Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  “I’ll be riding the east wall,” he said.

  2

  Jacob got one of the bicycles from the shed and headed east, into the sunrise.

  During the summer, Arbella felt crowded. Nearly ten thousand people, all of them crammed together in a town that had once housed barely four thousand before the First Days. Many of the First Generation families still had their own residences, but elsewhere in the town, as many as three families shared a single three-bedroom home. To meet the rising demand for food, nearly every lawn had long since been turned into a vegetable garden. The stoplights had come down because there weren’t any more cars to stop, just young children with sticks and dogs by their sides driving herds of goats or sheep into the markets in the center of town. The Pecan Valley Golf Course out on Southton Road was now a dairy farm. The peach orchards out on Interstate 55 were now home to thousands of pigs and turkeys and chickens. And even the wetlands that stood between the town and the river to the east were being turned into cropland. But with the coldest days of winter upon the town, there wasn’t much going on. Most of the shops were still dark. Jacob saw lamplight in a few windows, but only a few. Save for the horse-drawn milk wagons coming up from the dairy, he had the town of Arbella pretty much to himself. Just his thoughts for company.

  Steve Harrigan was right of course about the Code. Jacob hated how simply he’d put it, because it made the Code sound like a platitude, but for all that, he was right. The Code really did keep them alive. It was their moral core, the center around which their entire society orbited. Arbella was an island in a world that quite literally wanted to devour them, and the Code they lived by helped them to not only survive, but thrive in that world. They worked for each other, giving freely of their skills and their goods, so that all had a chance to survive. You had to trust your fellow citizens. You had to believe that, together, you were greater than the dangers of the wasteland. You had to believe it, because anything else meant surrendering to the fear and pain and death that lurked beyond the walls. Jacob’s thoughts turned to Jerry Grieder, Amanda’s husband. It wasn’t just some stolen jewelry, he told himself, thinking of Amanda’s pleas for mercy for her husband. Jerry hadn’t just stolen some young girl’s beloved locket, but rather the trust from the entire community. Jerry Grieder wasn’t just guilty of burglary; he was guilty of contaminating everything the people of Arbella stood for, what kept them alive.

  Jacob pedaled faster, the biting wind on his face the only thing that kept his tears from bursting loose. He was almost grateful for the sting on his cheeks. It felt good to hurt, because it was the only thing he could think of to convince him that he was still human. He’d known Jerry Grieder since they were children. How in the hell was he going to put a gun to the man’s head and pull the trigger? He just didn’t think he was going to be strong enough.

  Gradually he tired of the hard pedaling and coasted, letting the bike carry him along. His face and knuckles were raw with the cold, but he didn’t care. He kept going, watching the sleeping buildings, thinking about his home.

  Thirty years ago, before the First Days, Arbella was a little town nestled comfortably on a bend of the Mississippi River known as New Madrid, Missouri. Sheriff Taylor led the First Generation, a little over a thousand of them, out of Arkansas and into Missouri, fighting and dodging the undead the whole way. They happened upon New Madrid and found the place deserted. They put makeshift barricades up around the town, and over the course of four months fought the zombie hordes to a standstill.

  In honor of their victory they renamed the town Arbella, after the flagship of Governor John Winthrop’s Puritan fleet that had settled the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. It was from the deck of that ship that Winthrop delivered his famous “City Upon a Hill” sermon, and it was in that same spirit of shining a light on a cold and hostile world that Jacob’s mother, and the other members of the First Generation, turned an abandoned hamlet into a home.

  The barricades became sturdy twenty-foot walls of wood and razor wire, wide enough for the lookouts and the sharpshooters who continued to guard against the zombies that sometimes wandered too close. The empty churches were turned into grain silos. Dairy cows took over the golf course. Babies were born. Lives were lived. And very quickly, Arbella turned into a self-sufficient island of peace in the wasteland.

  Jacob was three when that happened.

