Plague of the Undead (9 page)

They traveled in silence the rest of the night and arrived on the southern outskirts of Sikeston shortly after first light.

Max was out front, riding point. All the other Arbella men had made an effort to shave in the evenings, when they made camp, but Max had not. He was sporting a splotchy mustache and beard that might grow into something big, but at the moment only made him look unkempt.

He stopped his horse, turned in his saddle, and motioned for the group to stop. Then he turned his horse and came back to where Jacob and Nick were waiting.

“Looks pretty quiet,” he said. “What do we do?”

Jacob scanned the city. It was too big, too spread out, to see all of it at once, but what he could see looked quiet and deserted. Most of the buildings were low, rectangular concrete boxes with grass and spindly shrubs climbing up the sides. Few of the buildings were more than two stories high, though there were some larger ones here and there that Jacob guessed had been hotels back before the First Days.

Nick had his map open on the back of his mare’s neck. “There’s this road here,” he said, and pointed to a thick yellow line that cut the town into two more or less even halves. “Malone Avenue. It looks like it runs all the way through town. I was thinking we could get on that and head west. That’ll take us by the airport, here, where we can let Frank look around for whatever he can find.”

Nick looked to Frank and the older man nodded.

“Okay. Then we head west again. That’ll put us here, in the middle of town. I was looking at some old photographs and it looks like they had a tractor supply store, a farm and home store, and a couple of other places that might be good to check out. After that, I thought we’d head north up to here and check out their medical center.”

Jacob glanced around the group and got nods all the way around.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

Once they entered town, they formed a single column, Jacob and Max riding at the head of the line, while Eli and Sheriff Taylor brought up the rear. Most of the trail up from Arbella had been over grass-covered roadways, which masked the sound the horses’ hooves made on the ground. And even in those places where the pavement remained uncovered, the whistling of the wind had been loud enough to conceal their movements. But that wasn’t the case here in town. Weeds grew up from the cracks in the roads, but nature had yet to reclaim them. The sound of hooves on pavement echoed off the windowless buildings on either side of the road, making Jacob more and more nervous. Glancing back down the line, he could see his worry reflected back at him from the others, but there was little they could do about it except keep a weather eye open for trouble.

Their luck held out all the way to the airport. Sikeston seemed as quiet as the grave. The only things moving were the birds, and there were plenty of those. Ravens, mostly. They’d seen several sitting atop the sign welcoming them to the airport, but there were many more on top of the three main buildings that made up the airport’s business center. They looked down on Jacob and the others with haunting, dead stares, completely unafraid of the intrusion into their home.

But looking past the birds there didn’t seem to be much they could salvage. The buildings had long ago been hollowed out and stripped down to the lath, and the runway was wrinkled and cracked. Here and there they saw a few small planes, but they were little more than rusted heaps. One even had a mulberry bush growing out of the frame that had once held its windshield and a carpet of green clover growing on its wings.

“Any chance there’s gas in the underground tanks?” Jacob asked Frank. If there was anything salvageable around here, it would be that.

“Maybe. Though it looks like this place has been cleaned out already.”

“Where do you suppose those would be?”

Frank turned toward the hangars. “Over there’d be my—”

He cut himself off and pointed at the tree line beyond the hangars.

A dead woman had just stumbled out of the trees. She was badly decomposed, her clothes nothing but dirty rags embedded into her rotting flesh. The decomposition was so complete her legs could barely carry her, and every jerky step sent a shudder through her body that seemed like it might cause her to collapse. But she staggered on, one clumsy step after another.

Jacob scanned the tree line, looking for more. One thing they’d learned about the undead over the last thirty years was that they tended to group together. They sought each other out wherever they could, gathering into progressively bigger and bigger herds. Some of the First Generation told about seeing herds so large they shook the ground when they walked and made such a horrible moaning they could be heard for miles. Herds like that didn’t exist anymore—at least Jacob hoped they didn’t—but he had no doubt they once did.

Still, it only took one. A bite or a scratch from a zombie wasn’t necessarily fatal, but the infection that usually resulted from a bite was. Back in grade school, one of his shooting instructors had described zombies as walking petri dishes full of just about every deadly bug known to man, making their bites almost as dangerous as that of a venomous snake.

But surprisingly, this zombie seemed to be by itself. It staggered slowly across the parking lot, making it almost halfway before tripping over a rusted pipe and falling face-first into the weeds.

