We don’t have much of a choice. I throw the door open and spill onto the pavement. Shards of glass dig through my pant legs, bite into my knees. The door acts as a shield from the other zombies for a time, enough for me to limp around the other side. Their collective weight would be no match for me and as I’m almost near Lilly’s door, my own door slams shut. The shield is down.
Lilly moves on her own volition…mostly. I have to help her out and it’s painful. I’m biting my tongue to distract from the pain.
A zombie reaches for me, grapples the back of my cloak. The cold chain around my neck with the picture of Darlene and Junior stretches. I spin around with almost as much speed as is normal and blast this zombie woman’s face to shreds. In the process, the bullets that don’t hit the mark take out three other stragglers.
I tell myself not to look up, not to see how many more are closing in on us, and let me tell you, that never works. It’s like saying don’t look down when you’re standing on the edge of a skyscraper.
“What about the weapons?” Lilly asks.
“Leave them,” I say. I push her in the direction of an alley. When I say leave the weapons, I meant the ones in the trunk. My sword is in the backseat, and I can’t leave that. So I lean into the car, against my better judgment, I might add, and grab the sheathed blade. Guns run out of ammunition eventually. The sword won’t.
Twenty-Seven
By the time I reach the alleyway Lilly has disappeared to, the amplified moans reaching my ears, Lilly is already at the other end. She has stopped. She’s standing there with her back bent, looking like she’s in pain.
I catch up to her. I have to do my own zombie walk to make it, but I do.
She still hasn’t moved. This is starting to worry me, and right now, with the wall of dead closing in on us, I don’t need another worry added to my growing list of things to worry about.
“Lilly?” I say, surprised at how strong my voice sounds. I feel anything but strong right now. Luckily, I’ve been able to ride a wave of adrenaline, but it’s already depleting.
She doesn’t answer.
“I’m unarmed,” she says instead, and I’m wondering who she’s talking to. Can’t be me.
Then I see who it is.
My zombie shuffle comes to a stop about fifteen feet from the mouth of the alley. Vision isn’t what it used to be and nailing my head on the steering wheel didn’t help much, but a blind person could see the men and women who crowd around Lilly. They all have guns, big rifles like the kind we stole from Paul and Duane.
“You!” a man shouts. “You stop right there!”
Now, I’m no longer the Jack Jupiter I used to be, no longer that writer turned snarky action hero, but this close to the end, able to see the light at the other side of the tunnel, I think I have to be.
So I don’t stop, don’t listen to this asshole. Or at least, I don’t act like this is exactly what I want. Can’t let them know I want to get captured and taken to Abby. I turn around. The zombies stream in the opening where the Lincoln sits, crashed and forgotten. The image that comes to mind is of sand going through an hourglass. The slow drip of an IV. They are too smashed together, too eager to get at this reachable fresh meat, that they’re getting wedged between the buildings. I wonder what will give way first, the zombie’s rotten bodies or the brick. You may think that’s an easy question to answer, but seeing what I see, I know it’s not. They’re so many that the brick seems to swell until it can’t hold it much longer. Then these savage beasts trample each other, tearing off rotten flesh, exposing cranberry-red innards, sending brick dust into the alley.
“Stop or I’ll shoot!” the same man says.
This time, I do stop. I put my hands up and turn around slowly.
“Always gets them,” this man says. He says it loud enough to be heard over the squelching and tearing and death rattling.
“Drop your weapons and come forward,” a woman says. She has prematurely gray hair and a face like a weathered headstone.
I do as she says. Lilly is looking at me out of the corner of her eyes, hands still raised, nose and lips still bleeding.
I walk up next to her and the man tells me to get on my knees and hold out my hands. I do this, too, only because that moaning and rattling is weighing heavy on my shoulders. I can feel this wave of death heading for the coast, ready to drown us all.
“All right, good. I like when people listen to me. It’s not often that that happens,” the man is saying. He takes handcuffs out and puts them harshly around my wrists.
“Don’t you think we can do this a little farther away from the dead?” I say. I’m not trying to be sarcastic. The man doesn’t like it. He snarls at me. This is a man who no longer fears the zombies, not even a horde like the one behind us.
