Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  “Jacob, got a plan?” Nick asked.

  “Not really.”

  Smoke drifted into Jacob’s eyes and he turned his face away, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened them, the slave with the broken neck was climbing to his feet, his head still tilted over at a painful looking angle.

  “Oh, crap, we got problems,” Jacob said.

  Nick looked back at Kelly. “You got her?”

  Kelly had Chelsea’s horse by the reins. “I got her. You guys just find us a way out of here.”

  “Let’s go this way,” Jacob said, directing them back through the maze of vehicles.

  The smoke was thick. They kept bumping into things, and the horses were difficult to control. Waiting for them on the other side were two male slaves, both of them with big sections of metal pipe in their hands.

  Jacob leveled his rifle, aiming for the head, and instead shot the first man in the neck, the other in the chest.

  “Are we shooting now?” Nick asked.

  “Might as well,” Jacob answered. “Not like we’re gonna give away our position.”

  But then a gust of wind cleared away the smoke for an instant, and they saw the Family running toward the caravan from the road.

  And Casey was leading the charge.

  Jacob heard several shots and turned toward the head of the caravan. Free men with pistols and rifles were trying to get a bead on them through the smoke. On horseback, they made a target big enough for even an untrained shooter to hit.

  “Come on, this way,” Jacob said, and turned them back toward the slave encampment.

  Jacob took the lead. They charged into the slave encampment, blind in the clouds of smoke, only to find themselves crushing headlong into a mass of slaves. Snarling faces, twisted with rage and desperation, swarmed all around him. Hands clutched at him, pulling at his clothes. Jacob twisted and kicked and punched with the rifle, but there were too many of them. They finally managed to pull him from the horse and he fell into a wail of kicks and punches.

  As he went down, he saw Nick and Chelsea pulled down as well, but once he hit the ground he threw his arms over his head and pulled his knees in tight to protect himself from the kicking.

  And then the kicking stopped and Nick was pulling him to his feet.

  “Come on, we gotta go.”

  Bleeding and bruised all over, Jacob tried to make sense of what Nick was saying. His vision was a blur, but he saw Nick pointing to the west. Through a hazy screen of dissipating smoke Jacob had a view of a large group of zombies advancing through the tall grass, their feeding moans so loud they could be heard even over the gunfire the free men were directing toward them.

  Jacob looked around for Kelly, but couldn’t see her. All he could see were zombies closing in, pulling slave and free man alike to the ground wherever they found them.

  Through the drifting screens of smoke Jacob saw Casey climb to the top of an RV and pull Mother Jane up behind him.

  “Nick!” he yelled. “We need to go up!”

  There was another RV nearby and Jacob covered them with the rifle as Nick pushed Chelsea up to the roof. A zombie staggered toward him, smoke curling off its back. Behind it were three more, coming up fast.

  “Nick, hurry!”

  “I’m going, I’m going.”

  Jacob raised his rifle and fired into the advancing zombies. He dropped two, but only winged a third. It spun halfway around and stopped walking, but then turned his direction, straightened, and stumbled forward again, its left arm hanging limp as a flag from a nasty shoulder wound.

  “Jacob, get up here!”

  He glanced to the roof of the RV and saw Nick with his hand stretched down to him. Jacob slung the rifle over his shoulder and caught Nick’s hand.

  Nick pulled him up to the roof just as a crowd of the undead clutched at his feet. Jacob kicked their hands away, gave it one last push, and landed hard on the RV’s metal roof.

  He rolled over onto his back and caught his breath. “Damn, that was close,” he said.

  Nick laughed. “You ain’t kidding, brother.”

  Jacob got to his feet. The smoke grenades were starting to burn out, and big gaps in the smoke clouds started to appear. The crowd of zombies surrounding their RV was large, but there were many gaps in their number. They seemed to have gathered around a number of trailers and RVs, wherever the living had taken to the roof for shelter. Looking across the line of vehicles, he caught another glimpse of Casey and Mother Jane. They were both busy pulling members of the Family onto the roof of their RV, which was filling with people. Looking off to his left, toward town, he saw the main body of the herd coming down the highway. It was a black river of bodies that spread out to the horizon.

