The Dead Won't Die (26 page)

The man in the black battle suit knocked the zombie into the wall with a hard swipe of its hand. He watched the zombie crash into the wall and fall to the ground, and that was the break Jacob was looking for. He had no weapons, but he did have the foam spray that Stu had told him about. He raised his right arm and squeezed his ring and pinkie fingers into his palm, activating the foam. It jetted out like water from a fire hose. He could barely believe how much of it there was. It hit the man in the suit and immediately started to harden, locking his gun to his hip like he'd been caught in amber.

The man twitched and twisted like a zombie, but he couldn't break the foam's hold.

The second battle-suited man entered the intersection a moment later. Like his partner, he was armed with a mini gun on his arm. He turned it toward Jacob and began to fire just as Jacob hustled for the next intersection.

Jacob reached the corner and threw himself to the ground.

The suit was incredibly bulky, not at all meant for ground fighting, but the dive got him out of the way of the bullets. They laced up the metal wall behind him, chewing the tin to bits.

Jacob ended up on his belly, just around the corner. He struggled like a bug to roll over, fighting to get to his feet.

He finally had to put his right hand on the ground and drag his knees forward to find his balance, but eventually he managed to get his legs under him and rock his weight back to the point he could stand up again.

His attention immediately turned to the second battle-suited figure. Jacob sensed the man would press his advantage. If the roles were reversed, that's what he would do. Jacob decided not to run. He knew if he was going to survive he'd have to take the fight to the attacker, so he moved to the corner and waited for the man to show himself.

Even though he was wearing one of the oldest models of the battle suit, Jacob had already sensed the confidence the suit gave the wearer. The second mercenary would no doubt recognize how old Jacob's suit was, and figure he had the advantage.

Jacob was counting on that.

He waited just around the corner for the man to present himself. As soon as he did, Jacob lunged forward. He hooked his right arm under the man's outstretched weapon arm, hooked it over, and wrenched down. He wasn't sure whether he broke the man's arm or not, but even through the suit he could sense the man's alarm and pain.

Jacob didn't give him time to get back on his feet. He stepped in front of the man, who was still on his back, struggling to get back on his feet, and used the last of the foam to hose down the man's faceplate.

The man was struggling frantically to scrape it off as Jacob turned away.

He lumbered down the corridor until he found a way out. He saw the aerofluyts off in the distance and that helped to orient him. He turned right. He also saw that the other eleven power cells were still back in the trailer he'd ransacked. They were maybe forty meters away.

Time for a decision
, he told himself.

He could try to make a run for it, though that would no doubt leave him just as out of luck as before. The men in the black battle suits were professionals. They would break the bonds the foam had put them in, and they'd come after him with real guns. It would only be a few seconds before they found their way out of the corridors and filled him with gunfire. He'd be dead in minutes.

But he wasn't out of options. Jacob believed that to his core. As long as he was on his feet, he had options. He had choices to make.

He looked around.

Off to his right lay the city of El Paso. Stu and the others were working their way up from that direction. It would only be a matter of time before they made it to the
Einstein
.

Off to his left was basically nothing but desert. He had the hangar, and the flight line commanders' station, but little else.

And then he stopped.

That wasn't exactly true, was it? He had the car the two mercenaries in the battle suits had driven in on.

And their trailer was loaded down with the most dangerous explosive on the planet, wasn't it?

The answer to that question made up Jacob's mind. He raced forward and grabbed the first zombie he found, a woman of about twenty, wearing the remnants of a lacy top and a short miniskirt.

He couldn't move his left arm, but he did manage to throw his shoulder into the dead woman's back and press her face-first into a nearby wall. Holding her with the help of the suit, he removed the two remaining grenades he'd taken from Jordan Anson, stuck them into the crook of his dead left arm, and twisted the top of the cylinder all the way to the end.

Jacob wasn't positive, but he was guessing that was a minute.

The grenades set, he shoved them down into her underwear and pushed her toward the car.

Much to Jacob's satisfaction, the zombie behaved exactly as she was supposed to do. She plodded forward without any sense of direction, without any objective other than to eat the living.

