by Joe McKinney
Yes, James.
What question? What did I forget to ask?
How, James. How come you can sense the dead? Didn’t you ever think to ask? When the military men were laughing at you, didn’t it seem strange that you knew you were right?
Yeah, I guess. Well, no, not really. I always felt like I was wrong.
Because they weren’t inside your head. They didn’t know what you knew. But I do, James. And you know how I know?
Jimmy shook his head, unable to articulate the thought aloud.
I know because I have the power too. Yours turned on the night the zombies came to Mill Valley, didn’t it?
“Yes,” Jimmy said, breathlessly. Turned on was exactly how he had come to think of that night, like somebody had just flipped a light switch inside his head.
The same thing happened for me, James. My power to sense the zombies, it flipped on that very night.
You mean, like a light switch.
Yes, exactly like that.
Daddy?
Yes?
Why isn’t it working now? The sight, I mean. Usually I can sense the zombies. I could sense them before I came down here.
I don’t know. It doesn’t work down here for me, either. That’s how I got trapped. Now hurry, James. I need help.
But Jimmy didn’t move. Ahead of him was some sort of catwalk, another metal platform like the kind that had collapsed under his weight back at the entrance to the sewers.
What’s wrong? Why aren’t you coming to me?
Jimmy turned and looked behind him. The blue light from the algae didn’t carry far. Twenty or thirty feet along, and his visibility was gone, swallowed by the darkness. But something was there. He could hear it splashing, and moaning.
James?
He could see silhouettes now, bunches of them, coming toward him.
Daddy, I think I’m trouble.
§
Jimmy pulled his pistol as the first zombie lumbered into view.
As she came closer, the faint blue glow from the algae lit her ghastly features. It was a woman, or had once been. Her shoulder-length hair was matted with blood and clods of mud. Her neck seemed unable to support the weight of her head, making her hair hang like a curtain of yarn in front of her face. The skin on her arms and neck was oozing with abscesses and open cuts that no longer bled. The clothes had been torn from her chest, and when she moved, black ribs showed where the flesh had been eaten away. She raised her gnarled hands and began to moan.
There were more behind her.
A lot more.
Jimmy raised the huge pistol, holding it with the two-handed grip all children inside the walls were taught. He squeezed off a round, and the blast clapped over his ears like an enormous pair of hands, leaving him momentarily deaf and stunned.
He didn’t even realize the lead zombie had closed the distance between them until she put her filthy hands on him.
But that was enough to get him moving.
He ran for the platform he’d seen a few moments before, but stopped at the railing. The stairs leading to the aqueduct must have collapsed during the fighting, for they lay in a broken, rusted heap twenty feet below him.
Where more zombies had gathered, attracted by his gun shot.
The dead went into a frenzy when he appeared on the landing.
Oh God, oh God, oh God, Daddy, what do I do?
The woman with the black ribs was clutching the air between them. He could smell the rotten-meat stench she carried with her. Even over the open sewage he could smell her. Another three steps and she’d be on him.
“No,” he said, kicking at her. His heart was pounding painfully in his chest. “Stay back!”
But zombies, of course, don’t ever stay back, and Jimmy was forced to back up until he was pressed against the railing.
It was then he knew what he had to do.
He jumped.
§
Dr. Knopf stood in front of what was left of the Huntington Movie Theater, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck. Not even ten o’clock yet, and already the sun was punishing him. He had never handled field work well, and now that he was getting on into middle age, he had even less patience for it.
But he had to deal with it. At least this one last time. Jimmy was out here, somewhere, and he had to find him.
But which way?
To his left the street was piled high with the rubble of collapsed buildings. To his right, the street was a silent canyon between windowless buildings. It would be easier to go that way, but just because it was easy was no guarantee that Jimmy had gone that way. The boy had survived here as a toddler because of his gift, going not where the going was easiest, but where his senses told him it was safest. Avoid the zombies. That would have been his only concern.
So which way was that?
“Well, how about it, Dr. Knopf? Any ideas?”
Knopf shifted his attention from the crumbling buildings and looked at the young captain. Fisher’s uniform was still crisp, his tie knot still regulation perfect. Despite all the walking they’d done in this God-awful heat, his gig line was straight as an arrow. The man didn’t seem to know how to sweat.
“He could be anywhere,” Knopf said. “I suggest doing another sensor sweep.”
“We’ve done eight sensor sweeps already, Doctor. Are you sure the boy even went into town? Perhaps he ran back to the compound.”
God save me from idiots in uniform, Knopf thought. Yes, they’d done their sensor sweeps, but Fisher himself had admitted that the high concentrations of lead in the ground were playing havoc with their equipment. It was probably doing the same thing to Jimmy, though to what degree there was no way of knowing. He’d have to do further research. The only remedy was to keep running the sensor sweeps, keep tracking over the same ground. Eventually they’d hit pay dirt.
“He’s here, Captain. I’m sure of that.”
“Hmm,” Fisher said. “You have a special bond with the boy, I suppose.”
Knopf looked at him sharply. He didn’t like the way that sounded, the nasty implication in the Captain’s tone. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, Captain?”