It tried over and over again to get back on its feet, but couldn’t manage it.

Jacob was about to go over to it and crush its head when the first ravens lit from the business center and began circling the still struggling zombie.

More followed.

Soon an enormous flock of them circled in the air over the dead woman.

“What are they doing?” Kelly asked.

“I don’t know,” Jacob answered. He looked to Frank. “You ever seen that before?”

“No.”

Jacob turned to Sheriff Taylor, who answered with a single shake of his head.

The first few birds had already landed next to the dead woman by the time Jacob turned back. One of the birds darted forward and stabbed at the dead woman with its beak. The zombie raised one feeble arm, but it didn’t come anywhere close to the bird.

More darted in, pecking at the zombie.

Jacob heard angry squawking and a furious rustling of wings, and then the birds rushed in as one and started to tear the zombie apart, fighting over the leathery scraps they had ripped away in big strips. The zombie thrashed and writhed to the last, but it never had a chance against so many.

It took the birds less than two minutes to strip the carcass down to the bone.

When they were done, the birds went back to fighting amongst themselves.

It was a chaotic scene, and one that held them all with a shocked and rapt fascination.

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Frank said.

Beside him, Bree shuddered. “It was awful.”

Frank turned to Sheriff Taylor. “Why do you suppose they attacked that zombie like that? Ravens are carrion birds. That thing was still moving.”

“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Taylor said.

“I guess they smelled the decomposition,” Barry said.

Taylor shook his head. “That’s possible, but birds cue off of movement more than smell, don’t they?”

“Raptors do,” Barry agreed.

Taylor surveyed the blackened skeleton that was all that remained of the zombie, and shook his head. “I don’t think we should stick around here to discuss it,” he said. “Where there’s one of those things, there’s probably a hundred. We should make ourselves scarce.”

“Are we going to ride out of town?” Bree asked.

Jacob glanced at Taylor, who nodded.

“That’d be the smart thing to do,” Jacob said.

“But . . . what about the medical center?” Bree asked. She looked from Jacob and Taylor back to Frank, like she hoped he’d back her up. “I wanted to see if there were any medical supplies there we could salvage. There are things we need back in Arbella. Syringes and IV bags. A defibrillator, if they’ve got one. That’d be the Holy Grail, actually.”

“She’s right,” Taylor said. “We can’t pass up a chance to collect medical supplies. Nick, you said the medical center was north of town?”

“North of where we were. It should be due west of us now, across that field there.”

“Okay,” Taylor said. “We’ll head there first. We make it quick though. We grab what we can and we get out.”

“Thank you, sheriff,” Bree said.

“Absolutely,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s worth it.”

Thirty minutes later they reined up in front of a wall of concrete barriers two stories high. The walls were pocked with bullet holes and brown, woody vines were growing up its moldy face, but they could still see the word
LIARS
written in spray paint all over the walls.

“What’s that about?” Jacob said.

Nick came up alongside him. “No idea. Let’s ask the anthropologist.” He turned in his saddle and called out to Owen. “Hey, professor, what’s this all about?”

Owen stared up at the walls, and then scanned their length in both directions. Evidently whoever built the wall hadn’t had enough concrete sections to surround the hospital. There were gaps, and those gaps had been filled with buses and intermodal cargo boxes and anything else the builders had been able to put their hands on. But the word
LIARS
was painted over all of it.

Owen glanced at the ground where, even now, thirty years after the First Days, shell casings could still be seen rusting in the grass.

“Looks like they put up a pretty good fight. If they were shooting toward the hospital I would imagine they must have rounded up most of their undead and kept them here in the hospital. These shell casings and bullet holes in the walls are probably from them trying to keep the zombies inside.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much obvious,” Nick said. He waved a hand toward the wall. “What’s with the
LIARS
written all over the place?”

Owen’s eyes narrowed.

Jacob had been watching the two men during their time on the trail. They’d taken a strong dislike to one another. On Nick’s side, that dislike came out as name-calling and mockery. Owen just did a lot of squinting and muttering.

Yet another problem he had to add to his list.

Owen said, “I haven’t seen any specific mention of liars, but I think I can infer what they meant here. During the First Days, there was a lot of talk of finding a cure. Everybody had lost somebody they loved. People were desperate for a way to bring them back.”

“How do you cure a zombie?” Nick said. “They’re dead. There’s pretty much no cure for that.”

Owen took a long moment to answer.