That meant he wasn't safe here. He turned and ran as fast as the suit would let him for the culvert he'd seeded with the power cell just a little while earlier.

Zombies clustered around him, but Jacob didn't worry about it. The ones he could knock down, he did. The ones he couldn't avoid, he just ran over. They'd all be erased from the planet in less than a minute anyway.

He ran through a corridor until he emerged on the empty plain south of the hangar. From there he ran due south, looking for the drainage ditch where he'd hidden the power cell.

He found it just seconds later. Turning, he was surprised to see that he'd covered so much ground in such a short period of time. Even still, he barely had time to jump into the ditch and press himself into the pipe in its base.

A moment later, the zombie carrying the grenades detonated.

And right after that, the real explosion went off.

C
HAPTER
26

“Jacob!”

He opened his eyes. Tried to anyway. He blacked out again.

“Jacob, come on, answer me, baby. Come on, please.”

He stirred once more, and managed a groan.

“Jacob? Is that you? Come on, Jacob, it's Kelly. Speak to me. Let me know you're okay.”

“Can't move,” he managed to say.

“Jacob, where are you? We'll come get you.”

“In a ditch,” he said. “Inside a pipe. South of the . . . south of the hangar.”

“Okay, baby, you hold on. We are on the way.”

The grenades he'd detonated outside the Squadron Training Center had left his ears ringing, but that was nothing compared to the tornado alert siren that was currently blaring in his ears. He had barely heard Kelly, even though he had little doubt they'd cranked the gain up on his headset all the way. He blinked until his vision came back into focus. Or at least as close as it was going to get. He was still seeing double, and everything seemed to be floating around him. He focused on the medical diagnostic report screen at the bottom left corner of his faceplate. Blood pressure was 131/84. Pulse was 74. Breathing rate was normal. Temperature was 99.4. So he was fine.

Except that he felt like shit.

He might have blacked out again. He wasn't sure. But he did finally come around sometime later when he felt hands on his boots, tugging him out of the pipe.

He was too shell-shocked to resist, or even to call out. They tugged on his legs and, gradually, he started to slide into the daylight. They rolled him over and faces hovered above him, but he couldn't see them through all the cracks in the faceplate.

Instead he felt himself slipping back into unconsciousness, and as he did, memories floated up to the surface of his mind like soap bubbles. He remembered Kelly at sixteen, giggling at his lame-ass jokes. He remembered the first time she got drunk and tried to sing but only managed to sound like somebody was strangling a cat. And the sight of her in a black bikini, sitting on a wooden rail above the dunking booth at the Arbella Summer Harvest Fair. He'd nearly thrown his arm out just to get a glimpse of her coming out of that water barrel all soaking wet. She'd taunted him the entire time, too, knowing exactly what he was there for.

While his mind was doping him with memory, Kelly and Stu had flipped him over and started working the buckles loose on his suit. When they cracked it open, he was hit with a wall of heat and the stench of a burning city.

“What . . . ?” he said, as they pulled him out.

He separated from the suit, and though they tried to hold him, he fell onto a black carpet of burned grass. It crunched against his cheek and stained his hands with ash.

“Let's get him up,” Kelly said.

They raised him to his feet and Jacob felt such a head rush that he nearly vomited.

And then he looked around at what was left of the city and nearly vomited again.

The land was scorched all around him. The Squadron Training Center was fully engulfed in flame. The bricks of its face glowed red. Its windows were bright orange with fire. Everywhere he turned, he saw the charred bodies of zombies. Thousands and thousands of them. Columns of smoke rose from the ground. The hangar where he'd fought the two mercenaries in battle suits wasn't even there anymore. And farther away, the two nearest aerofluyts were also fully engulfed in flames.

“Did I do all that?” Jacob said.

“Yeah, baby,” said Kelly, laughing despite her tears. “Yeah, you did.”

“They're not gonna bill me for that, are they?”

“Just shut up, Jacob. God, you had me so worried. The explosion nearly flipped the APV. I thought for sure you were dead.”