Fisher raised his eyebrows, as though to feign ignorance.
“Only that you raised him. It would be natural, I suppose, for you to learn how he thinks.”
Knopf didn’t answer that.
“You were given charge of the boy shortly after your own wife and son were killed. Isn’t that right, Doctor? It would make sense that you’d invest extra effort to keep the boy close. Perhaps he filled some psychological hole in your head?”
“That’s pretty damn bold of you, Captain.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. You forget, Doctor, that I have an assignment as well. You are trying to get me to believe in magic. My job, if you’ll pardon my French, is to make sure you aren’t full of shit.”
And then it hit Knopf what was really going on here, what the Captain was actually accusing him of.
“Captain, are you suggesting that I faked more than a decade’s worth of research just so that child could take the place of my own son? Is that really what you’re suggesting?”
Fisher shrugged. “You tell me.”
“You’re a bastard, Captain. A certifiable bastard.”
“Maybe. But that still doesn’t answer my question.”
Knopf nearly hit him in the nose. He might have, too, if at that moment the street to his right hadn’t erupted with yelling and gunfire.
Knopf ducked his head, backing away from the commotion.
“What the…?” Fisher said. He was standing with arms akimbo, peering into the clouds of dust pouring down the street.
The next instant two troopers hurried out of the fog. A steadily retreating line of Troopbots was right behind them, firing into the dust.
One of the troopers, a soldier named Collins, hurried toward Fisher. “Zombies, sir! A whole mess of ’em!”
“What the hell happened?”
“We were going building to bui
lding, searching the rubble. A couple of our Troopbots found a door down to the sewer system and when they opened it, they uncovered a whole nest of them things.”
“How many?”
“Hard to tell, sir. Forty, maybe fifty. They overran our Troopbots.”
They could hear moaning now. A few of the approaching zombies were visible through the screen of dust, but from the volume of the moans, it was obvious there were many more behind them.
“So much for the eighty-six percent accuracy of your sensors, Captain?” said Knopf. “Guess you can never trust a zombie to play fair.”
“Don’t start with me, Doctor.”
The next instant he was on the radio, calling for the Warbots to converge on his location.
Knopf felt their approach before he heard them, the tread of their Tyrannosaurus-sized legs sending shudders through the pavement.
When the Warbots entered the intersection, they turned at once to the advancing horde of zombies. Their limited A.I. capability allowed them to process the scene and reach immediate conclusions about what had to be done. Without waiting for orders, they strode to the leading edge of the street, took side-by-side positions, and opened fire into the approaching horde, mowing down the zombies with a hail of automatic-weapons fire.
To Knopf, it seemed the shooting went on forever, and when the dust finally settled, the rattle of the guns still rang in his ears.
But the street was still. Nothing moved.
One of the Warbots turned to Captain Fisher. “What are your orders, sir?”
Fisher looked mad enough to spit. He glared at Knopf before turning back to his robots.
“Another sensor sweep,” he growled. “Find that kid.”
§
As he went over the edge, Jimmy saw a crowd of zombies lunging for him. Their ruined faces and bloody hands loomed large, and for a terrifying moment, he thought he was going to be shredded alive before he hit the water. But when he landed in the sewer channel, he kept his head under the water and started thrashing for the far side of the channel.
The water was black as ink, and he couldn’t see where he was going. He pushed and pulled his way through a forest of legs even as hands groped at his back.
One of them managed to grip the collar of his shirt.
Jimmy twisted away, breaking the zombie’s fingers, but still it held on. He swatted at the hands and kicked whenever he could, and somehow managed to reach the stone ledge on the far side of the channel.
They stayed on him, though.
He saw a rotten, wooden pallet leaning against the wall under the ledge and climbed on top of it. The ledge was another five feet or so above that, and he jumped for it, hooking his elbows over the edge so he had enough support to pull himself up. He kicked at the smooth cement wall below him, his toes sliding on the algae that grew there while hands groped at his shoes.
“Get away!” he yelled, pumping his legs with everything he had. “Get... away!”
And then he was up and over the edge, his full weight resting on the ledge. Jimmy rolled over onto his back and sobbed, his chest heaving.
What was he going to do? There was no place to go.
He rolled onto his side and stared down at the hungry crowd. Their hands were just a few inches below the ledge, their moans reaching a frenzied intensity. He knew he should keep moving, but the panic and adrenaline that had helped him climb had left him numb, and all he could do now was stare with glassy eyes at the clutching hands.
You must get up. You must leave.
Jimmy blinked. The Combot again.
How am I supposed to do that? There’s nowhere to go.
Stand up. I will help.
What’re you gonna do?
Stand up.
With a strange, disconnected feeling, almost like he was dreaming, Jimmy rose to his feet. The ceiling was arched, and this close to the wall he had to bend slightly to keep from banging his head. It made him feel like a diver looking over the edge of a cliff. Staring straight down into the ravenous horde brought a wave of nausea over him, and he groaned.
What now?
You must move to your left. Eighty feet down that tunnel you will find a large platform. Go there.
That’s your plan? What am I supposed to do when I get there?
