The Dead Won't Die (12 page)

He raced after Kelly and Chelsea, and caught up with them at the end of the passageway. In the pale red glow of the emergency lights, he could see they'd reached another of the metal pull-down doors. Coming up beside them he saw that the door was rusted and dented all over, but it wasn't a weak link like the one they'd found back at the platform. This one would hold.

“Shit,” he said. “Okay, okay, let me see what I can do here.”

“This one's easy,” Chelsea said. There was a large metal plate in the wall next to the door with a flat, square-shaped button in the center labeled E
MERGENCY
D
OORS.
Chelsea hit it with the palm of her hand and immediately a woman's voice came over the intercom. “Warning: Surface door breach. Warning: Surface door breach.”

At their feet, an internal lock in the door let go with a loud click, and the door raised up an inch or two.

Jacob grabbed the handle and yanked the door open.

The bright light and the heat of the late afternoon desert sun hit them square in the face. After spending hours underground, Jacob walked into the street nearly blind. It took several long moments for his eyes to adjust. A dry breeze carried thick clouds of dust down the street. He could feel the grit adhering to the sweat on his neck and his face. And on the breeze he could smell something rotten.

All the buildings around them were made of red brick. They were small, not a one of them taller than six stories, and shaped like squares. Halfway down the block to his left he saw movement in the dust clouds. Shadowy figures stepped through the blowing dust. Looking around, he counted twenty-four zombies. Some looked like the techs and hospital staff he'd encountered down below, while others were badly decayed, hardly a stitch of clothes left on their withered bodies.

From behind him came the sound of Chelsea pulling the metal down into place.

“It locks automatically,” she said.

Jacob pointed down the street. “See that? Those are zombies from the Great Texas Herd. Looks like they broke through the automated defenses.”

“Oh no,” Chelsea said. “That's bad. That's real bad.”

“Yeah, that's one word for it. Just tell me which way we need to go. Which building is your aunt in?”

“I don't see it here,” she said. “It's red brick like these, but it has white balconies in front of each of the windows.”

Jacob glanced to his right, where the buildings started to give way to houses. The dust clouds were thicker that way, and he thought he had a pretty good idea why. He pointed toward the houses and said, “We can't go that way. The herd's coming from there.”

“Okay, then,” Chelsea said, turning to the left. “This way. It has to be around here somewhere with all the other buildings.”

Together, they rounded the far corner and scanned a new set of buildings.

“Is that it?” Jacob said. He pointed at a building down the block from them.

“No, hers has white balconies.”

“Not that one,” he said. “Behind that one. See it there? You can just see the top level. Those are balconies, aren't they?”

“Yes!” Chelsea said. “Yes, that's it!”

Chelsea started to run for it, but Jacob grabbed her shoulder and held her back. “Wait,” he said. He nodded to the right. “Look over there.”

There were several large vehicles parked on the street near a construction zone less than a block away. A few grotesquely broken and decayed bodies came limping through the gaps between the vehicles. More followed close behind.

A moment later, they began to moan.

“Oh God,” Kelly said. “Why can't we catch a break? Jacob, why?”

“We'll make our own break,” he said. He pointed to the left of the building directly in front of them. “We need to do a dead sprint around that side of the building. Everybody up for that?”

“Do we have any other choice?” Kelly said.

“Not really.”

“Fine,” she said. “Let's do it.”

Jacob holstered his weapon and chased after the women. The three of them ate up the first hundred meters or so, but after that, all three had to slow way down. They were breathing hard and the bruised ribs Jacob got from the fight back in Temple earlier that day started to burn. By the time they came around the far side of the building, they were all slogging along at little more than a trot, all three of them breathing hard.

But the dead didn't know exhaustion. They were a relentless, unwavering, unending swarm that knew only the need to feed. Streams of zombies filled the streets like a flood, coming closer and closer to them.

Jacob was about to direct them around the back side of the building so they could find a way to climb up to a balcony, but then he noticed that a metal screen that was meant to protect one of the building's main entrances had only been pulled part of the way down.

“There!” he said. “Let's go through there.”

Jacob tried to lift the metal screen, but it wouldn't budge.

He turned to face the crowd gathering around them. They were a mixture of recently turned techs and medical personnel from El Paso, and older, rotting corpses, the vanguard of the Great Texas Herd.

And they were getting too close.

“Chelsea,” he said. “Can you roll under there and try the door?”

The girl dropped to the ground and rolled under the metal screen without effort. On the other side of the screen was a short passageway that led to a metal door. Chelsea pushed at the door and it swung open on groaning hinges.

“Jacob,” Kelly said. “I don't like this. Why would those people get gassed? Why would these doors be left open?”

“I don't know,” Jacob said. “Just get inside. Both of you. Find someplace to hide. I'll catch up with you.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Buy you some time. Now go!”

“Oh God, Jacob.”

A zombie in a gray, knee-length skirt and a red blouse darted out of the crowd and charged for Jacob. He saw her coming out of the corner of his eye and dropped her before she could get to him.

“Don't worry about it,” he said. “Just go.”

Three more zombies stepped over the fallen zombie and onto the sidewalk. Jacob raised his pistol and took deliberate aim before squeezing the trigger.
Rushed shooting is sloppy shooting
, he remembered his firing range instructor telling him back in grade school.
You get in a hurry, you get dead. Take your time. Find your shot. Squeeze the trigger.

“Jacob, this is stupid. Come with us. While there's time.”

“I know what I'm doing. Just get inside.”

“God, you're a stupid man, you know that?”

“That's what you always told me. Go on. Get inside. Be right behind you.”

