The Dead Won't Die (10 page)

“See this?” she said, pointing to the large dot that marked the southern end of a long red line. “This is where we are. We're immediately below what used to be the El Paso International Airport. We need to take the Red Line Tube to here, beneath the old Biggs Army Airfield. That's where my aunt Miriam's shop is located.”

“How do you know she'll be there?” Kelly asked. “I mean, she doesn't live in her shop, does she?”

“No, of course not. But the city is on lockdown. Knowing her, she'd rather be stuck at her shop than in her apartment. And if what we saw on the news is true about the
Hawking
's failure to shepherd the herd with their morphic field generators, I can pretty much guarantee you that's where she'll be.”

Kelly nodded.

She glanced at Jacob and he nodded back. It was the closest they'd come to a commonsense plan all day, and for the first time, Jacob was feeling pretty good about their chances. “So how do we get to the Red Line?” he asked.

Chelsea pointed at a sign over his shoulder that read R
ED
L
INE
, L
EVEL
F
OUR
. “We go down those stairs there, I guess.”

“Okay,” Jacob said. “Excellent.”

At the bottom of the stairs they joined a small crowd. Most were trying to work their way onto a sleek white train with black windows. Nearly everyone on the platform was dressed in some type of work uniform, lots of blue and yellow dungarees and lots of hard hats. Kelly wore a white blouse and tan-colored slacks. Chelsea also had on a white blouse, but she wore it untucked over a knee-length green skirt. They both fit in well enough. Jacob, on the other hand, wore a red jacket over the white shirt and pants they'd given him at the hospital. He was the only splash of red on the whole platform, and between that and the bruises to his face, he drew more than a few stares.

He just ducked his head and followed Chelsea through the crowd. The nearest open car door was directly ahead, and Jacob stood to one side to let the ladies get on first. Kelly and Chelsea found seats on the far side of the car. Kelly put herself on Chelsea's right and patted the empty seat next to her for Jacob to take.

“Jacob, what is it?”

He motioned for her to be quiet. He was still standing on the platform. From where he stood, he could see down the length of the train. The platform extended almost two hundred meters in that direction. There was another stairwell at the far end of the platform, but the crowds there weren't as heavy as where he was standing. It allowed him to see the pair of men hovering near the car doors nearest them. Both had the hard stare and chiseled toughness that he'd seen back on Galveston Island.

And they were staring right at him.

“Shit,” he muttered.

“Jacob?” Kelly said. “What's wrong?”

He ignored her question and stepped onto the train. Then he craned his head forward so that he could see down the inside of the train.

Four cars down, the two men stepped onto the train.

Jacob stepped back off the train, his gaze still fixed down the length of the platform.

The two men stepped back off the train.

“Jacob, what are you doing?” Kelly asked.

“Chelsea,” he said. “Let me have the notebooks.”

“What? No.”

“Chelsea, we don't have time for games. Give me the notebooks.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Hopefully keep us from getting killed. Now come on, hand them over. We don't have a lot of time.”

Kelly nudged Chelsea in the ribs. “Better do it.”

Chelsea clutched the notebooks to her chest like they were asking her to give up her newborn child.

“Come on,” Jacob said. “We do this right now or we're going to get killed. There are two more of those men down there.”

“Where?” Chelsea said.

She leaned forward, and when she did, Jacob grabbed the top of the notebooks.

Chelsea wouldn't let them go.

“Chelsea, come on. You have to give them to me. They're coming for us right now. Please. You have to trust me.”

There was no trust in her eyes. Certainly no forgiveness. The look she gave him could have cut glass. But she let the journals go.

Jacob took them. “Thanks,” he said. “I promise you'll get them back.”

“Where are you going?” Kelly asked.

“I should be right back,” he said.

He looked back down through the cars. The two men had reboarded the train, and they were watching him. Jacob held up the notebooks and used them to give them a mock salute.

Then he ran from the train.

When he glanced back over his shoulder, the two men were spilling out of the car, pushing their way through the crowd as they charged after him. Jacob quickly ran down his options. He still had both pistols. He could fight his way out of this. But even if he won the gunfight, doing it here, on this platform, in front of hundreds of people, was just as good as getting caught.

So if he couldn't fight, that left running.

And there were two ways he could go.

He could go back up the way they'd come and hope to get lost in the crowds. His chances of escaping were better that way, but he'd be lost trying to find Kelly and Chelsea again. Maps had never really been his thing, even back in his days with the salvage teams.

His only option was finding a way back on the train and rejoining Kelly and Chelsea, so he needed another way out.

He found it near the front of the platform. People in white and gray uniforms were filing down from the main level, packing themselves onto the train.

A warning chime sounded over a PA system, followed by a woman's voice. “One minute to departure,” she said. “All doors to the Red Line will be closing in one minute.”

He glanced back to the rear of the platform and saw the men getting closer.

Whatever he was going to do, he had to do it fast.

He ran toward the front of the platform and turned up the tunnel he found there. It was packed with people, all of them in the white and gray uniforms of their company.