There is a functioning Warbot there. It will protect you. Go now. You must move quickly.
The Combot wasn’t kidding, Jimmy thought. One of the zombies in the front had fallen against the wall, pushed down by the weight of the horde behind it, and its fellows were ramping up its back. A zombie in some kind of uniform was pulling itself onto the ledge. The zombie’s lower jaw was almost completely gone, like it had been torn off. Or shot off. Maggots swarmed in the rotting flesh where its chin and cheeks had been.
“No,” Jimmy muttered, shaking his head.
You must move quickly.
Slowly, inching along the narrow concrete ledge, zombie hands grasping at his feet, Jimmy made his way to a corner up ahead. The zombies matched him step for step, their moans echoing horribly off the walls and quickening his pulse.
How am I supposed to get down from here? They’re following me.
Round the corner. You will see.
And when he reached the corner, he did see. Immediately below him was a railing that went across the channel. It wasn’t high enough to keep the zombies at bay forever, but it was high enough to give him a chance at escape.
Yes, he thought, that’s how I’m gonna do it.
He jumped into the water.
The zombies stuck their hands through the railing, but he was already out of reach and running for the platform.
Right where you said it’d be.
They are coming. You must move quickly.
Jimmy looked back over his shoulder and saw, once again, that the Combot was correct. Already the zombies had tipped the railing forward and were scrambling over it. He had maybe a thirty-foot lead on them.
He closed the last few feet to the platform and rounded the corner. A sudden, intensely white light flooded his vision, momentarily blinding him.
“You are human,” a robotic voice said.
It took a moment for the purple blotches to clear from Jimmy’s sight. When they did, he saw a badly damaged Warbot trying to stand on its Tyrannosaurus legs―but something was wrong. One of its legs wouldn’t work. Its status lights blinked and flickered. It stumbled forward, then sagged to the ground, the spotlight on its shoulder lighting up the carnage at its feet.
The ground was covered with rotting corpses.
Fear gripped him anew. He had gambled on the Combot’s instructions, and this was where it had led him. To an abandoned sewer platform, and no way out.
“Zombies,” the Warbot said, raising a .50 caliber machine gun. “Human, you must take cover at the rear of the platform. Move quickly.”
Jimmy heard moaning behind him. That was all it took. He ran forward, scrambling over badly decomposed bodies, too frightened to allow the gore into which his fingers were sinking to slow him down.
The shooting started a moment later.
Jimmy reached the back wall, turned, and saw a zombie’s head and shoulders atomized by a three-round burst from the Warbot’s guns. But every zombie that was shot as it rounded the corner was replaced by more, and soon the Warbot’s gun was blazing in a continuous stream.
It wasn’t enough. The dead kept coming, pouring around the corner faster than the Warbot’s gun could put them down. Jimmy, who was so exhausted he could barely move, pushed himself against the back wall of the platform. There was some kind of vehicle abandoned there, like a rail truck, only on rubber wheels. Its windshield had come loose and broken into two pieces. Jimmy pulled the bigger of the two over him and tried to shrink into the gore of ruined bodies below him.
But it was only a matter of time.
There were just too many of them.
Jimmy’s eyes found one zombie staring straight at him as it climbed over the pile of torn-up corpses
. Its gaze never wavered. It had zeroed in on him and meant to have him.
Jimmy braced himself for the attack.
The zombie fell on top of him, moaning, pawing at the glass with its bloody hands. Jimmy screamed at the thing, pushing back with everything he had.
And the zombie’s head exploded. One moment it was pounding on the glass, smearing it with blood and sewage, and the next the glass was splashed with bits of bone and brain and clumps of bloody hair. The zombie’s headless corpse sagged against the glass as Jimmy gaped in shocked silence.
The sound of gunfire was gone.
So too were the moans.
“Human,” the Warbot said. “Human?”
Jimmy had to tilt the glass like a ramp to roll the corpse away, and once it was off him, he could see the gun smoke lingering in the foul sewer air.
“Human, they are gone. Please acknowledge.”
“I hear you,” Jimmy said.
He stood up and looked around. The far wall was dripping with fresh gore, and there were bodies piled high near the corner. How many? Forty? More than that?
Jimmy couldn’t tell.
He turned to the Warbot.
“Thanks,” he said, because it was the only thing that came close to how he was feeling at the moment.
“I cannot move. You must go. Gunfire will travel far in these tunnels. More zombies will come.”
“How many?”
“Unknown. You must go.”
He watched the Warbot as its status lights blinked and dimmed once again. The machine could not die, but if it had an equivalent, it was doing it now. Its lights were going out.
It was then that a thought occurred to Jimmy. Something he had overheard once in the weapons lab.
“Don’t Warbots usually work in teams?” he asked. “Where’s your partner?”
But the Warbot didn’t answer. Its status lights continued to fade, and as Jimmy watched, they went dark permanently.
There was nothing else to do but leave.
§
Jimmy found the second Warbot a few minutes later.
He had returned to the main channel and was following it further into the sewer system. There were more platforms here, lots of them, and other channels leading off in other directions.
