Dead Judgment

by Flint Maxwell

  Abby nods. In the faint light, I can see the fear on her face.

  Of all the ways to go out in the apocalypse, I know she wouldn’t want to be eaten by zombies. She’s been bitten once before; she knows the pain that comes with the spreading infection. She knows the fire, and the delusions that fill your mind while being on the cusp of death.

  “If I’m gonna die, Jack,” she says, “I’m glad it’s with you.” A pause. “But I wish it didn’t have to be in this place.”

  The tunnel bends, and we stumble over a few fallen boulders. They’re not tall enough to slow the zombies down, though, at least not for long. Over these rocks, I see the end of the darkness. This is where the green glow oozes.

  There is no door. There are no hobgoblins.

  We turn around now. I shift the piece of concrete into my left hand, and Abby sticks her left wrist into my right hand. I feel the ghost of her fingers close around mine even though they are not there. We raise our other hands, the ones holding concrete slabs given to us by the detonation of a nuclear weapon.

  The zombies are so thick that they almost don’t fit into the narrow passageway. Over the fallen rock they come. There are so many. The yellow eyes combine into one pulsing orb, almost gelatinous in its movement. Dead limbs. Guts hanging from their opened bellies.

  I picture Darlene. I picture Junior. Their smiling faces. Anything but the terror in front of me.

  We step back.

  “Jack,” Abby says over the zombies’ noises, the groans, the moans, the squelches.

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For saving me.”

  The leader of the pack has made his way over the barrier first. He is a man that is mostly intact. This in of itself is surprising. He wears clothes that have not fully rotted away, unlike most of his face: a button-up shirt open almost to the navel. It was once white, but now it is the color of stormy skies. I can still see the blue stripes going up and down. One of his eyeballs dangles on his cheek, and he is missing an ear.

  “Do you wanna take him, or do you want me to do it?” Abby asks.

  I don’t answer.

  She steps forward. With a sigh, she says, “It really is like the good old days, isn’t it?”

  Now comes a woman with no arms. A rail-thin male reaching out toward us.

  The lead zombie lunges. Abby slides out of the way and bashes it in the back of the head. It collapses in a heap.

  The no-armed woman comes at me. I swing my arm down and bring an end to her second life. Then the rail-thin man jumps, and he moves faster than I expected. I stumble backward and hit the pile-up of rocks behind me.

  The instant pain in my spine jolts through the back of my legs. Abby cleans up the mess I’ve made by bashing this zombie in the back of the head, too. Unfortunately I’m there to take the spray of rotten brains. They slap my chest wetly.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “Same old, same old,” she says. “Even until the end.” Then she’s looking down at me, there on this pile of rocks. “I’d offer you a hand, but, you know…”

  I nod. I know.

  I decide I’m not going to die lying down. I’m going to stand up and fight until I no longer can.

  As I’m making up my mind, the stone I’m lying on wiggles like a loose tooth.

  My heart, already pounding in my chest, skips a beat. The zombies are all around us. Abby swings and kicks and swings and kicks. The blood is flying, the bodies are dropping.

  I pry the stone free, and the glowing phosphorescence of radioactivity hits me in the face. I pull another stone out. Then another.

  This is no hobgoblin’s door, but it is a way out.

  32

  The hole is wide enough for us both to fit through. I don’t ask. I don’t wait for Abby to finish smashing this zombie to smithereens. I just grab her and pull her through.

  We tumble backward down another pile of rocks. Dust and soot invade my nostrils and lungs. I’m coughing, and my ankle is flaring with pain again. I’m not even sure where Abby is, but I know I have to get up before the zombies start pushing their way through the hole atop the pile. They’re relentless.

  On shaky legs and a painful ankle, I grab the biggest rocks I can find and start piling them. Limbs push through with a force I can’t comprehend. I move the stones over them anyway. One arm lops off, spraying blackish blood over the rocks like a macabre waterfall.

  Abby is up now. She’s helping me pile the stones.

