The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  “Park?” she said, unbelieving. “I thought—”

  She stiffened then, as she watched him. In a near-whisper she said, “Take off your mask.”

  He tried another key.

  “Park,” she said, insistent.

  He stopped. For a moment he just stood there. Then he carefully removed his mask and goggles, revealing his terrible skull-face for all to see.

  Mei recoiled. “But… you’re one of them, one of his—”

  “It was the only way,” Park said. He tried another key.

  Beside her in the cell, a skinny white man with curly black hair said, “I know you. You’re the one who captured me, who brought me here.”

  Mei said, “Is that… true?”

  “Yes,” Park said. He couldn’t meet her gaze. He tried another key, which turned with a click, and he slid the door open.

  The skinny man tried to rush out, but Park stiff-armed him back and said, “Only her.”

  “No,” Mei said. “We can’t—”

  “Mei, come here,” he told her.

  She shook her head, withdrawing. Park looked down and saw that she was pregnant. She asked, “What’s happened to you? You’re—”

  “I’m what I have to be!” he shouted. “To save you. Now come on!”

  For a moment he thought he had her. She took a tentative step forward.

  Then he heard clanging footsteps on the stairs behind him, and knew it was over.

  The Commander strode into the hall, his rifle raised. Behind him came the skull-faced girl and Greavey. The handcuffs dangled from Greavey’s right wrist, and half his left hand was gone—he’d chewed it off to get free.

  The Commander stared at Park with baleful eyes. There was a long silence. Then the Commander barked, “Get away from there!”

  Park took a few steps back.

  “Keep going! Move!” The Commander advanced. When he was even with the cell, he glanced at its occupants. “You brought us so many,” he said slowly, to himself. “Why a change of heart?”

  Park glared back, said nothing.

  “No,” the Commander declared then, with sudden triumph. “You’re not the compassionate sort. You only care about… one.” He swung his rifle around so that it menaced the skinny man in the cell, and demanded, “Who’s he here for?”

  The man shrank back, holding up his hands defensively. “Her! The girl! Please.”

  Park inched forward, but instantly the gun was back on him. The Commander said to Greavey, “Get her.”

  Greavey strode into the cell and with his good hand snatched Mei by her long dark hair and dragged her stumbling into the corridor. He stood her there in the middle of the hall, then stepped aside. She trembled.

  Behind the Commander, the skull-faced girl said softly, “Dustin, she’s pregnant.”

  “Not for long.” He leveled his rifle at Mei’s belly.

  Park stared at Mei, his sister, as she stood there right in front of him after so long, and he knew there was nothing he could do to save her.

  Then the skull-faced girl shoved the Commander as hard as she could.

  His rifle discharged, spraying rounds into the cement as he sprawled. The gun flew from his grasp and skittered across the floor, coming to rest at Mei’s feet. She spun and kicked it to Park, but not hard enough. The rifle slid to a stop near Greavey, who fell to his knees, grasping for it.

  Park leapt forward and tackled him, and they went down together, grappling. Park wrapped both arms around Greavey’s meaty right bicep, pinning it. The man’s mutilated left hand brushed over the rifle’s stock, but couldn’t get a grip on it. The Commander scrambled to his feet.

  Park pushed against the floor with his heels, pivoting him and Greavey. Park kept hold of Greavey’s bicep with one arm while with the other he reached out and snatched the rifle. He shoved the muzzle up under Greavey’s chin and held down the trigger. Chunks of the man’s fleshy jowls spattered across the floor, and his body went limp.

  Park rolled off him and came up in a crouch with the rifle aimed at the Commander, who slid to a halt just a few feet away. “Back!” Park said, and the Commander slowly retreated, holding up his hands.

  Park said, “Mei! Come here.”

  She staggered toward him. “Park… we can’t—”

  He held out the keys to her and said, “Get these goddamn cells open. Now.”

  The skull-faced girl approached him. The prisoners watched her with a mix of unease and wonder. She said quietly, “And the children. Please.”

