Deadman's Switch & Sunder the Hollow Ones

by Saul Tanpepper

  “Dude, it’s going to fall over,” I say, starting to worry.

  He kicks at them again and shouts. I hear an edge creeping into his voice.

  “Stop being so loud.”

  “Who cares? They can’t get us.”

  Micah swipes at the arm of an especially emaciated zombie. It’s somehow managed to get its entire bony hand through one of the openings. “Get the fuck away from me, you pervert!”

  “Perv?” I say, laughing nervously.

  I swing the knife at the arm, but it’s flailing around too much and I end up hitting it with my fist instead. The arm breaks with a loud snap! I mean, it just breaks right off like a dry stick, right at the wrist.

  “Damn, Jess.”

  The stump just keeps jabbing through, trying somehow to snag a piece of Micah even though there are no fingers left to grab with. The ends of the bone glisten dully through the rubberized flesh.

  “Dude, this isn’t working,” I tell him. I kneel down in the grass below him and tell him to push up against my back to unhook himself.

  I feel his hands skitter over the back of my shirt.

  “Would you just hurry?”

  “Your shirt’s slippery.”

  He ends up grabbing my ass by accident. Mumbling a quick apology, he pushes off. I stagger a little under the weight, glad he can’t see the foul look on my face right now.

  There’s a loud rattle behind me. I look up in time to see the heads of several zombies jerk to the sides. Something behind them is pushing through, trying to get to the front. For a split second I think of Moses parting the—

  Dead Sea

  —Red Sea.

  “What was that?” Micah asks.

  I can’t see it yet. But I know it’s big. I don’t answer. I just tell him to focus.

  He pushes, grunting and swearing under his breath. I can hear him trying to unhook the lace with the toe of his other shoe.

  The zombies in front suddenly lurch forward, their faces crushed against the fence.

  “Hurry up, Micah!”

  “What do you think I’m doing?”

  There’s a metallic twang as a wire connector holding the chain link to the frame pulls free. It whizzes past my face and disappears into the grass. Micah drops about a foot, hitting me and knocking me over. I fall onto my hands. The knife blade twists when it hits the ground and a bolt of pain shoots up my arm. It’s the same wrist I twisted fighting Stephen in the tram. Micah slams back into the fence, spinning around and coming face to face with the IUs. They hiss at him and reach through.

  “God, they stink.”

  But I’m not thinking about what they smell like right now. I’m struck dumb by my first glimpse of the thing that cleared a path through the Undead. It’s huge, a seven foot tall behemoth with shoulders as wide as a doorway and a head as large as a watermelon. It opens its mouth and lets out a wail that drowns out all the others.

  “What the fuck was that?” Micah cries.

  I still can’t speak. I try but nothing comes out. I know if I had testicles, they’d be somewhere north of my liver right now and heading for my throat.

  Its scalp is half-bald and mottled by old scabs. It grabs the top bar and its fingers are as white as bone and the beds of its long-missing nails are blackened. Old blood, I think. Blood from its victims. It starts to shake the fence.

  “Jess—ow!” Micah shouts as he pitches back and forth, slamming repeatedly into the fence. “What the f—Ow!”

  It’s trying to shake Micah loose. But then it stops and leans forward, pushing instead. The metal posts begin to bend, letting out an agonized squeal.

  I scramble for the knife, then jump back to my feet. The zombie stops and turns toward me. Its dead eyes seem to track my movements. Its tongue passes over its eroded lips and it lets out a soft moan.

  “Use the shovel!”

  I snap my eyes away long enough to grab the shovel. But instead of bashing the beast’s fingers, I jab the blade at Micah’s foot. He has time for half a shout before the lace snaps and he tumbles to the ground. The fence springs back, nearly jerking the giant off its feet. It steps backward, knocking over several zombies standing behind it.

  “Let’s get out of here!” I shout, pulling Micah by the arm. He swings around to snatch his bag and knife, nearly yanking me off my feet.

