Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  Jacob turned his attention back to Mother Jane. “Where did you get this?”

  “I don’t answer slaves,” she said, and spit at his feet.

  He turned his rifle around and shot her in the left leg.

  She screamed as she fell over onto her side, writhing uncontrollably. He stood over her as she tried to pull herself toward her pistol. “Where did you get this?” he demanded. “Where?”

  “Fuck you,” she said.

  He grabbed her foot and pulled her back, away from the pistol. Then he dug his thumb into the hole that had once been her knee and twisted.

  Her screams echoed off the sides of the wreck.

  “Where did you get this?”

  She stared at him with wild, terrified eyes, but she had the inner strength to deny him even still. He got down on his knees next to her and rested the barrel of his gun on her cheek.

  “Where did you get this locket?” he asked. “You’re going to die here in a few minutes. But whether you die from a gunshot, quick and easy, or whether I have to cut off a piece of you one at a time, depends on your answer. Last chance for the quick and easy option. Where did you get this?”

  She tried to spit at him again, but he managed to turn her face to the grass before she could get it out.

  “In pieces it is,” he said.

  The younger of the two guards had a Buck hunting knife on his belt. Jacob pulled it from the man’s scabbard and walked back to Mother Jane. She was watching him, her body shaking, but her expression was still one of maddening defiance.

  “Tough old hen, aren’t you?” he said. “Get on the ground.”

  He pushed her head down into the grass, then sawed into her right ear until he’d cut all the way through.

  He held it out for her to see.

  “I’m not playing with you anymore. Do you hear me? Where did you get this locket?”

  Whether he’d finally gotten past her pain tolerance, or whether she’d finally realized how far he was ready to go, he couldn’t tell. And he didn’t care. He wanted an answer, and he was going to get it.

  “Tell me!” he shouted.

  “Out of your backpacks,” she said.

  “Mine?” he said. “What?”

  “Your backpacks. The ones Casey took off you when he captured you.”

  Tears had turned her bloody face to a red river. It had spilled down her front like a baby’s bib, coloring her bra and the remnants of her blouse.

  Jacob leaned over her and said, “Whose backpack? Describe it. What else was in it?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Drawings and shit.”

  “Drawings?”

  “Yeah, drawings. A bunch of young girls sleeping. Maps and shit. I don’t know.”

  “Maps?” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, maps.” She rolled over and curled into a ball, the pain seizing her like a fist, squeezing her until she couldn’t even pretend defiance.

  He backed away from her, horrified, both at his own actions and at the implications of what she’d said.

  He grabbed her by the throat and pushed her onto her back.

  He looked into her eyes, searching for some indication that she was lying, that she was the devil attempting to throw discord into that which was in harmony. But the pain on her face was real.

  It was the truth.

  He backed away from her. She stared up at him, her face a mask of pain and blood and now, even a touch of beggary. She knew the end was upon her, and she wanted absolution. She wanted mercy.

  Jacob searched inside himself for that quality of mercy which is not strained, and he couldn’t find it. He was not that strong. If he was honest with himself, he was simply a man on the edge of survival, clutching at existence like it was the edge of a cliff. When he turned his mind inward, he saw an animal without mercy, without remorse.

  He leveled his rifle at Mother Jane’s belly and he fired until he’d emptied his magazine. He watched her body twitch and shake, and he felt nothing but disgust. He stared at the corpse for a long moment, hating her, but his mind still turning backflips over what she’d said. Finally, he dragged her out from under the awning so that the sun fell upon her. He ejected the magazine from his rifle and slapped in a new one. Only then did he walk away.

  Somewhere in his mind he had held a vision of her getting devoured by her own ravens. He thought there’d be justice in that. But as he walked away, and heard the ravens descend upon her risen and zombified corpse, he felt no need to look back.

  The real hurt was still to come.

  part five

  THE EMPTY TOWNS

  44

  The next morning Jacob sat astride a stolen horse, looking at a moldering one-story home waist deep in the weeds, and asked himself if he really wanted to know the truth.