“Idiots messed up the feeding frenzy,” the woman says.
“Don’t worry about it, Gina. Quincy has meat duty,” the man who handcuffed me says.
“Meat duty? Hell naw, I don’t got meat duty. It’s your turn, Mark,” this one known as Quincy says. He’s a young black man with a face as hard as stone.
“I’ll flip you for it.”
“No, ain’t no flippin when it’s your turn!” Quincy yells back.
Behind us, the zombies are closer.
Closer.
Always closer.
A rising panic hits me. It’s like two guys arguing on a set of train tracks while a freight barrels down on them. I have to speak up.
“Hey, can we move this along?” I say. “I don’t particularly want to be something’s dinner today.”
“Ain’t gonna matter much, man,” Quincy says. “Soon as we get back to ol’ Ab, y’all’s dead meat anyway.”
Ab. Abby. The sound of her name is enough to vanquish any of the panic and fear that has settled in me.
“Real nice,” Lilly says. “So much for manners.”
This raises a laugh from both the woman and the man with the other set of cuffs. He’s still chuckling as he slips them over Lilly’s wrists. I notice he doesn’t put them on her as tight as he did to me. Maybe he does have some manners.
“Seriously though, fellas,” Gina says, “they’re getting awfully close.”
Now that we’re both cuffed and unable to harm these District guards, Mark seems to relax a bit. He lowers his rifle, lets it hang on his shoulder, then raises his arms and shouts, “Bring those motherfuckers on! I’ll kill them all.”
Great, I think to myself, yet another psychopath to deal with.
“C’mon, Mark,” Gina says, her voice matronly.
The yell dies out and now Mark grabs his gun again. “I’m sorry,” he says to me.
And I look at him, confused. “For what? For doing your job—”
He raises his rifle up like a club. “For this.”
Twenty-Eight
Waking up is painful. There’s a dull thudding in my head that I don’t think we’ll ever go away. I haven’t opened my eyes yet, not fully, but I know I’m back to consciousness. I guess the best way to describe what has happened is like being under anesthesia.
I’ve been under once before. They put the mask on me and have me count down and I start feeling cold all over, then boom, next thing I know I’m waking up in a different room with a fresh cut on my leg and a pin in my foot. Except, in this case right now, I wake up with nothing but a new knot on my head and a few less brain cells.
It takes me a moment to remember what exactly happened. All I really remember was a bunch of zombies, but that’s no different than much of anything in this world. There’s always zombies.
Opening my eyes doesn’t do much else in the way of making me comprehend what’s going on. I’m in some kind of conference room with a big glass wall on the end opposite of me. From the wall, I see some of Chicago’s skyline. All of the other skyscrapers, the medium-sized buildings, the dead cars which look like Matchboxes from up here. Each building, it seems, is missing pieces or has been charred by fire; each building looks at me
with lifeless window-eyes. It’s a lonely and cold feeling that invades me. The whole city is diseased.
No, the whole world is diseased.
Only when I turn my head, which results in quite a few cracks and much pain, do I remember what has happened. The reason for this is Lilly. She’s sitting next to me in a cracked leather chair, something an executive of a Fortune-500 company might do business from. Funny when you think about that chair, really. How it once mattered, how it was once a sign of wealth and power and respect. Now it’s used to tie up nobodies in the zombie apocalypse.
This thought doesn’t help much in the way of that cold and lonely feeling, but seeing Lilly does. A familiar face is nice even if I hardly know her.
“Lilly,” I say, but it comes out like a whisper. I shake my head again. The pain hits me like a tidal wave.
Seeing her there with the blood on her face and her hands tied behind her back pisses me off. I’m pissed mostly at myself. I should have never let her come along with me. She had no reason to mess up what little life she had survived long enough to cultivate.
She flicks her eyes open. One of them is bloodshot.
“Lilly, are you okay?” I ask. It’s a dumb question, really. We’re obviously not all right.
“My head’s a little fuzzy,” she answers, “but I’m alive.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. The words explode from my lips.
“Don’t, Jack. This is what I signed up for.”