“Everybody wanted a cure,” he finally said. “Yes, they were dead. Yes, there’s no coming back from that. But people don’t always think right when it comes to losing the people they love the most. And when you see them walking around, it’s even harder to think of them as dead, even if you know it academically. Remember, knowing something and feeling something are very different. Every night on the news you’d see some segment on how close they were to a cure. I think we all knew it was a lost cause, but when your six-year-old daughter is wandering around the backyard with a piece of your ten-year-old son hanging from her lips, you find yourself willing to hang a hope on finding a cure.”

Owen’s face had turned red, and his breath whistled in his nose. Jacob watched the pain play out on the man’s face, and he was reminded yet again of what it meant to live in a small town. You know everybody, and everybody knows you. But nobody knows the real you, the deep-down dark places that you go to when you’re on fire with hurt and lost in the pain of memory. That belongs to you alone, even when you give it voice.

To his credit, Nick said nothing.

Owen looked up at the wall and studied the graffiti written there. “This,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “This is the work of an angry people. You can see their wrath all along this wall. They wanted to believe there was a cure, and what they got instead of the results they’d been promised, was more death. Is it any wonder they did this?”

Nick glanced at Jacob, clearly a little embarrassed. At least the man had some sense of shame.

Jacob nodded. “Thanks, Owen. That explains it just fine.”

Owen didn’t say a word. He just turned his horse around and went to the back of the line.

The south side of the hospital, the side that faced into town, had taken heavy damage. One of the concrete sections had fallen over, creating a big hole, but there were numerous other gaps as well. Jacob scanned the area for trouble. Everywhere he looked, he saw burned-out cars and trucks, and the ground was covered with thousands and thousands of rusted shell casings. There’d been some bad fighting here, back in the day.

“Bree, do you have a pretty good idea of what you need?”

Their medic rode up, Frank Hartwell by her side. “I have a wish list,” she said. “If I’m able to find anything on it is anybody’s guess.”

“Okay,” he said. “Well, it’s getting to be about noon. I’ll give you an hour. Sound like enough time to look around?”

“Should be, yeah.”

“Frank, you’re going with her, right?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Max, you, too.”

“You got it, boss.”

The three of them dismounted, climbed through the wall, and crossed the overgrown field that had once been the front lawn of the hospital. The front doors had long ago been knocked down and they slipped inside without incident.

“You think this is worth the effort?” Kelly asked. “I mean, thirty-year-old medical supplies?”

Jacob shrugged. “It’ll be worth it if she finds that defibrillator she was talking about. Even if it doesn’t work, we could rebuild it. We could save lives with one of those.”

He climbed down off his horse and the others did the same. They tied the animals off in a small field where they could forage for some grass. Then Jacob and the others took a seat in the middle of the road and shared a lunch of beef jerky and pickled vegetables.

Jacob was trying to get at the last piece of cauliflower in the jar when the ravens came back. They landed on the top of the wall and on the nearby roofs, hundreds of them. Several of the horses got spooked and started making noise.

Jacob stood up and turned in a circle, watching the birds land on every available roosting point.

Within seconds, the birds were all around them.

“I don’t like this,” said Nick.

“No, me either,” Jacob said.

Taylor grabbed Eli by the shoulder. “Go into the hospital and find the others. Bring ’em out here as fast as you can.”

Eli ran for the hospital.

Taylor pushed the brim of his hat up with his thumb as he looked around. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

“Uh-oh,” said Barry. “Hey, guys, we got trouble.”

Barry pointed off to their left. A gray-haired man with dark stains all over his clothes was walking their way, his gait too slow to be normal, his arms and legs too stiff. Behind him, two more men staggered out of the shadows.

Suddenly, the birds began to squawk excitedly.

Several hundred of their number took to the air and circled overhead.

The three zombies stepped into the street. Jacob went for his rifle, but Kelly put her hand on his.

“Wait,” she said. Kelly turned to Barry. “I think they’re changing their predation ecology.”

As they watched, the birds dipped toward the zombies, dive-bombing them, pecking at them a little at a time with each pass. Jacob had seen the same thing back in Arbella every time somebody’s dog got too close to a blue jay’s nest. The birds would dive-bomb the dog relentlessly, pecking at its back just where the tail starts. The dogs would go from angry and frustrated to hurt in just a few passes, and the next thing anybody knew the dog would run away, yelping the whole time.

But this looked somehow a little different, a little more like lions moving in to make a kill on some oversized prey.