  He didn’t remember the time before the First Days. All his life had been spent in and around Arbella, watching it grow, watching it prosper, watching it swell at the seams from the bounty the town made. The original thousand members of the First Generation had since had children, and taken in those healthy few who now and then happened upon the town and were willing to work hard. In the blink of an eye one thousand became ten thousand, and more were being born every day.

  Jacob watched daylight spread over the rooftops of the town and over the gardens. It dappled the metal roofs of the water purification stations like molten copper, and in that moment, Jacob swelled with pride for his town. True, he wasn’t there at the fight that ended the First Days, but he’d helped to build Arbella. He’d served it as a citizen, and as a member of the salvage teams sent out into the wasteland to gather the things the town needed, and most recently, as the chief deputy of its constabulary. He was thirty-five years old, and in line to take over the leadership of Arbella when the First Generation was ready to pass that baton along. In that moment, proud of his town and of himself, he found it easy to believe in the Code again. Its values were his values, and the town it protected his home.

  But the quiet didn’t last. A raid siren filled the cold morning air, sudden and shrill.

  Jacob was on Oberlin Street at the time, near the intersection with Yale, the east wall still about three blocks away. Within seconds of the siren going off the streets filled with people. Men and women came down from their porches to the edges of their gardens and looked at one another. The raid sirens were hardly used anymore, for there hadn’t been a sizeable zombie horde at the gates for more than twelve years.

  “Jacob, what is it?”

  He turned and saw Linda Moffett standing by her front gate, a dishtowel in her hands.

  He was about to tell her he had no idea, when the hue and cry came down the street: “It’s Jim Laymon up on the wall!”

  A woman ran into her yard. “Somebody make him kill that noise!”

  “He’s lost his mind,” somebody yelled back at her.

  Jacob stood up on his pedals and rode hard for the wall. A crowd had gathered in the street beneath Jim’s lookout station, and it was getting bigger by the moment. Some were yelling questions at him, others frantically trying to get him to cut out the noise. Nobody seemed to be getting his attention.

  Jacob saw a ladder leaning against the fence and scaled it.

  Jim was the very model of the Code. At eighty-four, he was one of the oldest citizens of Arbella, yet he manned a lookout post on the wall three days a week. Everybody works; everybody pulls their weight. That was the essence of the Code, and Jim lived it.

  He had set up a comfortable workstation for his day. There were jugs of water at his side, a basket of food a little ways off. His binoculars hung from a nail on the railing. There was even an umbrella, for later in the day, when the sun came out. He had heavy blankets over his shoulders and across his lap, though now the blankets were coming off as he leaned over the raid siren, working the hand crank with everything he had.

  Jacob ran over to him and put a hand on the crank to stop it.

  “What are you doing, Jim? Stop it.”

  “Look!” he shouted toward the river.

  It was a few hundred yards away. Jacob could smell the warm, sweet decay of its muddy banks and the upturned earth where the dredging teams were draining the wetlands just outside the wall. The clatter coming up from their pumper trucks was tremendous. But he didn’t see what Jim wanted him to see.

  Not at first.

  And then he saw movement in the darkness dow
n by the river.

  Jacob squinted, straining his eyes to see into the shadows. “Oh, no,” he said.

  From below, someone shouted, “Hey, Jacob, what’s wrong?”

  He leaned over the railing and yelled at the crowd, “Zombies on the wall! I need sharpshooters up here now!”

  Nobody moved; nobody spoke. They just stared up at him in shock.

  “Sharpshooters!” he said. “Send up the alarm.”

  It took a moment, but once a few members of the crowd scurried off, the others followed suit. Jacob turned back to Laymon.

  “Where’s their sentry? Why aren’t you using your mirror to signal them?”

  “They ain’t got one.”

  “What?”

  “They ain’t got a sentry.”

  “What do you mean? Where is he?”

  “They ain’t got one. Just workers.”

  That was a huge violation of protocol. Nobody but salvage teams ever went beyond the wall without sentries to cover their backs. That was never supposed to happen.

  “I need to get down there,” Jacob said.

