by Joe McKinney
“We ought to just shoot them,” Kelly said. She looked up at the tree where about fifty of the birds had taken shelter. “That’s only about twenty-five or thirty feet.”
“It’s an easy shot,” Jacob agreed. “It’s the noise that worries me.”
“We haven’t seen any signs of zombie activity all day. And the noise wouldn’t carry that far, would it?”
“A few miles,” Jacob said.
“At least that,” said Nick.
“Well, do either of you have a better idea? We’re all really hungry.”
That much Jacob couldn’t argue with. He stepped back from the tree, raised his rifle, and fired six times before the birds took to the air and flew to a nearby tree. They didn’t stay there, though. They took to the wing almost immediately, and when they reached the next tree, repeated the process. In a matter of minutes, they were out of sight.
“I had no idea chickens could fly like that,” Nick said.
“Me either,” Jacob said. He motioned toward the fallen birds. “Come on, help me with this. I’m hungry, too.”
Kelly found a package of sea salt in the kitchen and brought it out. “I didn’t trust any of the other spices,” she said. “But salt is a rock, so . . .”
“Sounds good to me,” Jacob said.
They made a small fire and salted up the five birds Jacob had managed to hit and cooked them on a spit roast.
Jacob knew they were taking a chance with the smoke, but there was no arguing with their hunger, and the smell of the roasting meat was enough to forgive the bad tactics.
Forgive, but not ignore.
As soon as the birds were ready, Jacob got a bucket from the barn and filled it with water and threw it on the pit. Once the fire was out and the coals soaked to stop them from smoking, they went inside and tore into the birds, the four of them eating from plates Kelly found in the kitchen.
For Jacob, it was one of the best meals he’d ever had. He sat back in his chair, and a plate full of bones stripped bare, and stifled a burp. “Oh, man, that was good.”
Kelly laughed. She was seated on Jacob’s left, Chelsea right across the table from her. Jacob, who knew Kelly pretty well, and who could tell Chelsea’s comment about the electric cars had been bothering her all day, couldn’t help but laugh when she finally brought it up.
“How is that even possible? In Arbella we had, what, like three gas-powered trucks that we could use for big projects, but usually only one was working at a time, and that because we had to cannibalize parts from the other two. I mean, the scale of production alone is just astronomical. Galveston Island isn’t that big, at least from what I remember on the maps. There are a limited number of people who could live there, right? Just like in Arbella. How could your people create the industry necessary to build electric cars? And the aerofluyts we saw? And the clipper ships you described? How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Chelsea said. “I was ten when we left. But I know that my parents had one, and most of the families I knew growing up had one.”
“Incredible,” Kelly said. “It’s just so hard to imagine.”
Jacob couldn’t help but smile. Poor Kelly, she was beside herself with a mix of wonder and jealousy.
“It’s no more difficult to imagine than those huge airships we saw,” Nick said.
“Aerofluyts,” Chelsea corrected him.
“Aerofluyts,” Nick said. “Sorry.”
“You said your people renamed Galveston Island The Temple,” Kelly said. “Is that like a religious thing? Are you Mormons, or Jewish, or something?”
Chelsea shook her head. “There’s no religion in Temple. And it’s just Temple, not The Temple. The founder of our community was a man named Dr. David Knopf.” She looked at the others for some sign of recognition, but when it didn’t come she said: “After the Provisional Government fell and it looked like the War was a total loss, Dr. Knopf led the surviving research teams and their families from Ohio to Galveston. Really, he was our town founder. There’s a statue of him in front of our public administration office.”
“Why Galveston?” Nick asked.
“Because it’s an island,” Kelly said. “They thought it’d be the safest spot to build a new community.”
“Makes sense.”
“And the Texas A&M maritime research campus was there,” Chelsea said. “When Dr. Knopf and his teams moved in to the campus they started calling it Temple. I don’t really remember why, but that’s what they called it, and eventually the name just stuck for the whole island.”
“What about the aerofluyts?” Kelly asked. “Why are they so big?”
“Well, they need to be to run the morphic field generator. That thing is huge. And plus there’s a whole community living inside. All the scientists and their families. That’s where I went to school, where we grew our food, where we went to the movies. You know. Lived life.”
Jacob and the others traded a glance.
“What?” Chelsea said. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” said Nick. “All of us have heard our parents talk about the movies, but none of us have ever seen one. Not one that we can remember anyway.”
“Oh,” Chelsea said. “Sorry.”
Kelly, not wanting to lose the momentum of Chelsea’s account, plowed on. “Tell us more about the aerofluyts,” she asked. “Those huge wings are solar sails, aren’t they?”
“Oh, yes,” Chelsea said. “They provide nearly all the power the ship uses.”
“Amazing,” Kelly said. She looked pleasantly lost, like one caught up in a daydream.
Jacob said, “What do their engines run on? Are they powered by the solar sails, too?”
“I don’t know,” Chelsea said. “Partly, I think. Chris would know more than I do. But I do know they can stay in the air for months at a time, and they travel all over the Americas, monitoring the great herds, testing the land and the zombies they capture for signs that CDHL levels are going down.”
