XOM-B (11 page)

I stride boldly down the steps, pitch the sign back and swing as hard as I can. Four heads come free from their shoulders. I swing again, pounding through two more zombies, but then something completely unexpected happens. The sign, my blade and protector, snaps free from the post and spins through the air, embedding itself in the forehead of a zombie who snaps back and falls motionless to the ground.

In that single moment of stunned disbelief, three zombies reach out and grasp onto the signpost. I try to pull it away, but their dead fingers are locked on tight. Others stagger toward me from the side and force me to give up my weapon. I stagger back up the steps and into Luscious’s arms.

She doesn’t ask what we should do next. She knows as well as I do. We’re going to die. Horribly.

The zombies climb over their dead-again brethren and start up the steps. I shield Luscious behind me and clench my fists. I’m not going to die easily. But I am going to die. Of that there is no doubt.

13.

Open jaws stretch out for my face. They snap closed just inches from my cheek. I push up on the zombie’s throat, lifting my hand just beneath his jaw. When his feet leave the ground, I thrust him back and send his rotting body back into the horde clambering up the staircase. Several of the monsters fall back, but they’re quickly replaced. Others have taken to climbing up the sides of the stairway, stepping on each other to reach up over the top. Their arms reach and flail from beneath the metal railings, closing in around us.

Luscious picks up a potted plant and throws it down on a female zombie. The pottery shatters and the zombie groans, but it continues to reach out, moaning through a mouthful of soil.

It’s a feeble effort, but at least she’s trying.

A dead woman, smaller than the others, breaks from the crushing horde and races up the stairs. Her open maw snaps shut when my heel connects with her chin. The kick flips her body back. She spills down the stairs, further congesting the stairway with corpses and the flailing undead who are trying to stand back up.

A day ago, I wouldn’t have even considered kicking someone in the face, even a zombie. Nor would I have had the knowledge of how to do so. But since we exited Luscious’s apartment, my instincts include various hand-to-hand combat skills. Even that phrase—hand-to-hand combat—is new. I also seem to have a clearer picture of what it means to think strategically, to look twenty steps beyond the current moment and see an end result. It’s like looking into the future. And it’s why I used a front snap kick rather than a roundhouse that would have sent her over the railing. Befuddling the horde at the bottom of the steps has bought me precious seconds.

I turn my back to our enemy, which is, in general, a bad strategy, but I also need to observe the battlefield, which is a good strategy. Also, the battlefield is very small and a quick turnaround reveals everything I need to know. We’re doomed. My last hope was that we could climb away, but the brick building lacks any kind of ornamentation and the nearest windows are fifteen feet up.

And then, all at once, time runs out. The zombies flailing on the ground are trampled and the horde rushes up to claim two more.

I knock the first back with a fist to its throat.

The second careens over the railing when I drive my elbow into his head and feel it cave beneath the blow. A third zombie rushes in, reaches out and takes my arm, the one that had already been bit. Its mouth opens, drops toward my bare shoulder and then—

—ceases to exist.

My ears register the explosion after I recover from the surprise of not being eaten.

The boom repeats again and again and one by one, the horde on the stairs drops to the ground.

An angry buzz fills the air. The sound is instantly recognizable because I’ve heard it since my first day of life. Heap’s HoverCycle! I turn and find the impossible—Heap himself, riding the cycle. He’s steering with one hand and firing his weapon with the other. Zombies scatter around the bike, flipping crazily through the air like someone is monkeying with gravity. While the gun in his hand cuts down the undead nearest the stairway, the twin cannons extending from the front of the cycle mow down dual columns of the things.

The cycle’s hum reaches a high pitch as Heap wrenches the handle to the left and swings the cycle’s backside around, using the vehicle like a giant club. Bodies explode into the air as the cycle comes to an abrupt stop at the bottom of the stairs.

“Get on!” Heap shouts.

I move for the cycle, but find Luscious locked in place, a look of abject horror on her face as she stares at Heap. She seems more afraid of him than she is of the zombies.

“Come on!” I yell to her.

