The Dead Won't Die

by Joe McKinney

  Jacob hardly knew what was happening. He started to protest, but before he could get the words out, the others rose from their chairs and started to file out toward the door.

  “Wait,” he said. “Goddammit, wait!”

  But no one was listening. They walked right by him without so much as a glance. Jacob tried to get Welch’s attention, but the man hustled right by him.

  He turned around and saw Lester Brooks trying to sneak away.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” he said, grabbing hold of the older man’s shoulder. “What was that? I thought you said you were on my side.”

  Brooks never even met his gaze. The younger man who had made fun of the Arbella Code stepped between them, grabbed Jacob’s wrist, and pulled it away from Brooks’s shoulder.

  Jacob tried to push his way around the younger man, but he wouldn’t let go.

  “You’d better let go of my hand,” said Jacob.

  “Not going to happen, Mr. Carlton.”

  “Dr. Brooks,” Jacob called out. “Hey, what is this? Talk to me.”

  “You’re done here, Mr. Carlton.”

  “I’m telling you,” Jacob said, “you’d best take your hand away. I’ll put a boot up your ass.”

  “Security!” the man said. “Somebody get Security over here, please.”

  Behind him, Lester Brooks slipped through the crowd and out the door, leaving Jacob alone with a few older men and the blond man, who still kept hold of Jacob’s wrist.

  Jacob wrenched his hand away.

  “Security,” the man said again.

  A team of three large men hustled through the far door and ran straight for Jacob. The blond man stepped back and motioned for the team to advance on Jacob. Jacob started to raise his fists, but he could see at a glance that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with the three security toughs. They were on him right away.

  He put up a halfhearted struggle, but that ended when one of the toughs wrenched his arm behind his back in a brutal arm bar.

  Jacob hardly had a chance to cry out. They pushed him through the door, shoved him down a darkened flight of stairs, and threw him down the sun-washed steps of the old City Hall building before he even knew what was happening.

  When he finally regained his feet, he found himself facing a wall of locked doors.

  There was no one around.

  Only the smell of the ocean and the sound of seagulls wheeling in the sky above him.

  Just like that, he’d been kicked to the curb.

  CHAPTER 4

  Jacob stood in the street, staring up at the front doors of City Hall, not at all sure what to do. After the way they’d treated him, he wanted to go back up there and bang on the doors. Give them a piece of his mind. Maybe throw rocks at the windows. Kick somebody in the crotch. Like maybe Lester Brooks, or that smug bastard Welch. But that wouldn’t do any good. He knew that. They’d just have him arrested.

  He thought about just leaving, going back to the hospital, which was about the closest thing he had to a home at the moment. The trouble was, he didn’t think he could find his way back there from here. He hadn’t paid much attention to the twists and turns they’d made through town. He was too distracted by the electric cars and the people in their strange clothes and the ocean crashing in his ears. Everywhere he turned, there was something new, something he’d never seen before. And now, after that fiasco up in the council chambers, he had no idea what they had planned for him. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to wait or if they were going to send a car for him or what.

  Maybe he was expected to just leave, go back to Arbella with his tail tucked between his legs like a scalded dog.

  An electric car beeped its horn at him and he jumped in surprise.

  The driver motioned him toward the curb impatiently, then drove around him.

  Still feeling stunned, Jacob stepped back onto the sidewalk.

  And the longer he stood there the angrier he got. It was finally starting to sink in that he and the entire community of Arbella had been put on trial for doing nothing wrong and made to look ridiculous. The values that Jacob held dear, his core beliefs, had been nothing but a joke to the Executive Council.

  They’d actually laughed at him.

  Even Lester Brooks, who had taken the time to come see him in the hospital, who had tried to coach him on how to handle the hearing, had laughed at him.

  The bastards, Jacob thought. Fuck those guys.

  Except that, really, he and the people of Arbella were the ones who were truly fucked. Back home, his community was busting at the seams. His mother’s generation had managed to live through the First Days, thirty years ago, and in the time since, that initial ragtag band of eight hundred survivors had turned what had once been a little backwater burg along the banks of the Mississippi River into a successful community more than ten thousand strong.

  But resources were tight. The town of New Madrid, which they took over and transformed into Arbella—named for the ship upon which John Winthrop delivered his famous City Upon a Hill sermon so many centuries ago—had housed only a few thousand people before the First Days. Now, though, they were having to get increasingly creative to feed and care for their growing numbers. Every lawn was a vegetable garden, and every man, woman, and child worked. Most did multiple jobs. Jacob himself was chief deputy of the constabulary, but also a carpenter, and a vegetable picker in the winters, and a former salvage expert. There were no freeloaders in Arbella. No one got to suck off the community teat. Regardless of age, or physical condition, or any sort of infirmity, everybody worked, everybody pulled his or her weight.

  But the town was at a crossroads, and there was an ongoing debate about what direction Arbella should take. The older folks, like Jacob’s mother and most of the town’s leaders, remembered the horrors of the First Days. They’d built the walls that hemmed in the town and kept the zombie hordes at bay. They’d developed Arbella’s Code and taught their children how to survive as a community. The older generation preached a policy of hold what you got. They were survivors, and they were winning. They had carved out a life for themselves and saw no need to change things.

