Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  “You think this is worth the effort?” Kelly asked. “I mean, thirty-year-old medical supplies?”

  Jacob shrugged. “It’ll be worth it if she finds that defibrillator she was talking about. Even if it doesn’t work, we could rebuild it. We could save lives with one of those.”

  He climbed down off his horse and the others did the same. They tied the animals off in a small field where they could forage for some grass. Then Jacob and the others took a seat in the middle of the road and shared a lunch of beef jerky and pickled vegetables.

  Jacob was trying to get at the last piece of cauliflower in the jar when the ravens came back. They landed on the top of the wall and on the nearby roofs, hundreds of them. Several of the horses got spooked and started making noise.

  Jacob stood up and turned in a circle, watching the birds land on every available roosting point.

  Within seconds, the birds were all around them.

  “I don’t like this,” said Nick.

  “No, me either,” Jacob said.

  Taylor grabbed Eli by the shoulder. “Go into the hospital and find the others. Bring ’em out here as fast as you can.”

  Eli ran for the hospital.

  Taylor pushed the brim of his hat up with his thumb as he looked around. “Damnedest thing I ever saw.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Barry. “Hey, guys, we got trouble.”

  Barry pointed off to their left. A gray-haired man with dark stains all over his clothes was walking their way, his gait too slow to be normal, his arms and legs too stiff. Behind him, two more men staggered out of the shadows.

  Suddenly, the birds began to squawk excitedly.

  Several hundred of their number took to the air and circled overhead.

  The three zombies stepped into the street. Jacob went for his rifle, but Kelly put her hand on his.

  “Wait,” she said. Kelly turned to Barry. “I think they’re changing their predation ecology.”

  As they watched, the birds dipped toward the zombies, dive-bombing them, pecking at them a little at a time with each pass. Jacob had seen the same thing back in Arbella every time somebody’s dog got too close to a blue jay’s nest. The birds would dive-bomb the dog relentlessly, pecking at its back just where the tail starts. The dogs would go from angry and frustrated to hurt in just a few passes, and the next thing anybody knew the dog would run away, yelping the whole time.

  But this looked somehow a little different, a little more like lions moving in to make a kill on some oversized prey.

  The zombies grabbed at the birds, but caught only air. They were too slow, and the birds struck with the lethal precision of predators. Soon one of the zombies collapsed to its knees, only to be knocked facedown under a furious pounding of black wings. The birds started to devour it, even as it continued to struggle.

  The other two zombies went down moments later.

  Soon there were three knots of ravens, tearing and pulling the corpses apart.

  “My God,” Kelly said, stepping forward with a hand over her mouth. She turned back to the group. “Galapagos,” she said.

  “Yes!” Barry said, clearly impressed. “Darwin’s finches reinvented for the apocalypse.”

  “What does that mean?” Jacob asked.

  “They’re evolving,” Kelly said. She was so excited she was trying to talk with her hands. “They’re showing adaptive behavior.”

  Jacob glanced at Nick, who only raised his eyebrows again. He was no help.

  “I don’t understand. What’s Galapagos?”

  “The island chain where Charles Darwin first worked out the theory of evolution. That’s what’s happening here. These birds are evolving. It’s . . . it’s like this. Ravens are opportunistic. They always have been. They have this huge range in their diet, everything from carrion to blueberries; they’ll eat anything. They’ve coexisted with humans since before we started keeping track of things like that. But in all that time, we’ve known them as scavengers. They’ll eat anything. They are the rats of the skies. But it’s usually what we leave them. The corn growing in our fields or the trash in our alleys. But these birds, they’ve found their own way. They’re living off the dead. Don’t you see?”

  No, he didn’t see, but he was trying. Jacob shrugged and said, “That they’re eating zombies . . . ?”

  “Yes!” she said. “That’s huge. They’ve gone from being our pests to being our predators.”

  “Not our predators,” Jacob said. “They’re eating zombies.”

