Plague of the Undead

by Joe McKinney

  Doctor?

  Silence.

  Dr. Knopf, I need you!

  Oh, you poor boy. Jimmy, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.

  Help me!

  Zombies were moving through the smoke ahead of him. Now that he was free of the sewers he could sense them.

  They were facing away from him, and Jimmy sprinted right for them. With luck, he’d get past them before they knew he was there.

  But then, all at once, the dead stopped their attack on the retreating Troopbots and turned to face Jimmy. Several of them lunged forward, reaching for him.

  It happened so fast Jimmy barely had time to adjust.

  He veered to his left, shooting a gap between them just as his father’s Warbot reached down to scoop him up. Instead of pinning Jimmy, it flattened one of the zombies.

  Jimmy didn’t slow down. He ran right into the thick of where the battle had been. He was in no-man’s-land now, midway between the retreating Troopbots on the one side and the zombies and his father’s Warbot on the other.

  Jimmy looked back just as the Warbot crashed through the zombie horde, trampling some and throwing others out of the way. Still carrying his father atop its shoulders, the Warbot stepped slowly into the intersection. They were close now, less than twenty feet between them, the Warbot towering over Jimmy. His father’s badly decomposed face was incapable of expression, but Jimmy could still sense the madness, the betrayal, the rage emanating from the man’s mind.

  Jimmy met his stare without blinking, and at the same time realized he was feeling exactly the same thing, betrayal and rage. The thought scared him, and for a moment, Jimmy felt his resolve waver. This was his father, after all. The man had done nothing but hurt him. And yet, angry as Jimmy was, a part of him wanted to love the man . . . needed the man’s approbation. But the scariest thought of all, the one Jimmy couldn’t get around, was that maybe they weren’t so very different, father and son. Maybe there was nothing but a fine line between them. Maybe Jimmy was just a gentle shove away from being exactly like him.

  “No,” Jimmy said suddenly. “I won’t join you. I won’t.”

  Maybe there was just a fine line between them, but the line was there. He looked up at the horror that his father had become and he was suddenly, absolutely, irrevocably sure. That zombie up there was not what he wanted to be. Jimmy was more than that.

  “Go on and do it, if you can,” he told his father.

  The Warbot straightened then. Jimmy could see it gathering itself for the final, crushing blow, like stomping out a bug, and he tensed to leap out of the way. But as the Warbot’s leg rose in the air, Jimmy saw a flash of movement off to his left. A second Warbot, this one bearing the insignia of Fisher’s expeditionary force, smashed into his father’s Warbot and both robots went tumbling into the side of a building, knocking down the brick wall there.

  The expeditionary robot stood up first. It backed away from the collapsed storefront, and right before it started firing, Jimmy caught a glimpse of his father’s Warbot inside, its enormous Tyrannosaurus legs bent up in front of it like a man who has fallen into a low, deep couch.

  And then the shooting started.

  The expeditionary Warbot fired both its .50 caliber machine guns, the bullets glancing off the other Warbot’s armor plating, but doing little harm. His father’s Warbot pulled itself loose from the wall and charged its opponent, and when they hit, it felt like the ground was splitting open beneath Jimmy’s feet.

  Their great weight tore up the pavement. Every step sent bits of rock and vast quantities of dust into the air, and within moments, Jimmy couldn’t tell the difference between the two. He could only marvel at the destruction they caused. They threw each other into the air and into the sides of buildings. The zombies swarming around their legs were crushed like bugs. Both robots were firing their machine guns continuously now, and the noise grew so loud Jimmy fell to the ground behind a pile of rubble, his hands clapped over his ears.

  Jimmy had no idea how long the fight went on, but gradually, the guns fell silent.

  And when the sound stopped altogether, and Jimmy looked over the pile of rubble he’d hid behind, he saw one of the Warbots tangled up in a collapsed wall, wrapped in metal cables, one of its cannon arms missing. It tried to step out of the wall, but one of its legs wasn’t working, and all it managed to do was fall face-first onto the pavement.