The door behind us opens. It doesn’t creak; the only reason I know it’s opened is because I hear footfalls on the carpet. Nice carpet, by the way. Wouldn’t expect anything less in a place like this.
I close my eyes to focus on the sounds. The pain that bolts through my head is almost unbearable. Three sets of footsteps, two sets heavy, one set agile and almost silent.
“There they are,” a man says. I haven’t been knocked hard enough to forget that voice. It’s Mark—not such a stupid name…surprise, surprise.
“What’s your name?” a woman’s voice asks.
My mouth parts. Relief floods me. All the tension in my body melts away. With this voice, a thunderstorm of nostalgia rushes into my head. Life flashing before your eyes—that kind. In my mind, I see a young woman of about eighteen or nineteen. She works at a gym, a gym I was so unfortunately stuck in the night of the outbreak. This girl saved me from killing myself before the zombies made their first appearance. She helped lift a barbell off of my chest—ninety-five pounds, nothing to brag about, but I don’t see the point in lying here. She helps me get back to my then-fiancé and future wife. She helps me get across the country. She helps me save the world. She helps me build a community in Golden Gate Park. She keeps my hotheaded brother in line. She finds a man who accepts her for who she is, missing hand and all. She marries him. She has years of happiness before the very guerrilla group she works for took that man away from her, destroyed all that she has built, all that we’ve built.
This is Abigail Cage, the sister I never had, part of the family I’ve been longing to get back to for the past two years.
Hearing her voice does so much to me. I suddenly feel tears rolling down my face, slowing at the edge of my beard, getting lost in the long—and graying—hairs.
“Abby,” I say. My voice has never shaken so much, not since I held Darlene, my wife, my love, my soul, in my arms while her blood drained from the slash in her neck, the slash given to her by the one-eyed man.
“What is your name?” Abby asks again.
I can feel Lilly’s eyes on me. The tension in the room is so heavy, I think the windows will blow open.
“Abby, it’s me—it’s J-Jack,” I say.
The footsteps again. Light, agile, almost silent.
She comes around the side of my chair and pivots. There’s a bitter chill in the rush of wind caused by the sudden movement.
Now she stands in front of me, but it’s not Abby, not the Abby I remember, the Abby I love. In the span of two years, this woman has aged a decade. She is haggard, her face is twisted with evil, her eyes are full of pain. I think if I blink—if I could blink—that the strings attached to her limbs would reveal themselves and there would be the one-eyed man floating above us all in the darkness, controlling those strings. The thought freezes me again. I want to shout, I want to scream.
I can’t.
On her missing hand she wears a metal hook, not like something a pirate would wear, but something much more sophisticated. Her clothes are too big for her body. She has lost a lot of weight.
“Abby,” I manage to say. “Abby. Don’t you remember me?” There’s a pleading in my voice, one I never expected to hear.
I think recognition flashes in her eyes, but it’s gone as fast as it came.
“How can I remember you? I don’t even know your name. So what is it? I’d like to know who I am about to execute,” she says.
The coldness running through me physically hurts. Execute? No. She heard me on the radio, she recognized my voice.
The tears in my eyes continue to course downward, getting lost in my beard. The throbbing in my head has flared up to something so painful, I can hardly think, let alone speak.
“Abby, you heard me. We talked on the radio. You recognized my voice,” I’m saying.
“Jack,” Lilly says. “Don’t.” This is the thudding of the casket lid, the last nail in the coffin, the first mound of dirt thrown into your grave. She has given up.
Maybe I should, too.
No part of the old Abby is present now. She is gone, gone like Darlene and Junior and Norm.
Gone.
Suzanna was right. I should’ve never come. I should’ve lived out the rest of my miserable life in silence, stuck in the past, just waiting to die.
“Jack what,” Abby asks.
Behind us, Gina and Mark are chuckling. They wait for the execution, this is nothing new to them, they’ve seen it before. The cat playing with the mouse before she brutally tears its insides out and leaves it on the doorstep for her master. I wonder if Abby will ship my body to the one-eyed man. I wonder if he’ll look upon me and laugh.
“Jack Jupiter,” I answer, sounding very far away. I’ve already checked out, accepted my fate.