  “Ravens are intelligent,” she said. “But they don’t know the difference between zombies and humans. That’s what’s so incredible about this. Consider it from a bird’s point of view. The thing that has spent ten thousand years chasing them from the cornfields is now dinner. It walks around smelling dead, yet still it walks. Can’t you see how huge that shift is? They’ve done more than change their diet. They’ve taken an environmental catastrophe and turned it into a niche to guarantee their own survival. They’re evolving.”

  Jacob thought on the implications of that, but he quickly realized he was out of his depth. It had been that way between them back when they were seventeen, and things hadn’t changed much twenty years later.

  Except that maybe the gap between them had grown more pronounced.

  She turned away from him and spoke in hurried, excited whispers with Barry, the two of them like kids with a new toy.

  “Oh, shit,” Owen said. “You guys . . .”

  The ravens had suddenly taken flight in a roar of beating wings and angry squawking. They filled the sky.

  Jacob saw why they’d launched a moment later. The houses to the west had once been small, comfortable one-story homes of red brick and wide lawns. The bricks still stood, but the lawns had turned to riot. Grass and wild shrubs grew shoulder high, and they’d covered the movement of a small army of zombies.

  As Jacob and the others watched, zombie after zombie stumbled from the overgrown lawns. They staggered out of the tall weeds, and then locked in on the hospital and moved that way. There had to be forty of them at least. And then Jacob saw why the zombies were passing them by and heading for the hospital, where Bree, Frank, and their escorts had just launched themselves from the building’s darkness. They were running through the tall grass as fast as they could go, trying to make their way back to the group, and it was driving the zombies insane with bloodlust.

  Some believed that zombies keyed on movement as much as they did on sound. Jacob had heard stories from some of the salvage team guys about going perfectly still and quiet while a zombie herd moved around them, a stone in the middle of a stream, but he’d always thought that the same kind of talk as someone who claimed they had to walk five miles to school, in the snow, and uphill both ways.

  Evidently, though, it was true, for Bree and the others weren’t going to make it. The zombie herd was already at the wall and closing in around them.

  Bree and the others stopped.

  Frank put himself in front of the group and swung his rifle down from his shoulder.

  “Rifles,” Jacob said.

  “No,” Taylor said. “Belay that order.”

  He walked to his horse and pulled the carbine from his saddlebags.

  He slapped a magazine into the receiver and charged the bolt. Then he rushed into the herd, firing as he moved, every shot deliberate and controlled.

  And so damn quiet.

  His shots sounded like a muffled cough, barely audible. Taylor charged into the herd and it never occurred to Jacob that he was watching a man in his seventies doing the shooting. He moved like a trained solider. Rather than give in to the excitement and confusion, all his movements were made with deadly precision.

  Three zombies noticed Taylor coming up behind them and turned on him.

  He put them down with perfect head shots.

  When they fell, the others turned on him. Half the herd, maybe twenty of them, were still headed toward Bree, Max, Frank, and Eli, but the others were coming for Tayl
or. He never slowed his pace. The herd swarmed around him, but he kept a straight line for the hospital’s front door.

  In school, Jacob’s tactics teachers had emphasized the importance of creating distance. Never let a zombie get too close to you. Create distance, take aim, and make your shots count, they’d said. But Taylor was doing exactly the opposite. He moved in close and fired, then turned, and fired again. Several times Jacob lost sight of him as the zombies closed in around him, until he’d suddenly erupt from their massing, gun blazing. He didn’t stop moving until he reached Bree and the others. Once there, he slapped in a new magazine, turned to face the approaching crowd of zombies, and systematically gunned them down.

  When the shooting was done, the street and the field in front of the hospital were littered with bodies. Jacob quickly lost count of how many of them there were. Certainly more than the forty he’d seen at first. Most lay in heaps on the ground. Some were slumped over the barricades. Others were face up in the grass, their arms bent at wrong angles, their heads caved in and misshapen from the gunshots.

  Taylor walked from body to body, sometimes pausing to push one over with the muzzle of his weapon. Then he motioned for Bree and the others to follow him back to the horses.

