I have spent a lot of time out there.”

“But it is possible,” Owen said. “Even likely. It’s like looking up at the stars and wondering if there’s someone else out there. It’s just not statistically possible that we are the only pocket of civilization to have survived. I think we need a plan for if, and when, we make that contact.”

“I think we should probably try to avoid any settlements, don’t you think?” Kelly said.

“Absolutely,” Barry said.

“Yeah, me, too. I think that’s a good policy in general,” Nick said. “I’ll, of course, record the location of any settlements we find. We could always arrange a future expedition to make the first contact.”

“But it might be an opportunity to open trade,” suggested Bree. “And if they’ve survived like we have, they’re probably not the kind of people who would want to hurt us. I mean, right? They’d know that survival is a team effort, right? They’d welcome more team members.”

Sheriff Taylor stood up.

All discussion stopped, and all eyes turned on him.

He leaned over the table and met the gaze of every person in the room. “Listen up,” he said. “These are the ground rules. We make first contact only if we have to. We will record the locations of any settlements, as Nick suggested, but we will avoid first contact if at all possible.”

Owen Webb started to object, but Taylor held up a hand to silence him.

“And I want to make sure that each of you understands this one thing. Under no circumstances are any of you to say a word about Arbella to anyone outside our circle. Not a single word. I will die before I give away the location of our home, and if you are going on this expedition, you better damn well do the same.”

He scanned the room again, his gaze unflinching, the matchstick clenched tightly in his teeth.

“Is that absolutely clear?”

A few nodded right away, clearly cowed. Others, including Owen, Jacob, and Frank, slowly nodded a moment later.

They left Arbella on April 21st, and for that first week on the trail it seemed to Jacob more like a vacation than exploration. For one thing, his headaches were gone. There was no one else to make asinine suggestions that etiquette demanded he listen to. And all the public pressure of what to do and how to do it were finally a matter for the record. He’d taken action. He’d made the decisions. Now, finally, he was alone with the consequences of those choices. And he felt pretty damn good about it.

The last of the hard freezes were behind them, and spring had come upon them quietly as a cat. The mornings were cool and usually foggy, but the afternoons were mild. It got cold at night, but not even that had been much of an issue. Working closely with Nick and Frank, he’d charted out their course so that they always ended up close to some sort of structure by nightfall.

At night, they kept up a rotating guard, which had seemed a little silly that first night out, but proved useful during the second night.

Just before dawn, Owen Webb woke Jacob in a panic.

“Outside,” he said. “Three of them coming up the road.”

“Shhh,” Jacob said, instantly awake.

He went to hand signals.
Just three. You’re sure?

Owen nodded.

They’d taken shelter inside an abandoned store that had once sold propane tanks. Frank Hartwell and his salvage teams had long since drained the tanks, but it was still one of the salvage teams’ most popular stops on their treks outward from Arbella. It was set back from the highway by a good distance and offered some excellent places to hide the horses. It was also easily defended and afforded a fairly good view of anything coming up the highway in either direction.

Jacob went to the edge of the lot, keeping low between two large rusting tanks, and scanned the road where Owen pointed.

There were way more than three. Jacob picked shapes out of the darkness, eventually counting fourteen in all.

A fairly decent-sized herd.

There were only three before
, Owen signed to him.
I promise
.

Something rustled in the grass behind them. It was Sheriff Taylor, coming up between the tanks, a black, mean-looking rifle in his hands. It looked sort of like an AR-15 with a collapsible stock, but it had a long, built-in suppressor on the muzzle and flip-up tactical sights. Jacob thought he’d seen every rifle in Arbella, but that one was a surprise

Jacob gestured at the rifle.
What’s that?

Taylor shook his head as if to tell him not now. The others were watching them from the storefront windows, crouched down out of sight. From somewhere behind the building, one of the horses caught the scent of the dead and snorted in fear.

Out on the road, several of the zombies turned toward the propane tanks and picked up their pace.

“Damn it,” Taylor muttered. “Gonna have to go tactical.”

“You can’t shoot that many of them,” Jacob said. “All the shots will attract every zombie in the area.”

Taylor winked at him. “Just trust the old man, would you?”

Moving in a crouch Taylor stepped onto the road. A few zombies saw him and began to moan. But before they had a chance to start the feeding call that would attract even more of their numbers, Taylor began to fire.

There was no muzzle flash, no loud crack. The gun was nearly silent. It made a noise like somebody quietly snapping their fingers each time Taylor shot. And clearly, it was deadly accurate, for within seconds, motionless corpses surrounded Taylor, dark humps against the road.

Taylor scanned the countryside and, evidently satisfied, raised the rifle and calmly walked back to the storefront.

Jacob followed after him. “What the hell was that?”

Taylor smiled. “The old dog’s still got a few tricks.”

“No kidding. Where did you get that rifle?”

“A little something from before the First Days. Part of my private stash.”

“I thought I’d seen every rifle in town, but I’ve never seen anything like that. What is it?”

“A Colt M4 carbine with a built-in suppressor. I railed it up a bit, but deep down it’s just your standard M4.”

“Those shots . . . it was so quiet.”

“Special ammo. It’s a 300 Blackout round, subsonic.”