  Moving through the zombies crowded around their RV Jacob saw several members of the Family. They were trying to find a way up, and a few were trying to get up on their RV, including Hank and a few free women he was trying to rescue.

  “Help me!” Hank said, extending a hand up to Jacob. He was holding on to the sides of the trailer, already halfway up.

  Jacob glanced at Nick, and an understanding passed between them.

  He leaned over the side and met Hank’s desperate gaze.

  “Help me!”

  Jacob kicked his hand, causing him to slide back to the ground with a scream of pain.

  Zombies closed in on the noise, narrowing their circle around him.

  “What are you doing?” Mother Jane screamed at them. “Help that man!”

  Jacob made a point to meet her gaze, and then he kicked Hank in the face, knocking him flat on his back.

  These zombies, the first of the herd to descend on their encampment, were the freshest and fastest of the bunch. When they attacked, they were vicious predators, snarling and tearing like dogs in a fight. They ripped into Hank with their teeth and fingernails, pulling him apart in seconds, his screams echoing over the roaring moans of the herd.

  Other free men and women were trying to climb up as well. Nick and Jacob went around the edge of the RV, smashing with their rifles any free man or woman trying to gain the roof.

  And then a smoke cloud dissipated and Kelly was there with the horses. She motioned for them to hurry.

  There was still a gap in the herd, Jacob saw. They could make it.

  “We have to go now,” he said to Nick.

  “How?” Nick said. “There’s too many of them.”

  “It’s now or never. Do it!”

  Nick nodded. He waited for the zombies to fall on yet another member of the Family, and then slid down the side of the RV. He turned and motioned for Chelsea with an I’ll catch you gesture.

  When Chelsea was down in his arms, Jacob turned to see what was happening with Mother Jane and Casey. The two of them were staring daggers at him.

  He gave them both a Go fuck yourself sign with his fingers and slid down the side of the RV. A zombie lashed out at him, but he managed to grab its arm, catch the back of the zombie’s right foot with a sharp kick of his left leg, and sweep the dead man’s feet out from under him.

  The zombie landed flat on his back, but Jacob didn’t stick around to continue the fight. He jumped to his feet and ran for the horses Kelly had managed to hold on to.

  Once he was mounted, the group turned to the south and took off.

  part four

  THE WRECK

  32

  They rode hard for as long as Chelsea could handle it, which wasn’t very far. Even with Kelly to help her, the poor girl could barely stay in the saddle. She was getting thrown all over the place and tiring fast, and to Jacob it looked like they were about to lose her. He came up alongside Kelly and gave her the sign to bring it to a stop. Kelly nodded, and as they slowed to a trot Chelsea slumped forward, her shoulders sagging. She looked beat to a pulp.

  “We’re out of sight now,” Jacob said. “Let’s stop here a second and figure out what we’re doing.”

  Nick came up alongside Chelsea. “Hey, you okay?”

  Ch
elsea tried to smile at him, but didn’t quite manage it. She was out of breath and limp as a ragdoll.

  “You did good,” he said. “For someone who’s never been on a horse before, you held on real good.”

  “You’ve never been on a horse before?” Kelly asked.

  Chelsea shook her head.

  Kelly traded a worried look at Jacob, and he knew exactly the thoughts playing out in her mind. Were they really about to take a hell-bent for leather ride through the wasteland with a little girl who had never even sat on a horse before? You’ve got to be kidding me.

  He shared her concerns, but didn’t let it show.

  The horses had found a muddy rainwater stream running across what was left of the road and dipped their heads to drink, their sides still heaving from the hard run.

  Nick said, “She’ll do fine.”

  He pulled a canteen from the saddle, shook it, and heard liquid sloshing inside. He handed her the canteen and said, “Here, have a little water.”

  Chelsea took it, unscrewed the cap, and drank.

