I trip over my backpack, then numbly pick it up and head for the end of the hall. This time Micah doesn’t try to stop me. He figures I won’t leave, but I’m this close to actually doing it. I don’t give a rat’s ass if there are zombies waiting just outside.
But when I get to the end of the hallway I turn around and pace back.
“It bit him. I saw. I saw blood right before…before…”
“We got disconnected.”
“We didn’t get disconnected,” I snap. “It fell into the elevator shaft, between the floor and the car.”
His face pinches. He knows I’m right. And he knows what it means. Ashley’s screwed.
But that’s not the bigger problem right now. Jake is. I know what I saw. I know he was bitten. I watched that IU’s teeth sink into the muscle between his neck and shoulder. I saw the blood on his shirt when he yanked away. I saw the tooth still embedded in his skin.
Right before everything went black.
Before we lost the stream.
Right after everything seemed to finally be coming together.
“Just sit down, Jessie.”
“Don’t tell me to sit down, Micah! I can’t. I want to leave. I can’t. I want to go home. I can’t do that either. I mean, I can.” I wave my hands hysterically around my head and keep pacing. Micah moves out of the way. He doesn’t want to get hit. “I want us to all go home and just when it seems like we finally can… It’s all fucked.”
I sputter, kicking at nothing. I almost punch the wall before stopping myself. My shoulder sends me a painful reminder that it was recently dislocated. I’m almost too far gone to heed it.
“That stupid son of a bitch had to try and be the hero!”
Micah doesn’t say anything. He’s staring at the opposite wall with the same look on his face as when he had his breakdown in LaGuardia. I step over to him and grab his shoulder and shake him. “Don’t you dare wig out on me!”
He snaps out of it, then launches himself off the floor. Without saying a word, he whirls around and heads for the front of the house.
“Where are you going?”
“Knives. There must be some in the kitchen.” He stops and turns. “Gather whatever we can find to defend ourselves. We’re leaving.”
“It’s still dark.”
“I don’t give a crap.”
“Whoa. What just happened? Just a minute ago, you were—”
“I just realized you’re right, Jessie. You’ve been right all along. You were right about the failsafe. You were right that we shouldn’t have split up. We need to go to Jayne’s Hill.”
I shake my head. Now he’s the one thinking irrationally and I’m the one trying to keep him from committing suicide by going out there. But then my own need to be with Kelly overrides everything. “I’ll search upstairs,” I say.
He turns and disappears into the kitchen. I stare at the empty hallway for another moment or two, listening to him opening and closing drawers. At least he’s got the presence of mind to keep the noise down and to use his Link for light. I turn and make my way up the stairs again.
The first room I stop in is the parents’. I’m not looking forward to seeing the little girl’s bedroom.
I don’t need a psychiatrist to tell me I’ve become obsessed with her. Or to tell me why. I know why. It’s because I feel connected to her. We share something: we’ve both been abandoned by our parents.
My father was killed when I was two, murdered by the monster that Professor Halliwell turned into after his attempt to create a cure for Reanimation went wrong. He, along with that fellow Nobel Laureat from Germany named Geena Bloch, and my father, had all been friends. Eric told stories about us having barbecues with the Halliwells. Of the families camping together. Apparently my mother and Mrs. Halliwell were pretty tight, too. I wonder whatever became of her.
But then Bloch disappeared under suspicious circumstances and Dad went to work for the president. He and Halliwell became terrible enemies. Halliwell accused my father of scientific abuse. “He was a nutcase,” Grandpa always said, whenever Halliwell’s name was mentioned. “A crazy, arrogant, old man who betrayed your father. He betrayed us all.”
Grandpa was the general in charge of the Omegaman Project at the time, the group that created the first Undead Marine forces using Bloch’s neural implant device that Arc eventually adapted. The predecessor of our own L.I.N.C. devices.
“How did he betray me?” I’d asked. The look Grandpa had given me had been withering and, for a moment, I thought I might be in serious trouble. Grandpa is one of those rare people who can give you a heart attack just by looking at you. He rarely shows emotion on his face, even if you know he’s just waiting to explode inside.
“By taking away your father, Jessica. He tried pulling some crazy, half-baked stunt, and all he got for it was ironic justice: he died and reanimated. But then the bastard—”
“Ulysses!” my mother exclaimed.
“He came and murdered your father.”
Nobody could ever explain how the monster had managed to escape his lab and make his way from the university to our house in Virginia from so far away.
Zombies don’t commit premeditated murder.
But, apparently, that’s what happened.
My mother became a basket case after that. She worked her way through men and booze like they were both going out of style, and all she ended up doing was losing herself. Talk about a crazy experiment in selfishness.
Eric was thirteen at the time. Thirteen and suddenly forced to become the man of the household. The parent. He never had a chance to be a kid, not after that.
And I never had a chance at having a real mother or a father.
I blink and the room in the house in Gameland comes back to me. I already know there’s nothing useful in here, nothing worth keeping, but I go through the dresser drawers anyway. I find an old pocketknife. I check between the mattresses and under the bed and in the closet. All the clothes seem to still be there, which makes me wonder what exactly happened the day the island was evacuated. How did they get separated from their daughter?