Jacob shook his head and laughed. The old man really did know how to make a splash. And then he saw the magazine sticking up from Taylor’s belt. On the bottom of it was a white sticker with a happy face on it. Jacob pointed at it. “Never would have thought you’d have a sense of humor about bullets.”

Taylor saw him pointing at the magazine and his expression turned serious. He stripped the magazine from the M4 and ejected the round from the chamber. Next he visibly and physically checked the weapon to make sure it was empty and then slid it back into his saddlebags.

He held out the two magazines, the one he’d just ejected from the weapon and the one with the smiley face, and said, “Look at those. Tell me what you see.”

They appeared identical. That is, until Jacob turned the magazines upside down and examined the bullets loaded there. In the low light it was hard to tell what he was supposed to be looking for, but then he saw it. The bullets in the magazine with the happy face were a different caliber. They were bigger. Not by much, but definitely bigger.

Jacob looked at Taylor in surprise. Bigger bullets like these would seat into the chamber just like the properly sized bullets, but if it was fired, it would jam up in the barrel and probably blow up in the shooter’s face. At the very least, it would ruin the gun.

“Why do you have these?” he asked Taylor.

“It’s a nasty surprise if anybody ever gets the gun away from me and tries to use it on our people. When you get to be sheriff, this’ll be your gun. Remember that.”

Then he put both magazines in his bag, took a seat against the wall, and said, “Wake me up when the coffee’s ready, okay?” And with that he lowered the brim of his hat down over his eyes and settled into sleep.

The encounter made them cautious, and it was slow going after that, just as Jacob had predicted. Morale remained high. But Bree Cheney, the pretty young blonde Frank Hartwell was so taken with, turned out to be the biggest surprise of all. Jacob had been a little worried about her before they started out, because she’d seemed so terribly nervous about what they might encounter, but she took to the trail right away.

At one point, just before sundown on the third day, she’d gone to the edge of the roadway—there was actual pavement still visible at that point—and faced the setting sun. A cool wind blew across the grassland, making it move like a sea of molten brass. Frank had brought his horse up next to Jacob’s so they could study the map a bit, but the sight of Bree on horseback, her hair filled with burning orange light, had completely thrown him over.

She turned suddenly, her smile beaming. “Isn’t it beautiful?” she said.

“Yes, it is,” Frank had said. “Yes, indeed it is.”

Jacob had chuckled at that, and then went back to his map.

The other big surprise was that the horses were managing the tall grasses without any real trouble, and everybody seemed to be doing okay with the long rides. He hadn’t heard any complaints at all.

Except for Nick, of course. From Nick there were complaints aplenty. He was a decent rider, but made little secret of his low opinion of horses. His horse, a rugged little six-year-old piebald mare, seemed to share a similar lack of respect for him. The horse absolutely refused to cross the numerous streams left behind from the rainstorms that kept them stuck in Arbella for the whole of March and early April. Even small ones made the animal nervous. The horse would be doing fine, then suddenly rear back at the water’s edge and fidget around like she was terrified of getting her hooves wet. The constant battles grated on Nick’s nerves and more than once resulted in him threatening to punch the animal in the nose. Jacob suspected the mare was just trying to show him who was boss, and Max and Eli even told him as much, but rider and horse proved too hardheaded to give in to the other. They ended up falling into a rhythm where either Eli or Max would come up alongside the animal, grab the reins, and coax the mare through the stream. It irritated Nick to need the help, but it got them along.

And in the evenings, while they couldn’t risk a campfire, they had Kelly’s homemade gin to ease the bumps and bruises of the day. All in all, Jacob went into those first few days with the feeling that they had this thing in the bag.

But of course it didn’t last.

They ran into trouble shortly after setting out on the fifth day. They’d had gloriously good weather for the first part of their trek, and it had spoiled them. Then it started to rain. It wasn’t much, at first, but the clouds grew darker and darker, and the rain went from a mild shower to an apocalyptic event. The wind picked up. Rain lashed at their faces like shards of glass. Jacob pulled a tarp over his head and pinched it close beneath his chin. Turning to look down the line of riders, he saw the others doing the same.

The horses grew skittish. Nick’s mare turned into a devil and got so uncontrollable that Max had to hand his pack animal off to Eli so that he could come up alongside to help control the horse.

Still, the animal bucked and snorted every time lightning fired in the distance.

After watching Nick get nearly thrown from his mount, Jacob made his way to the rear of the column and found Sheriff Taylor there, horse and rider with their heads down, trudging forward.

“I want to stop us up ahead,” Jacob said. “There’s an abandoned gas station there we can use to get out of the weather.”

“Sounds good,” said Taylor.

Jacob waited for more, but there was none. He regarded the man’s quiet resilience and wondered if it was fortitude or merely bluster. Surely he had to be as miserable as the rest of them. Yet there was that iron look in his eye, and that flat, unflappable confidence in his voice, which always gave Jacob pause. You don’t develop a reputation as the George Washington of your people without earning it, he thought, and maybe this was how you did it.

He turned his mare and headed back up the line.

“Listen up,” he said. He had to yell to be heard over the wind. “There’s an old gas station up ahead here. We’re gonna stop there and wait out this weather. Is everybody doing okay?”

He heard grunts and grumblings from the others, which was good enough for him.

“All right,” he said. “We’re almost there.”