  Park considered this. “All right,” he told her. “And the children.”

  An hour later Park returned to the cell block with a duffel slung over his shoulder. The prisoners were free now, around twenty of them, and were armed with weapons from the trunk of his car. The skull-faced girl had fetched the children, each of whom was being carried by an adult. The guards had fled, and Park had taken care of the Commander.

  Park said to the crowd, “You know the city’s under attack by an army of the living. They’re called the Sons of Perdition. You all know who they are?”

  The crowd was somber.

  “Anyone want to join them?” Park said. “Now’s your chance.”

  No one moved.

  “All right,” he said. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  They formed a convoy of vehicles and set out north, away from the fighting. Park drove his car, and the others followed. On the seat beside him rested the duffel, and in the back seat sat Mei and the skull-faced girl, each of them holding a child. At first Park was forced to barrel through clusters of moaners, but once he got away from the palace the streets were mostly deserted.

  The skull-faced girl stared out the window. One time she spoke faintly, “I said I wanted children. I was just… I didn’t think… He wanted to—when they got older—make them like us. He—”

  “It’s okay,” Park said. “It’s over.”

  The girl fell silent.

  “What’s your name?” Mei asked her.

  “Ashley,” she said.

  The convoy passed through the north gate without encountering any of the invaders. Park was faintly hopeful about slipping away unnoticed, but as he followed a two-lane road toward a cluster of wooded hills, a small fleet of pickups came racing out of the west, throwing up great clouds of dust.

  “Shit,” Park said. He hoped he could at least make it to the treeline before being overtaken.

  He did. Barely.

  “Get out,” he told Mei and Ashley then. “Move to another vehicle.” He passed the duffel to Ashley and said, “Take this. It’s Jack. Look after him.”

  “I will,” she promised.

  Mei lingered. “How will we meet up after—?”

  “Go, Mei,” he said.

  She insisted, “I don’t want—”

  “I said go!” he screamed.

  She gave him one last worried look, then fled.

  Park backed up his car so that it blocked the road, then he got out, fetched his scoped rifle, put on his mask and goggles, and crouched in the shadow of his car. Behind him, the rest of the convoy sped away.

  The pursuers drew near, seven trucks. Park lay his rifle across the hood of his car, then put a round through the windshield of the lead vehicle. The truck slid to a halt, and the others pulled up alongside it. Men with rifles poured out, taking cover behind the doors of their vehicles. Thirty guns, maybe more.

  The driver of the lead vehicle, a giant man with a blond beard who was dressed all in black leather, shouted, “You shot my truck.”

  Park didn’t respond.

  The man yelled, “You have any idea who you’re fucking with?”

  Again, Park said nothing.

  “Listen,” the man called. “This is real simple. We saw you all coming out. We know you’ve got women. We need them, your guns, and your vehicles. And you’re all drafted.”

  They didn’t seem to realize that Park was one of the dead. Good. He shouted back, “We don’t want anything to
do with your army.”

  “Drafted means you got no choice,” said the man.

  Park crept into the underbrush and took up a position behind a tree.

  “Hey,” the man called. “What’s your plan, huh? Just how do you think this is going to end?”

  For you? Park thought. Like this.

  He fired. The man’s body toppled against the truck, then slumped to the pavement.

  Park crawled away as the other men started shooting, their bullets shredding the foliage all around him.

  By dusk Park was down to his last bullet. It didn’t matter. He’d won. Thirty men had come charging up the hill after him, and he’d kept ahead of them, taking them out one by one. He’d dropped nine already, and there were moaners in these woods too who’d surprised and overwhelmed maybe two or three more. Mei and Ashley and the others were well away.

  Park had been hit twice in the chest, and many more times in the arms and legs, but those scarcely troubled him. By now his pursuers must know that he was one of the dead, and they would be going only for headshots.

