Dead World Resurrection

by Joe McKinney

  The crossing itself was anticlimactic.

  We entered a pipe about five feet in diameter, so I had to duck slightly to move through it, and began to feel our way forward.

  There was about an inch of standing water, and every step made a splash that echoed through the tube. It was dark, too. Even though Jessica was only an arm’s length ahead of me, I couldn’t see her.

  It would have been the perfect setting for something scary, for every sound sent reverberations in both directions, but the truth is, I felt completely safe the whole way.

  The crossing was a piece of cake.

  I don’t know how long we walked. A couple of minutes, maybe. Eventually we came up on the other side. I saw some shrubs, a patch of starlit sky, and then we were out, standing on the grass.

  We had arrived in Free America.

  But it was not the joyful homecoming I’d expected. I looked around. Something was wrong. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up. But what was the problem? What was wrong?

  There was a street to our left and abandoned buildings, shop fronts mostly, on the other side. A cold breeze blew dust across the pavement. I heard moans in the distance, and even though all else seemed quiet, my gut told me we were in real trouble.

  Jessica stepped into the street, looking back toward the wall.

  A Quarantine Authority truck rolled slowly down IH-10.

  It stopped.

  “Oh, no,” Jessica said.

  “What’s going on?” The truck was maybe a hundred yards away, which was close, but in the dark, I thought there was a chance they hadn’t seen us.

  The truck started to pull away, and I thought, Good! Yes. Keep going.

  “Jessica,” I said, “they’re leaving!”

  She turned to me and shook her head. “We have to get out of here.”

  “But they’re driving off.”

  It was true. The truck was accelerating away. It went down the highway a few hundred yards, and then suddenly its brake lights came on and it veered off the main lanes and back toward our position.

  I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  The truck bounced over the median, crossed a parking lot, and then accelerated down a surface street that would carry it behind us.

  “How did they...?” I asked.

  “Hurry,” Jessica said. “Across the street.”

  “Where?”

  “Those buildings.” She pointed to the shop fronts across the street. “Hurry.”

  I ran.

  I made it all the way across before I realized Jessica was still standing in the middle of the street.

  “Jessica?”

  “You need to go,” she said. “Get out of sight.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I can’t go with you.”

  The truck was getting closer. I could hear its engine pulling hard. And something else. Voices, the sound of boots on the pavement. Men running. Someone shouted orders.

  “Like hell. Come on, Jessica.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “What do you mean you can’t?”

  She looked utterly deflated, miserable. “I can’t go with you.”

  I could make out individual voices now, and the clatter of equipment and guns. The soldiers were seconds away.

  “But Jessica...?”

  “That world doesn’t exist for me anymore. It’s all changed. I’ve changed. You can’t go home again. Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Jessica, I—”

  “Don’t,” she said. “There isn’t time. I can’t go with you, and I can’t go back. But you need to hide. Now!”

  Halfway down the block, the truck came roaring around a corner. I was out of time. I had to act. There was a narrow alleyway between two buildings a few steps away. I backed into it, into the shadows.

  Out in the street, Jessica stood her ground.

  From my research on the Quarantine Authority, I knew they’d have helicopters over the area in just a few minutes. They’d have heat-sensing cameras and all sorts of sophisticated people-hunting equipment to bring into play, which meant I had only seconds to escape.

  But I couldn’t look away from Jessica. Quarantine Authority troopers bore down on her, yelling for her to get down on her knees, while the truck skidded to a stop on the other side of her and hit her with a super-intensity floodlight.

  I anticipated the gunshot, but when it came, I flinched just the same.

  I turned and ran, tears streaming down my face, and as I slipped away into the night I realized that the woman had given her life for me, and I never even knew her last name.

  Paradise of the Living Dead

  After the wreck, Andres de Vega stood waist deep on a sandbar, shivering miserably against the cold Pacific waves, unable to catch his breath. A quick glance around made it plain they were worse off than he’d first thought. Only a handful of the Santa Dominga’s crew had survived the desperate swim for safety after abandoning her to the deep. Those who hadn’t been so lucky floated face-down in the water with the wreckage and the dead horses, their bodies slowly rolling on the swells of the dark sea.