“You know about CDHLs?” Kelly asked.
“Of course,” Chelsea said. “They taught us about them in school. Plus, my dad was supposed to be a big deal in researching them. I remember him and my mom talking about them all the time, so I got it twice as much as the other kids.”
But it wasn’t CDHLs that had Jacob fascinated. It was something else she’d said.
“Chelsea, you mentioned the great herds. What can you tell us about them?”
“Not much, really,” she said. “We didn’t get a whole lot of that in school. But I do know from listening to my parents that there’s the Plains Herd, which is the herd we just got away from, and the smaller herds up along the East Coast. Those are smaller because of all the barriers put up during the War. They’ve got all sorts of names, but I’ve forgotten most of those. And, let’s see, there’s the Desert Herd on the other side of the Rocky Mountains, and a few more in Mexico and Central America. But the really big one is the Great Texas Herd.”
Jacob was almost afraid to ask, but his curiosity wouldn’t let him avoid it. “How big is really big?”
Chelsea shrugged. “Nobody knows exactly. The numbers change pretty much all the time. Some zombies rot away. Others get lost and drift off. And all the while new zombies are made from the recently dead and find their way into the herd. Their numbers probably vary by several hundred or maybe even thousands from day to day. I do remember my dad saying once that he thought the Great Texas Herd might be fifty million, maybe more.”
The full magnitude of her answer didn’t seem to scare her at all, but it sent a chill down Jacob’s spine.
“Your home sounds like such a wonderful place, Chelsea,” Kelly said. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. An entire community built around scientific research.”
Chelsea licked the last little bit of chicken grease from her fingers and nodded.
“Incredible,” Kelly said, shaking her head.
To Jacob, it looked like someone had just sold her on a picture o
f paradise.
With the meal finished, they wandered off to find places to sleep. Jacob took the first watch. The house had several rooms, and he spent an hour walking the place, getting a feel for the layout. Kelly had found a spot in a small side bedroom and had managed to clear most of the dust and accumulated trash from one corner of the room. Nick had talked Chelsea into sleeping in his room. Several times Jacob passed the closed door to their room and heard the girl giggling, but when he heard the giggles change to moans of pleasure he couldn’t take it anymore and went outside.
Three hours passed by as silently as the stars that wheeled overhead, and when his time was up he went back inside and woke Kelly.
“Your turn,” he said.
She sat up without seeming groggy at all, like she hadn’t even slept. “Are they finally done in there?” she asked, and nodded toward the bedroom Nick and Chelsea shared.
“I didn’t hear anything when I came in,” Jacob said.
Kelly frowned at the closed door. “That’s not right,” she said. “She’s just a little girl.”
“She’s seventeen,” Jacob said. “Girls younger than her get married in Arbella two or three times a year.”
“She’s not getting married,” she said. “She’s getting used by a horny thirty-five-year-old man. It’s not right. It’s disgusting.”
Jacob thought on that, and deep down he suspected that she was right. It felt like she was right. Still, that was Nick in there, his best friend, the man he trusted. “What do you want to do?” he finally asked her. It seemed like the easy way out, put it back on her, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“I don’t know if there is anything we can do,” she said after a long and thoughtful pause. “You can’t tell a seventeen-year-old girl to stay away from a guy.” Suddenly she was looking at him with a mix of anger and something akin to regret. It caught him by surprise. “I know that as well as any woman. Tell a girl that age that a guy is no good for her and she’ll run to his side faster than a rumor in the night.”
Jacob sat there in the dark, stunned and hurt. Was she talking about Nick and Chelsea, or about them? There had been a time, so many years ago now, but not so long ago that he couldn’t remember every day of it, that they’d been Arbella’s hottest couple. All the mysteries you could open up for the first time at seventeen, they’d opened up together. It had been a wonderful, magical, and ultimately heartbreaking summer.
Or so it was in his memory.
He’d always assumed it had been the same for her. But memory was a form of relativity, wasn’t it? It depended upon one’s point of view, both in time and space. The past, the present . . . hunger, desire, regret . . . they all played a part in building different vistas on the same battlefield that is teenage love. And what had seemed real, and powerful, and touched by an irresistible gravity to him—and, as he’d always envisioned it, for her as well—could be something else entirely from another’s point of view.
The epiphany hit him like an earthquake.
It hurt.
It hurt badly enough for him to turn a shield toward her.
“Has he violated Arbella’s Code?” he asked her.
Even in the weak silver starlight that leaked in through the open windows, he could see that the sudden hardness in his tone caught her off guard. She started to speak, but managed little more than a stammering and inarticulate mutter.
“Has he?” Jacob demanded, growing colder and sterner by the syllable. “Has he done anything against our laws?”
Kelly swallowed nervously. “No,” she said at last.
“Then drop it,” he said. “We’re done talking, and it’s your watch.”
With that, he rose, turned, and left her.
He went off to his own little corner of the ruined farmhouse for a few hours of dream-haunted sleep.
34
“Jacob, wake up!”
Rough hands shook him from his sleep.
“Jacob, come on, buddy. We got problems.”