  When he sees the giant, he freezes. “Holy shit!”

  “No time for admiration, Micah!”

  The giant zombie lets out another moan. This one seems to come right through the ground.

  Micah spins. In a flash he’s past me and scrambling the berm to the highway. The monster pushes and the fence rattles and strains. And I know—I know even without looking, just from the way the air seems to thin out and the way the loose sounds of the chain link suddenly grow taut—that the fence won’t hold for much longer.

  I snatch my bag and run like my life depends on it, because it does.

  Chapter 23

  I scrape my knuckles stumbling out onto the road, and race after Micah. He’s already a good fifty feet ahead of me. He glances back to make sure I’m coming, gesturing frantically. I think he’s actually smiling. If I weren’t so god damn terrified right now, I’d be so mad at him!

  We run full out for a good five minutes. He lets me catch up. Then we both slow down again and chance a look behind.

  The roadway is empty as far as I can see. We’re the only things on it. The night is quiet and peaceful, broken only by our heavy breathing and the grating whine of the crickets alongside the road. The air is still and thick with dew, invisible in the darkness, materializing on our skin like some sort of chemical reaction, a glue that’s bonding us to the night.

  The nearly full moon gleams down upon us, turning the road into a glistening river that stretches out ahead of us, never widening or narrowing, just drawing us down its constant track like thread on a single silver needle.

  “What the hell was that thing?” I finally manage to say. I lean against the shovel and pant.

  “My best guess?” Micah says, resting his palms on his knees. “Former New York Giants nose tackle.” He looks at me and snickers.

  How can he joke about it so easily? I wonder.

  But that’s the old Micah coming back. He laughed back there while dangling upside down just a foot from the zombies. I shake my head and make another check behind us to make sure the thing hasn’t suddenly appeared when we weren’t looking. “What the hell is a nose tackle?”

  He starts to explain, but I cut him off short. “Forget I asked. Anyway, what matters is that it gave up.”

  “You hope it gave up.” But he nods. I can see the look in his eyes, the eagerness, the sense of feeling alive in the face of such horror.

  “It’s not funny,” I say, and then I realize something, the difference between him and Reggie. Reggie masks his fear of death with humor. Micah uses humor to hide his fear of not living.

  I glance nervously at the side of the road. I strain my ears for any sounds. But there’s nothing to hear or see. Either the monster zombie couldn’t get over the fence, or something else happened to stop it. It’s not here and it’s not coming, and this knowledge lets me relax just the tiniest little bit.

  “Whatever,” Micah says, waving a hand behind us, dismissing the thing. “Good riddance.”

  If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was disappointed.

  The road begins to tilt slightly upward as we get closer to the island’s high point. It’s not enough to be a problem while walking, but we tire out faster when we jog, so we alternate between the two. I’m impatient and find myself wishing more and more we had a faster way to travel. Like Micah’s car. God, I miss that piece of crap.

  For that matter, I miss being home.

  In the twentieth century, Jayne’s Hill was four hundred feet above sea level. With the way ocean levels have been fluctuating lately, precise elevations are almost meaningless. Regardless, no one expects the sea level to reach as high as the hill. That’s w
hy Arc placed the Gameland mainframe computer there.

  We pace ourselves to keep from getting too tired. We need to keep something in reserve for if we run into another IU.

  Not if. When.

  Packs in hand, our feet quietly slapping the pavement, we run or jog or walk. The further we get from the wall, the more our breathing slips into the rhythm of the night. Do the Undead hear the crickets and frogs, too? The dogs barking somewhere off in the distance? The screech of an owl? What draws them out at night when the world is bereft of the living?

  The moon passes behind a cloud and the night darkens. It’s just one cloud, long and thin and strangely yellow, like drawn-out taffy. I sense the rhythm of the night change around us. Micah slows, seeming to become aware of it, too. I catch him glancing around more carefully, straining into the gloom, but it’s too dark to see much beyond the dull gleam of the highway.

  “What is it?”