“Hey,” he said. “It's me. I did get shot, though. God, I could use a nap.”

They carried him across the scorched desert and set him up on the medical couch next to Brooks. The man had regained consciousness. He was clearly in a lot of pain, but he seemed alert and dealing with it.

“Was that you?” he asked Jacob.

“Afraid so. I just destroyed a lot of your expensive toys, I think.”

Brooks tried to laugh, but it turned into a grimace of pain.

“You alright?” Jacob asked.

“No,” Brooks said. “Well, better than you, but no.”

Kelly appeared at his side. Her cheek was bruised and there was still ash in her hair and on her eyelashes, but she was smiling. “All your vital signs look good,” she said. “I can't believe you do the things you do.”

“Yeah, well, you know. All in a day's work, right?”

Beside her, Stu laughed. To Kelly, he said, “Your boyfriend is a tank. Four broken ribs, a concussion, multiple gunshot wounds. Good grief.” He looked Jacob square in the face. “By any rights, you should be dead.”

Jacob coughed in response.

“What were you thinking?” Kelly said.

“Just wanted to get out of life alive,” he said. He found Stu hovering over a computer. “Did you get the power cell I found?”

“Yeah, I got it. It's installed and charging up now. We should be at full power in less than twenty minutes.”

Jacob nodded to himself. “That's good. Alright.” He put a hand on Kelly's arm. She glanced at it, but didn't make a move to push him away.

Instead, she kept her fingers on his forehead and even brushed the hair away from his sweat-stained face. “You are so stupid,” she said.

“Yeah, but you heard him, right? He called me your boyfriend.”

She laughed. “How about we take that one step at a time, okay?”

From behind Kelly, someone shrieked in frustration.

“Who was that?” Jacob asked.

“Chelsea,” Kelly said, her expression turning serious.

“What is wrong with you people?” Chelsea said, storming into the small circle of light around the medical couches. “Seriously. You're making jokes. The whole reason I came here was to clear my father's name. Now the notebooks are gone. I have nothing left to prove his innocence. Nothing. All of this. All of this was for nothing.”

She stood there looking at them, daring them to say something.

No one did. Kelly reached down and squeezed Jacob's hand, but it wasn't the action of a lover. He seemed to sense that without the words. He knew Kelly better than anyone, and he knew her heart was breaking for the girl.

Stu and Juliette had suffered, too. They'd lost their boss, and a beloved friend. And this girl, she was the last surviving member of the Walker family. To see her in such pain, in such rage, was, in a way, to relive the death of their friend and mentor.

Brooks, once again, was the cypher. Jacob gave Kelly's hand another squeeze, then turned his head to look at the older man. Brooks had turned his head to find Chelsea out beyond the circle of light, but the pain was obviously flaring up again.

He called out to her, “Chelsea, I read your father's research.”

Silence.

“Chelsea?” Brooks said.

The next instant, the girl was at his side, jabbing a finger in his face. “Don't you dare even speak his name, you son of a bitch. You have no right, no right at all! I hope you fucking die on that couch, you bastard. I hope you suffer for the things you did.”

Brooks climbed painfully up on his elbows. The action forced him to wince and close his eyes. When he opened them, tears ran down his face from the pain.

Stu rushed to the man's side. “Hey, hey,” he said. “Go easy, Dr. Brooks.”

“Step out of the way,” he said. “I'm fine. Chelsea, will you please come back here? Please, child.”

She came back to the side of the bed. From where he lay, Jacob could see her face, and he was pretty sure he'd never seen such naked hatred before. Not even during their time among the Slavers.

“I did try to put the blame for the wreck of the
Darwin
on your father, child, you're right about that.”

Chelsea looked like she was about to claw his eyes out.

“Please,” he said. “Hear me out. I did do that, and for that error in judgment, I am deeply sorry. I did a disservice to your family based on my scientific prejudice and my personal greed. I was wrong, and I will make that right.”

“What are you saying?” Chelsea asked.

“Your aunt never got a chance to tell you about us, did she?”