“Well, Jack Jupiter, I’m sorry it has to end like this,” Abby says.
“No—” Lilly screams. “Don’t do it. Kill me first.”
I look at her out of the corner of my eyes, at a loss for words. Does she…does she care about me?
As if reading my mind, Lilly says, “We’re both screwed, yeah, I just don’t want to see your head blown off,” in a low voice. “Don’t want that to be the last thing I see.”
Eh, I get it.
“Shut up!” Abby shouts loud enough to cause the window to rattle. It makes me jump, and I wish I could fall inwardly on myself, vanish to nothingness, leave this all behind.
The guards are chuckling. Pieces of shit.
Abby walks closer to me, her claw-hand scratching along the table, making a terrible grating sound.
She bends down, her breath hot in my face. I almost cannot meet those eyes, those dead eyes.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” she says. “One shot in the back of the head, punishment for crossing into District territory and disturbing official District business.”
Shot in the back of the head, like my own son. My breathing is almost as shaky as my body. I’m thinking of Junior, of Darlene, thinking dying won’t be all bad. At least I’ll get to see them again in the afterlife.
“Please,” I say to Abby. “Please remember.” But I know it’s worthless. This empty shell of a person has made up whatever it has of its mind left. Suzanna’s words come into my head, a bullet to my brain—brainwashed. Abby is brainwashed and I can’t blame her. She is doing what she's been programmed to do.
Now Abby spins the chair around.
Lilly and I look at each other as I pass. “I’m sorry,” I say.
It’s all I can say.
Sh
e smiles. It’s a sad smile, a pretty smile. Gone too fast.
Then, the unsnapping of a button, that unmistakable sound of a gun being pulled free from a holster.
The cocking of the hammer.
Twenty-Nine
I’ve pictured this moment ever since I lost Darlene and Junior. Before I lost them, the idea of death was always on my mind, too—I mean, how could it not be when there’s zombies walking around to always remind you of what death is?
In the two years since I’ve pictured this sweet relief, this way to get back to my wife and son and all those who I lost before I arrived in Haven and all those I lost after, it was not like this. I would never in a million years think the person who was going to do me in would be a brainwashed member of my own family.
But that’s the way it is.
That’s the way it has to be.
I have to accept it, like I have to accept Darlene and Junior are gone, and Abby is brainwashed, and that I’ll never see my older brother again, never find out what happened to him.
To close my eyes or to not close my eyes, that is the question. Do I want to die a coward or do I want to die looking at the grinning faces of Gina and Mark?
I’m reminded of an amusement park. I don’t know why. Thought I’d have a more insightful final thought, but I can’t help myself. When I was younger, Norm took me to this place called Geauga Lake in Aurora, Ohio. It’s gone now, gone before the apocalypse happened.
In this place, there was one of those log rides. You sat in a long car that was made to look like a log floating in water. It pulled you up a steep hill, took you around a jerky bend—at this point, you’d feel how cold the water was, and no matter how hot the temperature had been, you’d almost always regret getting on this damn thing—then you’re looking down a huge drop that ends in a pool of the same cold water at the bottom. Down you went and the nose of the log would make a huge splash as it hit. Water flew up in, what seemed like to a younger me, a tsunami wave. But the reason these grinning District soldiers remind me of that ride is because there was a bridge you could stand on just over that large pool of water the log ride ended in. There, you’d get some of the splash. The idea was you wouldn’t get as much as you would’ve had you been on the ride. I told Norm that I didn’t want to ride it. He gave me his usual, You’re a wimp, you’re too chicken, blah-blah-blah excuse, and I waited for him on the bridge with the scores of other too-chicken spectators. The splash that hit me nearly knocked me off the bridge, and it felt so nice in the hot summer weather. All while saving me a panic attack from looking down that drop from the nose of the log. So I told Norm to go on it again, I wasn’t feeling well, blah-blah-blah, just so I could feel the splash again and again and again. Every summer we went to Geauga Lake, this was something I looked forward to, one of my fondest memories of childhood. It was a time when Norm and I seemed to get along back then, which was not often.
The Dead Collection Box Set #2: Jack Zombie Books 5-8 Page 37