  The survivors were spread out in a long, disorganized line along the sandbar, the water at their waists oily and burning with a reflected orange light from the setting sun. Most of the men had stripped down to their breeches and linen undershirts to keep from drowning under the weight of their armor, though some still wore their doublets and jerkins, and an improbable few still had their weapons.

  Somebody called his name and he turned. The Governor Don Miguel de Luna Cavazos, a man hardly older than himself, barely in his thirties, was supporting de Vega’s fellow captain of the infantry, Esteban Caval, with one hand and waving his sword in the air like a battle flag with the other.

  “Help me with him,” Cavazos yelled out to him.

  De Vega waded over to him and put Caval’s arm over his shoulder. Caval’s beard was black with blood from a gash on the side of his head, and he moaned and muttered something in protest as de Vega took his weight.

  “Easy,” de Vega said.

  “Have you got him?” Cavazos said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good.” He pointed to the shore with his sword. “Keep moving.”

  He didn’t wait for an answer. He splashed off toward the others, calling the men by name and shouting orders.

  De Vega watched him go, then began to move. The shore, a thin strip of white sand in front of a low wall of dark trees, was still far away, and de Vega was exhausted. He put his head down and trudged onward.

  A nearby soldier screamed, a high, unnatural sound that stopped de Vega in his tracks. The man was ahead of him, slightly to his right, and de Vega watched in horror as the man went down, waving one arm wildly as he fell.

  De Vega thought, Oh dear God, a shark!

  But it wasn’t a shark. The man sank to one knee and stayed there as others moved in to help him.

  When they pulled him from the water, he had his hand out in front of him, showing it to them like it was a gift, the arm covered in blood up to the elbow.

  Another soldier only a few feet from de Vega stepped on something and fell over screaming, the sound cutting off as the man went face deep into the water.

  De Vega splashed forward to help, but stopped when he saw what the man had fallen in.

  Cavazos came up behind him. “What are you doing? Help him.”

  “No, sir,” de Vega said. “Stop.”

  With his free hand, he pointed at the water.

  “Look there, at your feet.”

  Cavazos squinted at the water, cloudy with the man’s blood, and said, “What are those?”

  Large black rocks dotted the sea floor. Clinging to the rocks were hundreds of thousands of coin-sized clams, their shells a dusky white, the seam where the shells split open oozing some sort of mucousy growth that was as red and poisonous-looking as the eyes of the jungle frogs from the Peruvian rain forests up the coast. Everywhere they turned,
they saw more of the clam clusters, thousands of them.

  “Can you move?” Cavazos asked the injured man.

  “It sliced through my boot,” he said. “They’re like knives.”

  “But can you move?”

  The man trembled in the freezing water, but nodded.

  “Good man,” Cavazos said. “Keep going. But be careful. All of you.”

  To their right, they heard the Franciscan, Fray Juan Lacayo, moaning theatrically. The man was grossly fat and habitually drunk and complained more than an old washer woman, and now he was hollering at one of the Negro slaves to carry him through the clam beds.

  Cavazos hissed under his breath. Lacayo was a menace to morale. The Governor started that way to silence him but suddenly veered off to help yet another man who had gone under.

  He grabbed the man by the back of his shirt and hoisted him up, but the man had cut himself badly on the clams and was panicking in his pain. He grabbed for the Governor and pulled him down on top of him, and when Cavazos finally managed to regain his feet and pull the man’s head out of the water, de Vega could see he had a deep gash on his arm.

  “Your Excellency!” de Vega said, reaching out for him.

  “No!” Cavazos said. “Stay back.”

  “Let me help you.”

  “No. Keep going.” Cavazos waved him on. “I’ll be fine,” he said. “You go.”