  The other Warbot was in two large pieces, electrical cables and wires oozing out of its severed parts like guts. Neither machine was going to be getting up again. Jimmy could see that plain enough. And when he searched them with his mind, he could tell the one was dead, and the other, the one facedown on the street, was shutting down.

  But there was something else.

  Jimmy turned. A lone figure was limping toward him through the dust and smoke.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Jimmy said. “I’m done with you.”

  His father’s face was dark with blood and dust, except for the eyes, which were milky white and vacant. He raised his one good hand to Jimmy, the fingers clutching, and inched his way forward.

  You can’t have me! Do you hear? I’m not yours.

  Jimmy scooped up a heavy chunk of asphalt and threw it at his father. It hit him in the shoulder, but he showed no reaction.

  He kept coming.

  Just then Jimmy felt a hand on his back. He knew who it was without having to look around.

  “Step away, Jimmy,” said Dr. Knopf. “I’ve got this.”

  Dr. Knopf raised a pistol and pointed it at Jimmy’s father. But before he could pull the trigger, Jimmy touched his arm, guiding the weapon away.

  “No,” Jimmy said. “It’s for me to do.”

  Dr. Knopf looked at the pistol, and then at Jimmy.

  “Let me have it.”

  Knopf handed it to him without saying another word. Jimmy looked down at the pistol, so many things weighing on his mind, and then pointed it at his father.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But we’re not the same. Not at all.”

  And then he pulled the trigger.

  14

  Later, after the last of the zombies had been put down and the dust and smoke had cleared, Jimmy walked into the middle of the street and looked around. There was a darkened movie theater just ahead of him. He felt drawn to it.

  “Jimmy?” Knopf said, coming up beside him. “You okay?”

  Jimmy nodded.

  “You put a lot into my mind. I guess we have a lot to talk about, don’t we?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Both of them were silent for a time, watching the movie theater.

  “There’s something I have to do,” Jimmy said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The Combot.” Jimmy pointed to the movie theater. “Comm Six . . . it’s in there.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Jimmy nodded. He was sure.

  Knopf looked around uncomfortably. He seemed uncertain, doubtful. “I don’t . . .” he said. “Stand back for a second, okay? Let me send in a Troopbot first.”

  Jimmy looked at him, but said nothing.

  Knopf grabbed the first Troopbot he saw and pointed it towards the movie theater. After he’d explained what he wanted done, the robot marched inside, weapon at the ready.

  Jimmy and Knopf waited, listening.

  Several human soldiers stood nearby, looking on curiously.

  About a minute later, a single gunshot sounded from somewhere deep in the recesses of the theater.

  “One female zombie neutralized,” the Troopbot announced over the walkie-talkie.

  Knopf motioned to one of the human soldiers, who nodded back and went inside the theater to check it out.

  When he came back out, he was holding something in his right hand.

  He walked up to Knopf and handed it to him. A photograph. Black-and-white. Dirty with grime and creased where it had been crumpled and wrinkled over the years. It showed a little boy, about two, smiling, still a lot o
f the baby he once was in his chubby face, playing with a toy truck on a kitchen floor.

  “That was pinned to the zombie’s shirt,” the soldier said, nodding at the photograph. “There was nothing else in there.”

  “Thank you,” Knopf said.

  He stared at the picture, lost in his memories of a boy he had once hated, but had grown to love as though he was his own son.

  “What is it?” Jimmy asked.

  Knopf handed him the photograph. “It’s you,” he said.

  “Me?” Jimmy swallowed, his attention shifting from Knopf to the entrance to the movie theater. “But, Comm Six . . .”

  “I’m afraid so,” Knopf said. “I’m sorry, Jimmy.”

  Jimmy nodded, his mouth pressed into a thin, tight line. Then he slid the picture into his pocket.

  “Dr. Knopf, I’m done. I want you to know that. I’m done. I don’t want to do this anymore. No more experiments.”