The zombies grabbed at the birds, but caught only air. They were too slow, and the birds struck with the lethal precision of predators. Soon one of the zombies collapsed to its knees, only to be knocked facedown under a furious pounding of black wings. The birds started to devour it, even as it continued to struggle.

The other two zombies went down moments later.

Soon there were three knots of ravens, tearing and pulling the corpses apart.

“My God,” Kelly said, stepping forward with a hand over her mouth. She turned back to the group. “Galapagos,” she said.

“Yes!” Barry said, clearly impressed. “Darwin’s finches reinvented for the apocalypse.”

“What does that mean?” Jacob asked.

“They’re evolving,” Kelly said. She was so excited she was trying to talk with her hands. “They’re showing adaptive behavior.”

Jacob glanced at Nick, who only raised his eyebrows again. He was no help.

“I don’t understand. What’s Galapagos?”

“The island chain where Charles Darwin first worked out the theory of evolution. That’s what’s happening here. These birds are evolving. It’s . . . it’s like this. Ravens are opportunistic. They always have been. They have this huge range in their diet, everything from carrion to blueberries; they’ll eat anything. They’ve coexisted with humans since before we started keeping track of things like that. But in all that time, we’ve known them as scavengers. They’ll eat anything. They are the rats of the skies. But it’s usually what we leave them. The corn growing in our fields or the trash in our alleys. But these birds, they’ve found their own way. They’re living off the dead. Don’t you see?”

No, he didn’t see, but he was trying. Jacob shrugged and said, “That they’re eating zombies . . . ?”

“Yes!” she said. “That’s huge. They’ve gone from being our pests to being our predators.”

“Not
our
predators,” Jacob said. “They’re eating zombies.”

“Ravens are intelligent,” she said. “But they don’t know the difference between zombies and humans. That’s what’s so incredible about this. Consider it from a bird’s point of view. The thing that has spent ten thousand years chasing them from the cornfields is now dinner. It walks around smelling dead, yet still it walks. Can’t you see how huge that shift is? They’ve done more than change their diet. They’ve taken an environmental catastrophe and turned it into a niche to guarantee their own survival. They’re evolving.”

Jacob thought on the implications of that, but he quickly realized he was out of his depth. It had been that way between them back when they were seventeen, and things hadn’t changed much twenty years later.

Except that maybe the gap between them had grown more pronounced.

She turned away from him and spoke in hurried, excited whispers with Barry, the two of them like kids with a new toy.

“Oh, shit,” Owen said. “You guys . . .”

The ravens had suddenly taken flight in a roar of beating wings and angry squawking. They filled the sky.

Jacob saw why they’d launched a moment later. The houses to the west had once been small, comfortable one-story homes of red brick and wide lawns. The bricks still stood, but the lawns had turned to riot. Grass and wild shrubs grew shoulder high, and they’d covered the movement of a small army of zombies.

As Jacob and the others watched, zombie after zombie stumbled from the overgrown lawns. They staggered out of the tall weeds, and then locked in on the hospital and moved that way. There had to be forty of them at least. And then Jacob saw why the zombies were passing them by and heading for the hospital, where Bree, Frank, and their escorts had just launched themselves from the building’s darkness. They were running through the tall grass as fast as they could go, trying to make their way back to the group, and it was driving the zombies insane with bloodlust.

Some believed that zombies keyed on movement as much as they did on sound. Jacob had heard stories from some of the salvage team guys about going perfectly still and quiet while a zombie herd moved around them, a stone in the middle of a stream, but he’d always thought that the same kind of talk as someone who claimed they had to walk five miles to school, in the snow, and uphill both ways.

Evidently, though, it was true, for Bree and the others weren’t going to make it. The zombie herd was already at the wall and closing in around them.

Bree and the others stopped.

Frank put himself in front of the group and swung his rifle down from his shoulder.

“Rifles,” Jacob said.

“No,” Taylor said. “Belay that order.”

He walked to his horse and pulled the carbine from his saddlebags.

He slapped a magazine into the receiver and charged the bolt. Then he rushed into the herd, firing as he moved, every shot deliberate and controlled.

And so damn quiet.

His shots sounded like a muffled cough, barely audible. Taylor charged into the herd and it never occurred to Jacob that he was watching a man in his seventies doing the shooting. He moved like a trained solider. Rather than give in to the excitement and confusion, all his movements were made with deadly precision.

