by Joe McKinney
There were more behind her.
A lot more.
Jimmy raised the huge pistol, holding it with the two-handed grip all children inside the walls were taught. He squeezed off a round, and the blast clapped over his ears like an enormous pair of hands, leaving him momentarily deaf, and stunned.
He didn’t even realize the lead zombie had closed the distance between them until she put her filthy hands on him.
But that was enough to get him moving.
He ran for the platform he’d seen a few moments before, but stopped at the railing. The stairs leading down to the aqueduct must have collapsed during the fighting, for they lay in a broken, rusted heap twenty feet below him.
Where more zombies had gathered, attracted by his gunshot.
The dead went into a frenzy when he appeared on the landing.
Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God, Daddy, what do I do?
The woman with the black ribs was clutching the air between them. He could smell the rotten-meat stench she carried with her. Even over the open sewage he could smell her. Another three steps and she’d be on him.
“No,” he said, kicking at her. His heart was pounding painfully in his chest. “Stay back!”
But zombies, of course, don’t ever stay back, and Jimmy was forced to back up until he was pressed against the railing.
It was then he knew what he had to do.
He jumped.
9
Dr. Knopf stood in front of what was left of the Huntington Movie Theater, wiping the sweat from the back of his neck. Not even ten o’clock yet and already the sun was punishing him. He had never handled fieldwork well, and now that he was getting on into middle age, he had even less patience for it.
But he had to deal with it. At least this one last time. Jimmy was out here, somewhere, and he had to find him.
But which way?
To his left, the street was piled high with the rubble of collapsed buildings. To his right, the street was a silent canyon between windowless buildings. It would be easier to go that way, but just because it was easy was no guarantee that Jimmy had gone that way. The boy had survived here as a toddler because of his gift, going not where the going was easiest, but where his senses told him it was safest. Avoid the zombies. That would have been his only concern.
So which way was that?
“Well, how about it, Dr. Knopf? Any ideas?”
Knopf shifted his attention away from the crumbling buildings and looked at the young captain. Fisher’s uniform was still crisp, his tie knot still regulation perfect. Despite all the walking they’d done in this godawful heat, his gig line was straight as an arrow. The man didn’t seem to know how to sweat.
“He could be anywhere,” Knopf said. “I suggest doing another sensor sweep.”
“We’ve done eight sensor sweeps already, doctor. Are you sure the boy even went into town? Perhaps he ran back to the compound.”
God save me from idiots in uniform, Knopf thought. Yes, they’d done their sensor sweeps, but Fisher himself had admitted that the high concentrations of lead in the ground were playing havoc with their equipment. It was probably doing the same thing to Jimmy, though to what degree there was no way of knowing. He’d have to do further research. The only remedy was to keep running the sensor sweeps, keep tracking over the same ground. Eventually, they’d hit pay dirt.
“He’s here, captain. I’m sure of that.”
“Hmm,” Fisher said. “You have a special bond with the boy, I suppose.”
Knopf looked at him sharply. He didn’t like the way that sounded, the nasty implication in the captain’s tone. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, captain?”
Fisher raised his eyebrows, as though to feign ignorance.
“Only that you raised him. It would be natural, I suppose, for you to learn how he thinks.”
Knopf didn’t answer that.
“You were given charge of the boy shortly after your own wife and son were killed. Isn’t that right, doctor? It would make sense that you’d invest extra effort to keep the boy close. Perhaps he filled some psychological hole in your head?”
“That’s pretty damn bold of you, captain.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. You forget, doctor, that I have an assignment as well. You are trying to get me to believe in magic. My job, if you’ll pardon my French, is to make sure you aren’t full of shit.”
And then it hit Knopf what was really going on here, what the captain was actually accusing him of.
“Captain, are you suggesting that I faked more than a decade’s worth of research just so that child could take the place of my own son? Is that really what you’re suggesting?”
Fisher shrugged. “You tell me,” he said.
