“I ain’t scared. I’m just smart. How do you expect to take over an empire being a damned fool?”
Cameron’s smile disappears.
I give Abby the signal again. These two bitch and moan like an old married couple, but I’m no match for them together. We have to separate them.
Abby slams the trashcan lid on the ground harder. This time, Bry jumps. I think he was lying when he said he wasn’t scared, and that’s all right. He should be.
“Okay, something’s really up,” Cameron says.
I whistle, and that’s another sign.
Cameron whirls around, so does Bry, and there’s Abby waiting for them.
She says, “Boo!”
Before Cameron can raise his weapon, Abby throws the garbage lid at him like a Frisbee. He’s not fast enough to dodge it, and the sound it makes as it whirls through the air and crunches against his nose is vomit-inducing—at least to those not used to violence. For me, it’s music, a sweet melody in my ears.
Cameron cries out. I think his gun’s about to go off, but it doesn’t. Instead, he drops it and uses both hands to clutch the bleeding pulp that was once his nose. The rifle clatters on the ground, and Abby dives for it just as Bry levels his in her direction.
“BITCH!” he shouts. And that’s the last word he ever speaks.
I’m on him in an instant. I grab him under the scruff of his beard and twist. His neck doesn’t break on the first go-around. In the old movies, those relics of the world before this one, the action hero always broke the bad guy’s neck the first time. Then, of course, a barrage of bullets would bounce off his sweaty and muscular chest as if he was made of iron. But this isn’t the movies; I am no action hero.
It takes me two twists of the neck before I hear a slight crack, and even then Bry’s resisting me. He has a thick neck. It’s not easy to break, but when I’m determined, I can get a lot done—
Crack.
He falls to the ground in a heap.
I take his gun and aim down at Cameron. The blood is pouring down his face, gushing. He’s not as stupid as I originally thought, because he takes his hands away from his nose and raises them in the air.
“No, please,” he says.
Abby stands behind him with Cameron’s rifle. She shakes her head emphatically, telling me to pull the trigger.
I sigh. “Are you brainwashed?” I ask him.
“Huh?”
I look at Abby. “Is he brainwashed? You’d know.”
“Turn around,” she orders him. “Look at me.”
Cameron stifles a sob, turns.
She says, “The last of the living will never survive. If you want to make it, you have to…”
“What?” Cameron says. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s not brainwashed,” Abby says.
“What? How do you know?” I ask.
“I know,” she says. “There’s a saying, like a trigger. He doesn’t know the saying. Do you?”
Cameron turns around and looks at me. “What? What’s going on?”
“He’s just a follower,” Abby says. “Scum like the rest of them. Are you going to let him live? Are you really going to let him live, Jack?”
I don’t answer verbally, but I lower the rifle. That’s answer enough.
Abby says, “Don’t you remember Froggy? Don’t you remember what he did to Mother’s village? Don’t you remember what happened to Darlene after that?”
“I remember,” I say. “How could I forget? I remember it all too well.”
“Please,” Cameron says. “If you’re going to kill me, do it now. Don’t make me wait.”
I point into the night, where, just faintly, the bridge into this city is barely visible. Through the haze I can see its repaired towers, its long, taut cables. “That is where you are going to go,” I tell him. “You are going to cross that bridge and you are going to get out of this city and away from the District. Do you understand?”
Cameron says nothing.
“You get out of the District. It’s no place for a kid like you. You have a chance to lead a normal life—as normal a life as it can be now. You go west and you settle down in a place where there’s no District.”
“They’re e-everywhere,” he says. Tears streak down his face, get lost amongst the dirt.
“No,” I say. “They’re not.”
“They’ll take over the country. They already have jets,” he says.
I shake my head. “I won’t let them.”
“Who are you?” he asks.
I know he’s not asking my name. He already knows, but I tell him anyway. “I’m Jack Jupiter. Remember that name. That’s the man who let you walk out of here alive. You want to take over the world, you aren’t gonna do it with the District, I’ll tell you that.”
Cameron looks at me with a mixture of hate and understanding. I don’t blame him.
I remember being young, I remember being conflicted all the time, like he is now. I hope he lives long and I hope he changes his ways, and when he’s sitting under the light of the full moon, maybe with a wife who loves him and children of his own sleeping behind strong walls, he’ll remember the man who spared him.
The guard drops his hands, turns, and runs toward the bridge.
Abby and I watch him as he disappears over the horizon, getting smaller and smaller.
“I hope you don’t regret that later, Jack,” she says.
“I’m past the point of regrets. Whatever happens, happens. But I don’t have to kill if it’s not merited.”
Abby points to the dead guard at my feet, the one whose neck I snapped. She flips him over with the toe of her boot, cords standing out on her neck with the effort. The bearded man—Bry, Brian, whatever—is big.
He stares up at me with blank eyes. His head lolls flaccidly, the bones severed, out of place.
“What about him? Was his death merited?” Abby asks with a smirk.
She’s always trying to get a rise out of me. I think she enjoys it, but if I pressed her about it, she’d tell me she’s just playing devil’s advocate. Abby has never had any qualms about killing, not even that first night in Woodhaven, when she and I were the only ones who escaped the recreation center, and she certainly doesn’t have them now, though we’re the only ones of our original group who haven’t died—besides Norm.