  Others, though, like Jacob and his friends, had grown up in the shadow of the walls that separated the town from the outside world. Many of them, including Jacob, while working on the salvage teams, had seen the world outside the walls.

  And it wasn’t that scary.

  Or at least he thought it wasn’t.

  He’d convinced the town elders to let him organize an expedition to explore the Zone around Arbella. They’d planned and planned, picked the best and brightest of Arbella’s younger generation, even armed themselves to the teeth.

  But in the end, Jacob’s great plan had been a bust.

  They’d barely made it a week in the Zone before they encountered a sadistic caravan of Slavers and more zombies than they’d ever imagined, and the only thing that hurt more than knowing he’d been so terribly, terribly wrong, was the knowledge that the best and brightest of Arbella’s coming generation had died while in his charge.

  Remembering the dead blunted his anger.

  He turned to the beach and started walking away, thinking that the warm summer sun might clear his head, when one of the doors opened behind him and Kelly Banis stepped outside. She flinched from the bright sunshine, but then she saw him, and relief flashed across her face.

  “Jacob!” she said, and ran to him. She threw her arms around his neck and squeezed him tightly.

  He hugged her back. Pain shot up his left side from his still-healing ribs, but he didn’t care. He just kept hugging her.

  “Oh God, Jacob, I was so worried about you.”

  “They wouldn’t let me see you. I asked, but . . .”

  “I know. Are you okay? How do you feel?”

  “My ribs still hurt, but I think I’ll live.”

  She pushed back at arm’s length. “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “No,” he said. “No. It’s good
to see you again.”

  “You, too.” She stared at him for a long moment, her eyes glassy with tears she fought back. She sniffled. “I thought I was going to be all alone here.”

  “You’re not alone,” he said. “We’re here. You and me.”

  Jacob was thirty-four years old. Kelly was a year younger. They’d known each other since they were kids in grade school, and there had been a summer, back when she was sixteen, that the two of them had thought the world was a wonderland made just for the two of them. He’d said those very words to her during that summer, and he could tell by the look behind her insipient tears that she remembered them. He wondered, though, if she sensed, as he did, how the meaning was altogether different now.

  “These people,” she said at last. “What are they doing with us?”

  “I don’t know,” Jacob said. “I don’t know.”

  “This hearing, they’ve been talking about it for almost a month now. Then they came and got me this morning and kept me in that waiting room for hours just to tell me that they didn’t need to talk to me after all. Did you talk to them?”

  “Yeah,” Jacob said. “It didn’t go well.”

  “What happened?”

  He took a deep breath, glanced back at the doors to City Hall, and motioned her toward the beach. “You mind if we walk for a bit?”

  “Sure.”

  They headed south, toward the seawall. When they were out of sight of City Hall, Jacob said, “All they wanted to talk about was Nick.”

  “Oh God. What did you tell them?”

  “Well, they knew about it already. Most of it, anyway. I guess Chelsea told them most of it.”

  “But you told them about the Code, right? Jacob, what happened . . . we did the right thing. I hate myself for saying that. And I have to admit it, but for a long time, I hated you for doing it. I think, part of me anyway, maybe still does. But we did the right thing, Jacob. He was a thief.”

  “I know. And anyone who steals from his neighbor steals from all of us. I know.”

  “So, what did they . . . I don’t understand. You told them about the Code. What did they say?”

  “They laughed at me.”

  “What?”

  “And then they called Security to throw me out. I just don’t get it, Kelly. Why waste four hours out of their day if all they wanted was to laugh at us?”

  “Did they say anything? What about sharing their medical knowledge? Dr. Brooks promised that—”

  “I don’t think we can count on him for anything. He was laughing right along with the rest of them.”

  “But he . . .” Kelly trailed off.

  The look of distress on her face was heartbreaking. Jacob felt the same way. Or at least he thought he did. He wanted to reach out for her, take her in his arms again, as much for his own comfort as for hers. But he knew that would be the wrong thing to do. Like him, she’d watched lifelong friends gunned down and left to bleed out in the weeds of forgotten places. And if anyone could be said to have lost more than he had on this expedition, it was she. She’d watched her husband, Barry, murdered by the Slavers, his body tied to a clothesline so that all the slaves could watch him change. And ultimately, she was forced to watch his zombified corpse get stripped down to the bones by ravens.

  And still, she was a rock. He was, once again, both startled and amazed at her strength. He’d been beaten and shot, trampled by horses, and pummeled by evil men, and he was still on his feet, but when he looked at her and thought of all the love that she had lost, and saw that she, too, was still on her feet, he realized that hers was the deeper strength.

  They walked on in silence. Jacob was still thinking about the expedition and what had gone wrong when they reached the seawall.

  Suddenly, the sea, unknowable in its vastness, stretched out before him.

  Seeing it, smelling it, took his breath away.

  “What is it?” Kelly asked.

  “I’ve never been this close before,” he said.