Kelly crawled under the screen. With one last look back at Jacob, she went inside. Jacob watched her go, then wiped the sweat from his hands and got ready to fight. The faster zombies had broken out ahead of the main group and were bearing down on him. Behind them, swelling into the streets, were thousands more. Their moans bounced off the sides of the buildings, like echoes in a canyon, and for a moment, Jacob felt his courage waver.

He put his back to the metal screen, took a deep breath, and let the fast ones get in close. As soon as they stepped onto the sidewalk, they were his. He dropped five in rapid order, perfect head shots each. That left a gap between him and the leading edge of the coming herd.

Exactly what he was looking for.

He holstered his weapon, grabbed the nearest headless corpse, and pulled it toward the opening at the bottom of the metal screen. He did that again and again until finally he had nearly the entire gap blocked. Then he crawled through, turned, reached back through the hole until he found a dead woman's ankle, and pulled her body into the hole, plugging it.

He stood up just as the herd reached him.

A dark-haired woman in a red shirt lunged at him through the diamond holes in the screen, and he jumped back just in time to avoid getting a face full of fingernails. More zombies rushed his position, smashing the woman in the red shirt into the screen. For a hideous moment, he could see the metal wires cutting into her cheeks, but soon the weight of the herd behind her forced her down.

Jacob backed up to the door as more faces pressed against the metal screen. Their combined weight seemed to shake the entire building and he didn't know how much longer the screen would hold. He pushed the door open and was about to rush inside when he heard a snarling growl rise over the collective moans of the herd.

He turned toward to the screen, and to his horror saw the first who had been smashed against the screen digging at the barricade of bodies he'd used to block the entrance. She grabbed one of the bodies and pulled it free. Once the first one was out of the way, the others came loose easily.

The next thing he knew she was crawling under the screen.

When she stood up, her face was a bloody mess.

Jacob stepped forward, put his gun in her face, and fired, blowing her brains and blood all over the herd behind her.

He backed up again as her body fell to the floor.

Another zombie crawled through the gap, then two more behind it. Jacob shot all three, but he knew he had to get out of there. More and more of them were figuring out how to get through, and within seconds there would be far more than he could shoot.

And he'd long since lost count of how many rounds he'd fired.

He ran through the metal door and slammed it shut, but when he tried to lock it, he found the lock had been pried out of the door. The tool marks were fresh, too. No rust. It was at that moment that it hit him. He stood looking at the hole in the door where the lock had once been, and knew that Kelly was right. Something was going on here. The people in the tunnels deliberately gassed. The bodies with the bullet holes in their heads. So many defensive systems showing signs of tampering.

He tried to make sense of it, but at that moment bodies crashed against the other side of the door and he had to throw his shoulder into it just to keep it closed.

It was a losing battle, though.

There were too many of them. His feet started to slide across the hardwood floors as the zombies forced the door inward.

He glanced up the stairs to his left and saw Kelly poking her head around the corner. “Come on!” she said.

Jacob took a deep breath, then ran for the stairs.

A small crowd of zombies fell through the doorway while others scrambled over them. Jacob leveled the weapon at the first one to clear the tangle of bodies and shot her. The dead began to stand up all around him, even as more pressed through the narrow doorway. He climbed the first few steps and fired again and again.

He'd dropped eight more zombies by the time the weapon clicked empty.

“Jacob, come—”

Kelly's plea was cut off by a scream. It sounded like Chelsea.

Jacob raced to the first landing, expecting more zombies, but instead saw a figure in one of the big gray, armored space suits coming down the stairs. Its steps clanged against the floor, the servos that allowed its legs and arms to bend making pneumatic sighs. In its right hand the figure held a massive weapon, like a mini gun, of which he'd only seen pictures.

But it wasn't a mini gun. Rather than run separate, rotary barrels, like the mini guns he'd seen pictures of in Arbella's library, it had six small muzzle holes contained inside a single housing.

The figure raised the weapon, and Jacob threw his hands into the air. He twisted out of the thing's way and pressed his back against the wall.

The figure moved by him, and when the first zombies appeared at the foot of the stairs, the strange-looking mini gun jumped to life. In less than a second, six zombies were blown to bits against the wall. Another zombie rushed up behind the first six and tried to slash at the figure's copper faceplate.

Whoever was inside the space suit didn't even bother to shoot it.

With its left hand, the figure grabbed the zombie's face and pushed it to the floor, its augmented strength snapping the dead man's neck like a chicken bone. Jacob heard the dead man's neck break even over the moaning of the herd. The zombie landed on its back, unable to stand, unable to do anything but growl and snarl at the wall. It couldn't even turn over.

But the figure didn't pause to deliver the coup de grâce. Instead it raised its weapon and began mowing down the crowd pressing through the door.

Heads exploded.

Zombies dropped like wheat before a sickle.

And all the while, the figure advanced toward the door, crushing the dead beneath its lumbering stride.

Jacob stood in rapt fascination. He'd never seen anything like it. Once, when he was maybe eight or nine, and had begun to show some aptitude for building things out of scrap, his mother had told him about the robot armies the military had developed during the First Days, and how they had plowed through the zombie herds. After seeing Lester Brooks inside a similar suit just weeks before, he'd assumed the suits were merely suits.

A person inside.

But now, seeing this figure move with such precision, such complete and utter purpose, he wondered if he wasn't seeing some robot relic of the First Days.

The figure certainly moved that way.

Killed that way.

Chewed through the dead like a house on fire.

As the bodies fell, the figure continued to advance. And when they didn't fall fast enough, they were thrown against the wall like rag dolls. If he hadn't been so amazed, Jacob would have felt nothing but disgust for the violence of it. He'd seen bodies torn apart. Lots of them, in fact. But nothing like this.