  Knopf put his arm around Jimmy’s shoulder. His touch was warm, kind, accepting.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let me take you home.”

  “I’m not going back to the lab.”

  “No,” Knopf said. “I know that. I’m taking you home.”

  Resurrecting Mindy

  The big Christmas tree in front of the Dayton Mall had fallen down sometime during the last year. Kevin’s gaze drifted over the faded tinsel and mud-encrusted ornaments and wondered when that had happened. Probably during the rains back in early September. Those were bad. A lot of the area had flooded, and the winds that came with the rains must have done that damage to the tree as well.

  Of course, he really didn’t know for sure.

  And, really, when it came right to it, he didn’t care.

  The only time he ever came back here anymore was at Christmastime. The world had ended three years before, just before Christmas, and the inside of the Dayton Mall still had a lot of decorations hanging from the common areas and inside the shop windows. Every year right around this time he made the trek back to the mall and scavenged whatever he could carry to decorate wherever he was living at the moment. These days, it had become a ritual, just like keeping up his calendar, and keeping his hair trimmed, and making sure his food stores were well stocked. The rituals, in fact, were about the only things that kept his morale up anymore.

  And God knows there was enough to feel depressed about.

  There was a sort of soul-sucking loneliness that came with being the last man left alive.

  It made him wonder if there was any reason to keep going. After all, did it matter when he died? Tomorrow, or thirty years from now, the results would be the same. After he was finished, humanity was finished. Wasn’t he just postponing the inevitable?

  Could be. But he wasn’t quite ready to throw in the towel just yet.

  For now, he had a mission.

  Kevin got down on his belly so he could squeeze between the front tandems of an eighteen-wheeler. From there, he watched the parking lot, figuring out a safe route over to the doors.

  It actually didn’t look like it’d be very difficult this year. The zombie hordes that had swarmed the area in years past had thinned quite a bit. He didn’t know if the majority of them had moved on or decayed away to the point they couldn’t move anymore. Maybe they’d started to eat each other. Who the hell knew?

  He supposed it didn’t really matter.

  Fewer zombies meant it was easier to stay alive, and that was all that mattered.

  There were fewer than fifty of them out there walking the parking lot now, and it didn’t take long for a wide gap to open up in the crowd. Kevin tensed, ready to run. Another few seconds and it would be wide enough for him to go.

  And that’s when he saw her.

  Mindy Matheson.

  Holy shit, he thought. He stared at her for a long moment, watching her curious, clumsy movements. That really was her. That’s Mindy Matheson.

  And she’s faking it.

  It had been a while since he’d seen a faker.

  Most didn’t last long. Right after the outbreak, Kevin and some of the other survivors he’d hung out with back then had seen one or two a week. The fakers tried to make themselves look like zombies. They smelled like zombies, moved like zombies, had flies swarming around their eyes and mouths like zombies. But they weren’t zombies, and sooner or later, they messed up. They slipped out of character for just a second.

  And that was all it took.

  One tiny slip, one momentary distraction, and the zombies they moved with swarmed them.

  Usually, at least as far as Kevin was concerned, it wasn’t much of a loss.

  The only reason a person ever decided to fake it was because they had given up on their humanity. Surviving among the ruins of what the world had once been was hard. It sucked, in fact. In order to survive, in order to stay sane, you had to work at it. Every day was a fight. Every breath was bought with tears and sweat and loneliness. And sometimes, living free didn’t seem much of a payback.

  The fakers couldn’t hack it. The world they’d lived in, believed in, trusted, had collapsed. Many had made weapons, built strongholds, fought bravely, but in the end, their spirit of resistance had collapsed. Everything had collapsed, leaving them alone, scared, miserably vacant of purpose. They looked at the world and saw ruins; they saw emptiness; they saw a pointless future without faith, without hope, without meaning. They accepted that this was the end, and that going on with this world didn’t matter anymore.