Looking back into Bry’s glassy eyes, I say, “Didn’t you hear him? What he said he said he did to Mandy makes me sick. And he did call you a bitch… If that’s not a good enough reason to snap his neck, I don’t know what is.”
Abby’s smirk spreads into a full-fledged smile. When she smiles, she looks a decade younger, like she hasn’t lived all her adult life in the apocalypse.
It’s nice to see her smile.
“Touché, Jack Jupiter. Touché,” she says.
I bend down. The pain in my ankle is almost nonexistent now. That’s the adrenaline again. By the time it wears off, I think I’ll need a wheelchair. Don’t even get me started on tomorrow. I’ll need to be electrocuted just to get up—that is if I ever get to sleep. I’d bet some good batteries and old pain pills on the chances of me not getting to bed tonight.
Gently, I use my fingertips to close Bry’s eyelids, so he’s not staring up at me like a stuffed deer mounted above someone’s fireplace.
“He said he raped Mandy. Pieces of shit like him should die.”
Abby nods, then bends down and takes a knife from Bry’s belt. “He won’t be needing this.”
“No, he won’t. The gun, either. Come on, let’s go bust our friends out of prison.”
As Abby and I are dragging Bry’s body into the alley we came from, and covering him up with some of the loose debris and trash, she says, “What if the younger one goes on and notifies the other soldiers? Well, not really ‘what if’. More like ‘when’.”
“You really need to work on your views of the human race.”
She shrugs. “Can you blame me?”
“No…I guess not.
People suck.”
“That’s a drastic understatement,” she says. She lays a burned piece of cardboard, its edges crisped and singed, over Bry’s face. She pats it twice. “Sleep tight, B-ry.”
We walk to the mouth of the alley. The gates to the subway entrance are only about twenty feet from us, on the corner of what is left of this street.
As we’re walking, I say, “If he lets the guards know about our escape, you get to say ‘I told you so,’ but it doesn’t matter much. They’ll know about us sooner rather than later, I think.”
“That’s reassuring.”
I reach out and take the cold bars of the gate into my hands. Slowly, I pull them open. They whine and scrape the concrete. Someone really isn’t keeping up with the maintenance around this particular District stronghold. I don’t worry about anyone hearing the noise; if they didn’t hear our scuffle with the guards, they won’t hear this. I am glad, however, that our scuffle didn’t turn into a firefight. That would’ve really sucked. It was a big risk, doing what we did, I know, but like I said earlier: I’m past the point of regrets.
Down the steps we go for the second time. It’s a little better this go-around because we aren’t being escorted by the Beard and the Brat. We’re moving on our own free will, and we’re going to save our little band of rebellions.
The first walkthrough was a pretty nice precursor. Now we know where to go, how to get out, what knobs to turn, what doors to push.
“Ladies first,” I say to Abby, and make a sweeping gesture toward the ladder that leads to the hatch.
“No, I insist.”
“I should’ve known,” I say. “Chivalry may not be dead, but it’s certainly dead for Abby Cage.”
She nods, bends down and picks up some rope. “Here.” She hands it to me. “We may need this.”
I go up the ladder and push the hatch open. It doesn’t squeak as loudly as the gate on the surface did. As soon as the hatch opens, the constant drone of zombie noises assaults my ears, just as their smell assaults my nostrils. But this is put on the back-burner after what I see right in front of me.
A skinny man, as big and as intimidating as a scarecrow, wears his lips peeled back in a bloodless grin, his fists held high above him. He means to crush my face into dust.
I recognize this as Roland. Mandy probably threw him up to the platform so they could attack the guards when they returned. A silly plan, but no sillier than the one I embarked on an hour ago, going on the confidence of the hobgoblin lady. But hey, that plan worked so why couldn’t theirs?
“Wait!” I shout. “Don’t!”
The whoosh of wind as his fist whistles through the air brushes past my cheek. I nearly lose my footing and fall down the steps. That would do wonders for my ankle, wouldn’t it?
“Jack?” Roland says, cocking his head. He pulls his punch at the very last second.
Cringing, I say, “Yeah. It’s me.”
“You’re…you’re alive?”
“In the flesh.”
He puts his hands under my arms and rips me up through the hatch. I didn’t think the guy had that kind of strength, but lo and behold, I’m on top of the rock platform.
“What is it?” Mandy calls.
“Roland?” Lilly echoes.
It’s good to hear her voice. I’m glad she didn’t come after me and Abby.
Roland lets me go, and I peer over the edge.
“Jack!” Lilly says. “Oh, my God. I thought you were dead. Where’s Abby?”
From behind me, Abby says, “Right here.”
She has the ladder that attaches to the rock platform, and she hooks it over the hinge on the edge. It rolls out and reaches the bottom. Lilly is the first one to come. She wraps us all up in a hug.
The rest come not long after.
“We’re free?” Nacho asks.
I clap him on the shoulder. “Free as hell, my friend.”
He shakes his head. Tears pool in the corner of his eyes, threatening to drip down his cheek. “Gracias. Gracias!”