  And promptly spit out. She coughed and spluttered and jutted the canteen back in his direction with a horrified and disgusted look on her face.

  “What is it?” he said, taking the canteen.

  “Ugh. That’s whisky.”

  Nick frowned at the canteen. He took it, smelled it, and flinched away from it. “Whew!” he said. “That’s some good lighter fluid.”

  He took a sip and shook his head. “Yep,” he said, wincing, his voice suddenly strained. “The good stuff.”

  “Give me that,” Kelly said. She took the canteen, sniffed at it, and drank anyway. Coughing, she replaced the cap and gave it back to Nick.

  “That good, huh?”

  Still coughing, she started to laugh. “That’s absolutely awful. That’s not bathtub whisky. Somebody made that in a toilet.”

  With a chuckle, Nick poured it out and looked down at the stream from which the horses were drinking. “What do you think?” he asked, rattling the canteen.

  Kelly looked at the muddy water and shook her head.

  “Yeah, I didn’t think so either.”

  Chelsea’s horse had drifted away from the stream and caught a whiff of the swill Nick had just poured out. The mare shook her head and whinnied. Unable to control the animal, Chelsea got scared again.

  Kelly came up next to her, grabbed the reins, and settled the horse.

  “It’s okay,” she said to the young girl. “Here, lead him like this. No, no, use your legs. Squeeze, like this.”

  With help, Chelsea got her horse turned around and they headed back to the stream.

  “That’s good,” Kelly said. “Yeah, like that. You got it.”

  Chelsea’s horse calmed and fell in line with the others.

  Kelly released the reins so Chelsea could take them up. “How is it possible that you never learned to ride a horse? Back where we’re from, kids are taught to ride as early as five. And it’s part of school from day one. You got this fantastic education, but no horseback riding lessons?”

  “It never came up,” Chelsea said. “I mean, we’ve got horses in Temple. I remember watching them run along the beach. But I never had any real need to learn. Temple isn’t that big. You can either walk or ride a bike wherever you go.”

  “What about when you need to carry things?” Kelly asked. “You know, like a bunch of stuff. What do you do then?”

  “Well, we have electric cars, so . . . you know.” Chelsea shrugged.

  “Electric . . .” Kelly’s mouth fell open in shock.

  She seemed to have no idea what to say, which, in Jacob’s experience was definitely a first. He chuckled quietly. Kelly glared at him, and rather than try to respond and make a fool of herself, she turned her horse to the north and studied the horizon for signs of pursuit.

  “Can we stop here?” Chelsea said. “Just for a little while. We must have ridden like ten miles.”

  “Not half that far,” Nick said. “I’d like to put about twenty-five miles between us and that herd before I’d feel good about stopping. What do you think, Jacob?”

  The countryside around them was flat and green, broken frequently by stands of trees and ponds and little rainy weather creeks like the one they were currently using to water the horses. There had been a state highway here at one point, but the years and the vegetation had long since reclaimed it. Now, only rusting and leaning metal mile marker poles remained to show where the road had once been.

  Jacob panned slowly around, taking it all in. In their short but hard ride they’d seen more deer and birds and wild hogs than he’d seen during his entire time in the wasteland. And far off to the east, lost in the shadows of the trees, he saw a line of large, bulky animals that he couldn’t make out because they were too far away. He thought of the elephants they’d seen on their trek up Highway 55, and what Owen Webb had said about all the zookeepers during the First Days who had released the animals under their care to roam the countryside, and he could only stare in amazement. It was such a strange world they’d stepped into, beautiful and terrifying all at once.

  “We can’t stop,” he said. “Not yet.”

  “But I’m exhausted,” Chelsea said.

  “I know,” Jacob said. “But it’s not safe.” He turned to Nick. “All the animals we’ve seen, they’ve all been going south.”

  “To keep ahead of the herd, is my guess,” said Kelly.

  “Mine, too. Nick, what are we gonna find if we keep heading south?”