  But they didn’t have the courage to end it all either.

  They were the real walking dead, not the zombies, and Kevin had never felt anything but disgust for them.

  Until now, of course.

  He and Mindy Matheson, they’d dated right after high school. She’d never said two words to him during school. Neither one of them had been all that popular, but it had been a big school, and she had her friends and he had his. But afterwards, when they found they were working at the Home Depot together, neither one of them with the foggiest notion of what they were going to do with their lives, they sort of fell together.

  For about eight months.

  They didn’t end on an obvious note. No cheating, no fighting, nothing like that. They just drifted apart. At the time he’d figured they just weren’t right for each other. That explained why they hadn’t noticed each other back in school. What happened while they were working together was just the natural gravity of two lonely people. And so, just as their orbits brought them together, those same orbits carried them apart. She grew distant, he grew irritable. She stopped calling, he stopped caring. Soon they were basically strangers again. The brief interlude was forgotten, and the two of them went back to their lives of uncertainty and quiet desperation.

  He found it funny that the world had changed so much, and yet he and Mindy had changed so little. It made him laugh, the way the two of them were still living their half-lives, midway between life and death.

  But he laughed louder than he wanted to, and she had heard him. He saw her cock her head to one side. She turned toward the truck where he was hiding, her shifting, searching gaze the only thing that separated her from the wandering corpses nearby.

  Kevin whistled faintly, just loud enough for her to hear.

  She staggered forward.

  For a moment, he thought of running away from there. What did he think he was doing anyway? What could he do? It wasn’t like they were going to run off together or anything. Not now. To fake it for any length of time at all, she would have had to go native in a mighty convincing kind of way.

  And that she certainly had.

  Kevin looked her up and down, from the stringy, matted mess that was her hair to her bare and blackened feet, and tried not to grimace at the stench that came off her. Her face was filthy, her lips cracked and flaking. Her clothes were so stained and ratty he couldn’t even tell what color they had once been. Flies swarmed about her face.

  But she was standing right in front of him now, watching
him. She swayed drunkenly, her mouth hanging open slightly. He wanted to hate her, but her eyes were overly bright, pregnant with the suggestion of pain, and despite his loathing, he felt his heart breaking out of pity.

  He could, after all, still see the girl under all that grime and slathered gore. She had gotten skinny in a ghastly kind of way, but the curves, or at least the hint of them, were still in the right places. And she still had that cute little upturned nose that used to drive him wild when she smiled.

  “Hi, Mindy,” he said.

  She just stared at him, no expression on her face.

  “Hey, you know why they put fences around graveyards?” he asked her. Kevin waited a beat. “Because people are just dying to get in.”

  Again, he waited.

  Her expression didn’t change. She just stood there, swaying.

  “You heard that one, huh?”

  She might have nodded, but if so, it was faint, and he couldn’t be sure.

  “How about this one? A guy finds out he only has twelve hours to live. He goes home to his wife, determined to live it up for his last night on earth. So they have sex, and it’s great. An hour later, they do it again, and it’s even better. And then, a few hours after that, he tells her he thinks they can go at it a third time. ‘Easy for you to say,’ she tells him. ‘You don’t have to wake up in the morning.’ ”

  He beat his index fingers on the truck tire in front of him like he was firing off a rim shot. Ba dum bum. He smiled at her, and then the smile faded. Why in the hell was he doing this? There was no reaching this girl.

  And was he really so lonely that he was talking to a faker?

  But then he saw a flicker at the corner of her mouth, the faintest trace of a smile, and that brought a huge grin to his face.

  “Are you doing okay, Mindy?”

  The smile disappeared. He saw what looked like a tear forming in her eyes.

  He almost reached up for her hand then, and had one of the real zombies not let out a moan at that very moment, he might have thrown her over his shoulder and carried her away from there.

  But a few more real zombies had spotted him. Several were moaning now, staggering toward him. He’d been careless, and now it was time to go.