  The breath hitched in her throat. She nodded. Maybe, he thought, she understood how truly beautiful, and how truly frightening, he found that vastness, that endless carpet of green. He’d seen countless wonders in Temple, but none equaled this. None equaled the sea.

  He stood staring across the water, watching the white lines of the breakers coming toward the beach. There were groups of teenagers down there, pretty young girls in tiny bathing suits splashing in the waves, kicking water at their boyfriends. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Certainly very little idea of the world pressing against the backs of their elders. It was a nightmare out there. Even if it was a dream world here, on this beach.

  He turned to Kelly and almost asked her if she remembered the Hollow. Back in Arbella, along the banks of the Mississippi, the teenagers of his town had found a little spot just like this one. A place to play with another, to learn about one another, to try out one another.

  It was on the banks of the Hollow that Jacob had taken Kelly’s virginity.

  And where she had taken his.

  He wondered if this made her think of that long-ago time.

  “Which way do we go?” he said.

  She pointed to his right, westward. “That way. We’re about a mile that way.”

  He nodded, and again they fell into silence.

  Jacob turned his attention seaward, watching the distant clouds huddled along the horizon, listening to the steady break of the sea against the beach dotted with seaweed. The water called to something timeless within him, some void where memory and emotion came together and were one single, intense need.

  It was almost enough to overwhelm him.

  He turned to Kelly, the emotion so heavy in his chest it felt like a balloon swelling against the inside of his rib cage, choking away his breath.

  But she was watching the island, its glistening buildings and the silent electric cars, all the wonders of a future a woman like her should have had. It was always the way with them, always of two different worlds: Kelly, with her intellect and curiosity, and Jacob, with his simple tastes and rough ways.

  How, he wondered, had they ever come together?

  But as he wondered about their past, he saw a blue, bubble-shaped electric car come around the corner. It was just like all the others he’d seen, and he wouldn’t have paid it any mind if it hadn’t suddenly veered toward them, like the driver was struggling to keep it under control.

  Jacob put a hand on Kelly’s shoulder.

  He felt her go stiff with fright.

  And then the back door of the car opened and Chelsea Walker rolled out of the backseat.

  She landed face-first in the street, lay there for a second, stunned, and then jumped to her feet.

  “Kelly!” she yelled. “Help me! Please!”

  Behind her, three men climbed out of the car. All three were armed with slender black pistols.

  They didn’t bother to check for witnesses.

  They ran after Chelsea, and closed in on her before she could make it halfway across the street.

  “Jacob,” Kelly said.

  “On it!”

  He rushed the men. They’d knocked Chelsea to the ground and were swarming her, forcing her hands behind her back so that they could handcuff her. Jacob slammed into one of the men shoulder-first and sent him sprawling into the street. A second man was still wrestling with Chelsea, caught off-guard. He looked up just as Jacob drove the heel of his hand into the man’s face, catching him under the nose with the sickening crunch of shattered cartilage.

  The man fell backward, his face a blooming flower of blood.

  The third man was faster, though. He backed away and raised his pistol.

  Jacob didn’t give him a chance to pull the trigger. He lunged for the man, came up under the gun. He curled his right arm over the man’s wrist and twisted, wrenching the pistol back on its owner.

  The man’s eyes went wide in alarm and pain, but he never had a chance to utter a sound. Jacob got his finge
r inside the trigger guard and squeezed.

  The gun lurched, and the next instant the guard’s head swelled to three times its normal size and exploded.

  But there’d been no sound.

  Jacob stared at the weapon, the man who’d held it just moments before nothing but a headless corpse.

  But there were two more.

  One of them reached inside his coat and pulled out a pistol exactly like the one Jacob held. Jacob didn’t give him the chance to shoot it. He leveled the weapon he’d just taken and fired it right at the man’s chest.

  The explosion caught Jacob by surprise. The man grunted in pain, and then his chest swelled and burst open. He fell onto his back, dead, his chest a hollowed-out crater rapidly filling with blood.

  The third man, the man with the bloody face, scrambled toward the car.

  Jacob leveled his weapon and fired.

  The round hit the man just below the elbow of his left arm. It exploded and the man screamed in pain as his severed hand dropped to the pavement.

  He fell to the ground and tried to use his missing hand to crawl away.

  All he ended up doing was smearing a long line of blood on the ground.

  Jacob followed, coming around the back of the car with his gun raised. The man was panting, whimpering out of shock. But before Jacob could fire, the man scrambled to his feet and somehow managed to get the car door open and crawl inside.

  Jacob didn’t hurry. He came around the side of the car, leveled his weapon at the window, and fired.

  A normal bullet would have punched through and killed the man, but this gun, this round, it hit the window and exploded. It didn’t penetrate. The man let out a cry and ducked below the steering wheel.

  The car lurched forward, knocking Jacob to the ground.

  He rolled away from it to keep from getting run over, then jumped back to his feet and ran after the car. As the car moved forward, Jacob fired. The back windshield shattered, but several of the shots bounced off the car’s metal frame and exploded harmlessly in the air.

  The next instant, the car was speeding away.

  Jacob turned back to the girls. Kelly was trying to hold Chelsea in her arms, but the younger woman was fighting to break loose.