  He pulled the ladder over the wall and hurried down it. When he was on the ground again, he pushed the ladder into the grass and ran for the workers.

  The noise from their pumper trucks was deafening, and all the men wore ear protection. It was no wonder they’d failed to hear the warning siren. Their foreman was leaning over a table, looking at a map scroll. Jacob grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around.

  “Shut off those machines!” he yelled. “Shut ’em down!”

  He heard Jacob, Jacob knew he did, but he didn’t understand. Jacob pointed at the machines and drew his hand across his throat. “Shut ’em down! Right now!”

  He still didn’t understand.

  Jacob grabbed him by the shoulder, shoved him toward the front of one of the trucks, and pointed toward the river.

  A herd of zombies was coming up from the water’s edge, pulling themselves along through thick mud.

  “Shut off your machines!” Jacob yelled.

  Now he understood. The foreman jumped into the cab of the nearest pumper truck and hit the kill switch. As the pumps wound down, workers looked up from their hoses in confusion. The foreman made frantic X’s with his arms across his chest, and within seconds, the other three trucks went silent.

  Men turned from their work, pulling the earplugs from their ears.

  “Go to the wall,” Jacob shouted. He pulled his pistol. “Go, I’ll cover you.”

  They seemed as confused as the foreman had been until Jacob leveled his weapon at the approaching forms materializing out of the fog that clung to the river’s edge.

  Once the moaning started, they all ran.

  The trucks had big floodlights mounted on top of their cabs. They threw a blinding ring of light on the area the pumpers had been draining, and it kept Jacob from seeing anything beyond the light with any sort of clarity.

  A figure staggered into view less than twenty yards away. More stepped out of the fog on either side of him.

  Jacob raised his pistol at the first zombie and, for a moment, locked up in fear. He’d seen zombies before. More than most, in fact. During his time with the salvage teams he’d seen at least a hundred. He’d even put down a few. But he’d never seen one like the undead thing facing him now. It was covered in river scum, mud dripping off its frame. Jacob couldn’t tell if it was man or woman, much less what color the thing’s skin had been. Black, white, Hispanic, Asian . . . he had no clue. When they decay that badly, they all looked the same. All Jacob saw was river gunk dripping off a skeleton wrapped in a wrinkled leather sheet. The thing could barely walk. With every step, it looked like it might collapse. But walk it did, and it closed the distance between it and Jacob soon enough.

  The zombie raised its hands to claw at Jacob’s face and in that moment he got a glimpse of mud-covered bone showing through the decayed skin of its arm.

  Jacob raised the pistol to its face and fired.

  The thing’s head snapped back, and the next instant it folded to the ground in a heap.

  “Whoa!” he said, and clawed backwards toward the lit work area.

  More zombies staggered into the ring of light on rickety legs, all of them covered in river scum, all of them badly decayed. Jacob scrambled to his feet and was about to turn toward the wall when he heard someone yelling for help.

  It was an eighteen-year-old kid named Winston Roberts that he had arrested at least half a dozen times for fighting and public intoxication. Roberts was tangled in a nest of heavy hoses and wires, like a man wrestling with a giant snake.

  Jacob ran over to him and helped him climb loose of the hoses. “Go that way,” he said, pointing with his gun toward the wall.

  “What the hell, man? What is this shit?”

  “Go!” Jacob said. “Get moving!”

  Some people, even when it’s for their own good, just won’t take orders. Jacob had just pulled him from a muddy pit of hoses. He could see the zombies closing in around him. But all the kid heard was a cop telling him what to do. It was like his mind switched off. He bowed up like he wanted to fight him. Jacob turned and shot two of the things in the head, felling them at his feet. That was what it took to knock some sense into Roberts. He scrambled out of the mass of the hoses, the horror plain on his face.

  “Go!” Jacob yelled. “Get to the wall!”

  In the mud were the two zombies he’d just put down.