“You’re a bastard, captain. A certifiable bastard.”
“Maybe. But that still doesn’t answer my question.”
Knopf nearly hit him in the nose. He might have, too, if at that moment the street to his right hadn’t erupted with yelling and gunfire.
Knopf ducked his head, backing away from the commotion.
“What the . . . ?” Fisher said. He was standing with arms akimbo, peering into the clouds of dust pouring down the street.
The next instant two troopers hurried out of the fog. A steadily retreating line of Troopbots was right behind them, firing into the dust.
One of the troopers, a soldier named Collins, hurried toward Fisher. “Zombies, sir! A whole mess of ’em!”
“What the hell happened?”
“We were going building to building, searching the rubble. A couple of our Troopbots found a door down to the sewer system and when they opened it, they uncovered a whole nest of them things.”
“How many?”
“Hard to tell, sir. Forty, maybe fifty. They overran our Troopbots.”
They could hear moaning now. A few of the approaching zombies were visible through the screen of dust, but from the volume of the moans it was obvious there were many more behind them.
“So much for the eighty-six percent accuracy of your sensors, captain?” said Knopf. “Guess you can never trust a zombie to play fair.”
“Don’t start with me, doctor.”
The next instant he was on the radio, calling for the Warbots to converge on his location.
Knopf felt their approach before he heard them, the tread of their Tyrannosaurus-size legs sending shudders through the pavement.
When the Warbots entered the intersection, they turned immediately to the advancing horde of zombies. Their limited AI capability allowed them to process the scene and reach immediate conclusions about what had to be done. Without waiting for orders, they strode to the leading edge of the street, took up side-by-side positions, and opened fire into the approaching horde, mowing down the zombies beneath a hail of automatic weapons fire.
To Knopf, it seemed the shooting went on forever, and when the dust finally settled, the rattle of the guns still rang in his ears.
But the street was still. Nothing moved.
One of the Warbots turned to Captain Fisher. “What are your orders, sir?”
Fisher looked mad enough to spit. He glared at Knopf before turning back to his robots.
“Another sensor sweep,” he growled. “Find that kid.”
10
As he went over the edge, Jimmy saw a crowd of zombies lunging for him. Their ruined faces and bloody hands loomed large in his sight, and for a terrifying moment he thought he was going to be shredded alive before he hit the water. But when he landed in the sewer channel he kept his head under the water and started thrashing for the far side of the channel.
The water was black as ink and he couldn’t see where he was going. He pushed and pulled his way through a forest of legs even as their hands groped at his back.
One of them managed to get a grip on the collar of his shirt.
Jimmy twisted away, breaking the zombie’s fingers, but still it held on. He swatted at their hands and kicked whenever he could, and somehow mana
ged to reach the stone ledge on the far side of the channel.
They stayed on him, though.
He saw a rotten wooden pallet leaning against the wall under the ledge and climbed on top of it. The ledge was another five feet or so above that, and he jumped for it, hooking his elbows over the edge so he had enough support to pull himself up. He kicked at the smooth cement wall below him, his toes sliding on the algae that grew there while hands groped at his shoes.
“Get away!” he yelled, pumping his legs with everything he had. “Get . . . away!”
And then he was up and over the edge, his full weight resting on the ledge. Jimmy rolled over onto his back and sobbed, his chest heaving.
What was he going to do? There was no place to go.
He rolled over on his side and stared down at the hungry crowd. Their hands were just a few inches below the ledge, their moans reaching a frenzied intensity. He knew he should keep moving, but the panic and adrenaline that had helped him climb had left him numb, and all he could do now was stare with glassy eyes at the hands clutching for him.
You must get up. You must leave.
Jimmy blinked. The Combot again.
How am I supposed to do that? There’s nowhere to go.
Stand up. I will help.
What’re you gonna do?
Stand up.