Jacob moved quickly. He ran halfway up the length of the tunnel and stopped at a trash can. He pulled off his jacket and stuffed it into the can. Then he pressed the notebooks against his right thigh, merged in with the crowd moving toward the platform, and lowered his gaze.

The two hired men rounded the corner a second later. They pushed workers out of the way and jumped up and down to try to catch a glimpse of Jacob. When that didn't work, they ran up the tunnel.

Jacob, his head down, using passersby to block him from view, glanced left just long enough to see the men run past. Once they were out of sight, he hustled forward and got back on the train.

The doors closed right behind him.

Kelly was at his side a moment later.

“What in the world was that about?”

“Look there,” he said, and nodded up the tunnel.

The two men had stopped next to the trash can. One of them had fished Jacob's jacket out of the trash and held it up for the other one to see. They gestured at each other, then ran toward the train.

The train was already moving by the time the two men reached the platform. They tried to look through the windows, but couldn't.

Jacob held up one hand and gave them a wave as they slid by.

“Jacob, don't!” Kelly said, grabbing his hand.

“They can't see us. We got away.”

“We got lucky.”

It was Jacob's turn to shrug. “Yeah, but we got away.”

C
HAPTER
9

They were the only ones left on the train when it glided into Industrial Yards Station half an hour later.

Glancing out the window, Jacob got the feeling not too many people made it this far down the line, even when the city wasn't under lockdown. The Airport Station, where they'd boarded the train, was enormous. There'd been room on the platform for hundreds of people. And the place was clean and well-maintained, despite all the homeless people he'd seen there.

Industrial Yards Station, by comparison, seemed like an afterthought. The platform was barely five meters wide, and at most forty meters long. Benches lined the back wall. There were trash cans in between the gaps in the benches with paper and cups spilling out of the top. The walls, the floor, the grout in the tile: Everything had a worn-down, grungy appearance.

“This is where your aunt works?” Jacob asked, trying, unsuccessfully he thought, to keep the doubt out of his voice.

“Near here, yeah,” Chelsea said. If she'd noticed his tone, she made no sign of it. “We have a little walking to do, I think.”

“Okay,” Jacob said, glancing at Kelly. “I'm ready if you are.”

Kelly nodded.

But as soon as the doors opened, Jacob knew it wasn't going to be easy. They were greeted by a blaring alarm, five long blasts of a high-pitched siren. As soon as the last one sounded, a woman's voice came over the overhead speakers: “This area is under lockdown and has been restricted to authorized personnel only. All exits to the surface have been sealed. All surface travel has been suspended until further notice. If you notice any signs of incursion, report it immediately using the call boxes located throughout the station. Thank you.”

The message repeated twice more, once in Spanish and again in Chinese.

“Come on,” Chelsea said, stepping off the train.

Jacob and Kelly glanced at one another, and he saw her swallow a lump in her throat. She was scared, and so was he. Everything about this felt wrong.

But Kelly was the first to move. She stepped off the train and starting walking toward the nearest passageway off the platform.

Jacob followed.

Chelsea and Kelly rounded the corner and stopped. Kelly looked back at him and said, “Uh, Jacob. I think we have a problem.”

He hurried around the corner and immediately saw the problem. A thick metal roll-down door covered the entrance.

“Jacob, what do we do?” Kelly asked.

“There's another entrance farther down,” he said. “We'll try that one.”

He made his way down the platform to the other entrance. Like the first, a metal roll-down door blocked it. But it looked to be in bad repair. As Jacob studied it, the women came up behind him.

“Jacob, are we stuck here?” Kelly asked. “I think the train is going to leave soon.”

“I don't think this is a problem,” he said.

His earlier impression that the Industrial Yards Station was not much on anybody's mind when it came to upkeep was true here, as well. The pull-down door was battered and bent, and it didn't even latch securely to the floor. Against a small group of zombies, it would probably offer adequate protection. But to a living person, somebody with a desire to break through, the door was nothing.

It didn't even fit flush with the floor.

Jacob motioned for the women to stand aside and went back to the platform. At the far end of the platform was a custodial station, and he rummaged through that until he found a broom. He brought it back to the roll-down door, then wedged the handle under the opening at the floor. He used his knee as a fulcrum and pushed down with everything he had.

The first push didn't work.

He tried again.

“Jacob, what are you doing?” Kelly asked.

He glanced up at her through his bruised and swollen eyelids. “What did Archimedes say about a lever?”

Kelly frowned. “I thought you slept through physics.”

“I paid attention during the important parts. You're the smart one, so you tell me.”

“He said that if he had a lever, he could lift the world,” Chelsea said. “Jacob, can you get us out of here?”

He didn't answer. Instead, he bent his back into the broom handle and pushed.

The door gave way a moment later.

Jacob threw it open. “There we go,” he said.

Kelly shook her head. “You're good,” she said, and hurried through the door.

Chelsea followed right after her. Jacob came through right after Chelsea and pulled the door down.

“Can you seal that back up?” Kelly asked.

“On it already,” Jacob said.

Jacob grabbed the bottom of the door and gave it a good hard tug, then slid the broom handle through the lock on the door and a groove on the wall. He pulled at the bottom of the door, but it didn't budge. “I think this is good,” he said, and motioned them through the short corridor to the main concourse beyond.