  He shakes his head, faltering, but he doesn’t answer. We keep on running.

  The cloud shifts and the pall over the world falls away. But the old rhythm never quite returns.

  We’d been passing through what might’ve been parklands, back when the island was inhabited. There are fewer buildings and only the occasional IU or two. But now we’ve come to another residential area and we begin to see them again in larger numbers, groups of three or four, dozens standing in the middle of the roads below us. Others dwell in the shadows half-hidden beneath scraggly, unpruned trees, ghosts in the overgrown yards of houses whose windows stare blankly out at them.

  My pulse quickens. I’ve learned my lesson not to get complacent. I catch myself scanning every shadow I see, searching for that giant monstrosity that attacked us back there at the fence. But it’s not here. None of the IUs I now see is anywhere near as big as it was.

  Micah points to a group of them marching down one of the side streets, almost two dozen, all heading in the same direction away from us. They’re like an army. Or participants in some otherworldly funeral parade. I wonder where they’re going.

  What caught their attention? Was it a dog or a cat? Some other animal?

  There’s nothing for us to do but to keep running. Nothing to occupy my mind but whatever thoughts happen to wander into it.

  Images of Cassie and her parents inevitably come to me—the living versions, not the Undead ones: five-year-old Cassie on her swing, at the beach, playing. I imagine her father throwing a ball into the surf for the family dog to retrieve. I picture Cassie as she might look now. Alive, not Undead.

  There, but for the grace of God…

  I wonder where she disappeared to after she finally got out of the house. Is she looking for her parents? Are they still alive and living somewhere else? And if so, have they forgotten about her? Or are they Undead, too?

  I wish I knew: Do zombies stay close to where they were when they lived? Do they feel a sense of attachment? To places? To things? Why else would Cassie have kept her stuffed rabbit with her all these years that she was trapped in that bathroom? What difference to the Undead does a toy rabbit make?

  And why did I decide to keep it, just as I had the photos?

  A trophy?

  Am I sick? Is that it?

  I realize I’ve stopped looking for the giant and am now looking for a much smaller figure out there, even though I know it’d be impossible for her to have come so far tonight.

  I’m sorry, Cassie.

  I know they sense us. They turn as we pass, but just as they did during our bike ride a couple days earlier, they’re always too slow to react, too far behind when they start to follow. And even if they were quicker, the highway fence would eventually stop them.

  Nevertheless, some of them try to give chase. Their low hungry moans and the rattle of the chain link off in the distance giving voice to their primal desire, spurring us on. What else are they going to do on a night like this?

  “You think maybe they understand each other?” I ask Micah. “I mean, you know, if one moans, does that sound, like, communicate to all the others that there’s food nearby?”

  Micah doesn’t answer. He just keeps jogging, his bag swaying in his hands and his eyes scanning the road ahead and the shadows alongside it. The same obsessed look as when he’s playing Zpocalypto: focused and intense. The same old Micah coming back after the trauma of the past week.

  “I hope not,” I answer myself.

  We come across our first highway IU a full thirty minutes in. Micah sees it before I do and slows to a walk. He stops, raising an eyebrow at me.

  “What’s up?” I say. Then I see the creature, camouflaged in front of an old highway sign, two or three hundred feet ahead.

  It’s not moving. It still hasn’t sensed us.

  “What the hell’s it doing?” Micah whispers.

  “No idea,” I answer. I’ve seen them do this before, staring at the sky like this. It strikes me as creepy, and yet somehow peaceful.

  “Waiting for the mother ship,” Micah concludes, laughing quietly.

  “Aliens?” I say rolling my eyes. “What have you been smoking?”

  He shakes his head. “Maybe that’s the problem. Nothing lately.”

  I take a wary glance back along the way we came. The road is still empty as far as I can see. My heart is pounding in my ears, drowning out all the other sounds.

  No. Wait. There are no other sounds. No crickets. No frogs . They’ve all stopped. The night is unnaturally quiet. Realizing this really starts to freak me out.