With a strange disconnected feeling, almost like he was dreaming this, Jimmy rose to his feet. The ceiling was arched and this close to the wall he had to bend over slightly to keep from banging his head. It made him feel like a diver looking over the edge of a cliff. Staring straight down into the ravenous horde brought a wave of nausea over him, and he groaned.
What now?
You must move to your left. Eighty feet down that tunnel you will find a large platform. Go there.
That’s your plan? What am I supposed to do when I get there?
There is a functioning Warbot there. It will protect you. Go now. You must move quickly.
The Combot wasn’t kidding, Jimmy thought. One of the zombies in the front had fallen against the wall, pushed down by the weight of the horde behind it, and its fellows were now ramping up its back. A zombie in some kind of uniform was pulling itself up onto the ledge. The zombie’s lower jaw was almost completely gone, like it had been torn off. Or shot off. Maggots swarmed in the rotting flesh where its chin and cheeks had been.
“No,” Jimmy muttered, shaking his head.
You must move quickly.
Slowly, inching carefully along the narrow concrete ledge, hands grasping at his feet, Jimmy made his way to a corner up ahead. The zombies matched him step for step, their moans echoing horribly off the walls and quickening his pulse.
How am I supposed to get down from here? They’re following me.
Round the corner. You will see.
And when he reached the corner, he did see. Immediately below him was a railing that went across the channel. It wasn’t high enough to keep the zombies at bay forever, but it was high enough to give him a chance at escape.
Yes, he thought, that’s how I’m gonna do it.
He jumped into the water.
The zombies stuck their hands through the railing, but he was already out of reach and running for the platform.
Right where you said it’d be.
They are coming. You must move quickly.
Jimmy looked back over his shoulder and saw, once again, that the Combot was correct. Already the zombies had tipped the railing forward and were scrambling over it. He had maybe a thirty-foot lead on them.
He closed the last few feet to the platform and rounded the corner. A sudden, intensely white light flooded his vision, momentarily blinding him.
“You are human,” a robotic voice said.
It took a moment for the purple blotches to clear from Jimmy’s sight. When they did, he saw a badly damaged Warbot trying to stand on its Tyrannosaurus legs—but something was wrong. One of its legs wouldn’t work. Its status lights blinked and flickered. It stumbled forward, and then sagged to the ground, the spotlight on its shoulder lighting up the carnage at its feet.
The ground was covered with rotting corpses.
Fear gripped him anew. He had gambled on the Combot’s instructions, and this was where it had led him. To an abandoned sewer platform, and no way out.
“Zombies,” the Warbot said, raising a .50 caliber machine gun. “Human, you must take cover at the rear of the platform. Move quickly.”
Jimmy heard moaning behind him. That was all it took. He ran forward, scrambling over badly decomposed bodies, too frightened to allow the gore into which his fingers were sinking to slow him down.
The shooting started a moment later.
Jimmy reached the back wall, turned, and saw a zombie’s head and shoulders atomized by a three-round burst from the Warbot’s guns. But every zombie shot as it rounded the corner was replaced by more, and soon the Warbot’s gun was blazing in one continuous stream.
But it wasn’t enough. The dead kept coming, pouring around the corner faster than the Warbot’s gun could put them down. Jimmy, who was so exhausted he could barely move, pushed himself up against the back wall of the platform. There was some kind of vehicle abandoned there, like a rail truck, only on rubber wheels. Its windshield had come loose and broken into two pieces. Jimmy pulled the bigger of the two over him and tried to shrink into the gore of ruined bodies below him.
But it was only a matter of time.
There were just too many of them.
Jimmy’s gaze found one zombie that was staring straight at him as it climbed over the pile of torn-up corpses. Its gaze never wavered. It had zeroed in on him and meant to have him.
Jimmy braced himself for the attack.
The zombie fell on top of him, moaning, pawing at the glass with its bloody hands. Jimmy screamed back at the thing, pushing back with everything he had.