  As we work, I’m thinking in the back of my mind that I’m going to turn around and see another legion of zombies just standing there, waiting for us to finish so they can chow down. The thought is so real I can feel the cold air expelling from their lungs on the back of my neck, raising the hairs there.

  But when I spin around, when the rocks are piled and the groans from the dead on the other side are all but muffled, I see there are no zombies waiting for us.

  “Wow,” Abby says as we’re trying to catch our breath.

  I glance over at her. She’s covered in blood, dust, dirt—you name it. I can’t imagine I look much better. Never mind that, I can’t imagine the last time I actually looked moderately presentable. Roaming around the wastelands in a cloak, with long hair that falls back from my brow, and a beard—both speckled with gray, I might add—is hardly presentable, even in this day and age.

  “ ‘Wow’, what?” I reply. “We made it out again? We survived?” I smile. “Are you really surprised about that? You’re with Jack Jupiter. All I do is survive.”

  She hits me. “No. Wow, you really pulled that one out of your ass.”

  I shrug. “Not really. When you think about it, with the radioactivity in the area, the aftereffects of the bomb leaking out into the prison, the old woman knew what she was talking about.”

  “Hobgoblins.”

  “Right. She somewhat knew what she was talking about.”

  “Most old people do,” Abby says. She shakes her head. “Hobgoblins.”

  “Hobgoblins,” I repeat.

  Now we’re looking at where we wound up, and we’re not seeing much. It’s very dark in here, with only the faintest of a green glow. The darkness, however, has its benefits. For example, the golden eyes of the dead would stand out in the dark. Right now, I see none, and that’s a good sign. A really good sign.

  My own eyes begin adjusting as the adrenaline in my body starts returning to its normal levels. I see the muted gleam of silver tracks, more wrecked pillars. An old turnstile, its bars pointing up like a frozen spider.

  “C’mon,” I whisper. “And be quiet. Our voices are probably carrying.”

  I step up on the platform as Abby makes a point of not letting me lead her. She weasels her way in front of me, moving carefully around debris.

  Though my eyes have adjusted, they’ve not adjusted very well. I can hardly see farther than the downed turnstile. I’m searching for an exit, for some kind of light, focusing so intensely that I don’t even see the dead body in front of me.

  I hit it and almost fall on my face. The body makes this crunching sound, like stepping on old newspaper.

  Abby stops.

  I bend down and put my hand on what I think is a leg. The flesh is very well-done. Burned. The explosion blasted through here like it blasted through the other side of the pile of rocks.

  Touching this body’s leg doesn’t bring up a feeling of disgust, or anything like that; all it brings is pity. They could’ve been a zombie at the time the fire cooked them, or they could’ve been a regular person just seeking refuge underground—it doesn’t matter. All that matters is they are dead before their time. Taken.

  “Jack,” Abby says. She’s about fifteen feet in front of me, judging by her voice. I stand up straight, the pain in my ankle all but forgotten, and go to her. “Stairs,” she says.

  I can’t see them all that well. They really just look like a hunk of rock vaguely in the shape of the steps, but there’
s a tunnel here around them, mostly intact. I run my hand along the rough surface of the wall, and feel something.

  Paper.

  I pull my face close to it, close enough to make out a few letters in the darkness. The font is white, that helps. It’s a poster, the kind you see in almost every subway from here to New York City.

  I make out the words at the bottom of the page. It reads, ‘PAID FOR BY THE CDC’. I pull the page out of its fractured frame, and look over the rest of it, willing my eyes to adjust further. They listen to me…somewhat. The message atop the page says, ‘Please wear your masks!’ and the picture accompanying it shows an Asian woman fitting what looks like a more advanced version of a surgeon’s mask over her ears, a perfect white smile just visible.

