by Joe McKinney
Jacob watched it glide away, the only noise the wind popping in its sail-wings as it picked up speed.
Thirty seconds later, it was gone.
From behind him, someone spoke. “What in the hell was that?”
13
Nobody spoke. Not at first.
Jacob looked around the group, and saw his own shock and terror staring back at him. Even Taylor looked rattled. With the airship gone they seemed to have been consumed in an exhalation of darkness, though enough starlight filled the sky to cast a silvery light over their faces. A breeze gusted in off the grasslands, carrying the scent of rain. Above them, to the east, Orion the hunter was climbing the sky from the horizon, one foot in the vast reaches of space, the other digging for purchase on the edge of the world.
It was almost like nobody wanted to speak, or was afraid to.
And then one of the horses bumped into one of the other horses, and the sudden contact sent a wave of panic through their number. One horse reared and whinnied.
Eli rushed over to calm the animals, and eventually they fell silent again.
But the commotion had loosened everybody’s tongue.
Owen Webb put a hand to his forehead and paced in a circle. “Seriously, what the hell was that?” He’d been sleeping on his windbreaker before the encounter and it had messed up his hair, half of it sticking out every which way and the other half mashed flat against the side of his head. Between his crazy hair and the pacing, he looked like a man about to unhinge.
“I think we all know what that was,” Andy said.
“We do?” Owen snapped back, wheeling around to face him. “Please, enlighten me then, because I have no idea what the hell I just saw.”
Andy said nothing. He looked around at the others for some sign that others were thinking the same thing he was.
“Motherfucking space aliens is what it was,” said Eli.
Andy motioned at him with a Thank-you! gesture and turned back to Owen.
“That wasn’t a spaceship,” Owen said.
“It wasn’t? You just said you had absolutely no idea what it was. So what was it?”
“I don’t know!” Owen said. His voice had turned shrill and he was near to screaming.
“Quiet!” Jacob barked. He stepped between the two men. “Everybody keep your voices down. That thing made enough light to attract every zombie in the area. I think we need to move out.”
“But . . . to where?” asked Bree. “I mean, shouldn’t we, I don’t know, go back?”
“Why would we do that?” Barry said.
“Well . . . I don’t know, that thing. That was scary. Shouldn’t we tell somebody?”
“Like who?” Barry said. “And what would we tell them? That we saw an alien spaceship?”
“I’m not at all convinced that’s what we saw,” Owen said.
“You have no idea what we just saw,” Andy said.
“Neither do you. But I know it wasn’t space aliens.”
“You saw what it did. The lights. All the metal stuff rising to the ceiling. Those great big sails.”
“What’s a spaceship need cloth sails for?”
“I don’t know,” Andy said. “I didn’t build the damn thing.”
“Enough,” Taylor said. He stepped into the middle of the group. The others fell silent, waiting for him to speak. “I don’t know what that thing was,” he said, and made a point of looking right at Andy and Owen. “None of us knows what that thing was. But I know this. It put out enough light to attract every zombie around here, just like Jacob said. We need to be ready for that. I want everybody to gear up. We’re moving out in ten minutes. If we’re gonna have a fight, I want to be ready for it.”
“But where are we going?” Bree asked. She looked at Frank. “Shouldn’t we go back to Arbella?”
“We’re continuing with the mission,” Taylor said.
“But we don’t know what that thing was,” Owen said. “What if it comes back?”
“That’s exactly the point,” Taylor said. “We don’t know what it was. It could be a threat, or it could be something else. We just don’t know. But if there’s a threat to Arbella out there I damn sure want to know what it is. We’ll head back when we have some answers, not before. Now everybody get ready to move out.”
14
They traveled in silence the rest of the night and arrived on the southern outskirts of Sikeston shortly after first light.
Max was out front, riding point. All the other Arbella men had made an effort to shave in the evenings, when they made camp, but Max had not. He was sporting a splotchy mustache and beard that might grow into something big, but at the moment only made him look unkempt.
He stopped his horse, turned in his saddle, and motioned for the group to stop. Then he turned his horse and came back to where Jacob and Nick were waiting.
“Looks pretty quiet,” he said. “What do we do?”
Jacob scanned the city. It was too big, too spread out, to see all of it at once, but what he could see looked quiet and deserted. Most of the buildings were low, rectangular concrete boxes with grass and spindly shrubs climbing up the sides. Few of the buildings were more than two stories high, though there were some larger ones here and there that Jacob guessed had been hotels back before the First Days.
Nick had his map open on the back of his mare’s neck. “There’s this road here,” he said, and pointed to a thick yellow line that cut the town into two more or less even halves. “Malone Avenue. It looks like it runs all the way through town. I was thinking we could get on that and head west. That’ll take us by the airport, here, where we can let Frank look around for whatever he can find.”
Nick looked to Frank and the older man nodded.