  He looked up and down the empty street, taking in the skeletal remains of the houses, some of them with trees growing through the windows, some of them with roofs long since gone, and it occurred to him that he could simply throw the locket into the tall grass and go inside.

  He could keep silent.

  He could set his mouth in a smile of grim determination and pretend that out here in the wasteland, things were different.

  After all, hadn’t he himself become a thief? Hadn’t he killed his fellow man in abominable ways? Hadn’t he even thrilled at the brutal, soul-destroying torture and murder of an old woman who desperately deserved it? Hadn’t he done all these things and claimed that the end of his own survival somehow justified the means?

  That was really the question that needed answering.

  What was justice? Was it a pure Aristotelian form, a thing that existed unto itself as an absolute standard somehow removed from the muddy particulars of day-to-day life?

  Or was it a bendable thing?

  Could a man believe in a thing, in the Code that was at the heart of who he had been raised to be, and yet somehow shuffle off that coil for the mere convenience of survival?

  Was such a bargain possible?

  And if those sins—be they sins—be forgiven, what other sins might he set aside?

  Jacob looked at the locket in his hand and just didn’t know. He couldn’t answer the questions that plagued him. They seemed to form a knot so large and so dense he had no power to untie them. When he looked inward and tried to figure out the answer, the best he could come up with was a vague sort of emptiness where his certainty had once been.

  Feeling sick to his stomach, he climbed down from the saddle and trudged up the porch, the steps creaking beneath his weight.

  The voices he heard inside the little home went suddenly silent.

  He knocked twice on the door, then twice more.

  “It’s me,” he said. “It’s Jacob.”

  Kelly opened the door, and the fear and worry on her face blossomed into joy. She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him hard. “Oh, Jacob,” she said. “Oh, God, I’m so glad you’re here.”

  She held the hug for a long moment, and then leaned back to arm’s length and studied his face.

  “Jacob, are you okay?”

  He nodded, and stepped past her.

  “Jacob?”

  The house was deep in shadow, but he could see all right. Much of the ceiling plaster had fallen to the floor and turned to mud with the rainwater that had gotten in over the years. Tree limbs grew in through the empty windows. Everywhere he looked there were signs of animals encroaching on the remains of human habitation. Owl pellets crowded one corner. Birds and raccoons had pulled the couch cushions apart and repurposed the stuffing. And everywhere he turned he smelled the odor of rotting wood.

  But the really important things, many of them anyway, were still there.

  The photos on the walls.

  The handwritten notes on yellowed, curling paper tacked to the remains of a bulletin board. Even among the ruins, signs of everyday life remained. Jacob saw those things, and walked farther into the house.

  “Hey, Jake, you okay, man?” Ni
ck said. “You had us worried.”

  Jacob turned. His old friend was sitting at the kitchen table, Chelsea behind him with her hand on his shoulder. Nick’s rifle was on the table. Ever since they were kids Nick had been able to pull off that effortless smile. He could look so cool, so totally relaxed, even here at the end of the world.

  Jacob crossed to the table and picked up the rifle. He examined it, thinking about the lifetime they’d shared together, and then handed it to Kelly, who took it with a stunned and frightened look on her face.

  “Jacob . . . ?” she said.

  Nick stood. “Hey, man, what’s up?”

  “Sit down,” Jacob said. The bark of command filled his voice.

  Nick looked around the room. “You talking to me, Jake?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sit down,” he said.

  “All right,” Nick said. With a glance back at Chelsea, he sat at the table. “What’s up, Jake? Come on, man, you’re scaring me.” He tried the grin again.

  Jacob took out the locket and showed it to Kelly.

  Before she could ask what it was, he threw it on the table next to Nick.

  Nick stiffened. He reached for the locket, and then pulled his hand away like the thing was a venomous snake. He glanced at Kelly, and then at Jacob. But he said nothing.