  The others moaned as they closed in around him. But Jacob didn’t move. He was still staring at the two zombies he’d put down. He’d never seen any so badly decomposed before. There barely seemed to be enough muscle tissue remaining to haul the things around.

  A muddy hand fell on his back, grabbing at his shirt.

  Jacob yelled and spun away from it, breaking the zombie’s fingers as he twisted.

  He tripped over a hose and nearly fell. His right foot came down hard in the mud and he sank up to his calf. From the wall he heard people screaming, and all around him, the bloodcurdling moans of the dead.

  Mired in the freshly turned river soil, Jacob pulled on his leg with everything he had. “Come on, come on!” he muttered.

  One more pull and he was free, his foot coming loose without his boot. But there was no time to go back for it. The workers were gathering at the base of the wall, pushing the ladder back into place. Most of the zombie herd was closing in on Jacob’s position, but a few were making their way toward the panicked group of workers. He had to cover them.

  Jacob ran for the wall. The workers were shoving each other and yelling.

  “One at a time,” Jacob said. “Move quickly. I’ll cover you.”

  He stepped away from the crowd, putting himself between the wall and the approaching zombies. There were more than he’d first thought, sixty or seventy at least. Most were still recognizable as men or women, but some were barely more than skeletons, with only scraps of muddy cloth left of their clothes.

  Jacob looked down at the pistol in his hand and tried to remember how many shots he had left. There hadn’t been enough ammunition for him to top off his magazine before he went in to work, and he’d fired four rounds already.

  “You guys need to hurry up!” he yelled over his shoulder at the workers.

  They were climbing the ladder three at a time now, and Jacob could see it shaking and bowing under their weight.

  He turned back to the approaching zombies, took a deep breath, and shot the two nearest him. A third put on a sudden burst of speed and charged out of the herd. Startled, Jacob wheeled on the woman and fired without aiming. The bullet hit the top of her head and made it snap back, so that she was looking up at the sky. A wet chunk of her scalp flew out behind her. She stopped in her tracks, and then slowly lowered her gaze on Jacob again.

  For the second time that morning, he froze.

  Her eyes were dead and empty, yet somehow lit with an insane and insatiable rage. Or was it hunger? He couldn’t say for s
ure. He only knew that her eyes held him transfixed, like a rabbit caught by a snake’s stare.

  Shouting from above shook him loose of the thing’s stare.

  He glanced up and back. The last of the workers were on the ladder now, and Jim Laymon was motioning for him to come up.

  “We got sharpshooters on the way,” he said.

  Jacob didn’t need to be told twice. He turned back to the woman he’d just shot, aimed carefully at her nose, and put her down. Then he turned and ran for the wall.

  He went up the ladder in a daze. Somebody grabbed him and pulled him out of the way while someone else lifted the ladder over the wall.

  Dale and Barry Givens, two of Arbella’s best snipers, were standing there, rifles at the ready.

  “Can we take ’em down now, boss?” Dale said.

  Jacob stared at him for a moment, confused. Then he remembered they needed the approval of the constabulary to fire outside the walls. The noise was the big issue. The town had learned over the years that noise was the enemy when dealing with the undead. It brought them out of the woodwork.

  Jacob didn’t feel much like a cop. His chest was heaving. He was rattled through and through. He was covered in mud and only wearing one boot. He holstered his weapon and tried to calm the wild bird beating against the inside of his rib cage.

  But when he spoke, the definitive note of command was back in his voice.

  “Yeah, take ’em down.”

  3

  An hour later, Jacob was back at the office, sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper, trying to figure out what to say in his report.

  The workers should have had a sentry in place. At least one. Protocol called for one armed guard for every ten men working on a project outside the wall, and not following that protocol was just a stupid error. There was no other way to describe it. Even if they hadn’t been able to find a sharpshooter to do the job, the foreman should have at least used one of his crew. After all, every man and woman in Arbella knew how to handle a gun. They learned as children, as part of their schooling. It wasn’t worth risking everybody’s life just to finish a job quicker. Somebody was going to get it over this, and Jacob had his money on the foreman.