  De Vega nodded, and then, very slowly, began picking his way through the clam beds, Esteban Caval in tow.

  §

  It took de Vega the better part of two hours to carry his fellow captain ashore. He put his friend down on a flat black rock the size of a table and tended to his friend’s injuries as the others slowly lumbered out of the water. More than half of them had ghastly wounds from their trek through the clam beds, and all were exhausted. De Vega had never seen battle himself, but looking at these men, at their wounds and their haunted expressions, he thought of weary, wounded soldiers dragging themselves from the field of a terrible fight.

  He and Caval had both cut themselves on the clams as well, but their wounds were minor, Caval’s a scratch as long as a man’s finger just above the top of his right boot, and de Vega’s a small but deep cut on the heel of his left hand. The wound hurt a lot. It was a hot, steady pulse of pain that seemed to keep time with the thump, thump, thump of his heartbeat, but he could tell he was suffering less than some of the others.

  “So much for honor, eh?” Caval said.

  “Honor?” de Vega said. He looked down at the man and thought that he had never looked so weak, so demoralized, as at that moment. The young man he’d sailed with from Spain had been a loud, reckless joker, his eyes bright with expectation and the thrill of adventure and a touch of mischief. But not now. Now he looked half-dead, utterly demoralized.

  “It’s amazing how fast it all goes to the devil, isn’t it?” Caval said.

  De Vega nodded. For a moment, he almost tried to bolster Caval’s morale by reminding him of Cabeza de Vaca, whose story of shipwreck, extreme privation, and desperate survival had so recently excited the Court in Castile and had even prompted Hernando de Soto to leave Peru and brave the wild interior of Florida, but he knew that now was not the time. Whatever he might say would just come out sounding pathetically naive, and he was too tired for that kind of nonsense.

  The sky above them was turning to gold, the horizon on fire. All that remained of the storm that had wrecked the Santa Dominga was a few long, smoke-colored clouds reaching like fingers across the sky. De Vega breathed deeply, smelling the sea and feeling the chill of the approaching night in his throat. Under different circumstances, he thought, this place must seem a paradise, like Eden.

  He turned and watched the last of the survivors coming ashore. The Negro carrying Fray Lacayo on his back staggered out of the waves, his legs glistening with blood from cuts so deep the white of the fat beneath his muscles showed, yet still he carried the fat Franciscan.

  The Negro tried to put him down, but tripped over himself and let Lacayo fall onto his face in the sand.

  “Idiot!” Lacayo growled, spitting sand. The Franciscan always carried an olive-wood walking stick with a stamped brass ball at one end, and after he wiped the sand from his lips, he began to beat the Negro with it, lashing him across his bare back. The Negro did not resist. Rather, he pitched over and landed on his side. He lay there wheezing, his tongue fat between his teeth, like a horse that’s been run too hard.

  “Get up,” Lacayo shouted.

  The man didn’t move. Furious, Lacayo struck him again.

  “Stop that!”

  Lacayo wheeled angrily, ready to shout down anyone who would deny him his right to beat the slave, but his hard expression melted when he saw it was Cavazos yelling at him, the Governor now coming ashore with an injured soldier in his arms. Cavazos handed the man off to another soldier and said, “Put that damn thing away and start tending to the wounded.”

  “But, Your Excellency,” Lacayo said, “this slave—”

  “I don’t care to hear it,” Cavazos said, and as he stood there, the gash on his right arm oozed with fresh blood. Large, red raindrops fell in the sand at his feet and turned brown. “You’re not injured. Find some cloth and start dressing the wounds of the men who are.”

  Lacayo seemed like he wanted to argue, but he looked at the blood dripping from Cavazos’ arm and evidently thought the better of it. He ducked his head and went off, making a terrific show of looking busy.

  Seemingly oblivious to his own hurts, Cavazos began organizing the men, giving them orders to prepare a camp.