  “What is that?” Jacob asked.

  Nick looked at him and, for a moment, his face was a mask, inscrutable. But then the old confidence that had for so long, and so quietly, reminded Jacob of the ass kicking he’d taken at Nick’s hand all those years ago, suddenly cracked. Jacob saw through it all in an instant. He knew, absolutely knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Nick was the man Jasmine Simmons had seen in the dark in the corner of her bedroom.

  Nick seemed to know it, too.

  “What do you want me to say, Jake?”

  Jacob said nothing. He raised his rifle and pointed it at Nick’s forehead.

  “Whoa, hold on!” Kelly said. “Jacob, what are you doing?”

  Jacob took his hand off the trigger and pointed at the locket on the table. “Look at that, Kelly.”

  “What?”

  “Look at it!” he shouted.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, I’ll look at it.”

  She picked it up from the table and opened it. At first she seemed ready to glance at it and dismiss it and turn her attention back to Jacob, but then spotted the cameo inside the locket, and a horrible knowledge passed over her face.

  “This is the locket Jasmine Simmons lost,” she said.

  Jacob put his finger back on the trigger.

  “Nick?” she said. She held out the locket. “What is this? What’s he talking about?”

  Nick didn’t answer. Calm as could be, he stared up the length of the rifle barrel at Jacob, waiting for him to speak.

  “Oh, my God,” Chelsea said. “What are you doing? Put the gun down.”

  “Do you want to tell her about it, Nick?” Jacob said. “Do you want to tell her about the young girls? There’s a dozen just like her back at Arbella. Maybe more than that? Some that didn’t respond the way you wanted. Wouldn’t pose for your drawings. But you had a way around that, didn’t you? Burglary was incidental, wasn’t it? The real reason you did it was to get that little peek you desperately wanted. That’s it, isn’t it, Nick? You’re a fucking predator, aren’t you?”

  Nick didn’t say a word.

  “Put the gun down!” Chelsea said. “Holy hell, what is this?”

  “He’s a thief,” Jacob said.

  “So what?” Chelsea said. “So are you. So am I. So is everyone in this room. You’re holding a stolen gun, for God’s sake. Put the gun down. Come on, everybody. Show a little common sense.”

  Jacob took a deep breath. “We have a law,” he said. “It’s called the Code. It is the moral fabric that we live by. It is who we are.”

  “Is it?” Nick said. “Is it really? Look at us. We are on the edge of the map here. We have traveled outside of our moral sphere. The Code teaches us that we have survived because we support each other, no matter what. Isn’t that true? Didn’t I lift you out of the herd? Didn’t I carry you when you couldn’t even walk? Haven’t I earned the right to say I support my brother?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “And that’s what makes it worse. We had a contract, you and I. We took an oath. We swore to each other that we’d always have one another’s back.” He kept his weapon trained on Nick’s face. “But the locket is still right there. The truth is still right there.”

  “What truth?” Chelsea said. “Good God, put that gun down.”

  “Our Code is who we are,” Jacob said. “It doesn’t exist only in Arbella. It is who we are. Our word to each other follows us around wherever we go. It is woven into the truth of who we are. Wherever we go, we carry Arbella with us.”

  “Platitudes,” Nick said. “This is the fucking wasteland. Out here, we make our own laws. We decide what is right and what is wrong. We live by our wits, and by our fists. Haven’t you been paying attention, Jacob? This is the Wild West. The law here is what we make it.”

  It was his first misstep. Even up to that point, Jacob had doubted his ability to carry through with the punishment the Code meted out for all thieves, but upon hearing Mother Jane’s words spoken from his best friend’s mouth, his self-doubt thawed and resolved itself into conviction. Jacob glanced back at Kelly, and saw her face, tear-stained, but just as resolute as his. She nodded yes to the question that hung unspoken between them.

  He turned back to Nick and adjusted his grip on the trigger.

  “Wait!” Chelsea screamed. “What are you doing?”