  One of the men emerged from behind a boulder and crept closer, scanning the bushes. Make the last shot count, Park thought, as he eased his rifle into place and peered through the scope.

  He was shocked. My face, he thought. My old face.

  No, he decided then, studying the man. But close. We could be brothers.

  Park’s finger twitched, tapping the trigger. He could easily put a bullet through that face, but he hesitated. It had been such a long time since he’d looked in a mirror. Since he’d recognized himself.

  Any moment now he’d be spotted. Take the shot, his mind urged. Do it. But what difference did it make? Mei was safe. Park continued to stare. He didn’t want to see that face destroyed.

  No. Not that face.

  He imagined the eyes of all the people he’d delivered into the horrors of the necropolis. He imagined the old woman screaming as his teeth tore into her. He heard Mei’s voice crying, “What’s happened to you?” and his own replying, “I’m what I have to be. To save you.”

  Slowly he reached up and grasped a handful of fabric.

  There. The man had seen him, was taking aim. For an instant the two of them stared at each other through their scopes.

  Park removed his mask.

  Dustin watched from the wall of his palace as an army of the living battled through the city toward him, but he was powerless to do anything.

  In the yard below, one of his followers came into view.

  “Hey!” Dustin shouted. “You! Up here!”

  The man stopped and looked at him.

  “Listen to me very carefully,” Dustin said. “This is your Commander speaking. You are to walk around this palace to the main entrance. Once inside, turn right and keep going until you reach the stairs. Take them to the top floor and continue on the way you were. You’ll come to a door leading out onto this balcony. Then remove me from this fucking spike! Do you understand?”

  The man stared back with vacant eyes. “Walk around the palace…” it moaned.

  “Yes,” Dustin said. “And the rest of it. Turn right—”

  “Walk around the palace… ” The creature took a step toward him, then away. “Walk around the palace… ” it repeated, as it wandered, back and forth.

  Obedience

  By Brenna Yovanoff

  Brenna Yovanoff’s first novel, a contemporary young adult fantasy called The Replacement, should be out from Razorbill around the same time as this anthology. Her short fiction has appeared in Chiaroscuro and Strange Horizons. On her LiveJournal (brennayovanoff.livejournal.com), she claims to be good at soccer, violent video games, and making very flaky pie pastry, but bad at dancing, making decisions, and inspiring confidence as an authority figure.

  One of the most wrenching aspects of a zombie plague that makes it completely different from, say, an invasion of alien arachnids is the knowledge that these hordes of enemies were once our friends and neighbors, were once decent, loving people. As we perforate their faces with a .50 caliber machinegun, or hack at their clutching hands with a machete, axe, or chainsaw, it’s impossible not to wonder whether these moaning ghouls retain any trace of their former personality. Are the people they once were still trapped in there somewhere, aware of what’s happening around them? Might they ever be cured, the way a mentally ill patient can be, with the right treatment?

  Books and films are filled with incidents in which survivors try to show mercy to zombies—as with the barn full of zombies in Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead—or will even fight to protect them, as with the zombified newborn in the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead. Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park suggests that it’s impossible to safely keep dinosaurs in captivity, and much the same thing seems to be true of zombies. The temptation is always there, though—what if it were just one zombie? Just one little girl, surely we could handle that?

  But if zombie stories have taught us anything, it’s that keeping zombies around, whether out of mercy or as research subjects, seems to have a way of ending up badly for everyone involved—and by “badly” we mean with teeth, blood, and screams.

  When the first drinking glass hit the floor and broke, Private Grace pressed her back against the wall and steadied the sidearm with both hands. The window above her was single-paned, the weather-stripping rotten. To her left, a freestanding radiator was rusting gently. The house was a summer cabin, cramped, and redolent with the smell of mice. They’d spent the better part of an hour nailing the windows shut, then gathering glassware—pitchers, vases, dinner plates, a souvenir ashtray with a cartoon walrus painted in the bottom—and arranging the dishes in rows along the sills.