  Nick thought for a second, recreating his maps from memory. “Well, let’s see, assuming we’ve gone about five miles, we probably have another five to go before we reach Bernie. About fifteen miles after that, if we keep going south, we’ll come up on Malden. Malden might be a good place to head, actually. Highway 62 runs through there, and that would give us more or less a straight shot back to Arbella.”

  “How far?”

  “Three days maybe, if we push it.”

  Jacob looked back to the north. The smoke was gone from the sky, but he knew they weren’t very far from the herd. Their only hope was to put as much distance on the herd this first day as they could. Jacob and the others were limited on how far they could travel by horseback. Kelly had picked some strong animals, but even the hardiest of horses had limits. Twenty-five or thirty miles a day, especially over the rough and overgrown country they were traveling, was about the extent of what they could reasonably expect. But the zombies, moving on foot, would travel much slower. The fastest of them could do maybe three miles in an hour, and probably closer to two, but they never stopped walking. They never tired, never slept, never stopped, just kept on walking one step in front of the other, slowly, but inexorably making their way to their next meal. Any distance they put on the herd would be swallowed up during the night, while Jacob and the others were forced to rest. It was going to be close.

  “Chelsea,” Jacob said, “I’m sorry, but we don’t have a whole lot of options. Stopping here, now, will get us killed.”

  She nodded.

  Jacob nodded to Kelly. “What do you think, can we make Malden by nightfall?”

  “You said it was, what, about twenty miles?” she asked Nick.

  “About that.”

  “I think we can make that,” she said. “The land is pretty flat, and I bet at least some of the road will still be usable.”

  “Okay then,” Jacob said. “Let’s head home.”

  33

  Kelly was right about the road.

  Another mile went by and they began to see bare spots in the high grass, and soon the grass gave way almost entirely, leaving only sand and patchy clumps of weeds here and there. In some places, they could even see asphalt.

  They made Malden two hours before sunset. They were so far ahead of schedule that they even debated using the extra time to push east along Highway 62. But Kelly said the horses needed resting. They’d worked them hard, and they were going to work them hard again in the morning. Bes
t to let them rest.

  And so they rode out on Highway 62 just east of town, and stopped at a deserted farmhouse. During his salvage team days, Jacob had learned that commercial buildings, like gas stations and truck stops, tended to make the best choices for temporary shelter. Because of their industrial construction, they tended to hold up better to the ravages of time and weather than residential homes, which were more often than not made with wood frames and therefore subject to termite infestations and wholesale rot. And, because the architecture of commercial buildings was defined by their customer access function, they tended to have points of entry on only one side of the building, making them easier to defend against an undead attack, should that ever become an issue. But the farmhouse they found just outside of Malden was remarkably well preserved. It stood atop a slight rise, commanding quite a good view of the surrounding countryside, and its animal enclosures were hidden from the main road and still in pretty good shape.

  And, best of all, there was a huge flock of feral chickens foraging in the yard. Seventy or eighty birds at least.

  “Oh, God,” Nick said. “I am so hungry.”

  “Me, too,” Jacob said, watching the flock peck at bugs around the yard. He remembered nights of chickens and quail roasting in bacon fat on a cast-iron skillet and his mouth instantly started to water.

  Kelly laughed. “You’re going to try and catch a bunch of wild chickens? This I got to see.”

  “It’s no problem,” Jacob said.

  “Oh, I’m sure it isn’t. Not for a couple of tough guys like you. What’s a couple of chickens up against you two?”

  “Is that sarcasm?”

  “Oh, never,” Kelly said. She cast a mischievous smile his way. For a moment, in the low light of dusk, it made her look seventeen again. “I’d never dream of doubting you, Jacob.”

  Jacob rolled his eyes at her, and then he and Nick went after the chickens. They charged into the yard, thinking the feral variety couldn’t be that much different from the domesticated birds they’d learn to catch, pluck, and field dress in their animal husbandry class back at school. But after the dominate cock spurred Nick, putting a nasty gash in his right arm and almost lopping off his left ear, and Jacob lost the hens when they took to the top branches of an ash tree, they realized they needed a better plan.