“Okay. Then we head west again. That’ll put us here, in the middle of town. I was looking at some old photographs and it looks like they had a tractor supply store, a farm and home store, and a couple of other places that might be good to check out. After that, I thought we’d head north up to here and check out their medical center.”
Jacob glanced around the group and got nods all the way around.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s move out.”
Once they entered town, they formed a single column, Jacob and Max riding at the head of the line, while Eli and Sheriff Taylor brought up the rear. Most of the trail up from Arbella had been over grass-covered roadways, which masked the sound the horses’ hooves made on the ground. And even in those places where the pavement remained uncovered, the whistling of the wind had been loud enough to conceal their movements. But that wasn’t the case here in town. Weeds grew up from the cracks in the roads, but nature had yet to reclaim them. The sound of hooves on pavement echoed off the windowless buildings on either side of the road, making Jacob more and more nervous. Glancing back down the line, he could see his worry reflected back at him from the others, but there was little they could do about it except keep a weather eye open for trouble.
Their luck held out all the way to the airport. Sikeston seemed as quiet as the grave. The only things moving were the birds, and there were plenty of those. Ravens, mostly. They’d seen several sitting atop the sign welcoming them to the airport, but there were many more on top of the three main buildings that made up the airport’s business center. They looked down on Jacob and the others with haunting, dead stares, completely unafraid of the intrusion into their home.
But looking past the birds there didn’t seem to be much they could salvage. The buildings had long ago been hollowed out and stripped down to the lath, and the runway was wrinkled and cracked. Here and there they saw a few small planes, but they were little more than rusted heaps. One even had a mulberry bush growing out of the frame that had once held its windshield and a carpet of green clover growing on its wings.
“Any chance there’s gas in the underground tanks?” Jacob asked Frank. If there was anything salvageable around here, it would be that.
“Maybe. Though it looks like this place has bee
n cleaned out already.”
“Where do you suppose those would be?”
Frank turned toward the hangars. “Over there’d be my—”
He cut himself off and pointed at the tree line beyond the hangars.
A dead woman had just stumbled out of the trees. She was badly decomposed, her clothes nothing but dirty rags embedded into her rotting flesh. The decomposition was so complete her legs could barely carry her, and every jerky step sent a shudder through her body that seemed like it might cause her to collapse. But she staggered on, one clumsy step after another.
Jacob scanned the tree line, looking for more. One thing they’d learned about the undead over the last thirty years was that they tended to group together. They sought each other out wherever they could, gathering into progressively bigger and bigger herds. Some of the First Generation told about seeing herds so large they shook the ground when they walked and made such a horrible moaning they could be heard for miles. Herds like that didn’t exist anymore—at least Jacob hoped they didn’t—but he had no doubt they once did.
Still, it only took one. A bite or a scratch from a zombie wasn’t necessarily fatal, but the infection that usually resulted from a bite was. Back in grade school, one of his shooting instructors had described zombies as walking petri dishes full of just about every deadly bug known to man, making their bites almost as dangerous as that of a venomous snake.
But surprisingly, this zombie seemed to be by itself. It staggered slowly across the parking lot, making it almost halfway before tripping over a rusted pipe and falling face-first into the weeds.
It tried over and over again to get back on its feet, but couldn’t manage it.
Jacob was about to go over to it and crush its head when the first ravens lit from the business center and began circling the still struggling zombie.
More followed.
Soon an enormous flock of them circled in the air over the dead woman.
“What are they doing?” Kelly asked.
“I don’t know,” Jacob answered. He looked to Frank. “You ever seen that before?”
“No.”
Jacob turned to Sheriff Taylor, who answered with a single shake of his head.
The first few birds had already landed next to the dead woman by the time Jacob turned back. One of the birds darted forward and stabbed at the dead woman with its beak. The zombie raised one feeble arm, but it didn’t come anywhere close to the bird.
More darted in, pecking at the zombie.
Jacob heard angry squawking and a furious rustling of wings, and then the birds rushed in as one and started to tear the zombie apart, fighting over the leathery scraps they had ripped away in big strips. The zombie thrashed and writhed to the last, but it never had a chance against so many.
It took the birds less than two minutes to strip the carcass down to the bone.
When they were done, the birds went back to fighting amongst themselves.
It was a chaotic scene, and one that held them all with a shocked and rapt fascination.
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Frank said.
Beside him, Bree shuddered. “It was awful.”
Frank turned to Sheriff Taylor. “Why do you suppose they attacked that zombie like that? Ravens are carrion birds. That thing was still moving.”
“I’ve never seen anything like that,” Taylor said.
“I guess they smelled the decomposition,” Barry said.
Taylor shook his head. “That’s possible, but birds cue off of movement more than smell, don’t they?”
“Raptors do,” Barry agreed.
Taylor surveyed the blackened skeleton that was all that remained of the zombie, and shook his head. “I don’t think we should stick around here to discuss it,” he said. “Where there’s one of those things, there’s probably a hundred. We should make ourselves scarce.”
“Are we going to ride out of town?” Bree asked.