  Now, they hunkered down, waiting. There had been food at least, canned, coated in dust. They ate quickly, passing the open cans back and forth as evening fell. The sound the glass made when it landed was explosive, a mortar going off.

  “What do we show these giddy bastards?” Whitaker called from the adjoining room, sounding clipped and perfunctory.

  The answer came from a dozen positions, followed by the metallic sound of carbines, magazines and bolt assemblies clattering into place. “No mercy, sir.”

  They had begun as an infantry platoon of forty-seven, mostly up from New Mexico and Texas. Now, they were thirteen. Ten privates, one combat medic, and Denton the Marine, all serving under Whitaker.

  Of the privates, only Grace and a trooper named Knotts were from Whitaker’s original squad. The other eight and Jacobs, the medic, had come off a company that had gotten pinned down at the Air Force base and, for the most part, died there.

  The base had been a short-term El Dorado, but when they arrived, their grand welcome was absent, save for a few survivors holed up in the bunkers. Some of the medical technicians had made a last-ditch effort to seal themselves in the sleep chambers. It was difficult to say whether the massacre had happened with the techs scrambling for safety or already in stasis, but one thing was certain. The flyboys had been dead for weeks.

  Where Denton originated from remained somewhat of a mystery. It was theorized that he was a deserter, but in truth, Grace did not much care. Denton had the best guns.

  “Smirkers,” someone shouted in the front hall, immediately followed by a crash as the door splintered. Fire came in three-round bursts, rattling through the tiny house.

  Grace crouched lower, sinking into her nanovest, bracing her shoulder against the radiator. She checked the cuffs of her jacket, tucked them deep into the tops of her gloves. Outside, pale hands seemed to float, palms flat against the windows. They were laughing, a storm of high-pitched giggles.

  They smiled. No training in the world prepared you for that. They smiled as they slashed and bit, tearing flesh off their victims in chunks. They smiled as they ran, a merciless full-out sprint, headlong, ravenous. They smiled right before you leveled the barrel and squeezed the trigger. Sometimes, if the shot was high enough, the caliber small enough, even when they fell b
ack—smoke rising from a neat round hole in the forehead—they were still smiling.

  Jacobs said it was neurological, an involuntary tic. He talked about them a lot, his language precise, his hands sketching neural pathways. It had been his idea to come up here, strike for the research complex near Rosewood. They were close now, a couple miles off, but the slopes were crawling with smirkers and everything had started to seem wildly impossible.

  A window broke somewhere and the house was suddenly awash with a new influx. They poured into the little common room. One was wearing a Christmas sweater, red, sprinkled intermittently with green trees, white reindeer.

  Against the other wall, Denton was cutting swaths through the mob—systematic, businesslike. His arms were massive, the muscles displayed in sharp relief as he swung the carbine up. The smirker in the Christmas sweater was closing. It moved fast, turning on him with hands outstretched.

  “Semper Fi,” Denton said, but it sounded flat and ironic. He jammed the muzzle in the smirker’s face.

  In the front hall, Private Sutter was shouting something. He was always shouting, hooting, whooping. Sutter, with the God-awful tattoo on his neck, upwards arrow pointing to the base of his skull. Corsican script said, in an incongruously graceful hand, Eat Me.

  Smirkers did not, in actuality, express much preference for the brain over other organs. They seemed content to take any piece they could get, but the celluloid lore of old movies was hard to shake.

  In the last few weeks, some of the privates had taken to painting targets on their helmets. Aim here in case of infection. Whitaker didn’t like it, but allowed the targets in the same indulgent way he allowed Sutter’s tattoo. Harmless, letting off steam. Grace thought it was morbid.

  The window above her fell in with a glittering crash, and she rose and popped the first smirker in the face. It slumped forward and she turned to meet the two that came after, dropping them on the carpet. After that, the process became automatic. Her territory extended outward for two yards and ran the distance of the wall. Every other inch of the house was someone else’s problem.