  “I don’t like this,” I hiss.

  “It’s just one.”

  He doesn’t sense the change in the air. He noticed it before when we were jogging, but now he doesn’t. It’s just the same obsessed gleam in his eye. This is what he’s been training for all his life: to kill zombies. Except this one is real.

  “So was Zombiecles back there,” I say.

  “Zombiecles?”

  I wipe a bead of sweat off my cheek with my shoulder, shrugging. “So, what do we do?”

  “You want to go back?” he asks. I know he doesn’t mean it. I know he’d be disappointed and argue if I said yes. But he knows I won’t say it. He knows I’d rather die than go back now. Now that we’re so close.

  “I’m going to ping Kelly.”

  “What? Here?” Micah sighs impatiently. “Text him. It’ll be quicker—quieter, I mean. Let him know we’re coming.”

  I hesitate. If I text, I won’t know if he’s okay. I won’t know if he’ll even get the message. And I want to hear Kelly’s voice.

  “And make it quick, Jess. There’s more of them coming.” He gestures off to the side.

  I glance over and see the shadows shifting. They’re less of a threat to us, because of the fence. But the noise they’ll make will alert the one on the road that we’re here.

  “I wonder how he got up here,” Micah wonders, shifting anxiously. He looks around. “Maybe there’s a hole in the fence.”

  Hope not, I think as I thumb in a quick message to Kelly:

  <>

  Then I pocket the Link.

  “You ready?”

  I nod, though I’m really not ready at all.

  Micah grins, and he gets that intense look again. “Good. Let’s go kick some zombie ass.”

  Chapter 24

  This doesn’t feel right. In fact, it feels absolutely wrong.

  This is what I think as Micah slings his pack on his back and tightens the straps. He squares his shoulders and stretches his neck. The knife magically appears in his hand, drawn from some hidden place. I’m sure he’d prefer a light saber. But then again, I think he actually prefers this real crap over Zpocalypto.

  He waits for me to give the signal. His eyes never leave the figure standing in the road.

  The moon hovers expectantly in the sky, shining down on us like a spotlight. The cloud has shifted further over, stretching out even longer and thinner. But I don’t have time to think about how unnatural it looks. Every secon
d I waste not moving is another second the zombies behind us and beside us and in front of us have to figure out we’re here, to get closer. To surround us.

  And sunrise is still more than an hour away.

  “I suppose now’s not a good time to ask why I have to carry the shovel,” I say. “I’m the one with the weak shoulder, remember?”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  It’s not that I mind. Yes, my fingers are cramped and sweaty from carrying it, but it hasn’t really been much of a burden. If anything, it feels good in my hands, like a bo staff, a comfortable counter weight while I’m running.

  “Quit procrastinating, Jessie.”

  I lift my hand to adjust my backpack, but as I do the strap catches on the handle of the shovel and it slips and goes clattering across the road, shattering the silence of the night.

  We both stare at it.

  Up ahead, the IU slowly lowers and turns its head. It stares at us without moving. Behind us, the moaning has grown louder. Retreat is out of the question. A single zombie on the road is still a much better alternative to several behind us, even with the fence for them to contend with.

  “Sorry,” I whisper.

  “Just pick it up and get ready to run,” Micah says, his voice low and urgent.

  I reach down and grab the shovel without lowering my eyes.

  “Now!” And he leaps forward.

  At the same moment, the zombie turns and steps toward us. Its first movements are awkward and slow, but it quickly shakes off its torpor. It raises its arms and howls.

  And we’re running straight toward it!

  “Oh yeah. It’s a fast one,” Micah pants. I don’t dare look over at him. I don’t want to see the look on his face.

  “Go right,” I tell him, raising the shovel. My shoulder twinges, reminding me that it’s still not up for a lot of physical abuse. I hope the thing doesn’t decide to pop back out again. Not now. “Aim low,” I tell him, “for the thigh. I’ll go left and go for its head.”