by Joe McKinney
He reached into his back pocket and took out the one thing he’d managed to keep with him through everything they’d experienced. The baggie Maggie Hester had given him the night before their expedition met for the first time.
“Nick,” he said. “Take this.”
Nick looked at the plastic baggie in his hand. “What’s this?”
“Inside that baggie is an address. It’s in Little Rock. Can’t be far from here.”
“Jacob, what are you doing?” Kelly said.
He ignored her question. To Nick, he said, “There’s an address on the piece of paper inside that baggie. You guys go there. I will meet you there.”
“Wait a minute,” Nick said. “What are you doing?”
“I’m gonna cover you. You take out those guards, you get some horses, and you head due south. Make that address, and I will find you there. I swear it.”
“Oh, Jacob, no,” Kelly said. “That’s stupid. Come on, let’s make a run for it.”
“You better go,” he said. “You’re burning daylight.”
And with that he turned and started firing down the corridor. Casey and the others dove for the nearest cover, but at least fifteen of them were caught out in the open, with nowhere to go. Jacob shot into their group until his magazine ran dry, then he ejected it, slapped in a new one, and started firing again.
He glanced over his shoulder just long enough to see Nick and the others sprint toward the gash in the hull.
Nick ducked into the bright sliver of daylight and fired four or five times, Jacob couldn’t be sure. But evidently he’d found his mark, for he and the girls slipped through the tear and were out of sight a moment later.
Good, he thought. At least they’re safe.
He raised his rifle to fire on Casey’s group again, but a voice from behind made him stop.
“Don’t do it, boy. I’ll bust your skull like a melon.”
Jacob turned his head just enough to see one of the riders, a huge, meaty man he knew only as Anderson, with a shotgun pointed at the back of his head.
“Go on,” Anderson said. “Put the gun down.”
Jacob’s chin fell to his chest and he let out a breath. “Damn,” he said.
He started to put the gun down, but just as he took his hand away, he heard a mechanical whirring noise and the clopping of heavy feet.
“What the . . . ?” Anderson said.
Jacob glanced around again, and couldn’t believe his eyes. A man in some kind of space suit was plodding into the loading bay, coming right for them. The suit was impossibly bulky, with a heavy nylon webbing bib in front that looked to be part body armor, part utility belt. There was a large pistol in a holster at his side, but the man didn’t use it. Instead, he reached for Anderson like a zombie would, grabbed the man’s arm, and with a mechanical groan, ripped it from his body.
Anderson went down screaming.
The man in the space suit fell on top of him, his knees making a loud crunch as they impacted the ground. He lowered his face down to Anderson, as though to feed, but the helmet he wore prevented him from taking the bite he so obviously wanted. Anderson, who writhed in agony but couldn’t shake the grip the space-suited man had on him, tried to beat on his attacker with his one remaining arm, but all he managed to do was hit the heavy shielded collar that rose up all around the man’s helmet.
Unable to take a bite out of Anderson, the space-suited man stood back up, put both hands on the sides of Anderson’s head, and squeezed until the skull gave way with a sickening crunch.
Then he stood. Anderson’s blood was all over his helmet’s copper-coated glass facemask, but for just a moment, Jacob could see through the facemask to the man inside. His neck looked broken, and one side of his head was caked over with blood. When he moved, he made a sound like the whirring of servos and gears, and in the back of Jacob’s mind it occurred to him that the suit was some kind of battlefield gear, meant to amplify a man’s strength and resiliency.
Jacob fired at the zombie in the space suit, but the bullets just ricocheted off the helmet. The zombie started toward him. Jacob fired at the zombie’s chest, and watched in horror as the bullets bounced harmlessly off the space suit. He ran for the nearest corridor, making it there just as Casey and his men entered the loading bay. They fired at Jacob, their bullets chewing up the wall just inches from his head. It spurred him to run faster and he sprinted back into the recesses of the ship. The last thing he heard as he put the loading bay behind him was the sound of Casey’s men attacking the zombie in the space suit.