Jacob glanced at Taylor, who nodded.
“That’d be the smart thing to do,” Jacob said.
“But . . . what about the medical center?” Bree asked. She looked from Jacob and Taylor back to Frank, like she hoped he’d back her up. “I wanted to see if there were any medical supplies there we could salvage. There are things we need back in Arbella. Syringes and IV bags. A defibrillator, if they’ve got one. That’d be the Holy Grail, actually.”
“She’s right,” Taylor said. “We can’t pass up a chance to collect medical supplies. Nick, you said the medical center was north of town?”
“North of where we were. It should be due west of us now, across that field there.”
“Okay,” Taylor said. “We’ll head there first. We make it quick though. We grab what we can and we get out.”
“Thank you, sheriff,” Bree said.
“Absolutely,” he said. “Let’s hope it’s worth it.”
15
Thirty minutes later they reined up in front of a wall of concrete barriers two stories high. The walls were pocked with bullet holes and brown, woody vines were growing up its moldy face, but they could still see the word LIARS written in spray paint all over the walls.
“What’s that about?” Jacob said.
Nick came up alongside him. “No idea. Let’s ask the anthropologist.” He turned in his saddle and called out to Owen. “Hey, professor, what’s this all about?”
Owen stared up at the walls, and then scanned their length in both directions. Evidently whoever built the wall hadn’t had enough concrete sections to surround the hospital. There were gaps, and those gaps had been filled with buses and intermodal cargo boxes and anything else the builders had been able to put their hands on. But the word LIARS was painted over all of it.
Owen glanced at the ground where, even now, thirty years after the First Days, shell casings could still be seen rusting in the grass.
“Looks like they put up a pretty good fight. If they were shooting toward the hospital I would imagine they must have rounded up most of their undead and kept them here in the hospital. These shell casings and bullet holes in the walls are probably from them trying to keep the zombies inside.”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much obvious,” Nick said. He waved a hand toward the wall. “What’s with the LIARS written all over the place?”
Owen’s eyes narrowed.
Jacob had been watching the two men during their time on the trail. They’d taken a strong dislike to one another. On Nick’s side, that dislike came out as name-calling and mockery. Owen just did a lot of squinting and muttering.
Yet another problem he had to add to his list.
Owen said, “I haven’t seen any specific mention of liars, but I think I can infer what they meant here. During the First Days, there was a lot of talk of finding a cure. Everybody had lost somebody they loved. People were desperate for a way to bring them back.”
“How do you cure a zombie?” Nick said. “They’re dead. There’s pretty much no cure for that.”
Owen took a long moment to answer.
“Everybody wanted a cure,” he finally said. “Yes, they were dead. Yes, there’s no coming back from that. But people don’t always think right when it comes to losing the people they love the most. And when you see them walking around, it’s even harder to think of them as dead, even if you know it academically. Remember, knowing something and feeling something are very different. Every night on the news you’d see some segment on how close they were to a cure. I think we all knew it was a lost cause, but when your six-year-old daughter is wandering around the backyard with a piece of your ten-year-old son hanging from her lips, you find yourself willing to hang a hope on finding a cure.”
Owen’s face had turned red, and his breath whistled in his nose. Jacob watched the pain play out on the man’s face, and he was reminded yet again of what it meant to live in a small town. You know everybody, and everybody knows you. But nobody knows the real you, the deep-down dark places that you go to when you’re on fire with h
urt and lost in the pain of memory. That belongs to you alone, even when you give it voice.
To his credit, Nick said nothing.
Owen looked up at the wall and studied the graffiti written there. “This,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “This is the work of an angry people. You can see their wrath all along this wall. They wanted to believe there was a cure, and what they got instead of the results they’d been promised, was more death. Is it any wonder they did this?”
Nick glanced at Jacob, clearly a little embarrassed. At least the man had some sense of shame.
Jacob nodded. “Thanks, Owen. That explains it just fine.”
Owen didn’t say a word. He just turned his horse around and went to the back of the line.
16
The south side of the hospital, the side that faced into town, had taken heavy damage. One of the concrete sections had fallen over, creating a big hole, but there were numerous other gaps as well. Jacob scanned the area for trouble. Everywhere he looked, he saw burned-out cars and trucks, and the ground was covered with thousands and thousands of rusted shell casings. There’d been some bad fighting here, back in the day.
“Bree, do you have a pretty good idea of what you need?”
Their medic rode up, Frank Hartwell by her side. “I have a wish list,” she said. “If I’m able to find anything on it is anybody’s guess.”
“Okay,” he said. “Well, it’s getting to be about noon. I’ll give you an hour. Sound like enough time to look around?”
“Should be, yeah.”
“Frank, you’re going with her, right?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Max, you, too.”
“You got it, boss.”
The three of them dismounted, climbed through the wall, and crossed the overgrown field that had once been the front lawn of the hospital. The front doors had long ago been knocked down and they slipped inside without incident.