  Jacob stared at the carnage. Nick came up beside him.

  “What do you think?” Nick said.

  “That was amazing.”

  “Damn straight it was. Sheriff Taylor with a gun is like Picasso with a paintbrush.” He turned and gave Jacob a pat on the shoulder. “You sure you’re ready to be sheriff?”

  Jacob could only stare at what Taylor had done. Picasso with a paintbrush was just about the perfect description for what he’d just seen. He was still staring at the bodies in the grass when Sheriff Taylor stepped over the barricade, Bree, Max, Frank, and Eli coming up behind him. All four of them looked thoroughly rattled, though it looked like Bree had found her defibrillator.

  “Time to move out,” Taylor said. “Everybody saddle up.”

  He went to his horse and stuffed the carbine into his saddlebags.

  In the distance, a police whistle sounded. Three short, sharp blasts. Everybody turned toward the sound.

  “What the hell was that?” Nick said.

  The three whistle blasts sounded again, and this time, they were followed by a huge collective moan, as though from hundreds of voices.

  “Look at that,” Barry said, and pointed toward town where a vast dust cloud was rising into the air. The moaning was getting louder with every passing moment.

  “That’s a big herd,” Taylor said.

  “What do we do?” Kelly said.

  “We’ll make too much noise trying to run from them,” Jacob said. He looked over at Taylor and pointed down a side street. “I suggest we head down that way, hide between the houses. A herd that big’ll probably keep moving down the main road.”

  “How do you know that?” Kelly asked.

  “They’re a herd. They’ll follow along wherever the main body goes.”

  Before anybody could argue, the whistle blasts came again. And the sound of dogs barking.

  “What is that?” Nick asked.

  “We should be somewhere else,” Taylor said. “Jacob’s right. Let’s head down that way.”

  Jacob dug his heels into his mare’s flanks and she took off at a fast trot. The others followed along behind him. He took them halfway down the block, glanced back to make sure they had gone far enough, and then turned them into the alley between a pair of houses.

  Jacob climbed down off his horse, pulled his rifle from his saddlebags, and walked back toward the front of the house.

  “Where are you going?” Nick asked.

  “Lookout,” Jacob answered. “Just in case.”

  Taylor pulled out his own rifle and followed him.

  The two men got down on their stomachs behind the bush and watched the intersection at the end of the street. But it wasn’t zombies they saw first. A lone rider appeared, working his horse back and forth across the intersection, blowing the whistle as he moved.

  “What in the hell is he doing?” Jacob asked.

  Taylor shook his head, clearly as confused as Jacob.

  But then the rider reined in his horse. He was staring at something over by the barricades. He turned his horse off the road and into the field in front of the hospital. He stopped again, and then dismounted.

  “What’s he doing?”

  “He sees the bodies.”

  Sure enough, the rider knelt next to one of the corpses Taylor had put down, grabbed the thing by the chin, and turned its face first one way and then the other.

  He stood up and looked around.

  But there wasn’t time for him to investigate. The first zombies stumbled into the intersection a moment later, and he was forced to mount up again. He blew the whistle again, two short blasts, a pause, and then two more blasts, and rode north at a slow trot, a gigantic herd of the undead at his heels.

  “He changed the pattern that time,” Jacob said. “Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why’d he do that?”

  Taylor shook his head. “Don’t know. Signaling somebody maybe. No way one man could work a herd that big. He’s probably got some wingmen.”

  “Great.”

  The zombies coursed through the intersection like a black river. Their collective moaning sent up a wall of noise that sent a chill over Jacob’s skin. He’d heard stories from the First Days about people locked up in their attics while the dead filled the streets below, how the noise was so loud they were sometimes forced to go days at a time without sleeping, how it could drive a man so far over the edge he’d put his gun in his mouth. He looked back at the others in their group and saw several with their hands clapped over their ears. Jacob couldn’t blame them. He’d only been in the presence of that horrible moaning for a few minutes and already he felt jittery and sick with adrenaline and fear.