And from the sounds of it, they weren’t doing any better than he’d done.
He didn’t stick around to hear how it played out, though. He rounded a corner, saw four zombies coming at him, and turned right into the next corridor. A slender woman in a bloody white lab coat lumbered toward him, her mouth greasy with blood, her hair caked to the sides of her face.
Jacob took a step back as he struggled to get his gun on target. The woman was almost on top of him before he got a shot off.
He had stepped into some kind of lab. There were three more zombies on the far side of the room moving toward him. Orange emergency lights on the walls of the lab made the zombies look like gray ghosts. They slouched toward him, moaning, reaching for him. He could run, he thought, but just as quickly put that out of his mind. That would only take him right back into the waiting crosshairs of Casey and his riders. Instead, he ran right for the zombies closing in on him, twisting one way and then the other, threading between them even as they lashed out at him.
There were more zombies out in the hallway, blocking him from turning right so that he could double back to the loading bay. A woman in a black skirt and red top fell on him, her arms wrapping around his neck like a drunken lover. He grabbed her by her hair and spun her around. She was shrieking at him, arms flailing all over the place in a moot attempt to latch on to him again. Jacob pushed her forward, using her as a shield to plow through the zombies that were closing in around him.
He hit the top of another stairwell and had to stop. There was a zombie coming up the stairs, and the stairs were too narrow for him to be able to run around it.
The woman whose hair he held in his fist leaned forward, and as she did, her rotted skin separated from her skull with a sucking sound, like someone trying to pull a boot out of the mud.
The zombie staggered down the first two stairs, then turned on him. In his hand he held her hair and a huge chunk of her scalp. Disgusted, he threw it to the floor.
The dead woman charged him, and Jacob kicked her in the face with the heel of his boot, sending her sprawling down the stairs and into the other zombie that had been blocking the way. Both tumbled down to the next landing, and Jacob, recognizing the opportunity, ran for it.
Both climbed back to their feet as he ran by, but he didn’t bother to put them down. He kept running down the stairs, and as he did, the sound of some huge machine rapidly turning began to grow louder and louder.
He followed the noise until he came to a door labeled ENGINE ROOM MAINTAINENCE—EXTERIOR ACCESS PERMITTED ONLY WHEN GROUNDED.
A way out, he thought. Maybe, if he was lucky.
He tried the door but it was locked.
Back in Arbella, shortly after taking the job of first deputy, he and Steve Harrigan had made a call to Mitchel Foster’s home. The man was going through advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and neighbors had raised the hue and cry that he’d taken his wife, Gloria, hostage. They said he’d stood on the porch with a knife to her throat, saying he’d never let anybody break into his home like she’d done. He’d fought at the Battle of the Barricades, for God’s sake. Wasn’t nobody gonna break into his house now. And so he’d pulled his wife inside and sat for the next hour with her on his lap, the knife pressed into her flesh, no idea who he was, no idea who she was, no idea what anything was, only that he was a terrified man living in a world out to get him.
Jacob had leaned in through an open window and tried to
talk him down, but it hadn’t worked. It was like trying to talk to someone when you don’t understand the language they speak. At last he’d been forced to give the order to kick down the door. Harrigan, forty years Jacob’s senior, had stepped up without hesitation and kicked the door open. Then they’d both rushed inside and wrestled the knife away from Mitchel Foster, Harrigan holding Foster in a choke hold while Jacob peeled the man’s fingers back from the knife hilt one at a time. The whole thing was over in seconds, and the adrenaline high felt great, but it was the ease with which Harrigan had kicked in the door that impressed Jacob the most. He wondered if he’d be able to do the same, if the need ever arose.
Well, it was here. He looked left, looked right, and saw the corridor was empty. He took a step back, gave the door a good hard kick, and was both surprised and proud when it flew open.
Just like Steve Harrigan did it.