And then the zombie’s head exploded. One moment it was pounding on the glass, smearing it with blood and sewage, and the next the glass was splashed with bits of bone and brain and clumps of bloody hair. The zombie’s headless corpse sagged against the glass as Jimmy gaped in shocked silence.
The sound of gunfire was gone.
So too were the moans.
“Human,” the Warbot said. “Human?”
Jimmy had to tilt the glass like a ramp to roll the corpse away, and once it was off him, he could see the gun smoke lingering in the foul sewer air.
“Human, they are gone. Please acknowledge.”
“I hear you,” Jimmy said.
He stood up and looked around. The far wall was dripping with fresh gore, and there were bodies piled high near the corner. How many? Forty? More than that?
Jimmy couldn’t tell.
He turned to the Warbot.
“Thanks,” he said, because it was the only thing that came close to how he was feeling at the moment.
“I cannot move. You must go. Gunfire will travel far in these tunnels. More zombies will come.”
“How many?”
“Unknown. You must go.”
He watched the Warbot as its status lights blinked and dimmed once again. The machine could not die, but if it had an equivalent, it was doing it now. Its lights were going out.
It was then that a thought occurred to Jimmy. Something he had overheard once in the weapons lab.
“Don’t Warbots usually work in teams?” he asked. “Where’s your partner?”
But the Warbot didn’t answer. Its status lights continued to fade, and as Jimmy watched, they went dark permanently.
There was nothing else to do but leave.
11
Jimmy found the second Warbot a few minutes later.
He had returned to the main channel and was following it farther into the sewer system. There were more platforms here, lots of them, and other channels leading off in other directions.
He had entered some kind of hub, he realized, the main part of the sewer system.
What
did you do? The zombies are all gone.
For once, his father’s mind-voice didn’t knife into his head. It was almost pleasant, in fact. Jimmy wasn’t sure if it was the tone of surprised gratitude that softened it, or if he was just getting used to their thoughts passing back and forth, but either way the pain was gone. Jimmy let his mind reach out to his father.
Daddy, where are you?
I’m close, Jimmy. Keep coming. Around the next corner to your left.
The fighting, Jimmy saw, must have been intense through here. He had seen plenty of rotting bodies along the way, and even more wrecked Troopbots, but the carnage was especially bad through here. In some places he actually had to climb over the twisted, severed limbs of dead people and the faceless heads of downed robots rusting in the sewer water. And everywhere he turned there were bullet holes in the walls and the ceiling.
Then he rounded the corner and the smell of rot nearly knocked him over.
What lay before him was a gallery of horrors. The room must have been some kind of staging area for large equipment before the fighting, for there were oversized sleds loaded down with machinery and portable pumps and generators scattered around the room. But those were only the backdrop for the carnage Jimmy saw. Corpses were piled three and four deep. Most were so badly decomposed they were unrecognizable, their bodies swollen and discolored and swarming with flies and writhing worms. Others had been eaten, and what remained of their faces was twisted by pain that was frozen there like a picture. One man lay on his back atop a generator, his arms hanging limply off either side, his mouth open in an eternal scream, his torso ripped apart and emptied of its viscera so that he looked like the gaping belly of a canoe. Jimmy saw a dismembered foot here, an upturned hand there, the fingers curled up and inward like the legs of a dying crab.
And standing in the middle of it all, a grotesque king presiding over his court, was his father.
Jimmy’s mouth fell open.
The man could barely stand. His right arm had been chewed off just below the elbow, stringy lengths of sinew and shredded flesh hanging from the blackened wound. His neck too was open. Worms fed on the ruins of his throat. The green T-shirt he wore was stained with dried blood, and all Jimmy could read was the word Nationals in what had once been white lettering. And his face! Bits of skull showed through the holes in his forehead. His lips were gone, revealing the full horror of his bloodstained teeth. He leered at Jimmy. Almost like he was grinning at him.