  Kelly moved forward and pulled the young girl away. Chelsea put up a hard fight, but Kelly pulled her to the side and squeezed her arms over her chest, holding her down and muttering in her ear to calm her.

  It didn’t work.

  Chelsea screamed at him the whole time, and as she railed, Jacob heard not her, but Amanda Grieder screaming for her husband’s innocence.

  He leveled the rifle at point-blank range.

  “Nick, you violated the Code.”

  “Bullshit,” Nick said.

  “You committed burglary in the night.”

  “And what have you done? What right do you have to exact justice on me? How fucking dare you exact anything on me?”

  “You stood by and watched me put an innocent man to death.”

  To that, Nick had nothing to say.

  “You even congratulated me on a job well done. You fucking bastard.” Jacob couldn’t hold it back any longer. The tears were rolling down his face. “How could you do this to me? Nick, Goddamn it, I loved you like a brother. How could you do this?”

  “I love you, too, man,” Nick said. He was holding back the tears by a mighty effort. “Justice shouldn’t ever be personal. They told us that. Remember that? You can’t do this if it’s personal. The Code tells you that.”

  Jacob could barely hold the rifle steady.

  Kelly was crying, too. She stared at Nick, tears streaming down her face, and she shook her head in bitter pain.

  “You bastard,” she said. “Goddamn you.”

  Nick had seemed on the edge of a rally, but with that, he sagged. He looked at Jacob, and the effortless courage he’d always shown, the cool, calm confidence that defined him, was gone. He looked up at Jacob and all that was left was a pitiful man in the depths of shame and empty words.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Nick said. “You don’t.”

  Jacob raised the rifle. “I do. I will. I’m sorry, Nick.”

  He pulled the trigger, and Nick’s head snapped back on his shoulders like his wires had been cut. Jacob watched him for a long moment, his mind utterly empty, until finally he let the barrel fall to the floor.

  Only later, and then only dimly, did he become aware of Chelsea’s sobs filling the room.

  45

  It was Kelly who ended up doing the hard work. />
  Jacob took the body into the backyard and dug a grave. Then he put his friend in it and filled the hole back up with earth. Afterwards, he took one of the chairs from the kitchen and sat on the porch and watched the sunset come and go.

  Meanwhile, Kelly was inside with Chelsea, trying to explain it all to her. Jacob listened for a time, nodding to himself as she recited the lessons they’d first received as children about the Code. Every word she said was right. She told Chelsea about how the Code was a contract that one simply didn’t slough off because it made life hard, or because it required you to make hard choices. The Code sustained them, and it made life in a world that wanted to sink its teeth into your throat possible.

  Jacob listened to her, the same words he’d heard all his life, and he wondered how he could believe in something that demanded he kill the best friend he’d ever had. How could something that was meant to hold him together tear him up so badly inside?

  He thought about that for a long time.

  And he was still thinking about it later that night when the aerofluyt’s morphic field generator finally went critical, and a dark gray mushroom cloud rose into the sky above the ruins of North Little Rock, Arkansas.

  46

  “Are we in danger?” Jacob asked.

  They’d gone to the front porch to watch the sky. The horizon was bleeding orange across the roofs of the buildings to the north, and the mushroom cloud was still rising.

  “Is there gonna be like fallout or something?”

  “We’re fine here,” Kelly said. “The morphic field generator utilizes non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation. No fallout, but it’ll give anybody anywhere close to the blast site a nasty sunburn.”

  “Like how close?” Jacob asked.

  Kelly shrugged. “I don’t know. The hot zone is probably something like ten miles. Anything inside of that range is probably toast. There’s probably going to be a warm zone outside of that, say another fifteen miles.”

  “We’re about forty miles away, I think,” Jacob said.

  “Yeah, about that. We’re probably okay.”

  “Probably?”

  She grunted in frustration. “Like I would know? Jacob, I have no idea. I’m just guessing.”