Did they even survive, or were they caught up in the outbreak, too?
The last thing I do before leaving the room is to take one of the pictures of the girl out of my pocket—Cassie, according to the writing on the back—and I set it on their bed. I wish I could do more to bring them together, but it’s much too late for that now.
I find myself crying while searching her room, a veil of tears streaming down my face unbidden and unhindered. I let them fall. They continue as I check the remaining two rooms, a study and a some kind of recreation room, but there’s nothing in either of these, either.
By the time I rejoin Micah downstairs, my tears have dried up.
He holds out a shovel and my pack and asks, “Ready?” The eagerness in his voice is unmistakable.
I nod. I may not be able to fix what broke here thirteen years ago, but maybe I can fix what’s waiting for us in Jayne’s Hill tonight.
Assuming, that is, there’s something left to fix.
Chapter 21
We huddle behind the front door for a few moments with the lights off, listening. There’s not a sound coming from outside, no thumps or moans. Slowly, Micah pulls away the wispy curtain covering the tiny window in the door and peers out. The fabric shreds in his fingers and pieces of it flutter to the floor.
“Well, I see one,” he whispers. His breath is a ghost on the glass, flitting into and out of view. “It’s standing on the lawn, looking the other way.”
Facing the other way, I want to tell him. Not looking. Anyone who’s peered at an Undead’s blackened cataract eyes up close knows they don’t see like we do. They don’t look. Maybe their eyes work in some other way we don’t know about. But they don’t use them to look.
It’s a moot point whether or not they can actually see with their eyes, or if they sense us in some other way. The fact that they can sense us is all that matters.
“Yeah, because they’re bored,” I say, maybe a bit too grumpily. “Slow night with no one to eat. Seriously, Micah, who knows what makes them do what they do. They could be having a pool party somewhere for all we know.”
He turns and gives me a strange look, as if to say, Don’t go crazy loco on me now. The thing is, I’m wondering the same thing about him.
“Just let’s go, okay?” I tell him. “I’ll take out the one on the lawn. You can keep an eye out for the rest.”
“No way. I’m taking it out. You keep watch.”
It’s actually a relief to hear him say that. What if it’s Cassie’s mother or father standing out there? Would I be able to quiet them? Or would I choke?
He quietly turns the handle. It makes a soft grinding noise, like it needs oil. When the cylinder is fully rotated and clicks dully, he pulls the door open, then checks around the corner at the rest of the porch before stepping out onto the landing.
Then he’s gone, slipping down the walkway as silently as a cat, as smooth as oil. Metal gleams in the moonlight. He turns when he reaches the zombie, but the thing doesn’t even have a chance. The dried overgrown grass makes a crunching sound, whispering complaints at Micah’s unexpected intrusion. But the zombie stands perfectly still, its chin raised slightly, exposing its neck.
There’s a shing and the thing slips silently to the ground. It lands with a muffled thump and is dead before I’m even out the door. Micah raises his blade again. It arcs down one more time, entering the back of the Undead man’s head at the base of the skull. Crack!
With a single swift movement, he twists the blade, wrenching apart the vertebrae and severing the cord. Then he pulls the knife free. I suddenly get that strange familiar sensation again, the one where it feels like I’ve seen him do this before. I know it’s just from watching him play Zpocalypto. The same catlike movements. The same unfocused look in his eyes, like he’s seeing something I can’t, something in his VR goggles.
But there are no goggles. And no amount of playing—especially in that crappy VR setup he owns—could prepare anyone for the ruthlessness of the act I just witnessed.
He wipes the knife off on the back of the monster’s shirt and nods at me.
I join him on the sidewalk, kneeling beneath the feathery heads of the unmown grass.
“Let’s hope they’re all that easy,” he whispers.
It bothers me that Kelly and the others haven’t pinged. I wish they would. It’s killing me not knowing what happened.
“So what do we do?” I say.
“We go.”
“No, I mean, which way.” I wasn’t part of the earlier planning, so I hadn’t seen the map. I don’t know which route they took. “Walk or run?”
“Can you jog?”
I nod.
“Good. It’ll be the quickest and quietest way to get there without draining ourselves.”
“Quiet’s good.”
“I don’t might fighting if it’s only a few. We can outrun them if we have to.”
“You forget what it was like back in Long Island City. They don’t tire.”
He shakes his head. “No, I remember. They were fast, but that was different. It’s night now.”
“They’re not reptiles.”
He frowns at me, puzzlement on his face.
“They’re not, like, cold-blooded and stuff. I don’t think temperature affects them.”
He chuckles. “I wasn’t thinking about that. I just meant that there’s more noise right now to mask our sounds.”
I hadn’t really noticed it before, but he’s right. The crickets are loud tonight, a high-pitched buzz that I’d totally blocked out. And there’s frogs, too. The night is actually louder than it was during that first day we were on the island, when there was only the soft whisper of the breeze coming through the buildings.
He stands up, offering his hand. “Highway’s around the corner at the end of that road. We get back on it and go east. Three, three and a half miles. Might get there in an hour jogging.”