He stepped onto a metal floor made of a heavy gauge mesh. He could see right through it to some kind of access corridor. But he barely noticed that, for the room he stepped into was the strangest he had ever seen. It was a tube, perhaps three stories high, with gigantic turbine fans at either end. The fans were the same diameter as the tube itself, and though they seemed to be turning at a greatly reduced speed, the noise they produced was so loud, so powerful, that it made it hard for him to walk straight.
Snakelike metal tubes, mounted on the walls and on the ceiling, ran the length of the room, which had to be three hundred feet long at least, and down toward the end of the room was a sign that read EXTERIOR ACCESS PORTAL.
He clapped his hands over his ears and lurched down the tube-shaped room until he reached the access portal. On the door was the same warning he’d seen at the entrance: EXTERIOR ACCESS PERMITTED ONLY WHEN GROUNDED. He waved a hand over the black glass panel next to the door and it shot open with a solid, well-constructed thud.
Beyond was blue sky and green grass.
He was a good twenty feet above ground level, and he had little choice but to jump. He sat on the edge of the doorway and then lowered himself down so that he was hanging by his hands, minimizing the distance he had to drop. The ground below had been chewed up by the crash, and he dropped down onto a hill of upturned dirt that padded his fall but still hurt like hell.
He stood up slowly and dusted himself off, grateful to be alive. The sudden quiet and the sunlight on his face felt good. He turned around and faced the enormous wreck towering above him. Such a marvel, even in its desolation. It was a wonder to him that such things could be in the world. Just a few weeks ago, his world had been a shell from which he’d been eager to break free. But now, as he stood on the precipice of a future he couldn’t even hope to understand, he felt small, and mean, and scared to his core.
Reeling, he turned away.
And froze.
Circling in the sky behind the wreck were hundreds of black ravens.
43
Jacob clutched his rifle with both hands and headed to the rear of the crash site, careful to stay in the shadow of the aerofluyt. When he reached the end of the wreck, he got down on his belly and crawled forward to see what he could see.
Mother Jane was in her lawn chair, sitting under an awning, cooling herself with a fan. Two of Casey’s riders stood guard over her, but they both looked bored and tired. Jacob scanned the rest of the crash site, but there was no one else. Perhaps they were all inside, looking for him. Or fighting that zombie in the space suit. Or perhaps they were riding hard to the south, chasing after Nick and the others. Either way, Mother Jane was sitting there, wide open, and if he had any chance at all at breaking the Family’s back, it was this right here.
He sighted his rifle on the guard to Mother Jane’s right. There was a wagon a few feet behind the rider that could be used for cover. Best to take him out first. The other one didn’t have cover anywhere near him, making a follow-up shot on him all the easier.
Jacob took his time with the first shot, putting it square in the man’s chest. The guard looked young, maybe twenty at the most, but Jacob didn’t let that bother him. The man was old enough to have chosen how he wanted to live his life. If he chose to be a slaver, then a bullet out of nowhere was good enough for him. Jacob squeezed the trigger and when the guard shuddered and sank to his knees, Jacob immediately swiveled the sights onto the second guard and fired twice at him.
The second guard folded to the ground immediately, dead right there.
The ravens took to the air, squawking furiously.
Once they’d all flown, he turned his attention on the first guard. He was still on his knees. He held his rifle loosely in his right hand. Jacob sighted on him again and fired. The man’s shoulders shook, but he still didn’t go down.
“Crap,” Jacob said. He fired three more times, and each time the man’s body jittered and danced, but he didn’t fall. “Goddamn. Come on, go down.”
Jacob advanced on Mother Jane’s position. She was on her feet, a pistol in her hand, yelling for somebody to shoot that son of a bitch. She pointed her weapon at him, but before she could fire, he got off a hip shot that hit her in the elbow.
She screamed out in pain as the pistol went flying.
“You!” she said. She was holding her bleeding arm across her chest, her breath coming hard and fast. “Boy, you better . . . you know what’s good for you, you put that gun down right now.”