“Are you crazy?” she screams. “He’s an enforcer!”

“He’s my friend,” I tell her.

“Do you even know what they did?” she says. “How many people they killed?”

I have no idea what she’s talking about, and if I’m honest, I don’t know anything about Heap beyond what I’ve experienced during the past few weeks. But there is no doubt that he would do anything to protect me. That he’s here, rather than dead, speaks volumes about his commitment.

“This is Heap,” I tell her. “The friend that stayed behind to save me. His only job is to protect me.”

She doesn’t budge.

“And I’ve made it my job to protect you,” I tell her. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

“Freeman!” Heap shouts and punctuates my name with three squeezes of his trigger.

“Please,” I say to Luscious, filling my voice with desperation. “I’m not leaving without you.”

She looks from me to Heap and back again, caught in a cycle of indecision. So I help her by leaning forward and taking her wrist in my hand. She looks down and sees the bite mark on my arm. She gasps, her forehead scrunching with concern.

“Don’t let it be for nothing,” I tell her.

Heap fires his weapon, nearly nonstop. I haven’t looked, but his rate of fire suggests dire circumstances.

Luscious stands and follows me down the stairs. I get her on the cycle first, behind Heap, and sit behind her, sandwiching her between Heap and me.

“Hold on,” Heap says, matter-of-fact before sheathing his gun and shoving his foot down on the pedal.

I get my arms around Luscious and lock my fingers into a gap in the side of Heap’s armor, which is dented, scratched and dirty—a far cry from its typical polish. Could he have been fighting his way through this undead army since last night? It seems impossible, but yet, here he is.

Even with my grip on Heap, the cycle’s rapid acceleration nearly kicks me off the back, but I manage to cling to his back like a baby chimp to its mother, yet another thing I know about without having learned it for myself. A familiar rapid-fire thump fills the air as we race through the mob, knocking bodies to the sides and occasionally over us.

A woman spirals overhead, her angry eye burrowing into me as she reaches down, trying to claim me as her meal despite the fact that the cycle has stolen her legs and launched her skyward. She passes harmlessly overhead. We tear down the street, passing the big metal box in which Jimbo had kept the HoverCycle.

I try to look over Heap’s huge shoulder, but he’s too big. Then, in a flash, I can see the street ahead. It’s thick with undead. So many …
Where did they come from?
I don’t ponder the question. I can’t. A woman lunges for me and I fend her off by kicking out her legs.

I start to wonder how the woman could possibly be fast enough to reach me, but it’s not the zombies that are moving fast—we’re slowing down. Turning around in a smooth, but lackadaisical arc.

The woman reaches up for my leg, but is crushed beneath the cycle’s repulse disc.

“What are we doing?” I shout to Heap.

“We don’t have much time,” he replies.

“Time for what?”

He doesn’t answer. Once we’re aimed back the way we came, he shoves the accelerator pedal to the floor and we’re plowing through the dead again.

The thumping of bodies against the HoverCycle’s armored hood sounds out loudly again, but is suddenly drowned out by a high-pitched whine.

What is that?
I think, and then shout my question. “What is that?” but the wind steals my words away and my question goes unheard. I look back over my shoulder. The street is covered in undead, most of which are gnashing their teeth and giving chase. The rest are flattened into the pavement after being caught beneath the repulse discs or being smashed aside by our relentless race toward the Uppers.

But none of this provides an answer to the question. That, I find in the air high above the city, perhaps a mile up. There are thirty of them, flying machines with blank, domelike noses and slender wings. I zoom in on the planes, looking for pilots, but I can’t even find windows.
They’re being controlled remotely,
I think, and a new word comes to my mind:
drones.
I zoom out. They’re approaching the city, flying side by side, spaced out to span the entire distance of the Lowers.

That’s when I realize that Jimbo was right. They’re going to bomb the Lowers, destroy everything and everyone in an effort to eradicate the undead, wipe out the virus and protect the Uppers. Strategically, I understand the extreme measure, but morally … it’s abhorrent.