He followed them through the hallway, and stopped.

The women stopped, too.

Ahead of them was a narrow, hangar-shaped concourse, with a pair of ramps leading up to a higher level. Midway down the concourse, Jacob could see a pair of metal staircases leading out of sight. But his attention was focused much closer than the stairs. On the far left staircase, he saw five dead bodies. On the right were two more.

There was no doubt they were dead.

Most were lying in dried puddles of their own blood, their faces and the backs of their heads ghastly open wounds.

“Oh God,” Kelly said, covering her mouth.

Jacob walked to the nearest body and knelt by the woman's side. She was dressed in a blood-spattered white jumpsuit. She hadn't been dead long, though—maybe a few hours at most. Her face had started to go pale, and even yellow in a few places, a sure sign that most of her blood had pooled down at her feet. She was wearing black boots under her white jumpsuit, and he knew what he'd see if he pulled those boots off. Her feet would be swollen and purple from the pooled blood, filled to the point they might even pop. A bunch of times over the years he'd seen a fresh zombie like this leaving a thick trail of blood slime from ruptured feet.

But it wasn't that she had been a zombie that really bothered him.

The bullet holes in the woman's forehead were a much bigger deal.

And they
were
bullet holes.

The weapons he'd taken off the hired hit squads back in Temple didn't fire rounds like this. On the train ride up here, after the last of the passengers disembarked and they had the ride to themselves, he pulled the pistols and studied them. They worked much like the weapons he'd been firing all his life. The sights were the same, the trigger, the magazine that slid in and out of the receiver. It was all very familiar.

The real difference was the ammunition. Rather than a traditional bullet pressed into a cartridge, the Temple gun held about fifty very small rounds made of some sort of plastic. They looked a lot like the .22-caliber rifle rounds his mother had taught him to shoot back when he was seven.

But they weren't the same.

Chelsea had caught him studying the round and told him they were fired by compressed air. “That's why they're so quiet,” she said.

“Why do they explode?” he asked. “That man's head back in Temple. It just blew up.”

“Compressed air again. It explodes on impact.”

He studied the round anew after hearing that, and his awe for the technology that went into developing such a weapon ratcheted up another notch.

It was the perfect zombie-killing weapon, he thought. The fired rounds were completely silent, and the weapon could carry an enormous quantity of ammunition in a normal-sized magazine. It was limited in its range, that was true, kill-capable to only a maximum of maybe ten meters, maybe twenty at best, but it was able to thoroughly devastate anything it hit within that range. Even a glancing blow, especially one to the legs, would cause so much damage that a zombie would be unable to pursue the human firing the weapon.

The trouble was, those amazing compressed air rounds hadn't killed these people.

These folks were slaughtered by good old-fashioned gunfire.

Jacob rocked back on his heels and glanced up and down the concourse. There were signs at the far end, but over the last few years his vision had kind of gone to the dogs. The signs were just blurred garble to him.

“They were zombies, weren't they?” Kelly said.

“Yeah,” Jacob said absently. “They probably were.”

“Somebody killed them,” Chelsea said. “Whoever did this obviously walked away from the fight, right? I wonder why they didn't use the call boxes to report an intrusion.”

Jacob said nothing. He went back to studying the concourse.

“Well, those zombies obviously came from someplace,” Kelly said. “We already saw how flimsy that one door panel was. Maybe there's a surface entrance somewhere around here that they were able to penetrate.”

“Those aren't members of the Great Texas Herd,” Chelsea said. “Look at the way they're dressed. They didn't come from the surface.”

“She's right,” Jacob said. “Their clothes. These wounds. Everything's too fresh.”

“So where did they come from?” Kelly asked.

“From here, I guess.”

It took Kelly a long moment to process that. Longer still to finally speak. “But that's not what's got you spooked, is it? What's wrong, Jacob?”

Jacob used the barrel of his pistol to turn the woman's face so Kelly could see. He held up the gun and said, “A weapon like this didn't do this. This is rifle fire. A .223 or 5.56, probably. Old-fashioned, pre–First Days military hardware. It would have to be something that big to cause this kind of damage.”

“I don't understand. They were shot. What difference does the bullet make?”

“A whole lot,” Jacob said. “Chelsea, didn't you tell me there were no guns in Temple?”

The girl nodded. “Just the ones like you've got, which are used by the surface teams assigned to the aerofluyts. Guns of every kind were outlawed when my people left Mill Valley.”

“Well,” Jacob said, letting the dead woman's head slump back to the tiled floor, “looks like somebody's not playing by your rules.”

Jacob wiped the barrel of his gun off on a clean section of the dead woman's clothes and stood up. He pulled the other weapon from the small of his back and handed it to Kelly.

“I don't want that, Jacob. I can't . . . I can't kill again.”

“Take it,” he said.

“I can't.”

“You're gonna have to,” he said. “Look at these zombies. They all had to have turned in order to get these head shots, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So how did they die?” Jacob extended the gun to her. “Somebody had to kill them first in order for them to turn, right?”

With a darkly worried expression, Kelly took the gun. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess so.”