  Then some of the undead tried to wander away from the main road. He stiffened. For a second Jacob thought he might have guessed wrong about them sticking with the main herd, but then a dog came sprinting into view. It stopped in front of the small pack of wanderers and barked furiously. It moved closer to the main herd and barked again.

  The wanderers dutifully turned around and gave chase.

  “I can’t believe that,” Jacob said. “Why in the world would they be herding them?”

  “Maybe to keep ’em away from wherever that rider’s from. He’s like a diversion, you know?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  Taylor turned back to the herd, his mouth working slowly, like he was trying to keep count. It took nearly an hour and a half for the main group to pass, and even after that stragglers came along in progressively smaller packs.

  They watched another few minutes, but when no more came into view, they went back to the others.

  “Well?” Kelly asked. “What’d you see?”

  “The biggest herd I’ve seen,” Jacob said.

  “How many?”

  Jacob looked at Taylor and shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Half a million,” Taylor said. “Maybe more.”

  “That’s impossible,” Kelly said. “How could there be that many?”

  “I remember working crowd control at the Razorback games. We’d load sixty thousand people into that stadium in less than thirty minutes. I know what a crowd that size looks like. The herd I just saw was easily twenty times that number.”

  “That’s not all, though,” Jacob said. He told her about the rider with the whistle and the dogs. “It looked like he was guiding them north, out of town.”

  “That’s the direction we were supposed to go.”

  “Yeah,” Jacob said.

  He glanced at Taylor. The sheriff reached into his shirt pocket and took out a matchstick. He jammed it into the corner of his mouth and chewed on it while he thought.

  “So what do we do?” Nick asked. “We can’t very well head north
again. Not with all those zombies going that way.”

  “I think we should go home,” said Bree. She looked guiltily around the group, and then lowered her head. She seemed near tears. Frank guided his horse next to hers and held out a hand for her.

  “Jacob,” Nick said. “What do we do?”

  Jacob climbed up on his horse, but didn’t answer right away. If he was honest with himself he had absolutely no idea what to do. Nick was right. They couldn’t very well head north, not now, not with that herd moving that way. And they couldn’t head home, as Bree suggested. So far they’d seen strange ships in the sky and zombie-eating birds and cowboys wrangling more zombies than they thought were left in the world, but they couldn’t explain any of it. They had questions, lots of questions, and so far absolutely no answers.

  “I say we find a place to hold up for a while,” Taylor said. “One of these houses maybe. Or one of the buildings back in town. We can spend a day or two here. That’ll put some distance between us and that herd and give us a chance to rest the horses.”

  Jacob looked around the group and saw nearly everybody nodding in agreement.

  “All right then,” he said. “Nick, you got any ideas?”

  Nick took the map from his pack and studied it for a long moment. Finally, he pointed west. “If we follow this street that way it meets up with Kings Highway. We can take that south to Malone and head west from there. We should be able to find something there.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know,” Nick said. “A hotel, maybe. Maybe a business with a closed in lot where we can graze the horses.”

  “Okay.” Jacob looked around, and as nobody else had anything to say, he made his decision. “Okay, we’ll do that.”

  “Let’s move out single file, and keep it quiet. Hand signals only until we get somewhere safer than here. Max, you want to take point?”

  “Yes, sir, boss.”

  “Eli, bring up the rear.”

  The younger man still looked rattled from nearly getting killed back at the hospital, but he rallied and nodded.

  They took the horses out at a walking pace, careful to stay close to the houses where they had trees to cover them. Kings Hwy had figured large on the map, but it was little more than a two-lane suburban street, littered with debris and choked with tall grass, as was most of Sikeston. The tree cover had been dense on the other street, but it thinned out dramatically here, affording very little cover. Jacob, feeling dangerously exposed, ordered the group to split in two and move as close as possible to the rotting houses on either side of the street. He let Max take one column, while he took point on the other, Taylor, Kelly, Barry, and their journalist, Andy Dawson, coming up behind him.