“You’re welcome…o?” I say.
“‘De nada’, Jack. ‘De nada’,” he corrects me.
“De nada,” I say.
Abby leads them through the hatch then pokes her head back up.
I’m looking out over the platform at the milling zombies. Some have their heads tilted toward me, but most are busy bumping into each other and making that death rattle in the back of their throats.
“You coming?” Abby asks.
“I’ll be there in a second.” Now I’m looking at the last subway car. I can just see the top of the hobgoblin woman’s head, her graying hair.
Abby must see this because she says, “That’s a lost cause, Jack.”
I shrug. “She helped us. Now I’m gonna help her.”
“How?”
I raise my rifle and press down on the trigger. Heads explode, bodies fall, the undead become the dead once more.
Abby does the same.
The darkness fills with our gunfire, and the smell of cordite is thick in the air, but it is no thicker than the smell of death. We shoot until the ones that can still move, which is about fifty or so, don’t. And we shoot the ones that can’t move, too.
As we put our weapons down, my ears ringing, my hands trembling with phantom vibrations, Abby says, “You’re too good for this world, Jack. The way it is now. You’re too good.”
I say nothing.
She leaves as I climb down the platform toward that last subway car.
34
The woman looks out the grimy windows as if she’s appreciating the first true summer’s day after a long and cold winter and a wet spring.
“You killed them all,” she says.
I stand atop her car, looking over the edge, down at her scalp. She looks like a woman in a dream.
“I did. Now you can get out of here.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“You were right, you know,” I say, and she looks up at me. “About the doorway. There was one.”
“I know,” she says. “That’s where the hobgoblins come from.”
“That they do. Be careful out there.”
I give the woman the rope Abby gave to me, hoping that she’ll climb out.
“You be careful, too.”
“Where will you go?” I ask her.
She smiles somberly, and for a moment, I can see the woman she was before this world took her sanity. She looks like she might’ve been a schoolteacher, strict yet caring, always looking out for her students, both in the classroom and outside of it.
I had teachers like that when I was growing up. They’re worth more than they think. I hope this woman knows she is worth more than she thinks, too.
“Wherever the wind blows me,” she says. “But I presume I will go far, far away from here.”
I nod. “Good. I don’t think this place will be around much longer.”
“Are you going to destroy it?”
“I’m going to do what I have to do,” I answer.
“So yes,” she says. “More destruction for a destructive world.” She turns away from me, starts gathering up her things. I toss a knife through the opening in the top of the car. It lands a few feet away from her feet.
“For protection,” I say.
“I don’t need it,” she replies. “Not even from the hobgoblins.”
I smile. “Take it, just in case.”
She picks it up and puts it into the canvas bag with the rest of her things. “Happy?”
“I am. Go someplace west,” I say. “It’s safer out west.”
“Wherever the wind takes me,” she mumbles again. “If it is west, then it is west. If not…” She shrugs.
Smiling, I leave her. I go back up the ladder, but I don’t take it with me, so she can use it whenever she is ready.
Something tells me she will not leave, that she was just humoring me. She is at peace with death, and there’s nothing I can do about that, but this woman whose name I don’t eve
n know has helped me more than she’ll ever know. I hope she finds peace. Whether it be out west, or in the afterlife.
35
On the surface, Mandy is bent over. She’s holding a stick and drawing some sort of map on the dirty, cracked concrete.
“You sure?” Abby asks. “You sure that’s where they’re at?”
Mandy brings her free hand up and makes an X over her left breast. “Cross my heart,” she says. “I pored over those schematics for hours.”
“If they found out about you hacking in, surely they’d change them around, though, right?” Lilly says. She’s bent down and looking over the crude map. Now she looks at Mandy.
“They didn’t know what I looked at. All they knew was that I was in a place I shouldn’t have been.”
“Not to mention that they were betting on you being dead soon,” Roland says.
Mandy nods. “And that.”
I step into the circle. The map is actually pretty good, considering the circumstances.
“They wouldn’t have moved an entire arsenal of armed weapons because a peasant—no offense, Mandy—hacked into their mainframe,” I reason.
“None taken,” she says.
“I agree.” Abby stands up straight. She reloads the rifle from a clip she took off of Bryan before we buried him in the trash. Click-click. “So you know where it’s at, for sure?”
Mandy stands up. She points into the darkness, where we can just make out the broken black fingers of the few skyscrapers that once made up this city, whatever city it was. “Just over there,” she says. “No less than a mile in.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Roland asks. “Let’s take these sons-of-bitches down.”
I shake my head. “No, Roland.”
His jaw is set firm, but at the sound of my words, it drops. “What do you mean?” he asks.
I look at Nacho, then at Mandy. “You’re going the opposite way,” I tell them.
“I know how to set the warheads off,” Mandy says. “I know how to get there. You need us.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Abby says, but her tone isn’t hostile. “I know how to set off the warheads. It’s not difficult.”
“And if she didn’t,” Lilly adds, “I’m sure we could manage. But I know where Jack is going with this.” She eyes me. “It’s not hard to read Jack Jupiter.”
Dead Judgment Page 15