“Assuming there’s no trouble.”
Micah’s eyes gleam in the moonlight.
“Yeah,” he says. “Trouble.”
Chapter 22
Jogging would be a lot easier if it weren’t for the packs on our backs. Even before we reach the cross-street, I get irritated with the damn thing bouncing around on my shoulders and pull it off. Micah does the same, claiming it’s making too much noise. We jog, swiftly and silently, rolling our feet from heel to toe to minimize the noise. I have the pack in one hand, the shovel in the other, and a knife tucked into the waist of my jeans behind me. I’ve slipped the pistol into a pocket of my backpack, which is held closed by a Velcro flap. I don’t want to risk losing it. Or it falling into anyone else’s hands like it did yesterday.
The highway looms ahead of us in the moonlight and we make our way to it, successfully managing to avoid drawing the attention of any Infecteds. I catch sight of at least a half dozen. They’re mostly just standing there staring at the moon or wandering off in the other direction. Even the ones that see us are too slow to give chase.
The highway had been built up higher than the surrounding ground, presumably to aid in drainage. Flooding had become a major problem here in the past few decades, especially since hurricane alley shifted north. We get these torrential rainstorms in February and March that drop two feet of water in a twenty-four-hour period. Monsoons.
Rising sea levels is another issue, though less so this far from the coast. A lot of the beachside roads were flooded during the first melt-off a couple decades ago, dooming many of the towns to a soggy, mosquito-ridden death. But I don’t really think about all this right now. All I care about is that the berms flanking the road make it that much harder for zombies to get up there.
We reach the eight-foot chain link fence in no time. I throw the pack and shovel over, where they land with a soft thump in the grass on the other side, and I begin climbing. Micah helps me, since my shoulder and wrist are still sore. We try to make as little noise as possible. But the rattling of the chain link still draws a few IUs out. They appear out of the deeper shadows between houses and from underneath long-abandoned cars. They crawl out of collapsed sheds and garbage heaps. I hang from the fence for a moment, then drop into the shadows beneath me, hoping I don’t land on a rock and twist an ankle.
After I recover my pack, I keep a wary eye on the Undead as they shuffle toward us.
“Let’s go,” I hiss.
Micah’s at the top and swinging his legs over the side before the closest one gets to within thirty feet of us. He sits on top and chuckles at me.
I gather up the shovel and do a quick check up and down the line of the fence. The grass is tall enough to hide a person—at least as high as my waist—though not so high as to hide anything that might be walking upright through it.
Micah drops his pack and the knife. I reach over to pick them up. “Out of the way,” he says. “I’m going to jump.”
“Just climb down,” I tell him, growing irritated. It’s like this is all a game to him now. He saw what happened to Jake back there, and yet he actually seems to be having fun. “You’re going to break your ankle.”
But he ignores me. He digs his heels in and pushes himself off. The wire sags beneath his weight, then bounces back. He arcs out, then jerks suddenly back, a yelp of surprise coming from his mouth. His body slams against the chain link, where he dangles upside down flailing his arms.
“Smooth move,” I tell him, reaching up to help. “This is why I just say no to shoe laces.”
“Just cut the damn thing!” he says, looking mildly embarrassed. Serves him right.
I reach up just as the first zombies reach the fence,
and I get a good whiff of one before sticking my nose into my armpit. The things start to hurl themselves at the wire, desperate to get to us.
“Hey! Ouch!” Micah shouts at them. He kicks his loose foot out and knocks one away.
“I don’t think that’s going to help,” I say warily. “Just get the hell down from there.”
“Would if I could.”
They try to reach through and grab him, but the wire snags their fingers. A few poke through, brushing Micah’s exposed stomach. He smacks them away in disgust.
“Well, at least they can’t bite you.”
He gives me a dirty look. “No, but I can still kick them.” He lashes out and strikes one on the forehead through the fence. It ricochets back and falls down. Micah starts laughing. “See?”
I reach up with my knife, more irritated than amused. He needs to get serious. I slip the tip inside the loop and try to saw through it. “Stop squirming!”
“They’re touching me!”
“So?”
“So, I’m ticklish.”
“Ha ha. Very funny, Micah.”
“Just hurry up. I’m getting a head rush.”
“That’s just oxygen going to your brain,” I snipe back. “Something it’s been deprived of lately. And stop bumping into me.”
“Try climbing up.”
“Screw you. I’m not sticking my fingers or anything else through the fence here. They’ll get gnawed on.”
I stand as tall as I can on my toes and thrust the knife out. I finally snag the lace, but I still can’t get any leverage on it.
“Forget it,” Micah says, pushing me away. He plants his free foot on the fence and tries to get himself turned around. But his sneaker keeps slipping. “Okay, try pulling on me instead. The damn thing has got to break sometime.”
So I grab his shoulders and pull on him. Meanwhile the group of Undead on the other side of the fence has grown to about ten. More are coming, drawn by the noise.
“So much for making a quick getaway,” I grunt.
“Damn party-crashers.”
The fence starts to lean toward us from the combined weight of the zombies and us pulling on it. I let go, but Micah tells me not to.
Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones Page 28