“What about you?”

Brooks winced again at his pain, but pushed on. “Chelsea, after your father started talking up the Triune Movement, your aunt and I found ourselves constantly showing up at the same functions, the same conventions, giving talks at the same dinners, always saying the same things against your father. I can't tell you how many nights we sat over dinner together, talking about the crazy things your father was saying, and all the while growing closer. Chelsea, I loved your aunt. And I think she loved me. We just couldn't make the long distance thing work, what with her here and me in Temple. It was hard, and eventually, it just got too hard to work.”

Chelsea stared down at him with contempt still plain on her face. For a moment, Jacob thought she might actually spit on him.

“Please,” Brooks said, still fighting through his pain. “This is important. Do you remember when Jordan Anson asked me to get your father's notebooks?”

The girl nodded.

“When I did, I noticed that she'd been copying them into her data bank. It was stored in her personal account, but I thought I knew what her password would be—and I was right.” He smiled at the memory of that, or perhaps of his memory of how the password came to be. He winced again, and then said, “I have all the notebooks on my tablet over there. Everything.”

Chelsea turned to the table behind her and picked up the tablet Jacob had seen him reading earlier.

“It's all there,” Brooks said again. “Everything your father wrote. I've read it.”

“And you're locking it away as evidence, right?”

“It is evidence,” Brooks said. “It's evidence the world needs to see.”

“What?” Chelsea said.

“When we get back to Temple, I'm going to make sure the world knows what your father had to say. I still don't buy it all, not all of it, but if Miriam thought enough of it to give it a fair shake . . . well, that's good enough for me.”

“That'll ruin your reputation,” Stu said.

“Probably get me kicked off the Council, too. Might even be enough for the board of directors at my company to vote me out. We'll see.”

Chelsea said nothing to that. She hung her head and went forward to the seating area. She sat down with her back to Jacob and the others and started to cry. In the stillness of the darkened hold, he could hear her sobbing.

A moment later, all the lights came on. The air-conditioning started up, blowing waves of cool air over Jacob's sweaty face.

“Looks like we're back in business,” Stu said. “You feel well enough to come up front with me?”

“Yeah,” Jacob said. “I think so. Kelly, can you help me?”

He sat up and dropped his feet over the edge of the med couch. He rested an arm on Kelly's shoulder and slid off the edge.

“Jacob, I'm not sure about this. You should stay in bed.”

“I'm fine,” he said. “Stu there said all my vitals showed normal.”

“Your blood pressure's a little high, but other than that, yeah, you're okay.”

“See?” Jacob said to Kelly. He flashed a smile at her. “I'm good.”

They went up front to the cockpit. Stu slid into the driver's seat, and Juliette took the spot next to him. Jacob looked out the windshield at a scorched wasteland. Most of the fires in the buildings had gone out, leaving only blackened skeletons without roofs and windows.

“What do you think the damage is?” Jacob asked. “You think anybody was topside for this?”

“Doubtful,” Stu said. “The entire city had already gotten the order to head down below into the safe zones. If they were above ground, they were doing it contrary to orders.”

“What about the herd?” Already he could see figures coated in ash, slogging their way through the burned-out wreckage that had been the air base and most of northern El Paso. There weren't many, but he could see more off to the east.

“I'd say you wiped out about half of one percent of the herd,” Stu said. “We're gonna see a whole lot more before this is all over.”

“So what's the plan?”

“I was thinking we head to Temple. See if the good doctor back there is true to his word.”

“I thought you said we didn't have any food.”

“We don't, but now that we've got the power cell fueling us, we can do this trip in less than a day.”

Jacob turned to Kelly. “What do you think? You game?”

She put her hand on top of his and stroked the back of his knuckles with her thumb. It was an old gesture he'd forgotten about, though the memory came back to him immediately. She looked right into his eyes. “Let's do it.”

He smiled, then gave Stu a pat on the shoulder. “You heard the lady. Let's do it.”

“You got it.”

Stu pushed the throttle level, and the vehicle lurched forward into a brave new world.