Then, the bombs fall. Barely visible specks drop from the open hatches in the bottoms of the planes. Thousands of them.

A hundred feet from the ground, the bombs split into thousands of smaller projectiles, strike the city and detonate.

The light reaches my eyes first, pluming bright white and then orange.

The sound comes next, rolling past like thunder.

And then it repeats, over and over, growing closer as the bombs eat up entire neighborhoods, undead, living and all. A shock wave rolls toward us, visible as it pushes dust, trees, buildings and bodies before it.

Heap glances back and shouts. “Hold on tighter!”

Tighter?
Then I remember the jet turbine beneath me.

I shove my fingers deeper inside Heap’s armor plating and grip as hard as I can, pulling myself tight against Luscious, burying my face in her wavy hair.

I feel a kick beneath me and the whipping wind becomes a tornado, seeping through the cracks between our bodies and trying to pry us apart. I turn my head to the side. The apartment buildings and the people still inside them, perhaps watching us pass, are a blur.

And then, they’re nothing. The shock wave is right behind us, gaining slowly even as we accelerate to ridiculous speeds, pulverizing everything in its path as more bombs fuel its rage.

Suddenly, the neighborhoods are gone and in the flash of clear view I see the side street that leads to the bridge, and then the ruined bridge itself. But there is something strange about my view of the bridge. It’s shrinking. I’m looking
down
at it, from high above.

We’re airborne. Heap must have jammed his foot all the way down on the repulse pedal, launching us up and forward, over the river in the same way I jumped the gorge the night before.

But we’re not alone in the sky. Billowing hot, orange flames churn behind us, scalding my shirtless back and reducing the river below to hissing steam. When the heat becomes almost unbearable on my back, we drop, and not in a controlled way, but something closer to a meteor, burning a path through the sky on its way to meet a crushing end on the planet’s surface.

14.

The HoverCycle slams into the sleek black road on the far side of the river. I didn’t think the repulse engines could actually be forced down while powered up, but it seems our speed combined with the weight of three bodies is more than the vehicle can handle. There’s a momentary screech of metal on metal and a shower of sparks. The cycle spins and tips, but Heap plants one of his big feet on the ground and keeps us upright until we stop against the side of a tall building that looks more like an impossibly large obsidian obelisk with neon décor.

Turned sideways, I now have a clear view back toward the river where the wall of flame curls up toward the sky. The blasts have been spaced perfectly so that none of the buildings on this side of the river received any damage. In fact, there seems to be a steady breeze flowing toward the river.

As the flames give way to roiling black smoke, the Lowers are revealed. All that remains of the many neighborhoods are the scattered and charred skeletons of buildings and people, undead and living both, now equally dead.

“Off,” Heap says, standing up from the cycle and holding it upright with his hands.

Luscious stands without a word and wanders into the street. Her black outfit is dirty, but otherwise hale. Her red hair might be a little singed, though. Her steps are clumsy and staggered, like one of the undead, but her attention remains fixed on the far side of the river.

“They did it,” she mumbles. “They really did it. Jimbo was right.”

When I get off the cycle and join her, Heap lets go and the loyal vehicle falls to its side.

I step up next to Luscious, staring at the ruins, wetness once again returning to my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say. I reach down and take her hand, but she yanks it back and steps away from me.

“You’re one of them,” she says, anger radiating from her core. “An Upper. If the Council made you, then you’re one of them!”

She hauls back to punch me, and I intend to allow it. Her anger is understandable, and I think my jaw can suffer the abuse, especially if it helps her handle the loss of her home and I’m not sure how many friends.

But her fist sticks in place when she sees the tears in my eyes. She stares at me, understanding their meaning, but something else about my tears has her perplexed. The combination is enough to pause her assault.

“Your tears are a lie,” she says. “Phony. You have no reason to care.”

“I have no reason not to. I have no memory of the time before. Of the Grind. I’ve never had a reason to think negatively about anyone.” My head turns back toward the steaming river. “Until now.”

She squints at me with suspicious eyes. “But you’re still a product of the Council. You’re privileged. Above everyone else.”