  Abby looks over my shoulder at the page, shakes her head again. “There’s more,” she says. “I’ve seen them before. The government was really trying to save face after what happened. Whether it was accidental or on purpose, who knows? But it’s funny, isn’t it? They knew what they we were dealing with, the virus, they knew how dangerous it was.” She takes the poster out of my hand, grins. “And they still tried shoving their public service announcements in our faces. Half the world was probably dead by the time they printed up this one, yet they kept going. Crazy.”

  I nod. The anger is still present, though, not really simmering down yet. Seeing the poster hasn’t helped, but at least the anger masks the fear. Right?

  “There was one,” Abby continues, “that showed a man in a trench coat and hat and sunglasses clutching his arm. The heading on top of the poster said, ‘Don’t hide a bite! Go to a government-approved clinic today!’” Her eyes flash with anger in the darkness. “By then, I’m guessing everyone knew just what those ‘government-approved clinics’ were.”

  I nod. I can imagine.

  The government’s goal was to stop the spread of the infection as quickly and as quietly as possible, but the disease went through the country like wildfire—an old simile—and by the time the secret of the clinics came out, it was all too late. The secret, of course, being that behind the facade of scrubs and mask-wearing doctors and nurses was a small army in hazmat suits. They would throw the infected person in a room with a bunch of other infected persons, dim the lights so they couldn’t see their eyes, then blast them all to hell with their government-approved rifles. They knew there was no cure. They knew there was no stopping the disease. The only hope they had was to kill all those who were infected…nearly two decades later, here we are.

  It happened. I can’t change the past. I have to live in the moment.

  “Jack,” Abby says. “Are you all right?”

  I figure there’s no point in lying.

  “No,” I say. “I’m not.”

  “Me, either,” she answers. “I think this is a way out. Let’s go.”

  33

  Abby is right. There is a door up here—or what’s left of a door. It is not easy to open.

  “We’re gonna have to kick it,” I say.

  “What if there’s District out there?”

  I smile at her. “Then we’re gonna have to kick them, too.”

  She nods.

  “Together on three,” I say and then I count.

  On ‘three’, both of us swing our legs out and hammer the metal emergency exit. The door opens slightly wider, but it’s wide enough for us both to fit if we turn sideways. We don’t immediately go out, though. We wait about two minutes, watching for either District or zombies. They would’ve heard the noise we made.

  None arrive.

  We slide through the opening and come upon what looks like a city dump. There are piles of debris and garbage…at least upon first glance. The truth is that this isn’t a dump; this is just part of a city that was hit by the nuclear bomb.

  We walk on slowly. From beneath a pile of cars, a pair of shoes stick out. I’m reminded of The Wizard of Oz, when the house lands on the witch. Connected to these shoes are bones. There is hardly any meat on them, and I wonder if that was the blast or the zombies.

  Probably a little of both. The thought makes me shudder.

  Abby says, “I know. It’s bad. Don’t look… Looking just makes it worse.”

  “Makes the imagination run wild,” I agree.

  She nods. “Now what? We’re here, so what do we do?”

  “We get the rest of them out.”

  It takes us a solid fifteen minutes to find what resembles a street. The ground beneath us is fractured, faded away to nothing in some parts. Semblances of civilization are all around us: broken street lamps, cars flipped over or blown to metallic husks, traffic lights without their colored glass, looking at me like a face without eyes, burned clothes with their former inhabitant’s ash marks on what was once sidewalks.

  We circle the block.

  In an alleyway, tucked behind trash and piles of debris, we hear voices. Abby grabs me and pulls me down to the ground between what’s left of two tall buildings. Ahead of us, the shadows of District soldiers dance high upon the brick walls. They are talking, laughing, generally shooting the shit.

  Once they disappear from the mouth of the alleyway and their voices fade, Abby whispers, “This place is crawling with District assholes.”

  “Such an eloquent way of putting it,” I say.

  We crouch-walk to the end of the alley. The soldiers are walking up a dirt road that looks well patted down by traveling feet. They are heading into the heart of the diseased city, where jagged buildings jut up to the sky like broken gravestones, glowing with that eerie green light of radioactivity.