Three zombies noticed Taylor coming up behind them and turned on him.

He put them down with perfect head shots.

When they fell, the others turned on him. Half the herd, maybe twenty of them, were still headed toward Bree, Max, Frank, and Eli, but the others were coming for Taylor. He never slowed his pace. The herd swarmed around him, but he kept a straight line for the hospital’s front door.

In school, Jacob’s tactics teachers had emphasized the importance of creating distance. Never let a zombie get too close to you. Create distance, take aim, and make your shots count, they’d said. But Taylor was doing exactly the opposite. He moved in close and fired, then turned, and fired again. Several times Jacob lost sight of him as the zombies closed in around him, until he’d suddenly erupt from their massing, gun blazing. He didn’t stop moving until he reached Bree and the others. Once there, he slapped in a new magazine, turned to face the approaching crowd of zombies, and systematically gunned them down.

When the shooting was done, the street and the field in front of the hospital were littered with bodies. Jacob quickly lost count of how many of them there were. Certainly more than the forty he’d seen at first. Most lay in heaps on the ground. Some were slumped over the barricades. Others were face up in the grass, their arms bent at wrong angles, their heads caved in and misshapen from the gunshots.

Taylor walked from body to body, sometimes pausing to push one over with the muzzle of his weapon. Then he motioned for Bree and the others to follow him back to the horses.

Jacob stared at the carnage. Nick came up beside him.

“What do you think?” Nick said.

“That was amazing.”

“Damn straight it was. Sheriff Taylor with a gun is like Picasso with a paintbrush.” He turned and gave Jacob a pat on the shoulder. “You sure you’re ready to be sheriff?”

Jacob could only stare at what Taylor had done. Picasso with a paintbrush was just about the perfect description for what he’d just seen. He was still staring at the bodies in the grass when Sheriff Taylor stepped over the barricade, Bree, Max, Frank, and Eli coming up behind him. All four of them looked thoroughly rattled, though it looked like Bree had found her defibrillator.

“Time to move out,” Taylor said. “Everybody saddle up.”

He went to his horse and stuffed the carbine into his saddlebags.

In the distance, a police whistle sounded. Three short, sharp blasts. Everybody turned toward the sound.

“What the hell was that?” Nick said.

The three whistle blasts sounded again, and this time, they were followed by a huge collective moan, as though from hundreds of voices.

“Look at that,” Barry said, and pointed toward town where a vast dust cloud was rising into the air. The moaning was getting louder with every passing moment.

“That’s a big herd,” Taylor said.

“What do we do?” Kelly said.

“We’ll make too much noise trying to run from them,” Jacob said. He looked over at Taylor and pointed down a side street. “I suggest we head down that way, hide between the houses. A herd that big’ll probably keep moving down the main road.”

“How do you know that?” Kelly asked.

“They’re a herd. They’ll follow along wherever the main body goes.”

Before anybody could argue, the whistle blasts came again. And the sound of dogs barking.

“What is that?” Nick asked.

“We should be somewhere else,” Taylor said. “Jacob’s right. Let’s head down that way.”

Jacob dug his heels into his mare’s flanks and she took off at a fast trot. The others followed along behind him. He took them halfway down the block, glanced back to make sure they had gone far enough, and then turned them into the alley between a pair of houses.

Jacob climbed down off his horse, pulled his rifle from his saddlebags, and walked back toward the front of the house.

“Where are you going?” Nick asked.

“Lookout,” Jacob answered. “Just in case.”

Taylor pulled out his own rifle and followed him.

The two men got down on their stomachs behind the bush and watched the intersection at the end of the street. But it wasn’t zombies they saw first. A lone rider appeared, working his horse back and forth across the intersection, blowing the whistle as he moved.

“What in the hell is he doing?” Jacob asked.

Taylor shook his head, clearly as confused as Jacob.

But then the rider reined in his horse. He was staring at something over by the barricades. He turned his horse off the road and into the field in front of the hospital. He stopped again, and then dismounted.

“What’s he doing?”

“He sees the bodies.”

Sure enough, the rider knelt next to one of the corpses Taylor had put down, grabbed the thing by the chin, and turned its face first one way and then the other.

He stood up and looked around.

But there wasn’t time for him to investigate. The first zombies stumbled into the intersection a moment later, and he was forced to mount up again. He blew the whistle again, two short blasts, a pause, and then two more blasts, and rode north at a slow trot, a gigantic herd of the undead at his heels.