  De Vega had a great deal of respect for Cavazos. Like de Vega and Caval, Cavazos had missed his chance for glory with Pizarro and de Soto against the Incan king, Atahualpa, and the seizing of the Incan capital city of Cajamarca. They were all three products of an aimless generation, inheritors of a Spain gutted by the long and debilitating civil war their fathers had fought, a war that had left the country bankrupt of everything but a standing army, no glory left to claim.

  But if glory and honor had passed him by, Cavazos gave no indication of it. He called de Vega over and told him they needed to find food and fresh water for the men.

  “Gather a small party together and scout the area. The men need to eat and rest before we start moving again. We’ll need firewood too. It’ll be dark in a few minutes, and I want a fire to chase away their misery.”

  But before de Vega could answer, the Negro Lacayo had beaten let out a horrible groan. Cavazos gave the man a curious glance. Others near the man gathered round him. The Negro rolled over onto his back and stared up at nothing. His eyes were mapped with cracked veins as bright as red thread, and his mouth was warped with pain.

  The Negro tried to speak, but couldn’t. He opened his lips and gulped twice for air, the breath finally leaving him with a throaty rattle.

  And then he was dead, his eyes still open, sightless to this world.

  Cavazos walked over to the dead man and looked for a moment at his face. Lacayo tried to speak, but Cavazos silenced him with a hard stare.

  “Captain de Vega,” Cavazos said.

  “Your Excellency?”

  Cavazos lowered his voice so only de Vega could hear. “Find some men to take the body away from camp.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And, Captain....”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Take it a good distance away. In case there are animals around.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  De Vega got four uninjured men to carry the body. They gathered around it, and each took a foot or a shoulder. There was a quiet moment, an odd, silent moment, when things were almost routine, the men putting their hands on the corpse, looking at each other to time their lift.

  And then, abruptly, things were no longer routine. Everything changed.

  The Negro—de Vega did not know his name, or even think to ask it—rolled his head to one side and sat up. His mouth fell open and his yellow, bloodshot eye
s fell on the man holding his left shoulder. Those who saw what was happening froze, not in fear, but in confusion.

  A gravely snarl came out of the dead man’s throat, and he lunged for the soldier at his shoulder. The man was too stunned to pull his hands away, and before he could shake himself out of his confusion, the Negro had his mouth on him, his teeth tearing into the thick wad of muscle at the bicep, ripping it away.

  The others stood by in shock, unable to believe that this man—this slave, for God’s sake—was doing this, was attacking one of their own. De Vega watched the moment spin out in unreal time, each second seeming to go on indefinitely as a thick rope of gore fell from the Negro’s mouth.

  He thought, Do something! For God’s sake, do something! But his feet were stuck in place, his hands grasping reflexively at the empty air at his side. A soldier named Rivera stepped in front of de Vega, his shoulder blocking de Vega’s view of the attack, and in one smooth motion plucked the Negro off the man and threw him to the ground.

  The Negro’s shoulder struck the rock at Caval’s feet, and Caval stumbled to one side, away from the gore-stained mess the man had become.

  The man who’d been bitten was screaming, long and hollow-sounding, like a wounded animal. The sound was unearthly, seemingly too big for one man to make, but it acted like a gunshot in de Vega’s mind. A sudden, violent chill ran over his skin. He began to swallow convulsively, uncontrollably. He felt like a swarm of bees were buzzing angrily inside his ears. But somehow, through his fear, he found himself and moved. He grabbed Caval and pulled him back. The Negro, meanwhile, had regained his feet and was staggering into the middle of the other injured men, who did their best to get away from him. He pivoted on his shredded leg, swiping the air with his fingers, his mouth open in a continuous groan.

  Cavazos stepped through the panicked crowd and ran his sword through the Negro’s chest, right through the heart, the tip of the steel erupting from the man’s back.

  Cavazos stopped, waiting for the man to fall, for him to sink to his knees and his weight to slide down the blade, but the slave gave no indication that he even noticed the steel through his heart. His expression never changed. He didn’t even blink.