  Across the way is a different dirt road, heading to the east. Beyond that are gates, what was once the subway entrance that would lead you into the heart of the city, but is now the entrance to the underground prisons and torture chamber.

  We have circled back. The two figures are still out there. They hold guns. My eyes are not good enough to see if it’s the same men, the one with the beard and the younger fellow, but it doesn’t matter. Whoever they are, they will have to be disposed of quickly, before they can alert the other District soldiers in the area.

  The problem is an obvious one: we don’t have weapons. Not to mention we’re pretty injured, banged up and beaten.

  “You go left, I’ll go right,” I say. “On my mark, we take them down at the same time.”

  “What could go wrong?” Abby says sarcastically.

  Behind them now, I can hear what they’re saying.

  “Fucking psychos,” the bearded one says. “I hope they rip that Jack Jupiter apart. That would be funny, huh?”

  The other guard mumbles his consent.

  “You all right, Cameron?” the bearded one asks.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  “Making you uneasy, huh?”

  Cameron says, “I don’t like it. They never made all that damn noise before; I think something’s up.”

  “Nothing’s up,” the bearded one says with a chuckle. “That damn place is sealed tight. Even if they could get out, they’d never see the surface. All those damn tunnels will get you turned around. On top of that, there’s over a hundred deadheads roaming around in there, and they’re hungry. Starved.”

  “Not so much after Helga, eh, Bry?” Cameron says. I hear the humor in his voice.

  “Fucking bitch,” Bry, the bearded one, says a little lower. “Glad that dyke threw her over the edge, she deserved it. Can’t stand them Black Knights. Can’t stand them at all. Almost as bad as the jack-offs in the cells themselves. Except for that Mandy bitch. Remember what I did to her?”

  Cameron twists his face up in disgust. He shakes his head. “I remember.”

  “Never thought a bitch that big would be so tight,” Bry says. “Best damn prison pussy I ever had.”

  Disgust roils in my stomach, but I barely feel it over the hate I have for this man. I have to hold myself back from storming out there and ripping Bry’s head off.

  “I can’t stand the Black Knights, either,” Camero
n says, obviously trying to avoid talking more about what Bry did to Mandy. “They think they’re all hot shit because they get to drive around and look for traitors to the District, but we all know they’re just sitting on their asses doing nothing most of the time. Sure they get lucky here and there, but who doesn’t?”

  “You got a good head on your shoulders, kid,” Bry says. “Maybe one day you and me will be running this place. What do you say to that?”

  “I say,” Cameron says, “that you’re full of shit, Bry.”

  Bry laughs heartily.

  “But if you’re serious, then we should go in there and kill all those motherfuckers ourselves. Cut ‘em up and feed them to the zombs.”

  “I like the way you’re thinking,” Bry says. “But we have to bide our time. You wanna start a revolution, you have to do it from the inside. Think about an infection, the way it spreads.”

  “You talking that old-world shit to me again, Bry? You know I don’t remember that.”

  “Right, right,” Bry says. “But just because you don’t remember it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  Across the way, Abby and I catch eyes. I give her a nod. That’s partly my signal, and partly the telepathy we share from surviving together for so many years. She picks up the lid of a trash can and bangs it against the concrete. On my side, both guards whip their heads in the direction of the sound.

  “What was that?” Bry asks.

  Cameron replies with, “I don’t like this.” He clutches his gun to his chest. His finger no longer hovers on the trigger guard. It is now on the trigger.

  I have to be careful, I know.

  “I’m gonna check it out,” he says.

  Bry chuckles. “So wet behind the ears, son.”

  “What the hell does that mean? You insulting me?”

  The bearded guard sighs and shakes his head. “Never mind. All I’m saying is you don’t split up to check a suspicious noise. We go together, got it?”

  “What, you scared?” Cameron asks. He grins. His teeth are the color of nicotine stains, nearly brown in their appearance.