Jacob scrambled to his feet. He’d been in deep sleep, but he was wide-awake in an instant. Nick had his rifle in his hand, clutching it by the breach. He had Jacob’s in the other hand, waiting for him to take it.
“What’s going on?”
“Zombies,” he said. “I counted eight.”
“The herd?” Jacob said. He couldn’t believe they’d caught up with them already.
“I don’t think so,” Nick answered. “They were coming at us from due west, probably from the town. The ones I saw were looking pretty bad, like they were older.”
Jacob nodded and took his rifle. He tried to move quietly, but the house was old and the floorboards creaked beneath his feet, even when he tried to put his feet down slowly and deliberately.
Where the hall connected to the living room he hesitated. It was still dark, an hour at least till sunup, and the house was steeped in darkness. But from somewhere ahead of him he could hear feet sliding on the wooden floor, and wood groaning beneath an unfamiliar weight.
Jacob craned his head around the corner. Halfway across the living room was a dead man, badly decomposed, his clothes rotted into his skin and his face little more than strips of dark flesh hanging from dull yellow bone. He was stumbling toward the hallway. Behind him, another dark form was climbing through the empty window.
Jacob turned to Nick and signed what he’d just seen. Then he swung his rifle around so that he could use it as a club, took a breath, and charged around the corner.
The first dead man was faster than he should have been. Decomposition as bad as his should have slowed the muscles considerably. No sooner had Jacob rounded the corner but the man was on him, hands up and clutching for him. Jacob reacted quickly though. He brought his rifle down on the man’s face with enough force to snap the man’s back, breaking the neck. The zombie stopped, head staring at the ceiling, but didn’t fall. He just swayed there on his feet, unable to move.
Jacob swept the zombie’s legs with a single kick, and when the thing lowered its arms, he drove the rifle down again three more times, crushing its skull. The second zombie had fallen heavily to the floor after coming through the window, and Jacob was able to smash his head to a pulp before he could regain his feet.
Looking through the window, Jacob could see three, no, four others coming up the slope of the lawn.
At the same time, hands slapped against the front door.
From somewhere in the back of the house, they heard a scream.
Both men went running. Chelsea was standing in the hall in bare feet, a blanket pulled over her shoulders.
Nick took hold of her as Jacob kicked in the door to Kelly’s room. Kelly was on her back on the far side of the room, using an upturned wooden chair to hold a zombie at bay. Three more were pushing their way inside the window directly opposite Jacob.
“Help me!” Kelly yelled.
There was no time for clubbing the zombies. Jacob saw that in an instant. He flipped the rifle around and leveled it at the head of the zombie trying to get at Kelly. He fired once, sending the thing sprawling into the corner. Then he turned his weapon on the zombies coming through the window and fired until each went down. He rushed forward, grabbed one of the moldering zombies by the remnants of the coat left on its back, and pulled it through the window to the floor. He leaned out the window and saw more zombies coming up from the road.
Kelly was still on her back. Jacob went to her. “Are you okay? They get you anywhere?”
“No, I’m okay.”
He helped her to her feet, and then turned on Nick. “I thought you said there were eight of them out there.”
“I saw eight.”
“Yeah, well, there’s a shitload of them out there now. We got to get to the horses and get out of here.”
He went to the bedroom door, pushing his way past Nick and Chelsea. But no sooner had he entered the hall than the front door gave way with a crash.
Jacob stopped short.
“Okay,” he
said. “Not that way. Everybody out the windows. We’ll head around back.”
They scrambled through the windows and ran around the side of the house. Three zombies had gotten into the corral and were trying to force their way into the stables. Jacob ran ahead, jumped the fence into the corral, and swung his rifle at the first zombie to turn his way. The zombie fell back against the doors to the stable but didn’t go down.
Jacob grabbed the rifle with both hands and smashed it down again on the zombie’s face.
That did the trick and the zombie collapsed.
But not before the other two put their hands on him. Jacob teetered over backwards and went down hard. The zombies fell on top of him and the stench of their rotten bodies made him gag.
Nick was there the next instant, pulling one of the zombies off him.
Jacob had his rifle up in a port arms position, jammed up under the second zombie’s chin to keep his rotted mouth away. With the other zombie off him, Jacob was able to push with his left hand and pull with his right, while at the same time twisting to his right. The zombie rolled off of him and landed on its back in the dirt. Jacob put his knees on the thing’s chest and smashed the rifle down on its nose three times before it stopped moving. He stood up then, chest heaving, to see Nick rising from a kill of his own.
“Get the horses ready to ride,” he said to Kelly and Nick. “I’ll hold these off.”
They nodded at him and ran for the stable doors.
“Wait,” Jacob said, grabbing Nick by the arm. “Give me your rifle. I’m empty.”
Nick handed it to him without hesitation and Jacob ran for the center of the corral. From where he stood he could see the yard filling with zombies. They came around both sides of the house like a river flowing around a rock. More were coming out the house’s windows.
Jacob ejected the magazine from Nick’s rifle and checked it. Eight rounds in the magazine, one in the chamber.