He laughed at her.
The young guard was still on his knees. He still held his rifle in his right hand, though it looked ready to fall. He had blood coming out his mouth and more of it spattered across his face. He was trying to speak, but all he managed to get out was a long, stuttering groan.
“Die already,” Jacob said, and fired a round into the man’s ear.
The other guard was already dead. Jacob could see him lying face up in the grass, one arm bent over his eyes like he was asleep.
“You . . . you put that gun down,” Mother Jane said. She was breathing hard, her right arm immobile.
“Shut up, bitch,” Jacob said. He stood over her, and felt a red-hot rage cloud his mind. This was the woman who had made him a slave, who was responsible for the deaths of his friends and the worst degradation he had ever experienced. Remembering it made his whole body shake with anger.
But instead of the fear he expected an old woman to show, she only sneered at him.
He punched her in the face with his rifle. “Choke on that,” he said.
She went down, her one good hand coming up to cup her mouth and catch the teeth Jacob had knocked loose.
He turned back to the dead man with an arm over his eyes. The man was trying to climb to his feet, but couldn’t quite manage it. The ravens were eager to finish him, but Jacob couldn’t afford to have a zombie wandering around, not while he still had business to settle with Mother Jane. He walked over to the man and shot him at point-blank range.
With both guards dead, he turned his attention on Mother Jane.
She was staggering toward her weapon, blood oozing in ropes from her face.
Jacob grabbed her by the back of her shirt and threw her into the grass. He pointed his rifle at her face and let the moment settle, just so she knew where she stood. “You attacked us without provocation,” he said. “You had no right to do what you did.”
Her face was a flower of blood. She was missing teeth and her lips were smashed and swollen. She spit blood into the grass and smiled at him. “I don’t need no right to do nothing,” she said. “You make your own right in this world. Ain’t you learned that by now? I made you a slave because that’s what you deserve to be. You and all the rest. Nothing more than tracts and bridemeat. Go on and shoot me, if that’s what you think you’ve gotta do. But know this. My Casey is a better man than you. He’s your master, and you belong to him. And he’s gonna hunt you down to the ends of the earth to take back what’s his. There ain’t no place you can hide from him.”
Jacob pointed the rifle at her face. His anger was in full bloom. Every fib
er of his being hummed with rage. He squeezed the trigger, hungry for the kick to follow, hungry to see her die.
“That’s it, slave,” she said. “Go on, do it! Do what you’re told.”
But he didn’t fire. He lowered the weapon.
“You ain’t even got the guts to pull the trigger, do you?” Jacob barely heard her. In an instant, his rage was gone. When he’d thrown her to the ground he’d torn her blouse open. It was hanging in two strips from her shoulders, her bra wet with sweat and dark with years of worn-in grime. And from her neck hung a silver, heart-shaped locket.
He stared at it, frozen by it.
“You lookin’ at my titties, boy? You’re a sick little fuck, ain’t you?”
“Where did you get that?” Jacob asked, pointing at the locket.
She put a hand over it, and from the look on her face, Jacob could tell she thought she’d found a weakness in him.
“You like that, do you?”
She smiled wickedly. Jacob kicked her in the chest, knocking her onto her back. She rolled over, groaning, spitting blood and wheezing through her shattered nose.
“Where did you get that? You tell me right now!”
Though she was in pain, she laughed at him. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she said. She grinned wide, all her remaining teeth stained red with blood.
He pushed her down onto her back again, grabbed the locket, and yanked it from her neck. He was afraid to open it because he knew what he would see. It was Jasmine Simmons’s locket, and when he opened it and saw the cameo of her mother there, his stomach turned over. He felt lightheaded and a little sick, and he knew there were a million questions that needed answering, but for all that, the only thing he could think of was Amanda Grieder falling to her knees in the town square, her breath misting in the frozen air as she screamed at him: “You made a mistake. You didn’t even find the locket. How can you kill him if you didn’t even find the locket?”
